EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Juarez Mayor Armando Cabada returned to his post on Monday after taking a leave of absence four months ago to run for a different public office.
Cabada fell short in the MORENA Party primaries for governor of Chihuahua and for the Mexican congress. However, the mayor is still in the running for one of the at-large seats in Congress awarded to political parties based on their overall vote in the June 6 elections.
“We will work on pending projects […] the street lighting project is going forward, we need to finish the construction of 500 streets I promised I would build and the new (police) academy,” Cabada said Monday morning after coming out of an inter-agency public safety meeting.
Cabada told reporters he would address citizens’ concerns over the state’s construction of bus stops in the middle of traditionally busy avenues. Known as the BRT, the project consists of express routes for new, high-capacity segmented buses.
The returning mayor also said he wants to speed up work on a new police station in the high-crime Riberas del Bravo neighborhood and will work with Mayor-elect Cruz Perez Cuellar on a smooth transition of power come September.
Carlos Ponce Torres, a physician and city council member who was mayor of Juarez in the early 1990s, took over from Cabada during the leave.
Cabada is a television executive and son of Juarez television pioneer Armando Cabada de la O, who died earlier this year of natural causes.
Freelance Juarez photojournalist Roberto Delgado contributed to this report.