"Gunmen Boldly Attack Federal Forces In Mexico," reads the AP article after yesterday's multi-city attacks. Reminded me of two essential-reading articles by American journalist Charles Bowden. If you want to learn about Mexican realities, you can't find a better source.
I don't purport to know much about Mexico, other than this: it is the world's most populous Spanish-speaking country, and its 100 million + people share a border with the United States that stretches for more than 3,000 kilometers.
And this: "In 2008, more than 6,000 Mexicans died in the drug violence, a larger loss than the United States has endured during the entire Iraq War."
The quote is from Charles Bowden's article in the July/August issue of Mother Jones, "We Bring Fear." Nothing tops its portrayal of an honest Mexican journalist who had to flee from the Mexican Army in fear for his life.
Bowden is a master of suspense, of making you care for his subject. "We Bring Fear" makes the reader share the fear of Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, who has crossed the Army by writing stories about the utter impunity with which it carries out its work. And the matter of the Army's complicity in the very drug trade that it has been charged to fight.
Read Bowden's article to see if Gutiérrez Soto obtains asylum in the US, and the rest of MoJo for its "Totally Wasted" issue devoted to the never-ending War On Drugs.
For a look inside Mexico's drug cartels, Bowden's "The Sicario: A Juarez Hit Man Speaks" in the May Harper's is riveting reading.
There's nothing "patriotic" in the work of the modern Mexican sicario: just dealing out death, in all of its most horrid forms, to those who fall afoul of the cartel. Oh yes: Bowden's repentant sicario is a policeman, whose work for the cartel was indistinguishable from that of his day job as a cop.
Bowden's reporting from the field ("Juarez is a death machine") is nothing less than heroic, and he is an acknowledged expert on the war on drugs and undocumented migrants. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
With the border - a few miles south of Tucson - as porous as it is, I hope for his sake that he lives in gated community. Except, as we learned from the Mexican/Uruguayan film La Zona, walls don't afford protection when the barrio is everywhere.
(Map: Mapas-de-Mexico.com)