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Ciudad Juarez –  A violence-ridden stretch of Mexico's border with the United States has become virtually deserted due to intimidation from violent drug cartels, which have killed hundreds in that area in recent years, scared away local law enforcement and forced countless businesses to close shop.

Northern Mexico's Juarez Valley, a cotton-farming area located on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, has become increasingly desolate, with its three towns having lost between 30 percent and 45 percent of their residents since 2005, according to census figures.

The exodus is blamed on the ever-growing presence of the Juarez cartel, headed by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, and the Sinaloa mob, led by Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman, in that coveted drug corridor, where army patrols are intermittent and the occasional rumble of a late-model SUV carrying several heavily armed men is a stark reminder of who is in control.

According to some experts, the cartels want to empty the area completely to facilitate their drug-smuggling operations.

Before the violence escalated in that area, local inhabitants worked at agricultural and service jobs and at assembly plants known as "maquiladoras," an industry that has been battered by the deteriorating security situation.

Heading east from Ciudad Juarez, considered Mexico's murder capital, the first town in the Juarez Valley is Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, where criminals have imposed a late-night curfew on the few remaining inhabitants.

The town has long been at the mercy of gangsters and the December 2010 kidnapping of a 28-year-old policewoman who patrolled the area on foot and armed with just a handgun left it without any law-enforcement presence at all.

The woman's fate remains unknown.

The 2005 census put Guadalupe's population at 9,148, but it subsequently fell by 30 percent to 6,458 inhabitants in 2010, according to the INEGI statistics agency.

The next town is Praxedis G. Guerrero, whose deserted town square has recently become a regular dumping ground for the heads of people apparently killed by rival gangsters.

The town's chief of police is Marisol Valles Garcia, a criminology student who attracted international attention when she dared to accept a job that no one else wanted.

Her force consists of 13 officers, nine of them women, who must make do with just one patrol car and just four guns - three rifles and a pistol.

The shops in the town have been permanently shuttered and the only church was destroyed in a 2010 fire after a failure to make extortion payments to criminal gangs.

Praxedis' population has plunged 43 percent in recent years from 8,514 people in 2005 to less than 4,800 last year, according to INEGI.

The road that links the valley to Ciudad Juarez is Federal Highway 2, which runs near the spot where the bodies of Elias and Malena Reyes Salazar - siblings of slain rights activist Josefina Reyes - and Elias' wife, Luisa Ornelas, were found on Feb. 25.

Recently, the Chihuahua state human rights commission identified four "family extermination" zones in the Ciudad Juarez area and nearby towns.

An inspector from that organization, Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, said the situation in the Juarez Valley "is extremely dramatic because they've already wiped out entire families made up of six or seven members," referring to the murders as pure "terrorism."

In a letter sent to the Chihuahua governor's office and the federal government urging officials to include the Juarez Valley in the "We're All Juarez" crime-fighting and social-development program, which currently only encompasses Ciudad Juarez, a group of Chihuahua lawmakers described that stretch of the border as the most violent area in the world.

In the missive, the legislators specifically mentioned the plight of the rural municipalities of Praxedis G. Guerrero and Guadalupe, located across the border from the small Texas towns of Fabens and Fort Hancock and about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Ciudad Juarez.

According to the lawmakers, the Juarez Valley is facing "atypical circumstances" not found "in any other town of (Chihuahua) state or of Mexico."

Conflict among Mexico's various drug cartels and between the criminals and security forces has claimed more than 35,000 lives nationwide since December 2006, when newly inaugurated President Felipe Calderon militarized Mexico's drug war.