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violence

A policeman on patrol as seen through a bullet hole in the window of the Re-Fresh snack bar at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (URIEL SINAI / GETTY IMAGES).

Sixty Hours of Terror

November 16, 2009

Fernandes stole a look at the scene below. Bodies lay scattered on the station floor, slicked in blood. The gunmen scanned and swiveled. They shot from the hip, in steady bursts. On any other day, Fernandes would have taken them for college boys on their way home. These were no students, though. The ease with which they wielded their weapons amid the panic betrayed a professional’s mien. 

Police tape, marked DANGEROUS, cordons off a murder scene in Juárez, Mexico.

Call of the Narcocorrido

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.

Every five days the staff of a makeshift asylum at the edge of Juárez wash the inmates’ bedding and spread it to dry on bushes. Many of the residents of “the crazy place” have been driven mad by drug use and the anguish of loved ones lost to the drug war (Julián Cardona).

The Crazy Place

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.

In Memory of Xiong Huang

who disappeared from Shanghai and whose body, his brother believes, is now on display in New York City in an exhibition of plastinated cadavers In some province a hemisphere from here you tapped at your grandmother’s kneecap, her elbow crooked in [...]

Binh Danh, <i>The Botany of Tuol Seng #14</i>. Photographic negative on leaf.

Faces Fleshed in Green

While visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh, Binh Danh studied closely the mug shots of former prisoners. Danh, a Vietnamese-born artist whose family fled to a refugee c [...]

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