‘We’re not going to die, are we Dan?’ asked my friend Joe, a CBS radio [1]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. [2]‘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.
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