| Ciudad Juarez |
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Ciudad Juarez
More than 60,000 people[citation needed] cross the Juarez-El Paso border every day making it a major port of entry and transportation for all of central northern Mexico. The city has a growing industrial center which is made up in large part by the more than 300 maquiladoras (assembly plants) located in and around the city. According to a recent New York Times article, Ciudad Juarez "is now absorbing more new industrial real estate space than any other North American city."[3] In 2008, Ciudad Juarez was designated as "The City of the Future" by the prestigious magazine "Foreign Direct Investment" published by the influential "Financial Times group."[4]. However, the city is also a site of widespread poverty and violence, including a famous series of unsolved murders of female factory workers. According to the prestigious magazine America Economia, this border metropolis has always been ranked as one of the best major cities to do business in Latin America.[5] The binational metropolitan area of Ciudad Juarez-El Paso is "ranked 16th in trade among the largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States."[6] The New York Times has commented on the exquisite restaurants of Ciudad Juarez, describing them as places that serve "the old-school bon-vivant elegant of Mexico as well as some excellent culinary innovation."[7] |
Ciudad Juarez, also known as just Juarez and formerly known as El Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juarez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juarez has an estimated population of 1.5 million people [1] It stands on the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo del Norte), across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. El Paso and Ciudad Juarez comprise one of the largest binational metropolitan areas in the world with a combined population of 2.5 million people. In fact, Ciudad Juarez is one the fastest growing cities in the world. For instance, a few years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published that in Ciudad Juarez "the average annual growth over the 10-year period [1990-2000] was 5.3 percent. Juarez experienced much higher population growth than the state of Chihuahua and than Mexico as a whole." In 2000, the United Nations reported that the world's population was growing at a rate of 1.14%.[2]