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El Paso
Living together
Jun 26th 2008 | EL PASO
From The Economist print edition

The climate is fantastic, and cross-border business is thriving. But the cartels are a big problem

IT WAS a quiet Friday night in El Paso for Sandra, a young student. Her friends had gone across the border to Ciudad Juárez for a film festival. She had been looking forward to it, but at the last minute felt “una semilla”, a seed of doubt. Women have been getting murdered in Juárez for a long time—hundreds in the past 15 years, with many more missing, and the cases unsolved—but she always felt that you have to keep living your life. Of late, though, the violence has gone to another level. The weekend before, there were two dozen people killed in Juárez, casualties of the fierce war between Mexico’s drug cartels.

Violence and chaos never come at a good time, but the current upsurge is frustrating for Texas’s sixth city. El Paso is separated from the rest of the state by hundreds of miles of mostly empty desert; in fact, it is closer to San Diego, on the Pacific, than to Houston. Locals complain that nobody cares about them. In the past, some would have added that the city did not care about itself. Over the past year the FBI has been investigating dozens of prominent citizens as part of a public corruption probe. But lately El Paso has become more ambitious.


The county, some 740,000 strong, is expecting a wave of spending from the expansion of its local army base. In 2005 Fort Bliss had 25,000 people, counting troops and their families. By 2013 it will have 90,000. The construction alone will pump several billion dollars into the local economy. Another coup is a new medical school, which was accredited in February. It will be the first located on the border.

The economy is fairly strong. One recent report predicted that El Paso will have the third-fastest rise in its “gross metropolitan product” in 2008—4.4%, compared to a national average of 1.4% for America’s metropolitan areas. The latest from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is that El Paso has added 3,100 jobs in the year to date, which is enough to keep unemployment stable at 5.5% in May, the national average. Many American cities are doing much worse than that.

Downtown revitalisation is also part of the good news. Elizabeth Taylor spent her first honeymoon with Nicky Hilton in his downtown hotel in 1950. The district was then pretty much ignored for the next 50 years. There are only 300 housing units downtown, and not many restaurants. It empties out at the end of the day as everyone scatters into the sprawl. Now El Paso wants to recapture some of the old glamour. One advantage of the neglect is that many attractive art deco-style buildings are still around. The city is sponsoring art projects and laying on free wireless internet for everyone.

Such excitements aside, the big thing about El Paso is its sister city in Mexico. Juárez is much larger than El Paso (more than 1.5m people), but poorer and far more troubled. Businesspeople on both sides say the two cities form a single economic unit. According to Bob Cook, the president of the Regional Economic Development Corporation, more than 50,000 El Pasoans are employed because of the Mexican maquiladora industry—commuting to management or support jobs in the maquilas every day, where goods are processed for export to America. Mexican shoppers account for a fifth of El Paso’s retail business. Americans benefit from shopping in Mexico, too, crossing over to fill up with cheap petrol.

And the ties between the cities are not only professional. Some 80% of El Pasoans are Hispanic, and many have family or friends in Juárez. El Pasoans, like most people in South Texas, are uniformly opposed to the border fence that the federal government is building. “Everybody around here thinks that it’s a pretty foolish endeavour,” says Toby Spoon, who commutes to Juárez every day for his job as vice-president of The TECMA Group, a company that helps American manufacturers operate in Mexico. “We interact like one big community.”

This relationship means that Juárez’s worsening violence is El Paso’s problem, too. Some 2,500 Mexican soldiers and federal police were deployed to Juárez in March, but the violence has not abated. El Paso is a safe city, but residents are becoming anxious. The local hospital has been locked down twice while doctors treated Mexican police officers who had been wounded. They were worried that gangsters would burst in to finish the job, as has happened in Juarez. Even if the violence stays on the southern side of the river, it casts a shadow.