Editing Ciudad Juárez (section)

=== Mexican Revolution ===
The city was Mexico's largest border town by 1910. As such, it held strategic importance during the [[Mexican Revolution]]. In May 1911, about 3,000 revolutionary fighters under the leadership of [[Francisco I. Madero]] laid siege to Ciudad Juárez, which was garrisoned by 500 regular Federal troops under the command of General Juan José Navarro. Navarro's force was supported by 300 civilian auxiliaries and local police. After two days of heavy fighting most of the city had fallen to the insurrectionists and the surviving federal soldiers had withdrawn to their barracks. Navarro then formally surrendered to Madero. The capture of a key border town at an early stage of the revolution not only enabled the revolutionary forces to bring in weapons and supplies from El Paso, but marked the beginning of the end for the demoralized Diaz regime.<ref>{{cite book |first=Ronald |last=Aitkin |pages=85–90 |title=Mexico 1910-20 |publisher=Macmillan & Co |date=1969}}</ref>

During the subsequent years of the conflict, [[Pancho Villa]] and other revolutionaries struggled for the control of the town (and income from the Federal Customs House), destroying much of the city during battles in [[Battle of Ciudad Juárez (1911)|1911]] and 1913. Much of the population abandoned the city between 1914 and 1917. Tourism, gambling, and light manufacturing drove the city's recovery from the 1920s until the 1940s. A series of mayors in the 1940s–1960s, like Carlos Villareal and René Mascareñas Miranda, ushered in a period of high growth and development predicated on the PRONAF border industrialization development program.