'Juarez Is Love': City Hosting Pope Francis Sheds Gangland Battleground Image Agence France-Presse
go to original February 5, 2016

Notices with images of missing girls pictured next to a poster of Pope Francis in Ciudad Juarez. (AFP/Yuri Cortez)

Ciudad Juarez, just across from El Paso, Texas, is striving to show that it is no longer a gangland battleground or the dark place where hundreds of women have been senselessly murdered.

Life has returned on the streets while inmates at the state prison put a coat of fresh paint on the penitentiary's church as they prepare for the pope to visit them on February 17. The prison is a symbol of the city's violent past, but also of its recovery.

Some 30 inmates in orange jumpsuits arranged plants and painted the church this week in biting-cold temperature as they spruced up a place where some 100 prisoners died in riots and brawls in 2010.

...The murder spree peaked at more than 3,000 homicides in 2010, but it fell in the following years, dropping to around 300 last year, according to official figures.

The local government has attributed the improvements to the arrival of a hardnosed police chief and a crime prevention program.

But security experts and law enforcement sources say violence dropped because the Sinaloa drug cartel won the turf war and focused again on getting drugs across the border.

Read the rest at GlobalPost

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