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But consider this possibility: Violence is now woven into the very fabric of the community and has no single cause and no single motive and no on-off button.

Violence is not a part of life, now it is life.

Just ask Miss Sinaloa.

I sit on the mezzanine in the fine shopping mall and have a pastry with a cup of espresso. The air is cool and clean. Outside, men guide cars into parking spaces. This big chamber of business is an escape from the noise of Juárez. I buy ten kilos of beans for the people out in El Pastor’s crazy place.

A week or so later, there is a shooting in the parking lot. One of the old men who guides cars into the slots goes down, a sidebar to a barrage of automatic gunfire.

The city protects itself by telling stories about itself. The police captain who was machine-gunned with his eight-year-old son is now explained by the city in this fashion. He was a dirty cop, kidnapping rich people for ransom. But then the families of the kidnap victims grew angry about him. So, in order to stay safe, he always traveled with his child, since he believed no one would kill an innocent child in order to kill him. But, the city tells itself, he was wrong. A family member of a kidnap victim did kill the captain and in that act also murdered his eight-year-old boy. But this was excusable because the killings were an act of retribution.

And so in this story swirling around Juárez, the murder of a child is made sense of and thus made safe for everyone. The story is not based on facts. No one requires facts. The story is based on need.

And the need for explanation is great.

Good Friday brings eleven executions, La Gloria brings six, and on Easter Sunday, another eleven die. I float in a dreamtime of death.

It is 1 P.M. on Easter Sunday, and in a street of maquila workers, a crowd gathers to look at a corpse. The guy is nineteen and belongs to a gang. A hole in his head has blown out one eye. Members of the opposing gang sit in the bed of a police pickup truck while one cop fills out a form. I stare at a young gang kid. As a photographer raises his camera, he pulls his sweatshirt up to cover his face. His eyes are dead and empty, maybe the gaze left by too much glue and paint sniffing. But his middle fingers flash a gang sign and they are covered with blood.

A car stops, three young girls—twelve or thirteen years old—race across the street as the father keeps the motor idling. They hold hands as they skip into the crowd and form a smiling chorus line of Capri pants and tube tops. This has become the norm—kids, parents, babes in arms, all show up on the killing grounds. Some people bring their dogs, children make videos, snap photographs. Sometimes the kids get a bonus, since the bodies now and then are of children.

It is now 1:30 P.M. and suddenly the police race away with the body. Another killing has been called in. The city morgue is overwhelmed—by midnight there will have been 103 murders in Juárez in March. Forty bodies are tossed into a common grave due to lack of space and because the families either do not claim the corpses or cannot afford a funeral.

President Calderón’s war against drugs has been officially rolling since December 1, 2006, and so far, according to the government tally, 3,800 Mexicans have gone down in drug killings, 334 cops have been murdered, and 39 soldiers have perished. Since January 2008, the number of drug killings is officially up 30 percent nationwide, but in Juárez, it is more like 60 to 70 percent and rising.

The hillside is rock, soil, yuccas, and creosote. This is Granjas Unidas (United Farms), a sweep by the poor into the hillside just above Juárez. It is nearing 3 P.M. and the ambulance rolls down the dirt track with the body. Off the road, a valley fills with tires and other garbage, and around this dump, people live in shacks and raise a few pigs, chickens, turkeys, and goats. The tiny grocery store is called Illusion. Just off the track is a fading carton of Mr. Clean. A generous splotch of red blood