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 Juárez 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 Juárez, 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 Juárez 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.

The white horse outside of Juárez, rumored to have been commissioned by drug lord Amado Carrillo (Darren McCollester).

They insist that power must replace power, that structure replaces structure. And they insist that power exists as a hierarchy, that there is a top where the boss lives and a bottom where the prey scurry about in fear of the boss. But if this is simply a battle between big cartels to control this border crossing, then why are murders happening all over the city to small-time drug sellers? In 2008, there were 20 murders in El Paso, Texas, while Ciudad Juárez, its sister city just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, officially reported 1,607—and there is likely some slippage in these numbers. Murders covered up, murders unreported, murders un-investigated.

There are two ways to lose your sanity in Juárez. One is to believe that all the violence is the direct result of a cartel war. The other is to believe that any murder is unrelated to the drug world. In Juárez, the payroll for employees of the drug industry exceeds the payroll for all the city’s factories—and Juárez is the mother lode of factories; it boasts the lowest unemployment in Mexico. There is hardly a family in the city that does not have a member in the drug industry, nor is there anyone in the city who cannot point out narco mansions or new churches built with narco money. The entire society in Juárez rests on drug money, and why shouldn’t it? It is the only possible hope for the poor, the valiant, and the doomed. So a person never knows exactly why he is killed but is absolutely certain that his death comes, somehow, because of the enormous profits attached to drug sales.

There has been little notice of this slaughter in the American media. People say there are murders in Detroit, that women are raped in Washington, DC, that the cops are on the take in Chicago, that drugs are everywhere in Dallas, and that the government is a flop in New Orleans. People tell me Los Angeles is a jungle of gangs, that we have our own revered mafia, and that drugs flood Mexico and Juárez because of the wicked, vice-ridden ways of the United States. All of these assertions may be true, but they are also distractions from the deaths on the killing ground.

In the last decade, something has changed in Juárez; I feel this in my bones. The state still exists—there are police, a president, a congress, agencies studded across various government buildings—but the Mexican government increasingly pretends to be in charge and then calls it a day. Thirty thousand Mexican soldiers are said to be fighting the drug war. Yet the police have connected scarcely a body to the cartels and the Mexican army has captured comparatively little cocaine—this in a city with thousands of retail cocaine outlets. The US beefs up the border, installs high-tech towers, tosses up walls, and puts twenty thousand Border Patrol agents on the line to face down Mexico. Still the drugs arrive right on time.

And, all the while, violence courses through Juárez like a ceaseless wind, and we insist it is a battle between cartels, or between the state and the drug world, or between the army and the forces of darkness.

But consider this possibility: violence is now woven into the very fabric of the community; it has no single cause and no single motive and no on-off switch.

Violence is not a part of life; it is life.

Just ask Miss Sinaloa.

She was a teenager when the white horse was created in the late nineties, but at that time Miss Sinaloa knew nothing of giant horses painted on mountains, nor of the cartels, nor of the crazy place here in the desert. She came here in December 2005. She stayed some months and then went home to Sinaloa, the state on the Pacific coast that is the mother of almost all the major players in Mexico’s drug industry. She was very beautiful; I know this because Elvira tells me so as we stand in the wind with the sand whipping around us.

Elvira is heavy with a coarse sweater, pink slacks, dark skin, and cropped hair with a blonde tint dancing through it. A man straddles a bicycle by her side, a boy in red overalls clutches a pink purse and stares, and sitting on the ground is the lean and hungry dog of the campo. Smoke fills the air from a trash fire behind the asylum where they all work. The facility—a concrete-block structure with various rooms inside—hosts a hundred inmates. The old woman gets about fifty dollars a week for cooking three meals a day, six days a week—she says she is one of fifteen caretakers. A doctor drops by on Sundays to check on the health of the locos, and the whole operation is sponsored by a radio evangelist in Juárez.

Every five days, the staff takes the bedding from the inmates, washes it, and then comes out beyond the walls and drapes it on creosote or yucca plants for drying. The blankets now huddle in the wind like a herd of beasts—green, red, blue, violet. One is gray with a tiger and her kitten on it. My mind spins back to the mid-nineties when Amado Carrillo ran Juárez and for a spell was dumping bodies wrapped in tiger blankets. He was rumored to have a private zoo with a tiger, one he fed with informants, but this was a common legend in the drug industry. Then, for a spell, he wrapped informants in yellow ribbons as gifts to the DEA. All this happened in the quiet days of the past when the killing was not nearly so bad.

Elvira explains how people wind up in her care: “There are many brought here because they tried to stab a father, or they are addicts, or they have been robbed or assaulted and broken forever. Many of the women here have been raped and lost their minds forever. There is a thirty-four-year-old woman here who saw her family assaulted, and then she was raped and lost her mind.”

She says this in a calm voice. It is simply life.

The wind blows, the dust chokes, the white horse watches, and suddenly Elvira starts talking about Miss Sinaloa—Elvira’s exact phrase, Miss Sinaloa, because the young woman was a beauty queen with gorgeous hair that hung down to her ass—and how very, very white her skin was, oh, so white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and replaced by elegant tattooed arcs. The police had found her wandering the streets of Juárez one morning. She had been raped, and she had lost her mind. Finally, Elvira explains, her family came up from Sinaloa and took her home.

The asylum facing the giant horse is not a place in Juárez where beautiful women with white skin tend to stay. Just down the road to the east is La Campana, the alleged site of a mass grave where Louis Freeh, then head of the FBI, and various Mexican officials gathered in December 1999 to excavate bodies. The story of the mass grave was soon forgotten, however, because its source was a local comandante who had fled to the US, a man known on the streets of Juárez as El Animal. And he could produce very few bodies—each and every one of which he had murdered personally. The burying ground itself was owned by Amado Carrillo. One of his killers now teaches English to rich students in a Juárez private high school. Of course, he continues to take murder contracts between classes. Then off a ways to the southeast of La Campana is the Lote Bravo, where dead girls have been dumped since the mid-nineties.

Valentino’s, across the street from Casablanca, where Miss Sinaloa was abducted and raped (Darren McCollester).

All this history comes flowing back to me as I hear the story of Miss Sinaloa. She had gone to a party with police, and then after the fun the police brought her to the crazy place. But there is always one enduring fact in Juárez: there are no facts. The memories keep shifting. Miss Sinaloa was a beauty who went to party in Juárez and was raped. Then later, the story is that she went to a party at Valentino’s, across the street from the Casablanca in Juárez, and that she consumed enormous amounts of cocaine and whiskey and became crazy, so loca that people called the police and the cops came and took Miss Sinaloa away.

The Casablanca is, of course, white, and has many rooms with parking beside each one and metal doors to protect the privacy of the cars and license plates from prying eyes. Men bring women here for sex or love or joy or whatever term they prefer. It’s so close to Valentino’s, and she has such long hair, she is so beautiful, and a fair-skinned woman is such a treat for street cops . . .

For days she was raped. Eight policemen in turn, over and over. Then they dumped her at the crazy place.

She had bruises on her arms and legs and ribs. Her buttocks bore the handprints of many men. There were bite marks all over her breasts. She had lost her mind.

And now she had come to the place of kindred souls.

People vanish. They leave a bar with the authorities and are never seen again. They leave their homes on an errand and never return. They go to a meeting and never come back. They are waiting at a bus stop and never arrive at their assumed destination. At times, some people keep lists of the disappeared. One such list hit 914 before the effort was abandoned. No one really knows how many people vanish. It is not safe to ask, and it is not wise to place a call to the authorities.

Still, we all love the hard look of numbers. So murders are tallied, and for fifteen years Juárez had recorded two to three hundred official murders a year. Periodically, skeletons are found on the edge of town, and these do not enter the totals. And once in a great while, homes are found in which people have been murdered and buried. Each time such a house of death is revealed there is a great to-do, the extraordinary sense of something hidden coming into the light of day. People always say they are shocked, the neighbors always say they noticed nothing amiss, the press always says the authorities are digging, digging, digging, and will soon get to the bottom of things. Every effort is made to keep this astonishing moment within the realm of order and to process the corpses so that numbers and structure can be felt and touched.

Often forensic experts huddle in these dig sites at death houses. They have no names, and only their backs are in the published images. There are few, if any, reports of their findings. They are the costume of order more than the substance of hard facts. Their bodies appear in photographs but not their faces. For that matter, the various elements of law enforcement at these charnel houses appear in the newspapers wearing masks. Only the cadaver dogs are shown with faces exposed.

And then, always, public notices of the death house and its bodies vanish from the papers much as the dead vanished from the city itself. Memory ebbs and the cavalcade of the vanished and the deceased disappears from sight and becomes some ghost column winding through the city streets that no one professes to actually see. Or the dead sit in the café where they had their last cup of coffee, belly up to the bar where they had that last drink, huddle in the wind and dust at the bus stop where they awaited their final ride.

Sometimes, the vanished never reappear. There are periods when no bodies turn up with hands duct taped and a bullet through the skull, but it is impossible to imagine the drug industry with its implicit contractual protocols ever taking a holiday from death. Sometimes the vanished never even become a name on a list. People are afraid to report their missing kin. In one instance, twelve bodies came out of the ground at a death house and yet not a single person slumbering there had been reported missing.

So, there are clearly two ghost patrols out and about in the city. Those who were murdered and secretly disposed of by the drug industry and those who vanished for some other reason and were never reported—pages left half-written, tales never fully told. Vanishings are somehow more final than executions because they are not just death but erasure—from memory, from any record of having been part of the human community.

During the season of violence that swept through the city and brought me into the circle of Miss Sinaloa, I stopped at a convenience store to buy a bottle of water. Taped below a pay phone was the photograph of a cop with the date he went missing, his name, and a phone number where someone waited for a message about his fate. It occurred to me that the city’s magical powers had reached a new level when even the police had to seek anonymous tips to find one of their own.

Certainly, the city police have learned to fear vanishing. Traditionally, officers have been required to leave their guns at the station house when they finish their shifts. But now they are publicly complaining about this practice because it forces them to travel home, like any other citizen, without a weapon. They say this policy is now unacceptable. They need their guns. They need more power.

Just down the road from the convenience store was a huge billboard soliciting recruits for the very same police force, an image of a man in a helmet with a black mask and a machine gun.

When the migration north was just beginning to pick up in 1993, El Paso-Juárez was where the first real effort was made to block illegal immigration, an operation that became the source for all the notions of a massively beefed-up Border Patrol, for all the walls and all the magical thinking about sensors, towers, cameras, and electronic doodads. When Amado Carrillo was running the cartel that hauled in $250 million a week in the mid-nineties, Juárez was barely a speck in the mind of the American government or media. When Amado Carrillo patronized the same private banker at Citigroup in New York as the then-president of Mexico, this, too, was of no interest. When NAFTA passed and went plowing into the lives of millions like a greed-seeking missile, this city that pioneered using cheap labor to bust unions and steal American jobs still did not merit attention.

The dust blows in Juárez; the workers climb aboard white school buses for the one- to two-hour ride to their shifts. The roads are dirt; some parts require that the bus be punched into four-wheel drive. Everyone here works in a maquilladora. I look to the north and see the blue federal building in downtown El Paso and the sweep of the American city along the slope of the Franklin Mountains. I stand on the rise of the Sierra de Juárez, over the ridge from the giant white horse and the asylum. The border is hard-edged but at times the confluence of the two cities makes them seem like one. But the border perfectly divides the killing ground from the land of plenty.

José Refugio Ruvalcabla was fifty-nine on November 27, 1994, when he turned up exactly on the line—midway across the bridge between the two cities—in his Honda Accord. He’d been a state cop in Chihuahua for thirty-two years and both of his sons were with him that day. All three were in the trunk, beaten, stabbed, and strangled. The father had a yellow ribbon around his head, knotted so it seemed to flower from his mouth.

He knew where the line was and what happened if that line was crossed.

So do American political leaders since they never seem to come here.

The barrio where I stand looking down from Juárez at El Paso is part of the puzzle of the violence in Juárez. These districts are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited. Most are stuffed with people who work in the maquilladoras. Later, I am in a barrio across from the asylum. The white buses lumber past carrying the tired faces of the factory workers. The road is ruts; most of the shacks lack electricity or water. The wind pelts everyone with dust. The houses themselves are a chaos of boards, pallets, beams, rebar, old cable spools, tires, bedsprings, concrete blocks, posts, scrap metal, car bodies, old rusted buses, stone, rotted plywood, tarps, barrels, black water tanks for the periodic deliveries, plastic buckets, old fencing, bottles, stove pipes, aluminum strips, pipe, broken chairs, tables, and sofas. Like the asylum itself, the place feeds off what the city rejects.

José Antonio Galvan, known as El Pastor, in his office at “the crazy place” (Darren McCollester).

The mural depicts a conquistador. A sign says, VISIÓN EN ACCIÓN. Vision in action. But one of the N’s has fallen off. In the corner stands a metal statue of a man in armor. This is the office of El Pastor, José Antonio Galvan, the evangelist who took in the battered remains of Miss Sinaloa and gave her succor in the asylum. His office was once a drug house where addicts punctured their veins and savored their dreams. El Pastor arrived here as a street preacher raving in the calles. The local priest called him a devil. But he drew others to him. As for the devil, he fights him daily—he keeps a black and red punching bag near at hand and slams it with his fists as he fights Satan. Everything about El Pastor is vital and coarse, his language often vulgar, his feel for the crazy people visceral. He is sitting in front of me, with a mop of graying hair, a fleshy body, a ready smile—but rough edges remain and keep him honed. He has a tattoo of a good-looking mestiza. And another of a beautiful indigenous woman.

He is showing me a movie of the asylum—men beaten by police and dumped half-crazy on the streets, addled addicts with seeping ulcerated wounds, women who will never remember what happened to them and never want to remember.

I stare at the ruined faces in the video and ask, “Does your congregation support this work?”

He smiles, points to the screen, and says, “This is my congregation.”

El Pastor spent sixteen years as an illegal immigrant in Los Angeles, where he learned to be a crane operator. He did lots of drugs and drank lots of alcohol and earned sixteen dollars an hour. Then, in 1985, he was reborn. He returned to Juárez to do God’s work, mainly preaching on the street to drug addicts. In the winter of 1998 El Pastor says he was driving through a bad storm when he saw a mound on the street and swerved just as a man stood and shook off the snow that had fallen and covered him. “I was driving that day and singing to the Lord and it was snowing. I said, ‘Lord, I’m working with you,’ and the Lord pulled my hair.” So El Pastor rounded up friends and spent the day gathering the wounded of the streets—brain-damaged addicts, ruined gang members, everyone left out in the snow in a city without mercy. That is the moment when he began scooping the crazy people off the streets, the moment when he began creating his asylum in the desert.

“Oh, they smelled bad,” he says, “covered with shit and all that.”

Originally, he came out here and lived in a hut with his wife. He had two donkeys for gathering wood. He started stacking up blocks and bricks. This went on for three years. The police would bring the rejects of our world—whores burned out by drugs and men’s lust, illegal immigrants kicked back by the US because they did not want to tend to their damaged minds, topless dancers who had lost that half step and were discarded, street people who had sniffed so much glue and paint they were now residents of oblivion.

El Pastor now houses and feeds a hundred of them. He walks me around and shows me his expansion dream that will give him the capacity for 250 souls. He will have the patients making bricks—those who can still function well enough to mix up mud. He will sell these blocks and so give the patients a kind of dignity and himself some cash flow to pay for the medicines they require in order to bottle up their rages. At present, he must raise ten thousand dollars a month on the radio simply to meet the medical, food, and staff costs of this crazy place he has created.

But now El Pastor is jubilant because he is talking about Juárez.

“I love Juárez,” he says, “I know it is dirty and very violent but I love it! I grew up in Juárez. I love it. It is a needy city and I can help my city. I can make a little difference.”