Archive for the ‘Local News’ Category
HP may build in Santa Teresa, NM
El Paso Mayor John Cook said he was aware that HP was looking at the area. He said he believed that the company was working with the Regional Economic Development Corp., or REDCo, to find a location.The move by HP would come as good news for Verde Realty, which owns about 24,000 acres at Santa Teresa.
HP has a more traditional business model, making large numbers of computers that are held in a warehouse and shipped in quantities for retail distribution. Dell builds to order. HP builds to inventory.
It can take a day to get goods across the border, says Alan Russell, president of TECMA Group, which builds and operates maquiladoras in Juárez for a variety of manufacturers.FBI: No evidence Mexico hit men targeted Americans
As you well know, Juarez is in the national headlines this week due to last weekend’s shooting of two American Consulate employees. We have always said that should the drug violence ever target or involve U.S. Business persons, that things would go to a whole new level. With the Consulate employees being killed, the attention has leapfrogged over business matters and has drawn both governments to the table. There are many rumors and stories as to why, or if these employees were targeted, or if this was a mistake in identity on the part of the shooters. I do believe that we will find the answers in the coming weeks. There is a lot of pressure to find the truth. As horrible as it is for these victims and their families, just maybe this new focused attention will bring the violence issues to a head, and the lives of many others will be saved. Below is a very good article published by the Associated Press that will give you some perspective. Please do not hesitate to call me directly should you wish to visit more in depth about how all this is affecting the business community. K. Alan Russell, President, The Tecma Group, L.P.
FBI: No evidence Mexico hit men targeted Americans
By OLIVIA TORRES AND MARTHA MENDOZA, Associated Press Writers Olivia Torres And Martha Mendoza, Associated Press Writers – Tue Mar 16, 7:12 pm ET
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – Confused hit men may have gone to the wrong party, the FBI said Tuesday as it cast doubt on fears that the slaying of three people with ties to the U.S. consulate shows that Mexican drug cartels have launched an offensive against U.S. government employees.
Gunmen chased two white SUVs from the birthday party of a consulate employee’s child on Saturday and opened fire as horrified relatives screamed. The two near-simultaneous attacks left three adults dead and at least two children wounded.
The working theory, described to the AP by FBI spokeswoman Andrea Simmons, drives home just how dangerous Ciudad Juarez has become — and just how vulnerable those who live and work there can be, despite the Mexican government’s claims that most victims are drug smugglers.
According to the line of investigation, the assailants — believed to be aligned with the Juarez drug cartel — may have been ordered to attack a white SUV leaving a party and mistakenly went to the “Barquito de Papel,” which puts on children’s parties and whose name means “Paper Boat.”
“We don’t have any information that these folks were directly targeted because of their employment by the U.S. government or their U.S. citizenship,” Simmons said by phone from El Paso, just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez.
Experts as well cast doubt on the idea that drug cartels would be interested in turning their guns on U.S. government employees.
“A systematic, nationwide shift to the use of such tactics would work against drug traffickers’ interests,” said Allyson Benton, an analyst with the Eurasia Group. “It would dramatically raise the level of both Mexican and U.S. governmental involvement in the fight against organized crime.”
The wife of one of the victims, a 13-year employee of the consulate named Hilda, described to a friend how she watched in horror as hit men pumped bullets into her SUV with her husband and children inside. She had been trailing her family in a second car when the attack occurred.
She leapt screaming from her car, begging the men to stop and telling them her children — ages 2, 4 and 7 — were inside, the friend said. But they continued until her husband, Jorge Alberto Salcido, was covered in blood, slumped dead behind the steering wheel.
All three children in the car were treated for injuries and released — the older children grazed by bullets and the youngest hit by shards of glass, the friend said. His account differed from authorities who said two children were in the car.
The friend asked not to be named, for fear of his own safety. Mexican authorities declined to comment on the discrepancy.
The other attack killed Arthur H. Redelfs, 34, and his wife, Lesley A. Enriquez, 35, a consulate employee who was four months pregnant. They too had just left the party at the lemon-yellow business, decorated with drawings of children’s blocks in a neighborhood of two-story homes with manicured lawns.
Their 7-month-old daughter watched the slayings from the back seat, where she was strapped into a car seat. Police found her wailing, her parents dead from gunshots.
President Felipe Calderon, Foreign Relations Secretary Patricia Espinosa and U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual flew together to Ciudad Juarez to express their outrage on Tuesday. Calderon, whose trip had been planned prior to the attacks, announced an expansion of the country’s welfare program.
The consulate was closed Tuesday to mourn for the dead, but the officials were expected to meet with employees there.
Amid the tension, a bomb threat forced the evacuation of about 3,000 people at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez. No bomb was found.
Already, the city is one of the world’s deadliest places. More than 2,600 people were killed last year, and another 500 so far this year — all in a city of 1.3 million.
The attacks on Saturday were the second time this year that gunmen shocked Mexico by opening fire on a Ciudad Juarez party. In February, gunmen killed 15 youths in what relatives said was a case of mistaken identity. State officials, who have made several arrests in the attack, maintain someone at the party was targeted but have not said who.
People who knew Saturday’s victims said they had nothing to do with drugs or crime.
Salcido was production manager at a Ciudad Juarez assembly plant of the Dallas-based information technology and outsourcing company, Affiliated Computer Services Inc.
The family friend said he had changed his home, work and mobile phone numbers recently after receiving calls from someone trying to extort money from him. Even so, Salcido, who led a local church choir, brushed off the threats, which are common in the crime-plagued city.
Enriquez was the sole consular employee killed in the attack. No stranger to Mexico’s violence, her work entailed helping U.S. citizens recover the remains of loved ones who had died in Mexico. Her husband worked as a jail guard in El Paso.
Members of both families declined to speak with reporters on Tuesday. Zonia Rivas, a nurse practitioner who lives across the street from Enriquez and Redelfs, said the couple would take walks around the neighborhood with their baby. Redelfs would clean his wife’s car every Saturday afternoon, a detail Rivas admired.
Rivas said she spoke to Enriquez just before she returned to work from maternity leave, and expressed concern that Enriquez was taking a risk by returning to the violent city.
“I just said, ‘Is there any way you can quit?’ and she said no,” Rivas said.
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Martha Mendoza reported from Mexico City. AP writers Alicia Caldwell in El Paso, Texas, and Matthew Lee in Washington also contributed to this report.
Maquilas dodge the violence in Juarez
Maquilas dodge THE VIOLENCE:
Juárez plants hurt more by recession than drug violence
Posted: 03/07/2010 12:00:00 AM MST
K. Alan Russell, president of The Tecma Group, says the 17 Juarez maquilas the El Paso company operates have not been hurt by the violence in Juarez. Above, he stands in a Tecma warehouse in El Paso last week. (Victor Calzada / El Paso Times)«1»
EL PASO — The drug war in Juárez has prompted an estimated 10,000 small businesses to close or move across the border to Texas. But it has not slowed Juárez’s biggest economic engine — the maquiladoras, or manufacturing plants, largely operated by international corporations.
“I’m not saying our industry ignores the problem. That’s not a smart thing to do,” Russell said. “It has an effect on the way we conduct ourselves, but not on the economics of our business.
“Our clients have plants in other parts of the world with political unrest and other challenges. As long as the executives and work force are safe, business takes its own road.”
Xóchitl Díaz, a spokeswoman for Delphi Automotive, one of Juárez’s largest maquila operators with 12 plants and a technical center employing about 15,000 people, said production at the plants had not returned to 2008 levels. That was because of the recession and decreased auto sales, she said, and not because of the violence.
The violence has made “people more careful and smarter about how they come to work,” and it is a constant topic of conversation among the workers, Díaz said. She said it had not hurt production or increased worker absenteeism.
An El Pasoan, who has owned a maquila in Juárez for more than 25 years, said the violence was not hurting his plant. But it has made everyone more cautious, he said.
He did not want his name published for fear that “some petty criminal” may take advantage of the drug war and do something to him or his family, he said.
Others in the industry did not want to be quoted for similar reasons.
The maquila industry is important not only for Juárez. It also brings millions of dollars and thousands of jobs into the El Paso economy, including jobs for several thousand maquila managers and other professionals who live in El Paso and commute to Juárez daily.
El Paso retail sales also get a huge boost from maquiladora workers who travel to El Paso to shop.
Thousands of maquila jobs have been lost. and some maquilas have closed since January 2008, when the violence began to escalate.
But those in the industry said the jobs were lost because of the recession, not the violence, which has claimed more than 4,700 lives since January 2008.
Tom Fullerton, an economics professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, agreed that the recession had caused the maquiladora’s latest slump.
But it’s “unquestionable that the violence makes doing business (in Juárez) more difficult and more costly,” Fullerton said.
Moving in
Bill Parisen, 42, vice president for an international manufacturer, said his company took the violence in Juárez into account when it started looking for a place to move its California plant this year.
“We did our due diligence. We found the border violence left maquiladoras unaffected in terms of employees needing to move in and out of Juárez,” Parisen said.
Low labor costs, the availability of well-trained workers and good logistics made Juárez the choice for the company over other areas in the region, Parisen said. In February, the company began moving production from a California factory to a plant operated by Tecma.
Parisen, who has been traveling frequently to Juárez in recent weeks, said he has no qualms about going to what has become known as one of the world’s most dangerous cities. He is familiar with the city because he traveled there frequently when he worked for a different company from 2003 to 2006.
“As a U.S. businessman, I know I have to be careful. When we go to restaurants at lunch, we go to a place fairly populated and not off the beaten path. We don’t go there (Juárez) at night,” he said.
“My co-workers had initial concerns, and some of their wives didn’t want them to travel (to Juárez).” But after the executives visited Juárez several times, they’ve become comfortable and even fond of the area, he said.
No flying bullets
Toby Spoon, 52, executive vice president at Tecma, said, “The main thing I want to get across is I don’t feel unsafe. It’s not like a Clint Eastwood movie — dodging bullets. É I still stop to buy a soda at 7-Eleven. I still go to eat at restaurants.”
“I use safe practices every time. I travel mostly in the safe corridors” established for the maquilas, said Spoon, who commutes daily between his El Paso home and Juárez.
Commuting is a concern for maquila professionals. But many maquilas, including Tecma and Delphi, provide contracted buses to take production workers, who live in Juárez, to the plants.
Future prospects
Lucinda Vargas is an economist and director of the Juárez Strategic Plan Association, which in 2004 completed a plan to improve the city’s quality of life by 2015. She said the violence was not driving maquilas out of Juárez, as companies have investments too big to leave. But, she said, she is concerned that the violence is making investments by manufacturing companies more precarious.
“I think corporate executives are trying to size up how significant Juárez should be,” she said. “Sure, it produces the raw, cold numbers of productivity. But will it fit into future strategy (of corporations) because of the risks involved?”
Vargas said her association determined, even before the violence escalated, that the Juárez plan could not be carried out until Mexican government and judicial institutions were reformed so the “rule of law” becomes a guiding principle of governance.
Recruitment picture
Mike White, senior partner for TeamNafta.com, an El Paso commercial real estate company that does industrial leasing in Juárez, said his firm is having more trouble recruiting companies to Juárez than at any other time in his 17-year career.
“It’s very sad. Until Juárez can prove it’s a stable place, I don’t think we’ll be recruiting many companies.”
Bob Cook, president of the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corp., or REDCo, which recruits companies to El Paso and Juárez, said companies continue to show interest in Juárez despite the violence.
“We’re now working with about 50 companies evaluating Juárez — about 60 percent more than a year ago,” he said.
All the companies are evaluating the violence along with the business benefits of Juárez, Cook said. Most have not made decisions. One company recently decided to locate in El Paso instead because of the violence, he said.
Some problems
The maquilas — most located in huge, modern industrial parks — have not been immune from the crime surrounding them. Some were hit by ATM bandits in late 2008.
“We removed our ATM machines,” as did other maquilas, and the robberies stopped, Tecma’s Russell said.
A Lear Corp. plant executive, kidnapped from his Juárez neighborhood in January, was rescued by Mexican soldiers. He told a Juárez TV station his captors thought he owned the Lear plant.
Spoon, who oversees personnel issues, said almost all of Tecma’s workers who live in Juárez know someone affected by the violence. But the “work force continues to march on,” he said.
The Mexican chamber of commerce estimates more than 10,000 small businesses, including restaurants, bakeries and other service businesses, have closed in Juárez as extortion attempts and other crimes increased. The economy also probably plays a role in some of the closings.
But the maquilas, most operated by large corporations, also march on.
Russell said if maquilas became targets of the violence, it “would take the whole issue to another level. I think the maquila reaction would be greater than anyone would want.”
Vic Kolenc may be reached at vkolenc@elpasotimes.com; 546-6421.
Maquila data
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Juárez had 339 manufacturing plants with more than 170,000 employees at the end of last year, reported INEGI, a Mexican government agency. Most of those are maquilas. That was a loss of more than 44,000 jobs since January 2008, the data show.
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The Association of Maquiladoras in Juárez has different numbers. It reported Juárez maquila employment slid from 249,837 workers in January 2008 to 166,454 in June 2009. That was a loss of more than 83,000 jobs during 18 months.
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The number of maquilas operating has remained fairly constant in recent years, as some plants close and others open, the data indicate. In January 2008, Juárez had 327 manufacturing plants, INEGI reported.
Juarez Drug War
Drug war: It’s U.S. problem too
Too many guns fuel violence, Juárez mayor José Reyes Ferriz says.
By Stephanie Sanchez / El Paso Times
Posted: 12/26/2009 12:00:00 AM MST
JUAREZ — Most big-city mayors live in a pressure cooker, but none faces the duress of Juárez’s elected leader, José Reyes Ferriz.
Runaway violence has damaged Juárez’s once-thriving economy. Its neighborhoods have turned from vibrant to mournful. And its streets have been stained with the blood of 2,580 people, all of them homicide victims of 2009. In contrast, El Paso, half the size of Juárez, has had 12 homicides this year.
Reyes, 48, a man of medium height with a soft voice, stands at the forefront of the government’s attempt to stop the violence and save the city.
Once a trade attorney, Reyes studied international law at the University of Notre Dame. He had been in office for two months when crime rampages became the norm in his city of 1.5 million.
Killers armed with assault rifles started attacking their victims in daylight. Messages threatening the lives of police officers and public officials were left scattered throughout Juárez.
Chihuahua police Cmdr. Fernando Lozano Sandoval was one of the first high-ranking officers to be wounded in the war between rival gangs — reportedly the Juárez and Sinaloa cartels. Gunmen ambushed him as he drove along a Juárez street in January 2008.
Sandoval survived the attack. Others haven’t been so fortunate.
Police began to log the deaths — sometimes a dozen a day — until the toll reached more than 1,600 people in 2008. In 2009, against the conventional thinking that the worst was over, Juárez became even bloodier.
In an interview this week in his spacious, wood-paneled office at City Hall, Reyes called the gangland violence a problem for both Mexico and the United States.
“The U.S. needs to get involved. But they need to get involved on the U.S. side,” said Reyes, who speaks flawless English.
The American government, he said, should enforce existing gun laws to help Mexico, especially Juárez.
At the start of President Barack Obama’s term, he sent agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to El Paso to investigate the type of people purchasing weapons, Reyes said. Reyes called the findings a shock and said they should have been a wake-up call.
“They found a woman who was receiving food stamps. She bought 10 AR-15s and AK-47s. What is a woman who gets food stamps doing buying 10 AR-15s and AK-47s, except participating in a conspiracy to send firearms illegally into Mexico,” he said. “The U.S. needs to prosecute those cases. It’s not a matter of going against the Second Amendment. It’s a matter of prosecuting those who are conspiring to send arms into Mexico.”
Reyes, whose office overlooks Downtown El Paso and downtown Juárez, said the United States needs to stop the flow of drug money from crossing into Mexico. And, he said, the annual 100,000 undocumented immigrants — including 7,000 deported felons — should be sent directly to Mexico City instead of being left at border towns.
“That (deportation) policy by the U.S. government is fueling the violence in Juárez,” Reyes said. “They can’t send them to Juárez and not expect us to have a problem.”
Reyes, accompanied by bodyguards when he walked from council chambers to his office, acknowledged that Juárez is one of the cities with the most murders in the world. But, he said, that does not mean it’s a dangerous place for people who steer clear of drug smuggling and other crimes.
The daily news of people being killed execution-style is hard for Reyes to take.
“It’s very difficult. We try to stop it. We try to find a way to solve it,” Reyes said. “Every time I see or get the police report — I get the police report immediately after something happens — it’s extremely difficult. The fact that the numbers are so large doesn’t make it any easier.”
Reyes said one of the steps his administration took to help quell the bloodshed was to clean up a corrupt police force.
In the past two years, Juárez has fired 800 people from its police department. Of those, a little more than 330 were ousted for lack of trust.
Now the city is patrolled by 3,000 municipal police officers, 200 state officers, 1,800 federal officers and 6,200 Mexican soldiers, Reyes said.
The Mexican army, he said, was sent to Juárez to help contain crime while the police force was rebuilt with trustworthy officers. Until recently, the military’s role was never to stop the homicides, he said.
“We knew we needed to do a cleanup. … We needed a force to help us, not as police officers but as a containment for us. … I think they (soldiers) have been successful because we were able to do that.”
Now, four of every five officers on the streets were hired by Reyes’ administration. They were trained at the Mexican Army’s headquarters in Delicias, Chihuahua, which is about six hours from Juárez. They are the only officers in the country authorized to carry automatic weapons.
Because the police force is stronger, Reyes said, the role of the military can now become to help lower crime rates. Once that happens, he plans to start withdrawing soldiers.
Reyes said his administration has also been getting advice from Inter-American Development Bank experts about social programs. The experts, he said, are based in Washington, D.C., and help design programs to enhance opportunities in education and employment.
Overall, Reyes said, he is optimistic about 2010. He said he foresees a decline in murders and other crime.
“We have the help of the federal government, the help of the state government,” he said. “We have gotten past the problems of 2009. I think we’re at a turning point. In 2010, we’ll see much better things.”
Stephanie Sanchez may be reached at ssanchez@elpasotimes.com; 915-546-6137.
