Information from Ciudad Juaréz, Diana Washington Valdez

I received an email from Diana Washington Valdez, writer and reporter living in El Paso, USA, yesterday with an update on the current situation in Ciudad Juarez:

 - About 1,500 girls and women have been murdered in Juarez since 1993. Young women and teenage girls still disappear from Downtown Juarez. The city police is making inroads into all other crimes, but doesn't seem to touch this area.

- In my book I wrote that the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Mexico and Moreles could be considered one region or the same region, because the Juarez drug cartel entrenched itself in all three states. The new president of Mexico, who assumes the office Dec. 1, was governor of Mexico state when crime grew rapidly and the drug cartel continued to expand. He did not have a good crime-fighting record as governor, and has ties to powerful and corrupt people in the state of Mexico. Chihuahua, Morelos and the state of Mexico are battlegrounds for the drug cartels.