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CIUDAD JUAREZ: The US businessman and his family were enjoying a steak lunch when the hit man pulled up outside the restaurant, lowered the window of his car and levelled a machine gun on his victim.
"I saw flames shoot from the muzzle, grabbed the baby and just hit the floor," the father of three, who asked not to be identified, said. "The gunfire was deafening."
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's industrial powerhouse on the US border, has already suffered damage to its reputation with the gruesome and largely unsolved murders of more than 300 women in an 11-year killing spree that shocked the world.
Now the desert city is in the grip of a wave of brutal gangland slayings linked to feuding drug cartels fighting for control of the cross-border narcotics trade that claimed 19 lives last month alone.
The grim and often very-public murders have also made headlines over the border in El Paso, Texas, sparking fears that they could drive away foreign business owners wary of getting caught up in the cross-fire.
"We are very worried that crime may scare away investors," Carlos Castaneda, president of the local Chamber of Commerce, said. "There may be people that are thinking of investing in Juarez who now may not because of safety issues."
RUN FOR THE BORDER: Police in the city - which is host to some 370 mostly foreign-owned export assembly plants or maquiladoras - have recorded more than 50 shootings, beatings and strangling deaths linked to organized crime so far this year, up from 35 in all of last year.
Prosecutors say the slayings, some of which have included acts of mutilation and torture, followed the seizure of drug shipments on both sides of the border that pitched rival cartels into a round of bloodletting.
Tourist stall holders and taxi drivers say the number of American day trippers is shrinking. Standing at his trinket-laden stall in the city's craft market, trader Juan Villordo says sales of souvenir key rings, shot glasses and T-shirts have fallen in recent weeks.
"People in El Paso read all about the drug dealers and the killings in the newspapers, and they get nervous," he said in the all but empty market. "Some are still taking the trolley bus down at the weekends, but they aren't coming over on foot like they used to."
Outside a downtown hotel popular with tourists, cab driver Ruben Gonzalez is glum. His shift started at 4am, and by 10am, he complains he has yet to find his first fare. "The problem is that the city is known the world over as a cemetery because of the women" who were murdered, he told Reuters. "And now it's just got worse."
"SCARING PEOPLE AWAY": As the body count mounts, with several victims turning up bound with duct tape in car trunks or burned on wooden palates in the streets, security concerns among jittery foreign plant managers in the city have risen.
"It's scaring people who used to live in Ciudad Juarez like top management from (foreign-owned) maquilas, who now live across the border in El Paso and travel to work," Castaneda said.
President Vicente Fox appointed a special prosecutor earlier this year to investigate the slayings of women in the city, who subsequently ordered a criminal probe of negligent local police and prosecutors, and claimed the arrest of five suspects in connection with the crimes. But authorities have made no arrests in connection with the gangland killings - dubbed "narco-executions" by local media. -Reuters
