Ten thousand dead and counting: Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city that’s deadlier than Afghanistan

CIUDAD JUAREZ — In March, municipal police officers detained the two brothers of Armida Vazquez and whisked them away in patrol cars.

Vazquez and her mother searched for Dante and Juan Carlos, cellphone shop workers in their mid-20s, and checked with the local and federal police here, to no avail. Nineteen days later, the strangled bodies of the brothers were found on the outskirts of this notoriously violent city. Witness testimony and other evidence led to three policemen, now in jail awaiting trial.

But the police pushed back. Policemen in civilian clothes, Vazquez says, approached her mother outside church and told her to stop making trouble. When Vazquez made a statement against the suspects last month, she says other policemen and relatives of the officers threatened her outside the courthouse.

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