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Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields
by Charles Bowden
by Charles Bowden
If you could reduce this book to one sentence, it would be this: The murder rate in Ciudad Juarez is now higher than any other city in North America--EVER--and with no significant change in demography or law enforcement procedure, it will continue to climb annually!
Imagine a continuum. On the far left is genocide. On the far right is municipal murder rate. The continuum only captures, say, the last 20 years. (This continuum does not include conventional warfare, where uniformed combatants meet on a battlefield and follow Laws of Armed Conflict.)
On the far left, fading to the right ARE
1983-2002: Sudanese civil war (2 million)
1988-2001: Afghanistan civil war (400,000)
1988-2004: Somalia's civil war (550,000)
1989-: Liberian civil war (220,000)
1991-97: Congo's civil war (800,000)
1991-2000: Sierra Leone's civil war (200,000)
1991-2009: Russia-Chechnya civil war (200,000)
1991-94: Armenia-Azerbaijan war (35,000)
1992-96: Tajikstan's civil war war (50,000)
1992-96: Yugoslavian wars (260,000)
1993-97: Congo Brazzaville's civil war (100,000)
1993-2005: Burundi's civil war (200,000)
1994: Rwanda's civil war (900,000)
1998-: Congo/Zaire's war (3.8 million)
2003-09: Sudan vs JEM/Darfur (300,000)
On the far right, fading to the left, are US MURDERS
1996: 19,650
1997: 18,208
1998: 16,914
1999: 15,522
2000: 15,586
2001: 16,037
2002: 16,229
2003: 16,528
2004: 16,148
2005: 16,740
2006: 17,030
2007: 16,929
2008: 16,272
At times the municipal murder rates may peak, like Miami in the 70’s, New York in the 80’s, Los Angeles in the 90’s, and New Orleans in the 00’s. However, these rates are for the entire United States, with a population of 300 million.
In Ciudad Juarez, a single city with a population of roughly 1 million, the number of murders are:
2008: 1607
2009: 2455
Extrapolate. This means that a single mid-sized Mexican city has 10% of the murders of an entire country 300 times its size! Read that again. This means that a single mid-sized Mexican city has 10% of the murders of an entire country 300 times its size! Compared to the US, Ciudad Juarez’s murder rate is a perverse outlier. The number of murders represents TWO magnitudes of order multiplied by a factor of three. In other words, if the United States had a similar murder rate as Ciudad Juarez, then in 2008: 482,000 murders, and in 2009: 736,000 murders. At this murder rate would you be a concerned US citizen? You betcha would!
So where in that continuum would Ciudad Juarez best fit? Looks to me like it would be closer to the left side--near the genocides. The paper napkin math above is not provided by the author, but I think it makes the point. Ciudad Juarez has a problem. It’s got a murder problem. And it’s at genocidal proportions. You’d be safer in Mogadishu, Somalia or Kabul, Afghanistan.
Now the book. Charles Bowden has the cold facts as his disposal, yet he chooses to write the book somewhat like a diary. He wanted to reveal what this murder rate has done to the citizens of Juarez. An eerie malaise has descended on this border city. There has not been a single arrest for murder in 2 years; not a single killer brought to trial. Nobody talks about the murders--even if they have relevant information. The police are corrupt, the army is corrupt, the newspaper is corrupt, your neighbors are corrupt. The army is killing cops, the cops are killing informants, informants are killing dealers, dealers are killing each other, and the cartels are killing everybody. Collusion in Juarez is a 3-dimensional web that is perpetually being re-weaved. Women and children are being killed in great numbers. And the killings are peculiar in their brutality. Most of the bodies have signs of torture, strangulation, amputation, and decapitation. Mass graves of 30+ people are not uncommon. People who’ve simply disappeared are not part of the murder count--not part of the count, that is, until their bodies are discovered years later.
Brown writes in a trippy, Jim Morrison, Riders on the Storm type of riff that highlights the killings by exposing the absurdity of daily life in this broken town. Brown takes you on a ride through the heat, the haze, the dust, and the fear in Juarez. The murders happen with such spinning regularity that for 320 pages you feel drugged and listening to a long bass guitar and piano organ solo. Over and over the bodies keep appearing. Their crumpled, limbless bodies appear every morning like dead cicadas. Police take hours to arrive at the scene of a murder. Why? Because they want to make sure the scene is safe to approach. The maimed are not taken to the hospital immediately because the killers will invade the emergency room and spray a magazine of bullets to finish the job. The dead may be the lucky ones. Gang rapes, molestation, severe beatings, and cellar slavery happen every day. Sporadic in the book, Brown interleaves the obituaries of the unidentified dead. Life rolls on; the dead are forgotten; newspapers mention nothing; Riders on the Storm.
The overriding conclusion I draw from this book is that the US war on drugs has not--and will not--work in Mexico. Period. I make this conclusion independent of Brown’s commentary. It’s also my political position on our drug problem in the States. Oh, and if your wonder, murder rates in 2010 are staged to set yet another record.
I wish Bowden stayed in non-fiction territory, because his book has the feel of a long diary. It works, but it’s much of the same, chapter after chapter. However, if this is the first you’ve heard that the Mexican border is dangerous, then this is mandatory reading for you.
Imagine a continuum. On the far left is genocide. On the far right is municipal murder rate. The continuum only captures, say, the last 20 years. (This continuum does not include conventional warfare, where uniformed combatants meet on a battlefield and follow Laws of Armed Conflict.)
On the far left, fading to the right ARE
1983-2002: Sudanese civil war (2 million)
1988-2001: Afghanistan civil war (400,000)
1988-2004: Somalia's civil war (550,000)
1989-: Liberian civil war (220,000)
1991-97: Congo's civil war (800,000)
1991-2000: Sierra Leone's civil war (200,000)
1991-2009: Russia-Chechnya civil war (200,000)
1991-94: Armenia-Azerbaijan war (35,000)
1992-96: Tajikstan's civil war war (50,000)
1992-96: Yugoslavian wars (260,000)
1993-97: Congo Brazzaville's civil war (100,000)
1993-2005: Burundi's civil war (200,000)
1994: Rwanda's civil war (900,000)
1998-: Congo/Zaire's war (3.8 million)
2003-09: Sudan vs JEM/Darfur (300,000)
On the far right, fading to the left, are US MURDERS
1996: 19,650
1997: 18,208
1998: 16,914
1999: 15,522
2000: 15,586
2001: 16,037
2002: 16,229
2003: 16,528
2004: 16,148
2005: 16,740
2006: 17,030
2007: 16,929
2008: 16,272
At times the municipal murder rates may peak, like Miami in the 70’s, New York in the 80’s, Los Angeles in the 90’s, and New Orleans in the 00’s. However, these rates are for the entire United States, with a population of 300 million.
In Ciudad Juarez, a single city with a population of roughly 1 million, the number of murders are:
2008: 1607
2009: 2455
Extrapolate. This means that a single mid-sized Mexican city has 10% of the murders of an entire country 300 times its size! Read that again. This means that a single mid-sized Mexican city has 10% of the murders of an entire country 300 times its size! Compared to the US, Ciudad Juarez’s murder rate is a perverse outlier. The number of murders represents TWO magnitudes of order multiplied by a factor of three. In other words, if the United States had a similar murder rate as Ciudad Juarez, then in 2008: 482,000 murders, and in 2009: 736,000 murders. At this murder rate would you be a concerned US citizen? You betcha would!
So where in that continuum would Ciudad Juarez best fit? Looks to me like it would be closer to the left side--near the genocides. The paper napkin math above is not provided by the author, but I think it makes the point. Ciudad Juarez has a problem. It’s got a murder problem. And it’s at genocidal proportions. You’d be safer in Mogadishu, Somalia or Kabul, Afghanistan.
Now the book. Charles Bowden has the cold facts as his disposal, yet he chooses to write the book somewhat like a diary. He wanted to reveal what this murder rate has done to the citizens of Juarez. An eerie malaise has descended on this border city. There has not been a single arrest for murder in 2 years; not a single killer brought to trial. Nobody talks about the murders--even if they have relevant information. The police are corrupt, the army is corrupt, the newspaper is corrupt, your neighbors are corrupt. The army is killing cops, the cops are killing informants, informants are killing dealers, dealers are killing each other, and the cartels are killing everybody. Collusion in Juarez is a 3-dimensional web that is perpetually being re-weaved. Women and children are being killed in great numbers. And the killings are peculiar in their brutality. Most of the bodies have signs of torture, strangulation, amputation, and decapitation. Mass graves of 30+ people are not uncommon. People who’ve simply disappeared are not part of the murder count--not part of the count, that is, until their bodies are discovered years later.
Brown writes in a trippy, Jim Morrison, Riders on the Storm type of riff that highlights the killings by exposing the absurdity of daily life in this broken town. Brown takes you on a ride through the heat, the haze, the dust, and the fear in Juarez. The murders happen with such spinning regularity that for 320 pages you feel drugged and listening to a long bass guitar and piano organ solo. Over and over the bodies keep appearing. Their crumpled, limbless bodies appear every morning like dead cicadas. Police take hours to arrive at the scene of a murder. Why? Because they want to make sure the scene is safe to approach. The maimed are not taken to the hospital immediately because the killers will invade the emergency room and spray a magazine of bullets to finish the job. The dead may be the lucky ones. Gang rapes, molestation, severe beatings, and cellar slavery happen every day. Sporadic in the book, Brown interleaves the obituaries of the unidentified dead. Life rolls on; the dead are forgotten; newspapers mention nothing; Riders on the Storm.
The overriding conclusion I draw from this book is that the US war on drugs has not--and will not--work in Mexico. Period. I make this conclusion independent of Brown’s commentary. It’s also my political position on our drug problem in the States. Oh, and if your wonder, murder rates in 2010 are staged to set yet another record.
I wish Bowden stayed in non-fiction territory, because his book has the feel of a long diary. It works, but it’s much of the same, chapter after chapter. However, if this is the first you’ve heard that the Mexican border is dangerous, then this is mandatory reading for you.
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| 08/01/2010 | page 80 |
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It's no secret that there is open warfare on the Mexican borders, but it is surprising that it gets so little attention compared to coverage of relatively safe places, like say Afghanistan. And I don't use the word "warfare" metonymically or flippantly. What is happening in Mexico is open war. War between the cartels and with the increasingly impotent state. It's hard to say which side is more heavily armed, but if you believe there are not pitched battles with Soviet RPGs, AR-15s, Uzis, automatic shotguns and the like, between cartels and the police in the streets of Juarez, Tijuana, Reynosa, etc., you are living in a fantasy. The US needs to wake up to the consequences of its medieval and entirely political drug policy.
This just in, $600 million to help secure the border. A lot of this money trickles over the border to help SEDENA and SEMAR, who end up fighting local law enforcement as well as cartels. It's out of conrol. BTW, this bill was passed by a congressional vote of 2-0. What?http://goo.gl/iIcU
If your selection of material to include in your reviews seemed less careful or if your writing style had less punch, I would not finish reading your darkest reviews. "I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places (Robert Frost, "Desert Places"). But your work is too impressive to be ignored.
Yes, Juarez is at the edge of several overlapping drug cartels, it's been identified by Mexican authorities as ground zero in their war on drugs, and, quite honestly, once a trend gets started and people desensitized, it tends to snowball by inertia alone.Good question.
I can't help thinking too that women are the casualties here, they're expendable, worthless, just so many notches in a belt for these murderers and thugs
Do they really consider women as worthless? I thought prostitution was a major business too. Or has it been completely eclipsed by drugs?
Manny, drug trafficking via Mexico is producing more money today for the cartels than all the storied years of the 70s, 80s, or 90s. Part of the reason is that drug addiction by Mexican themselves are at an all time high. So, the cartels have 2 markets, the US & Mexico. Drug use in Mexico has exploded in the last 10 years. Combine windfall profits, highly-trained (and former Army) militant arm of cartels, an impotent government, overwhelmingly corrupt Army, and a porous border for weapons heading southward, and you've got the environment where neighborhood thugs become city thugs, city thugs become regional thugs, regional thugs become cartel thugs, cartel thugs become national thugs. On this side of the Atlantic, Mexican violence has for the media become a daily topic. As I type this, in the background I hear Janet Napolitano discussing the $600 million dollar border security bill passed yesterday. The US military is forbidden to travel to northern Mexico off-duty.@Jessica, what's happening to women is worse than the men. Women are rape vehicles. They're harassed, exploited, and abused as often as they're talked to.
Jessica, cross post. Yes, women are employed by majority in the maquiladoras, and the men are employed by majority in the drug trade. This is in Juarez.
Yes, I lived in Mexico for a number of years.Cuidad Juarez is not--god forbid--representative of the rest of the country
Manny, few people realize just how bad it is. That's why I insist on comparing it with Afghanistan. That wasn't meant to be tongue-in-cheek: the violence is that bad. The drug lords have access to the kind of weaponry you only see in movies, and oftentimes are engaged in pitched battles with the military in the streets of major cities. Frequently, the military is the under-armed side. Just the other day I remember the DEA busting like 10 Mexicans (could have been Colombians) in a SUBMARINE. They had around 5 tons of coke and AK-47s stacked to the ceiling. Jessica -- true for the moment, but the real distinction is between Mexico of today and Mexico of a few years past. We never saw this kind of violence in the 1990's. It has spiraled out of control because of the growing power and effectiveness of the cartels, and the decreasing efficacy of the Mexican state.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36136926/...That article is from April of this year. It marks the point when the cartels started openly fighting the Mexican military. They are still just thugs tactically, but neither was this any kiddie shit. Coordinated, offensive assaults against multiple army bases complete with highway blockades. Just the weaponry seized after the attack included 50 assault rifles 60 grenades, grenade launchers and armored vehicles.
It's only gotten worse since then.
Over the last several months there's been several helicopter incursions into US sovereign airspace by Mexican Army in Juarez. NORAD knows about it, and local media have reported it, but our military is allowing it to happen on the 'low down.' I think it's our way of silently supporting the Mexican government's attempt to clamp down on cartel activity. But the Mexican army is so corrupt, I feel like we're shaking hands with a sleazy Maffioso.
Mexico can't possibly legalize drugs because of the political fallout in its relationship with the US. There is already sufficient right-wing belligerence against Mexican "anchor babies," illegals and such that racism and jingoism has come back in vogue as it has not previously in my lifetime. You can only imagine in horror at how much worse this would be if Mexico were cast as a place where drugs and prostitution were rampant and state-sanctioned. Keep in mind that remittances from expatriates is a fairly large component of Mexico's economy. No, the Mexican government has to toe the line with the US when it comes to drug legislation. This is our stupidity, not theirs.
Isaiah sums up what I'd say Brian. I'd only add that American statesmanship is overstretched right now, what with 2 wars, the re-rise of Russian assertiveness, Iranian nuclear intentions, North Korea, the rise of the financial powers of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). We can ill-afford to acknowledge a political and humanitarian crisis on our porous southern border.But your question highlights the basic answers I expect from a well-rounded, highly-starred, non-fiction book. It could have--but didn't--answer these kinds of basic questions. 3 stars only.
Brian wrote: "Is there any discussion within Mexico on legalizing drugs, to dry up revenue for these para-military rengades? If the government can't maintain order with police and military, it seems like they s..."Mexico has already decriminalized drug possesion sometime within the past year or two.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/se...