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The neighbors say that it is terrible about the child because the boy was young and innocent and played in the street a lot. No one is willing to give the reporters their name. And after a while, no one wants to talk at all. That is the silence that graces the city. Things happen and no one says much. Then after a while, no one admits the thing even happened.

Across the river in El Paso, the daily newspaper fails for days to make any mention of the dead cop or the dead eight-year-old boy. The silence can be a great comfort. Things can be frightening and yet reduced to nothingness by silence.

At noon one day in May, I am standing in a crowd staring at a dead man on the sidewalk. He was executed twenty minutes ago. Then a call comes, there is another killing. We rumble up into the hills. The body has been taken away, and now people stroll past the blood on the dirt as if there had been no gunfire, no scream, no thud, no murder. Just the soft buzzing of flies over the puddled blood. The wind carrying dust, the cry of roosters.

Two guys are in a Honda and it is Friday night. Two vehicles pull up and machine-gun them. No one notices. A man is walking down the street at night. He is riddled with bullets. After a while, people creep carefully from the houses. And then suddenly a pickup truck appears, and six men climb out, grab the body, toss it in back, and drive away. After that the police and soldiers arrive, but of course there is nothing for them to do. Or say.

Silence.

There are two ways to be safe and to stay sane. One is silence, pretending that nothing happened and refusing to say out loud what happened. The other is magical thinking, inventing various explanations for what you refuse to say and by these explanations dismiss the very thing you cannot let pass your lips. Of course, this applies only to individuals. Newspapers, politicians, and government agencies have a third method, they cite organizations—the drug cartels—and say that whatever is happening is because of “them.” This tactic is very appealing and takes one back to childhood, when the night belonged to monsters and hobgoblins. It was the tool of the cold war, when communists lurked under the bed, and is the tool of the new wars against terrorism and drugs. Like a stopped clock, it is accurate now and then. Organizations of all kinds lie, cheat, steal, and kill. But in Juárez, almost no account explaining the killings is linked to fact.

Instead, the cars driven by killers and the cars of the dead are lovingly described. Spent cartridges found at the scene are sorted by caliber and counted. The dead are sketched—the color of the skin and hair, the size of the bodies, the estimated age. But often there are no names, nor do updates appear in future editions. Three carloads of men described as commandos hit an upscale motel for lovers, one that functions almost like a gated community. They find a man and woman in a room, kill them, leave, and then nothing. The meaning beneath the skin of the word commando is never explored. But it is carefully reported that one hundred spent cartridges littered the room. The governor, José Reyes Baeza, announces on March 24 after a long silence, “All of the public security agencies are infiltrated—all of them, pure and simple—and we are not going to put our hands in the fire for any bad element.”

He also tells the populace that he has assurances from the highest government sources that the violence will decline in the next few weeks. Apparently, there is some wizard in the ministries who has access either to the future or to the forces that have been killing wholesale since New Year’s Day.

There is nothing but silence from the police forces, and not another word is said in the press.

Silence, like protest, is the drug of our time, the way we do something by doing nothing. We march, we wave placards, and we go mum, and all avoid touching the levers of power and all avoid stepping on the third rail of truth.

I sit on a tree well surrounding a scraggly shrub just