Juarez: city of fear
‘We’re not going to die, are we Dan?’ asked my friend Joe, a CBS radio reporter, shortly before we crossed from El Paso into Juárez, Mexico, murder capital of the world. ‘Nah,’ I replied. ‘Our guide is a priest. It’s a Sunday. The narcos will respect that.’
I was lying to make him feel better. In February, a sacristan in Juárez was killed, one of more than 2,000 drug-related murders in the city so far this year. Elsewhere in Mexico priests had been beaten and butchered: for the cartels, nothing is sacred.
Father Michael, an 86-year-old veteran of the second world war, was quick to inform us that his priestly status and the holiness of the day would offer us no protection: ‘Most killings occur during daylight and they increase on the weekend.’
Nor could we expect our journalistic status to grant us safe passage. Only last week, following the killing of a 21-year-old photographer, the local newspaper, El Diario de Juárez, published a frontpage editorial begging the cartels to stop targeting their staff. ‘What do you want from us?’ it said.
Father Michael has lived in Juárez for almost 20 years. He has seen its decline from industrial centre and party town to post-apocalyptic dystopia, complete with ancient US school buses rattling around like something from the Mad Max films. We toured the rubble. ‘This is where the souvenir stalls used to be; the bars and clubs were here — and this is the red light district.’ A lone prostitute squatted in the wreckage. God, on the other hand, was thriving. Juárez cathedral holds six masses on a Sunday, each heaving with sinners.
Read the rest HERE
Latest posts by Daniel Kalder (Posts)
- Book Review: Retroworld (plus, why I hate Star Trek) - April 3, 2014
- A very expensive fungus - October 16, 2013
- The secret rituals of history’s most creative minds - October 9, 2013
- Apparently we are all getting very old - October 3, 2013
- Vasily Grossman: from Stalingrad to toilet trouble - August 28, 2013
Print This Post
Man! Clancy knows how to do it.
First, Executive Orders.
Now this –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy's_Ghost_Recon_Advanced_Warfighter_2
When that came out some critics said it was crazy to think this type of nonsense could happen as close as Juarez. Those people would be wrong.
Well done. The whole “if I can stay alive for another 30 minutes”-moment sounds like a nightmare. Like one of my ‘anxiety dreams’ where I’m walking around with a loaded gun pointed at my feet all night long.
When I used to live in New Mexico, I never wandered south of the border. I was afraid I wouldn’t come back. Perhaps that was just me being a naive Wisconsinite out of his element, but the daily headlines about mass graves and drug cartels were something we didn’t see much in the local news in America’s Dairyland.
The most bizarre thing, and what I couldn’t touch upon in the piece, is the contrast between El Paso, which pace Cormac McCarthy is actually a peaceful, boring, incredibly safe place, and the violence across the bridge. The two cities are contiguous, but in El Paso it feels as though Juarez isn’t real, or rather, it’s fluid and bizarre like a nightmare that you can’t touch. But sometimes the nightmare reaches out and touches El Paso, although the city authorities pretend otherwise.
@DK
Similar vibe in Albuquerque. It’s the calmest, most laid-back city I’ve ever lived in. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more at ease. But there’s a subtext beneath the border that creeps into the air. As an outsider, maybe I was more sensitive to it than the locals, who might think I’m adding more intrigue than necessary.
But the entire Four Corners region is the inland equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. The closer you get to the Mexican border (or the deeper you go into the Southern Rockies) the weirder it gets.