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By Root 1428 0

down the street from one of the houses of death. Directly in front of me is a federal cop—a few minutes ago, they took my passport, examined it as a mystery object, and called it in to be recorded. I am now on notice. The street is rough and dirt, and ten yards to the west is a walled compound with a camera watching the entrance. Fifty yards down the calle the boys are digging, and eventually thirty-six bodies will come belching out of the ground. No one in the neighborhood ever heard, saw, or smelled a thing.

The bodies will not be shown to grieving relatives of missing people, nor will the location of the bodies be disclosed, nor will the press mention that the bodies have vanished.

The dog snarls through the steel fence. He is the only person here in the moment and refuses to be silent. The federal police wear masks.

Weeks and weeks go by, and the only mention of the bodies in the newspapers is that they have been taken off to Mexico City. Not a single sentence on who these forty-five people in the two death houses once had been, nor is the identity of their killers ever discussed in print. Nor is there any exploration of just who owned these two buildings where people were murdered and buried in gardens of bones.

Silence.

The sacred lines are being erased as the walls go up and towers slam light on the ground at night. The war flees into the sky, where machines enable the illusion of control. For over eighteen hundred miles the line between Mexico and the United States follows a river or crosses deserts or scampers up and down mountains or wallows in the wind softly singing against the green face of the grasslands.

I am sitting along the line and I am far from Juárez and Miss Sinaloa, but it is all of a package. The fabled cartels have been assigned cities, and made into boxes and arrows on organizational charts created by the U.S. agencies. But they seem reluctant to stay within these lines.

A month ago I drove a dirt road past two big work camps with piles of steel girders and rows of heavy equipment, depots where men went forth each day to weld and build car barriers to stop evil people from bringing evil things north. This is homeland security.

Then last week a semi with a loaded trailer came through the car barrier and drove north on a dirt road. And didn’t quite make it. I stand where it slid off the road and down a steep slope. I can smell cow shit and the stench of death—it was officially hauling a load of steers. The new car barrier didn’t stop it because someone has already cut out chunks in two places and put in gates.

No matter. Up in the sky, there are Black Hawk and A-Star helicopters, and big dirigibles looking with radar deep into the heart of Mexico, and ground sensors in the dirt and towers with magic eyes hooked to computers, and a standing army of gunmen in uniforms—more people, at least twenty thousand, under arms to police this line than the roster of the entire U.S. Army at the beginning of that long-ago Mexican War.

This is the blanket we use to wrap our nervous dreams, and we call it security. We invent special nodes of hell, cartels, cities like Juárez. We call killers drug lords as they sell industrial compounds, torture, and murder. We scan the skies and the earth, we stare with infrared lenses in the night, we bluster and weld and build walls. And we never really face what is in front of us, never face what is inside our gutless language of cartels and drug lords and homeland security, never face that forces are unleashed on the land with names like poverty, a fix, murder, and despair, and our tools cannot master these forces.

Miss Sinaloa knows this. And I am learning.

I am standing on the edge of order, a place called Palomas, Chihuahua, about an hour or so west of Juárez and on the line. Census data says seventy-five hundred people live here, but due to the economic failures of farming, then of migrant smuggling, followed by the current boom in killing and kidnapping, it may now be home to three thousand. In 1916, Pancho Villa crossed here and attacked Columbus, New