Doctors and journalists organized a rally outside the mayor's office in Juarez to protest the seriousness of the daily threat against them and everybody else in the city.

According to a newspaper tally, five doctors have been killed and 16 others have been abducted thus far this year, The victims include physician Guillermo Ortiz Collazo and his assistant, who were killed in a car-bomb blast on July 16 while treating victims of an earlier explosion.

Psychologist Carlos Perlasca said the situation in Ciudad Juarez has reached such extremes that nearly all residents are technically suffering from chronic anxiety.

Perlasca said he himself has been a victim of kidnapping and that that experience prompted him to relocate to El Paso, Texas, which lies just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez.

“For any person who’s been personally affected, whether by a kidnapping or extortion, the symptoms flare up to the degree that you need a great deal of help,” he said.

According to mental health specialists, the recent wave of extortions and kidnappings in Ciudad Juarez has forced hundreds of mental health physicians to cross the border to El Paso, Texas for psychological care.

And now, a little Edmund Burke:

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.

(h/t About Last Night for the quote.)