Smart Tech Alliance took Juárez's case to government

The alliance is a group of local technology companies — besides New Discovery, Daniel Ayala, Rafael Rucobo and Alberto Valero Ortega were represented that day — that has spent years building industrial technology solutions from Juárez. Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuéllar attended, with the city's Dirección General de Desarrollo Económico. Mariana Ramírez and Abril Rangel Cruz organised the forum.

Around the table were Héctor Ochoa of the Secretaría de Economía, federal deputy Alejandro Pérez Cuéllar, councillor Alejandro Acosta, Juan Acereto of the city's international affairs office, economic development director Tania Maldonado, Enrique Licón, Elías Chacón of Red Juárez Emprende, Humberto Álvarez and Claudia García of CODER Juárez, Francisco Turati of the state's innovation and competitiveness institute, and Beto Torres Vela of the US Consulate General.

On April 17 the group sat down with Tania Maldonado, the city's director of economic development, and Álvaro Raúl Gutiérrez Gómez, director of industrial and business development, to go through what the alliance is building and where it lines up with the municipal plan.

The order matters. The alliance came first — an informal group of software companies that had been meeting on its own — and it is what produced the institutional channel: the conversations inside it led to CANACO opening a specialised software section, which Liz Pasillas was elected to lead in February 2025. By April the two were working as one thing, an industry group with a chamber behind it. The ecosystem work goes back further still, to the 2021 Paso del Norte workshop where the same organisations first put their plans side by side.