Once known as a booming industrial metropolis and a model of economic progress in Mexico, the border city of Juarez has become infamous as the murder capital of the world.
Thousands of people have been killed there since 2008 when Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent in the army to carry out his offensive against the drug cartels.
The official story is that the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels are fighting for the city and the access it provides to the multi-billion dollar U.S. drug market only a few hundred metres away.
Fault Lines travels to Ciudad Juarez and asks how human life there came to be worth so much less than the drugs being trafficked through it.
Original air date: June 13, 2011
Writer and journalist Chuck Bowden contributed generously to this episode and appears in it. He passed away on August 30, 2014.
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