Mounting drug-related violence and 800 murders so far this year have driven some 3,000 families from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez into the US, a border expert said on Friday.
Officials reported 10 new deaths in the Mexican border city on Friday, and five others elsewhere in Chihuahua State.
Most of the families seeking safety across the border were middle-class, said Antonio Payan, a political science professor at the University of Texas in El Paso, the US city adjacent to Juarez.
The mayor of Ciudad Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, said he “knew that some families had left to live in El Paso out of fear of the city’s violence,” but said that he had no figures.
Ciudad Juarez is the battleground in the power struggle between the Sinaloa and the Juarez drug cartels.
In escalating violence, the city of some 1.5 million has registered some 800 homicides so far this year. More than 70 people have been killed in the last week.
Experts said the figure was triple that of the whole of last year.
Bank and car robberies, extortion, kidnappings and protection rackets were also on the increase in Juarez, the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego said.
An increase in kidnappings in the business community was another reason for the relocations, with at least 38 reported this year.
Most of those who left and moved to the US had dual nationality or children born there, Payan said.
Violence throughout Chihuahua State left 15 dead on Friday, officials said.
Ten people died overnight in separate incidents in Ciudad Juarez, local police said, and an armed commando attacked and killed four males, including three youths, on a basketball court in the town of Casas Grandes.
One man died of bullet wounds in a hospital in a nearby municipality, police said.
Federal authorities have deployed more than 36,000 soldiers across the country, including 2,500 in Ciudad Juarez, in an effort to combat drug trafficking and related violence, but some 2,000 people have been killed in Mexico so far this year.
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