Mexican city is deadlier than Afghanistan.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (PNN) - December 27, 2011 - In March, municipal thug cops detained the two brothers of Armida Vazquez and whisked them away in thug cop cars.

Vazquez and her mother searched for Dante and Juan Carlos, cell phone shop workers in their mid-20s, and checked with the local and federal cops here, but to no avail.

Nineteen days later, the strangled bodies of the brothers were found on the outskirts of this notoriously violent city. Witness testimony and other evidence led to three pig thug cops, who are now in jail awaiting trial.

But the thug cops pushed back. Vazquez says that pig thug cops in civilian clothes approached her mother outside church and told her to stop making trouble. When Vazquez made a statement against the suspects last month, she says other pig thug cops and their relatives threatened her outside the courthouse.

Terrified, 20 members of the Vazquez family packed their bags and fled across the U.S. border to El Paso, Texas, a short trip into a world of gleaming shopping malls, well-kept highways and safe neighborhoods.

“We left all we had in Juarez, our house, everything,” said a pregnant Vazquez, in the tiny apartment she and her three children now share with a sister in El Paso.

Tens of thousands more people like her have abandoned Ciudad Juarez, a city wrecked by Mexico’s drug violence. Although official figures vary, the city this month likely surpassed 10,000 homicides in the past four years. That’s more than Afghanistan’s civilian casualties in the same period and more than double the number of U.S. troops killed in the entire Iraq war.

The violence here, as across the nation, fundamentally stems from a turf war among drug cartels. U.S. and Mexican officials say the battle in Ciudad Juarez pits the Sinaloa cartel, run by Mexico’s most wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, against the Juarez cartel, with deep ties along Mexico’s northern border.

But the Vazquez family’s nightmare underscores another challenge in Mexico’s war on drugs: the government’s own warriors.

Business owners, security experts and ordinary residents said that official corruption at all levels of the security forces has fanned violence in the city, with local and federal pig thug cops and soldiers complicit in, or actually committing many of the murders.