MEXICO.- Ciudad Juarez, a border city in northern Mexico that was considered one of the most dangerous places in the world until recently, has seen its murder rate drop by 75 percent over the past two years, a report released Monday said.

Juarez, located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, will end this year with 784 homicides, the Chihuahua state Attorney General's Office said in a report.

The figure includes killings registered through last Thursday in the city of 1.3 million people, the AG's office said.

Ciudad Juarez, which was the epicenter of a war between rival drug cartels, registered 3,115 murders in 2010 and 2,086 in 2011.

"The residents were the ones who paid the highest cost," the state human rights commission's representative in Ciudad Juarez, Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, told EFE, referring to the actions taken by officials to reduce the violence in the border city.

Ciudad Juarez has been plagued by drug-related violence for years, with the Juarez cartel fighting the rival Sinaloa cartel for control of smuggling routes from the border city into the United States.

The border city, which topped the list of the world's deadliest cities for three consecutive years, dropped to second place in 2011 with 148 homicides for every 100,000 residents.

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