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Zacatecas, an old Mexican state initially settled because of a silver strike, testifies to the job opportunities in Mexico. Over half its population is now in the United States, and more Zacatecans live in Los Angeles than in their home state’s biggest city. As one longtime resident of a Zacatecan town put it, “There is nothing here.”

Or as a professor at the University of Zacatecas in the Department of Economics explains, “Work opportunities here are nonexistent, so this is going to cause more migration to the United States, even though it is getting harder to find work over there.”

There are some openings in journalism. In Ciudad Victoria in the Gulf state of Tamaulipas, members of the local police kidnapped the pressmen of the daily paper to end its irksome publication. Some radio reporters were mowed down in Oaxaca. In Agua Prieta, Sonora, a border town facing Douglas, Arizona, a protest march marks the first anniversary of the killing of newspaper editor Saul Noe Martinez. He was kidnapped from the town jail by gunmen, and his body was later found in Chihuahua.

Underneath the headlines and the news bulletins, these hard facts grind people up and remold them into new destinies and sometimes monstrous decisions.

“It’s beautiful,” she begins, “I’ve been a policewoman for years. It’s something I have inherited. My father was a police officer. I can serve my country. But it is dangerous, our society, our times, well, values have changed. People don’t respect police officers now. And the violence—families are falling apart.”

She stands in the bright sunlight on the edge of a mall parking lot, one with a police tower in the center to guard the shoppers and their cars. Her uniform has no name, her badge has no number. She is fat, and carries a .40-caliber semiautomatic. She belongs to the municipal police, the same force that has been losing comandantes to executions.

Her post is across the street from the monument to fallen officers.

There are thirty-five names on brass plaques on the monument. The first dead cop came in 1969, but things sort of ambled for almost twenty years, and then around 1990, business picked up, with thirty-five of the dead coming since then. And the most recent dead cop memorialized is September 2007—none of the recent corpses have been recorded. Nor does the monument pay any heed to missing cops. The monument is painted a faint green. The statue of a giant cop stands before it and stares down at the hat of a fallen officer.

Twice, she refuses to speak of drugs in the city.

And when asked if she had heard about fellow officers picking up a raped beauty queen on the streets of the city, a woman called Miss Sinaloa, she snaps, no.

She answers this question very fast and her face does not smile at all.

Fear has been my pale rider. I have never faced an audience without fear, nor gotten out of the car to do that first interview on a story in some strange city without fear. Sentences also cause fear, as does that blank page waiting for words to fall on its white expanse and clot it with stabs at meaning. Violence rocks my body with fear, as does great sorrow in others since I fear my inability to stop the tears.

When I was in high school, in freshman English one of my fellow students read a paper on fear, and it was about chemical changes in our bodies and how these various juices both signaled our fear and created the state of being we call fear. I was struck at that moment and rather disappointed. I wanted fear to be something exalting, like courage, not compounds that could be written on a chalkboard like a recipe. And I was suspicious of the argument because it seemed to reduce something out of control to order. Fear is not only paralyzing, but also explosive. I have learned in life to never trust people who are afraid, because their behavior cannot be predicted. The killer facing me over a plate of food is rational. He kills and sometimes he feels nothing. There are such