AP reports:
El Paso church programs and other charities are scaling back their outreach programs to Mexico, amidst the increasing violence attributed to the drug cartels spilling across the border from Juarez. The churches include the El Paso diocese of the Roman Catholic church and the Abundant Living Faith Center.
At least two church groups have chosen not to send members over the border to aid the poor because of the ongoing drug cartel war.
“It pains us. The violence is out of hand. We actually had a parishioner who was kidnapped, so it’s too close to home,” said Monsignor Arturo Banuelas, of El Paso’s Roman Catholic diocese.
Banuelas, whose young nephew was shot and killed in an ambush in the west coast state of Sinaloa earlier this year, said parishioners from El Paso would normally make trips to a city jail and several missions around Juarez to deliver food, clothing, blankets and Christmas gifts at this time of year.
But because of the ongoing drug cartel war _ more than 1,300 people have been killed in the city of 1.3 million this year _ he canceled the church’s outreach.
Officials with the Abundant Living Faith Center in El Paso also have canceled trips to orphanages and local ministries in Mexico that aid Juarez’s poorest.
Pat Rodriguez, the center’s outreach director, said her church group has been forced to wait for aid organizers from Mexico to cross the border and pick up supplies. And even that effort has waned as the violence in the sprawling city across the Rio Grande has mounted in the last year.
“Some of them don’t come now,” Rodriguez said of her Mexican colleagues. “I’ll go two or three weeks, or even a month without seeing them.”
Rodriguez said before the situation in Juarez became so volatile, aid workers would make weekly trips to her church’s food pantry. But criminals have forced many of those groups to scatter or dramatically reduce their own efforts amid threats of violence, she said.
Both Rodriguez and Banuelas said their churches have historically taken youth volunteers to pass out food or do community service, but the risk is simply too great now.
For Banuelas, the final straw came this summer when a youth group returned from an outreach mission south of Juarez. Shortly after the group left, more than a dozen people were killed in the same small town.
Warring cartels have been fighting for control of the city’s lucrative drug and human smuggling trade. Mexican authorities have stationed thousands of soldiers and additional police officials in the city, but the fighting has only intensified.
Armed robberies and kidnappings for ransom have increased across Mexico. Officials estimate that more than 5,300 people died in Mexico in organized crime-related slayings in the first 11 months of 2008.
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