The Most Violent City on Earth

September 24, 2009 — -- The sun is beating down as Elizabeth Padilla is laid to rest in the Garden of Eternity cemetery. She lies under a pane of glass. Her pretty face has been made up one last time.

"Open your eyes, my darling," her mother cries. "There is something I wanted to tell you." "Princess," her sister wails. "I'll never forget the way you danced and sang." "Why you?" her mother screams. "You were so good."

Elizabeth Padilla was 29 and had been a policewoman for eight months when she died. She was killed one Wednesday just before 1:30pm while on her way to work in her dark Plymouth. Her murderers fired six 9mm bullets, hitting her in the right arm and in the head.

She was one of 14 people murdered that day in Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Just another ordinary day.

Before the white wooden casket is placed into the concrete vault, her unit reports for duty one last time, shouting out in unison, "Elizabeth Padilla, present!" Her brother, who is also a policeman, says there is no justice in this country. But he will carry out justice, he says. The squad car sirens wail a goodbye.

Ciudad Juárez, a border town in the north of Mexico, is at war: a war the government is fighting against the drug cartels and a war the drug cartels are fighting against each other. More than 1,500 people have been murdered there this year alone. A total of 1.5 million people live in the city, which is considered the most violent in the world.

Ciudad Juárez has become a symbol for the battle Mexican President Felipe Calderón is waging against the drug cartels. And perhaps also for the fact that he is losing.

A little under three years ago, shortly after he took office, he promised he would defeat the Mexican cartels. Ever since their Colombian counterparts lost their influence in the 1990s, the Mexican gangs are now the world's most powerful. They provide cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine to the world's largest drug market, the US. It's a multi-billion-dollar business. In its annual list of the world's richest people, Forbes magazine this year placed the boss of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquín Guzmán, nicknamed "El Chapo," at no. 701, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion.