• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Since the time of troubles began, the police of Juárez have responded in kind. Many have fled, and so now at any given shift there are, at most, two hundred cops looking over the city. Also, if they leave the station, they are careful about getting out of their patrol cars. Residents complain they no longer see them out and about. Then, there is the fear the cops now have of the army since fellow officers are periodically snatched by the military and return with tales of woe. People have discovered that if they call the police, no one comes.

Bank robberies, store robberies, and car theft have boomed. Increasingly, guys are robbing stores armed with nothing but toy pistols.

Mexico itself is exploring a new kind of installation art, beheadings. In the first four months of 2008, there had been at least forty decapitations. Some are left on fence posts.

On the U.S. side, Margarita Crispin, a thirty-two-year-old U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, gets twenty years in prison. For four years, she’d worked at the bridge separating Juárez and El Paso, and for four years, she’d waved drug shipments through. One load, the one that did her in when the van broke down, held almost three tons of marijuana. The federal government seized $5 million she had stashed and a lot of jewelry.

It is hard to stay clean when such possibilities dance before one’s eyes.

We put too much emphasis on who is clean and who is not clean. There are places where being clean is meaningless and Juárez is one such place, and the entire border is like Juárez when this issue of being clean comes up. There is too much money made both in the drug industry and in the people-smuggling industry for this wealth not to flow across everybody’s life. If you refuse to be in the business, someone in your family is in the business, and someone in your family who is totally clean is bankrolling little business ideas off drug money or people-smuggling money. You might be a DEA agent, but you’ll have a brother who has a nightclub bankrolled by people from this other world or you’ll have a sister who marries a guy who works for a cartel. And you’ll spend your own free time running a “Just Say No to Drugs” basketball league to keep kids clean, but these facts will just be facts. And this sketch I’ve just laid down is not a hypothetical, it is the human architecture of a friend of mine. And he is hardly unique.

I’ve never done any kind of drug deal in my life. But I’ve loaned out scales to friends who felt differently.

So drop the notions you carry about who is clean and not clean. Who is honest or dishonest will get you closer to reality.

Her husband is driving in Juárez, she sits beside him, the three-year-old is in the backseat. It is Sunday, April 20, 2008, and Algae Amaya Nuñez is twenty-nine years old at this moment and the moment is 10 P.M. Her brother, mayor of a community in Chihuahua, was assassinated on September 24, 2006. Her father, a former mayor, was assassinated in February 2007. Algae rides in a red 2007 Fusion with Texas license plates. The family straddles both sides of the line. One bullet goes through her neck, the other her belly. Five spent 9 mm casings are found by the vehicle. The husband pulls over to help his wounded wife. He vanishes—witnesses saw commandos in two pickups take him away. But they leave the three-year-old. Kin come over from the Texas side for the child. They are pursued along the road that leads to the bridge by the hit men who shoot at them. They make it back alive to the United States.

Algae helped found the school where she taught history and sociology.

Now she is a corpse and joins her executed brother and father.

So tell me, what does clean mean?

The lunch is very long—a feast of carnitas, pork chunks fried in a big vat of oil. The man wolfs down his food. He was a sicario, an assassin. His work was for Barrio Azteca, the key Juárez gang, which has at least three thousand members. The other five hundred or so gangs work for Barrio Azteca and dream of making the grade and joining