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 Business News | June 2008 
Mexicans Move Across Border to Flee Drug Crime
 Chris Hawley - USA Today
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| | Falling U.S. home prices beckon middle class seeking 'tranquility' | | |
Mexico City — In February, Salvador Urbina decided he was tired of the shootouts, the kidnappings and the military patrols in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez.
So he put his house up for sale, packed up his car, and moved his wife and children across the border to El Paso, joining a growing stream of professionals who are relocating to the USA to get away from Mexico's drug wars.
"I didn't want to leave," said Urbina, a lawyer. "But there's a very deep psychosis developing in Juárez. Criminals are taking advantage of the situation there. Every day I worried about the safety of my wife and family."
In U.S. cities along the border, middle-class Mexicans are buying homes or renting apartments and even moving their businesses across the border, say real estate agents, chambers of commerce and city officials. Many are getting investor visas for a long-term stay.
Dropping housing prices in the USA are part of the draw, said Mireya Durazo, a real estate agent in San Diego, across the border from Tijuana. But the main impetus is a wave of violence unleashed by Mexico's 18-month-old crackdown on drug cartels, she said.
"First it was the dentists, then lawyers and doctors … now it's teachers, owners of little stores, people from the working class," Durazo said.
Drug gangs are increasingly bringing civilians into the fray as they battle soldiers and each other for control of drug smuggling corridors, known as "plazas."
In all, about 4,000 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderón began deploying troops to attack the cartels in December 2006, according to a tally by the Reforma newspaper. Polls released recently by Reforma and El Universal newspaper show most Mexicans say the government is losing the battle.
In Ciudad Juárez, extortion attempts and arson have plagued business owners this year. At least seven restaurants and bars have been torched, said Jaime Torres, a spokesman for the city's Public Safety Secretariat.
Real estate companies have seized upon such incidents to market U.S. homes.
"Are you looking for a safer place to live?" advertises the website of Latin Credit, a real estate company in San Diego that caters to Mexican residents. "Live in tranquility!" says an ad for El Paso homes in the Diario de la Frontera newspaper of Ciudad Juárez.
Urbina, a 45-year-old lawyer with dual Mexican and U.S. citizenship, occasionally teaches courses at the police academy in Ciudad Juárez. After Calderón flooded the city with troops, he and other lawyers started getting death threats.
This year, drug traffickers launched a wave of police killings in Ciudad Juárez. When some of his former police academy students started winding up dead, Urbina knew it was time to go.
Urbina now commutes to work in Mexico every morning and returns to El Paso every night. He spends 20 hours a week stuck in traffic waiting to cross the Rio Grande.
"It's terrible, with the gasoline (prices) and the air pollution," he said. "But a lot of people are doing it now. I think the problem of crime is the worst it has been."
Oscar Orozco, a partner in an accounting firm in Ciudad Juárez, said four of the company's nine partners now live in Texas.
The crisis in the U.S. housing market has made homes more affordable for these upper-middle-class Mexicans, said Clara Jaramillo, president of Latin Credit. Her company has sold about 50 homes in the past year to Mexicans leaving Tijuana to move north.
In recent months, the number of Mexicans calling the company has tripled, she said.
To avoid the cross-border commute, some Mexicans are trying to bring their businesses with them, said Steve Ahlenius, president of the McAllen, Texas, Chamber of Commerce.
About 70% of the people approaching the chamber for help setting up a business are Mexican nationals, compared with about 30% two years ago, he said. McAllen lies across the border from Reynosa, Mexico.
The violence has discouraged some Americans from crossing the border to eat or shop in Mexico, Ahlenius said. In response, some Mexican restaurateurs and shop owners are opening U.S. branches to recapture customers.
In Laredo, Pavel Hernández said he decided to open his restaurant, El Real de México, on the U.S. side because he wanted more stability.
"I've seen how businesses, businessmen and their families end up bankrupt from being kidnapped or robbed, and many of them end up emigrating," Hernández said.
"It's sad that investors are investing here and not in Mexico," he said. "My dream was to open a restaurant in Mexico. But I've abandoned that dream because, well, you see how things are." |
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