Molly Molloy: The TT Interview

As 2010 drew to a close, the death toll in Juárez surpassed 3,100 for the year. Since 2008, New Mexico State University librarian and professor Molly Molloy has painstakingly kept a daily tally of each one of the drug war killings that has made the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso one of the most dangerous in the world.

Molloy talked with the Tribune from her university office in Las Cruces about why she took on the macabre task of counting the dead, why the numbers are important and why it's so critical that reporters in the United States get the figures right. It's not just about the data, she says, but it's the societal implications of who the dead are and why the city has descended into the bloody abyss that seems to have no near-term end.

The edited audio recording of the interview is below and a transcript follows.

TT: Molly, I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about when you started tracking the number of deaths occurring in Juarez and why you decided to do that.

Molloy: It really started around March or April of 2008, where I was actually writing things down, almost on a daily basis. In January of 2008, I believe about 48 people were killed: more than one person per day. And then February I think was about the same. And then … I believe the number in March 2008 was 117, which seemed incredible for one month. I mean that is more than three people per day. The numbers of people murdered just kept going up and up.

I believe the highest monthly total in 2008 was in August, and it was about 230 or something of that sort, something that had never been seen before. The year ended with over 1,600 people killed, which was more than five times the number of people killed in Juárez in any year for which we had any records. This is an extraordinary thing. I mean it is extraordinary in terms of Juárez itself and Mexico, but it’s also extraordinary in terms of the demographics of violence, of murder, in any place in the world.

The numbers of people murdered continued to rise, and there were several months in 2009, when over 300 people were murdered in a month. And the same thing has continued in 2010. The number of people killed in Juárez toped 3,000 in one year last week sometime. The idea of more than 3,000 people being murdered in a single year is rather extraordinary. I mean that averages more than 10 people per day.  It’s just an extraordinary phenomenon. It’s a terrible phenomenon, but I think it needs to be closely studied, and the only way to really study it, to even begin studying it, is to try to keep a more-or-less accurate figure of the number.

TT: How do you keep an accurate track of the number of deaths that happen?

Molloy: I don’t claim that it’s exact. But I basically do it from press accounts. There are other ways to do it: through reports that come from the attorney general’s office in Juárez. And actually the newspapers get most of their numbers from the periodic reports that come from the attorney general’s office for the state of Chihuahua based in Juárez. That is the way they do it, and I just follow the press accounts and what’s published and try to keep a tally.

TT: So what was the murder rate before 2008 in Juárez?

Molloy: Especially if you go back into the 1990s and look at the numbers for the deaths in Juárez for murder, they generally range between about 150 and 300 over the course of about 15 years, going back all the way to 1993 up to 2007. 2007 had about 300, which was the highest ever reported until 2008.

TT: What do you think we can learn from studying these numbers?

Molloy: What we need to do is consider bigger social issues, social factors, demographic factors, apart from the standard explanation that this is a cartel war. Because many of the people that are killed are — it would be very, very difficult to place those people within some sort of membership within an organization that could be called a drug cartel.

Many of them are very young people: young men mostly between the ages of say 15 and 20. They may, indeed, be selling drugs or doing some sort of street work related to the drug business that puts them in a violent situation, or they may be gang members which is of course a very violent lifestyle. But you have to look at what are the social conditions that put these young men into this situation. And one of the social conditions in Juárez is that very few young people have the opportunity to go to high school. Once they graduate from elementary school when they’re about 13 or 14 years old, they don’t have access to public high school. And so, they end up on the street. They don’t have access to jobs either. The number of jobs available for young people in Juárez has really dwindled over the last few years, mainly because of the downturn in the maquiladora industry that’s been based on the downturn in the worldwide economy, and especially the U.S. economy. And so there’s just very few opportunities.

Another thing that I believe is part of the violence in Juárez is the fact that for several generations now the export industries, the maquiladora industry, has essentially been the foundation of the formal economy in Juárez, you know, the legal economy. Most of the people who work in factories, in maquiladora factories, do not earn a living wage. What you often have is a family where every person who’s old enough or can pretend to be old enough to get a job will be working. Meaning, mother, father, teenage children will all be working a shift in a maquiladora, and so younger children are often raised in a home that has no adults because, when one adult is not working they’re probably sleeping. And so, a lot of children go straight from school to the street, and they lack the kind of family structure that is so important to raising children. And it’s even more important to raising children in a city like Juárez that is a very poor city and there’s a lack of social infrastructure.

The only real social infrastructure in many cities in developing countries is the family. That’s what keeps the social structure together. If you create an economic situation that works against the family structure, which I believe is what the maquiladora system has done in Juárez, you end up with a lot of children being raised with very little parenting.

What I want to do eventually is create a database that will allow us to actually see who the murder victims are, because if you can really look at the murder victims with their names, their ages, how they died, what kind of car they were driving — all these details are available — then you could counter the argument, or the pronouncements, made by people like the president of Mexico, echoed by many people in the U.S. government and press that 90 percent of the people killed are criminals. There’s no evidence that they’re criminals. The data — who these people actually are, how and when they died — just that simple data will be a very important element of truth in the future if and when this terrible phenomena ceases and we can actually look and see what happened in Juárez.

TT: From your perspective, why is it so important for reporters to get these numbers right?

Molloy: I don’t see any reason why the numbers reported in major U.S. newspapers should be 200 underreported. The point is, if I can do this, why can’t other major newspapers in the United States do it? It’s not that difficult.

I think they owe it to both their readers here in the United States who are concerned about this issue and they certainly owe it to the people of Mexico and the people of Juárez to do an accurate job of reporting this terrible violence, because these are people’s lives. Without having that basic number of how many people actually died yesterday, I think we’re missing the most basic thing about this violence.

TT: What do you see for 2011? Do you think there’s any hope for some decrease in the amount of violence that’s happening in Juarez?

Molloy: I don’t think that it will change that much in 2011. I like to think maybe going over this 3,000 number will shock people into doing something. But we’ve passed these barriers before and it hasn’t changed. It’s only continued to go up. I also don’t see any short-term possibility that things will improve drastically in Juárez. For one thing, the city has to deal with all of the residuals of this violence, meaning, orphaned children, families that are even more destroyed, families that have lost one or two breadwinners. Even if these people were making money by selling drugs or doing some other criminal activity, once they’re dead, who takes care of the remaining members of the family? Who earns the money? It’s not like a grandmother can just go out and get a job in a maquiladora and feed her grandchildren who have been orphaned. What economic substitute for the earnings that are lost now to those families will there be? The only possibility that I can see is that someone else in the family gets involved in the drug business and starts to bring home money again. And so, that just brings more violence because this kind of economy is not ever going to be a peaceful one.

I’m pretty pessimistic. I don’t think we’re going to see drastic improvements in the near future. I don’t think you can destroy the basic building blocks of the society — and in Mexico that is the family. You can’t destroy that at the level it’s being destroyed in a place like Juárez and expect that people are just going to all of the sudden turn peaceful.