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Some people would have you believe that El Paso’s apogee was 1950, and we’ve been in steady decline ever since.

Here’s Woody Hunt, in an interview with ElPasoInc.com, talking about the effect of corruption on El Paso’s economy:

Q. What prompted you to start researching corruption?

My interest is really driven by economic development. In 1950, El Paso’s median family income was 14 percent higher than the state and was on par with the nation.

By 2000 the medium family income was 30 percent below the state and 35 percent below the country.

That long slide in our income indicated to me that we were not economically competitive and we are becoming less so.

So I began to ask, what can we do differently, first to stop the slide in income, then to turn things around and close the gap?

Mr. Hunt would have you believe that corruption crippled El Paso’s economy since 1950, but 1950s the represented a technological change, not just in El Paso but the entire United States .

Before 1950, El Paso’s success resulted from it’s role as a railroad hub.

From Out of the Desert, an El Paso history by Owen White, published in 1923:

In the beginning El Paso occupied a position on the frontier of the United States, whereas today it occupies a commanding situation as the central point within a circular frontier which is all its own. Stretching away from El Paso in every direction, north, east, south and west, for a distance of seven hundred miles, there is a vast territory over which it is El Paso’s logical destiny to dominate.

El Paso enjoyed its status as the Queen of the Desert because it was the hub for intersecting railway lines, east to west and north to south.

Railroads began to lose their unique value after World War II. 

From Wikipedia:

After Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953, his administration developed a proposal for an interstate highway system, eventually resulting in the enactment of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.

Thus began El Paso’s loss of status as a logistical hub. Over the following years, as the Interstate Highway System developed and improved, trucks supplanted rail as the principal means of transportation for goods and raw materials.

Read the rest at https://elchuqueno.com/corruption-and-the-decline-of-el-paso/

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