A look back at the drug war in Juarez

At the city cemetery called San Rafael, bodies of unidentified or unclaimed victims are buried separately in a communal grave.

(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Feb. 8, 2016 12:19 PM PT

From 2007 to 2013 nearly 11,000 people were killed in Juarez, Mexico, many in violence touched off by warring drug cartels. In 2008 and 2009, Times photographer Don Bartletti spent several weeks documenting the violence during a time when Juarez was known as the “murder capital of Mexico.”

Drug war in Juarez (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Heavily armed Mexican army troops patrol Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in an open pickup truck. Soldiers speed through the city in teams of two trucks assisting local law enforcement with emergencies as varied as traffic accidents and drug cartel assassinations.

(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

A coroner’s worker in Ciudad Juarez removes the body of a 12-year-old girl from a vehicle in which she and her father were killed in a hail of bullets.

(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Investigators inspect the body of one of two men killed in Tierra Nueva, a graffiti-stained neighborhood of dirt streets and concrete shacks in south Ciudad Juarez. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

The wife of one of the two Tierra Nueva victims is consoled by neighbors at the crime scene. The other victim was involved in “illegal things,” a neighborhood resident said. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Schoolboys, in foreground, look at the body of a shooting victim in a playground in Satelite, a working-class section of east Ciudad Juarez. The area is notorious for drug dealing. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Coroners workers Raymundo Grado, left, and Enrique Lopez remove the bodies of shooting victims from the Tierra Nueva neighborhood.

(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

The city morgue has three walk-in refrigerators packed with bodies. Heads are kept in cardboard or foam boxes. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Soldiers console the brother of a shooting victim in Ciudad Juarez in 2009. Many Mexicans don’t trust authorities enough to report crime or suspicious activity. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)