• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Until very recently, he liked it just fine. In fact, he loved it because he loves Mexico and has never thought of leaving. Even though he lives near the border, he has not bothered to cross for almost ten years.

But now, things have changed. He has researched the humanitarian treaties signed by the United States, and he thinks, given these commitments by the American government, he and his boy will be given asylum. He has decided to tell the authorities nothing but the truth. His research has failed to uncover one little fact: No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum by the United States of America.

Suddenly, he sees a checkpoint ahead, and there is no way to escape it.

Men in uniforms pull him over.

He is frightened but discovers to his relief that this checkpoint is run by the Mexican migration service and so, maybe, they will not give him up to the army.

“Why are you driving so fast?”

“I am afraid. There are people trying to kill me.”

“The narcos?”

“No, the soldiers.”

“Who are you?”

He hands over his press pass.

“Oh, you are the one, they searched your house.”

“I have had problems.”

“Those sons of bitches do whatever they want. Go ahead. Good luck.”

He roars away. When he stops at the port of entry at Antelope Wells in the boot-heel of New Mexico, U.S. Customs asks, as they always do, what he is bringing from Mexico.

He says, “We bring fear.”

There is a phantom living in Juárez, and his name is on everyone’s lips: la gente. He is the collective unconsciousness of the city, a hoodoo conjured up out of murder, rape, poverty, corruption, and deceit. Everyone in the city—man, woman, and child, professor and street alcoholic—knows what la gente thinks. Just as I have never met or interviewed an American politician who did not know what “the little people” think, nor have I met this army of phantom dwarfs that allegedly dominate my own nation or heard so much as a whisper from another domestic band, the Silent Majority. In the same way, I must listen to drivel about la gente.

In politer circles, la gente gives way to a different phantom, a thing called civil society. Of course, neither la gente nor civil society exists, just as in the United States there are no little people nor a Silent Majority. All these terms are useful for two reasons: They allow people to talk about things they do not know, and they allow people to pretend there is an understanding about life that does not exist. Oh, and there is a final bonus: They allow newspaper columnists to discuss people they have never met and say knowingly what the people they have never met actually think.

In Juárez, la gente—this collective mind that is wise and knowing—is a necessary crutch because the police are corrupt, the government is corrupt, the army is corrupt, and the economy functions by paying third-world wages and charging first-world prices. The Mexican newspapers dance around truth because, one, corrupt people who are rich and powerful dominate what can be printed and, two, any reporter honest enough to publish the truth dies.

And so we are left, those of us who actually entertain the possibility that facts exist and that facts matter, with rumor and this phantom called la gente. Of course, this means we have no one to talk to and can only console ourselves with the dead, their bodies leaking blood out those neat holes made by machine guns, because the dead are past lying and the dead know one real fact: Someone killed them. They often do not know who killed them. Nor do they know why they were killed. But at least they know they have been killed and are now dead.

This is more than civil society and la gente know because the television news and the newspapers do not always report murders and if they report murders they do not always give the names and if they give the names, they almost never follow up on the murders.

You live.

You die.

You vanish from public records.

And you become the talk of the phantom called la gente.

Juárez is pioneering the future again, and this is a city of achievements.