Mexico's City of Dogs: A Portrait of Ambitions and Failures in Ciudad Juarez Michelle Garcia and Ignacio Alvarado Alvarez - Al Jazeera America
go to original September 8, 2013

The efforts of the animal control teams and the high death toll have done little to diminish the stray dog population. In the streets of Juarez, thousands of dogs still wander. (Julian Cardona/Al Jazeera America)

In better times - and there were better times in Ciudad Juárez - even the mangiest street dog could count on kindness for its survival. Unwashed and unkempt, the streets were his home, the neighborhood his master. Scraps, the stray bone, a bowl of water - he got by.

Imagine, then, the upheaval that upended this imperfect but functioning system when a manageable 20,000 street dogs morphed into a teeming population of 200,000 mutts, German Shepherds, Labs, and the favored dog of city dwellers for years - the Poodle.

The bond between man and his best friend was corrupted. One man nailed a dog to his fence. A gang of 10 children lassoed a cat, hurling it up onto the street cables high above, leaving it to dangle there.

On the surface, this breakdown in the relationship between man and beast could be attributed to the brutal violence that tore at the social fabric in Ciudad Juárez between 2008 and 2011.

Often described in overly simplistic terms as a "drug war" among "drug cartels," the disaster that erupted in this city resulted in the deaths of an estimated 10,000 people, 100,000 abandoned houses and 2,000 businesses shuttered or destroyed in fires - within four years. But no single occurrence in this border city across from El Paso explains the roughly 700 dogs found dead on city streets every month, victims of hunger, car tires or execution.

When the number of homicides dropped significantly - from an estimated 2,086 in 2011 to 751 in 2012 - many declared an end to Juárez's designation as the "murder capital of the world" and spoke of a city on the mend.

But to this day, the dogs still roam the streets. Their miserable bodies betray the lasting legacy of violence, their wretched lives warning that the human conditions - which ushered in the crisis and determined their sad fate - persist.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera America

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!