Did Prohibition Help Create Ciudad Juarez’s Shady Reputation?

Here is an interesting article that claims that Prohibition in the US is responsible for the shady reputation of Juarez, Mexico:

Prohibition in the United States drove Texas bars and brothels to the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and helped create an image problem that Mexico’s murder capital has been unable to repair, according to a newly published book.

A total of 2,600 murders attributed to organized crime were committed last year in Juarez, home to almost 1.5 million inhabitants. By some measures, the gritty metropolis just across the Rio Grande from El Paso has the world’s highest homicide rate.

“El Paso had been a corrupt place since the end of the 19th century. The Puritans took control there and expelled everything that sullied the image of that area to the Mexican border (region),” Mexico’s Rutilio Garcia Pereyra, author of “Ciudad Juarez la fea” (Ugly Ciudad Juarez), told Efe.

He says the process was reinforced after World War I when the United States adopted Prohibition.

“After the dry laws, none of the 150 canteens that had once been in El Paso remained. All were moved to Juarez, where they continued to operate with the same owners and the same rationale,” the author said.

Garcia Pereyra, a professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez, the book’s publisher, conducted research for the work at the municipal archives of Ciudad Juarez and the University of Texas library.

Ciudad Juarez’s negative image was created by some conservative U.S. newspapers, whose editorials sought to spread “Puritan, Protestant and discriminatory ideas” and depict Mexicans as “a race with vulgar social customs,” the author said.

That stigma has “unfortunately … been passed down to our time” and has been exacerbated by the hundreds of killings and disappearances of women in the 1990s that gave the city a lot of bad press and notoriety, even though, according to Garcia Pereyra, the central state of Mexico “has more murders of women than Juarez.”  [Latin American Herald Tribune]

Read the rest at the link, but I think the US prohibition on marijuana today has also helped lead to violence in Juarez as well.  However, that shouldn’t be used as an excuse by the Mexican authorities to enforce law and order in their own town.