The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

In Mexico, there is an axiom that the country is bound to suffer through hundred-year cycles of uprising. The war for independence from Spain ignited in 1810, exactly one hundred years before the inception of the bloody revolution against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Death-toll estimates for the War of Independence range from 400,000 to 600,000. The revolution claimed anywhere from 500,000 to two million. Today, one hundred years later, historians, journalists, and policy makers struggle to approximate a tally for the country’s ongoing drug war, a conflict that began ahead of schedule, when president Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels in 2006, just two weeks after taking office in the most closely contested election in Mexican history.