Ciudad Juarez passed the 2,000 mark in homicides Tuesday — setting a record for violence in the border city that has become ground zero in Mexico's war on drugs and cementing its place as one of the most murderous cities in the world.

Before 2008, Juarez, a city of 1.5 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso, formerly had about 200 homicides annually, a rate comparable to or lower than such U.S. cities as Houston. But last year, Juarenses — as residents of Juarez are known — saw 1,600 lives lost in an alarming and mostly unsolved crime wave. This year, that number was passed by summer's end.

“With this, our city has reached a new historic mark in violent acts that verifies that this is the most violent zone in the world outside of declared war zones,” Norte newspaper reported Tuesday.

It's hard to determine how many people have fled since the violence escalated. But using the 2005 population estimate of 1.5 million, Juarez's murder rate for 2009 so far has surpassed 133 per 100,000 inhabitants, based on the homicides reported.

A new ‘murder capital'

By comparison, Houston had 294 murders among its 2.2 million residents in 2008, a rate of 13 homicides per 100,000 residents. Dallas, with a population of 1.3 million, recorded 170 homicides — the same murder rate as Houston, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime reports.

The estimated 2009 Juarez rate also pushes the city past places like Caracas, New Orleans, Cape Town and Moscow, all dubbed in 2008 “Murder Capitals of the World” by Foreign Policy Magazine.

Tony Payan, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied the problem, said Juarez has been beaten down not only by inter-cartel violence and the war on drugs, but also by the ongoing economic crisis.

“Having hitched itself successfully to American patterns of consumption, including drug consumption, it has also become the one city where the crunch of the war on drugs and the worldwide financial crisis have had a very heavy impact,” Payan said. “Tens of thousands of young men roam the streets with little or no hope of obtaining a job, of receiving drug treatment, of escaping the cycle of violence.”

Women, children included

“And the possibility of violence, which also encapsulates the possibility of making some money, draws them back into the eye of the storm. And thus, they are falling dead right and left,” Payan said.

On Monday alone, 11 men were killed. Most victims of the year's murders were men slain in conflicts between drug cartels or between cartels and the Mexican government, which has dispatched soldiers intended to keep peace.

But 85 children and 107 women also were among this year's victims, according to Norte newspaper. The death toll also included 49 police officers and several attorneys. More than 10 were U.S. citizens, the Chronicle has previously reported.

Nearly all the slayings remain unsolved.

“The city itself shows signs of weariness; people are tired; fear is everywhere,” Payan said.

lise.olsen@chron.com