The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

by Francisco Cantú

a research librarian and professor at New Mexico State University who studies violence in the borderlands, argue that “when President Calderón or other government spokesmen say that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, it is also the case that fewer than 5 percent of the crimes have been investigated. And by reading the daily accounts of murders . . . one sees that the overwhelming majority of the victims are ordinary people and that most of them are poor: children, teenagers, old people, small-business proprietors who refused to pay extortion demands, mechanics, bus drivers, a woman selling burritos from a cart on the street, a clown juggling at an intersection, boys selling newspapers . . . and dozens of people who have been slaughtered inside drug rehabilitation clinics.”