Top: Workers of an electronic assembly plant ride on a bus to their work place in Ciudad Juárez. Bottom: A man holds a bullet casing in his hand at a crime scene in Ciudad Juárez on February 24, 2011. Three girls, ages 12, 14, and 15, were shot dead by hitmen on February 23 while standing on a sidewalk, according to the local media. point of access. A border city that provides lowwage labor and unparalleled access to the world’s largest consumer market, Juárez has become a city of stark contrasts. Gruesome murders have captured the attention of the international media, but Juárez’s business community is arguing that there’s more to the city than cartel violence. At a national level, Mexico faces the same challenge. “Restoring Mexico’s International Reputation,” a recent report from the Woodrow Wilson Mexico Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, explains that in 2010, more than 80 percent of the stories about Mexico in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times related to crime and corruption. Many of Mexico’s leaders think that the shortage of stories about topics other than the violence is contributing to a perception that Mexico is a failing state. In Juárez, the problem is even more acute. Especially since 2008, when the global recession caused many local employers to cut production and trim their payrolls, city officials have worked tirelessly to rebrand the city, stressing the investment opportunities it offers. 12 <strong>SIPA</strong> NEWS Local political leaders in Juárez have launched a public campaign, often echoing statements from the country’s president, Felipe Calderón, in order to calm international investors and help build “Brand Mexico.” They want to highlight the fact that in spite of the violence, Juárez is open for business. When I met Hector Murguia, the city’s affable mayor, he was seated comfortably in his dark, wood-paneled office, a luxurious corner on an upper floor of Juárez’s hulking, cement city hall building. He slipped quickly into his sales pitch. “In Juárez we have the best labor force in the world,” he said. He focused mainly on telling me about the city’s universities and the high-tech skills of the factory workers. He chose his words carefully when talking about the violence. “The root cause of the insecurity is the absence of opportunities [and] jobs,” he said. The important thing,” he said, “is implementing policies that strengthen the businesses. ”At the national level, Calderón’s branding campaign was captured in the government-produced documentary film, Mexico: The Royal Tour, which was released earlier this year. It follows President Calderón as he gives an American journalist a seven-day tour of various tourist attractions in Mexico. “We need to change the perception about Mexico,” Calderón says to the camera. As we drove through the security checkpoint at the border, Mary, the executive from Genpact, told me, “I come over every single day; there’s no reason to be nervous.” She took me on a tour of Genpact’s facility, through rooms filled with young people working at computer stations. The violence, after all, has devastated the city’s small business community, but so far it has left the export sector and the multinationals relatively unscathed. Sylvia Longmire, a former Air Force intelligence analyst and author of a recently published book on Mexico’s cartels, told me, “a lot of U.S. businesses are operating in Mexico without problems . . . business is flourishing.” “Mexico is not a failed state,” she said. On another day, I passed through a security gate and met with Miguel Hidalgo, a senior executive at ACS, a Business Process Outsourcing company that employs 3,000 people in Juárez. He took me on a tour of the brightly painted red and yellow building, through a massive room filled with employees in their twenties, dressed like typical college students in casual attire, wearing stylish t-shirts and new sneakers. Some of the young men and women had tattoos on their arms and hands. One tough looking young man, with short cropped hair and an olive green dress shirt opened at the collar to reveal a number of neck tattoos, stood confidently in front of his work station. “Sir, what I’m going to need you to do is go ahead and click,” he said calmly into the microphone on his headset in an impeccable Midwestern American accent. Outside ACS’s office, I saw white corporate buses driving by, one after another, picking up and dropping off workers at other corporate campuses and factories. Trucks rumbled by to line up to cross the border into the United States. By late 2011, foreign companies had signed deals to invest $17 billion in Mexico, and Juárez itself has attracted almost $600 million worth of investment from foreign companies. Mexico’s economy is projected to grow by as much as 4.8 percent in 2012. In spite of the violence, the factories that line the southern bank of the Rio Grande are expanding production, and multinational corporations are opening new facilities in Juárez. This is the image the city is trying to promote. “Juárez continues to be a magnet for investment,” Mayor Murguia told me. Nathaniel Parish Flannery is a first-year MIA candidate.
An Island of Open Identity: Singapore and Long-Distance Nationalism Bhaskar still remembers the day when the phone rang in his old family home in the north of Kolkata. “We are pleased to offer you a tuition grant to come study in Singapore,” said the dean of Singapore Management <strong>University</strong>. The grant came with a contract to work in a Singapore-based company for three years after graduation. The decision was not an easy one. India was the only home Bhaskar had ever known—Indian his only national identity. No one in his family held a passport, had boarded an airplane, or traveled abroad. If he accepted the grant, he would commit to spending at least seven years in a very foreign country; if he rejected it, he might miss the opportunity of a lifetime. Bhaskar doesn’t like missing opportunities. NOTE: The names in this article have been changed at the request of the interviewees. Shoppers browsing through a market specially set up for Deepavali in Little India, Singapore. By PrIyAM SArAf <strong>SIPA</strong> NEWS 13
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