Summary
In Dec 2006, Felipe Calderon, as one of his first acts as president of Mexico, declared war on the drug cartels of his nation and announced his intention to use the Mexican army as his instrument. Violence exploded across the nation and the number of murders soared, but the Army has suffered almost no losses, and the price of drugs in American cities has remained stable or has even declined. Yet, the vast majority of politicians and media outlets claim it is a war to the death against drugs and drug cartels. In 2008, there were 20 murders in El Paso TX, while Ciudad Juarez, its sister city just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, officially reported 1,607. And, all the while, violence courses through Juarez like a ceaseless wind, and people insist it is a battle between cartels, or between the state and the drug world, or between the army and the forces of darkness. Here, Bowden narrates the experience of a victim of the violence in Juarez.
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Extract
The Crazy Place
Miss Sinaloa came to this place in the desert to live with the other crazy people under the giant white horse. She did not belong, but then neither did the caballo. The horse stretches over half a mile in length, sketched onto the Sierra de Juárez with whitewash by a local architect. He copied the design from the Uffington horse in Great Britain, a three-thousand-year-old creation deep from the dreamtime of Bronze Age people. He said he was doing it as an exercise in problem solving (the original faces right, his faces left and is three times as large) and as a way to draw attention to the beauty of the mountains. What he did not say was what some in the city whispered: that the horse was sponsored by Amado Carillo Fuentes, then head of the luárez Cartel, a criminal enterprise that, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), was earning $250 million a week by 1995. But, of course, that was in the golden age of peace in luárez, when murders ran just two or three hundred a year, and at any given moment fifteen tons of cocaine were warehoused in the city, waiting to visit American noses. Those were the good old days, when life made sense - even in death.
Now, the world has changed. In December 2006, Felipe Calderón, as one of his first acts as president of Mexico, declared war on the drug cartels of his nation (the luárez cartel is one of many such organizations in the republic) and announced his intention to use the Mexican army as his instrument. Violence exploded across the nation and the number of murders soared, but the Army has suffered almost no losses, the cartels have suffered almost no losses, and the price of drugs in American cities has remained stable or has even declined. Yet, the vast majority of politicians and media outlets claim it is a war to the death against drugs and drug cartels.They insist that power must replace power, th...See the full content of this document
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