In the PM newsroom, two men listen to the strains of a narcocorrido drifting from a police scanner. The vague shrill discord of accordions and a brass band echoes in the glass office until a burst of distortion shatters the ill-begotten melody and imposes a staticky silence. They know in the expanding quiet that someone will die tonight.
Boss of the bosses. What a ridiculous thing to call him. What does that mean here? What does it get him? Nothing that lasts. Someday it will end. Someday his own people or someone else’s people will kill him. He knows this: unless something changes, he will die.
Thousands of deaths in Mexico are chiefly the result of traffic in high-potency pot smuggled across the border with ruthless resolve. But when marijuana legalization came up as one of the most requested questions during a presidential town hall meeting early in Obama’s presidency, he laughed it off.
In Juárez, 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. 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.
He is taking me on a tour of Juárez, but we won’t be visiting any museums or historic sights. We are going to tour the City of Death—Juárez’s slums, or colonias.
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