Juarez Quotes

Summertime is always the best of what might be.

There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.

Focusing on the dead women enables Americans to ignore the dead men, and ignoring the dead men enables the United States to ignore the failure of its free-trade schemes, which in Juarez are producing poor people and dead people faster than any other product.

Espero el dia que podamos recuperar la cuidad y salgamos, bailemos, cantemos, juguemos en sus calles. Anhelo el día que podamos amar, reír y vivir de nuevo en Cuidad Juarez, en Mexico.

The cartel wars in Juarez made it the most dangerous city in the world between 2008 and 2012, even worse than Baghdad. More than 10,000 people were slain during that period. When Monica and I visited, Juarez was experiencing another killing spree, with nearly a hundred murders in October alone. Throughout Mexico, the homicide rate had surged to 18 percent over the previous year. Everyone on both sides of the river was on edge.
Downtown Juarez was desolate. Monica pointed out the pink crosses on the lampposts. Since the 1990s, hundreds of Juarez women, most of the teenagers, have been kidnapped, many of them in plain sight on the streets where we were standing. Some of their bodies have turned up in mass graves. Each of the crosses on the lampposts represents one of the missing women.

He said that some nights he heard the tom-tom beat of his passion, but he didn't know for sure whether it was really the beat of his passion or of his youth slipping through his fingers, maybe, he added, it's just the beat of poetry, the beat that comes to us all without exception at some mysterious hour, easily missed but absolutely free.