Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [58]
Miss Sinaloa knows a different future. There will be cocaine and whiskey and it will help, but it will never prove sufficient to the need. And the need will not be denied. She knows these things but will not tell me the answers. What is violence? What does it mean for violence to be out of control? And where, within this thing called violence, do we fit this thing called murder? Maybe it is the coke, she loves that coke. Or the whiskey. And maybe it is neither. Maybe the problem with my understanding her is that I already know and refuse to see what is before me and to face what is in me.
I want to explain the violence as if it were a flat tire and I am searching the surface for a nail. But what if the violence is not a kind of breakdown, but more like a flower springing from the rot on a forest floor? The families, the crosses on the wall, the uniforms of the police, the street signs advising safe speeds, all these things are the nails in a tire long dead and flat, the chants of a vanished religion. The cholos with cold eyes, short lives, and the itch to put a bullet through the head are the function. The drugs dusting everyone’s life are the way. The hydra-headed monster we seek, the creature killing all over the city, is like sunshine in fact, and this new light falls equally on one and all.
The factories are now the house of death, offering no future, poisoning the body with chemicals, destroying the spirit faster than cocaine or meth.
Juárez is not behind the times. It is the sharp edge slashing into a time called the future. We have made careers out of studying the Juárezes of the world, given them the name Third World. We have fashioned schemes to bring them into our place beside the sacred fire and called these schemes development. Each new building with a wall of glass stands as a temple to our ambitions to pour the mash of human life on this planet into one mold. But always, a place like Juárez is seen over the shoulder, some city glimmering in our own past, a place we have moved beyond, and now, with a few magical tugs of our economic ropes, we intend to bring Juárez and its sister cities around the world promptly into our orbit of power and largess. We count the employment, we tally the exports, we rummage in the till, and we comfort ourselves with these numbers because that is our safe place. We do not wander the calles—in Juárez, there is a actually a private bridge so that the masters of American capital can visit their holdings here without squandering precious time in the long lines of machines that are the crossing for the rest of humanity. All our understanding of such places is based on the new buildings and the calming numbers. And we are careful what we count. Every story on Juárez says it has 1.2 million people or 1.4 million even though for at least a decade it has had more than 2 million people. But if it really has 2 million people, then all the numbers treasured by business and two governments are diminished. More taxes must be repatriated from Mexico City, and suddenly a huge shortfall in paved roads, sewers, water, electricity, police, and public transport must be admitted. A simple shift in total population takes Juárez from the column called developing to the column called failure. So we are careful in what we see and what we count and what we admit.
But what if Juárez is not a failure? What if it is closer to the future that beckons all of us from our safe streets and Internet cocoons? Here, boys stand on corners with pistols because there is no work, or if there is work, it pays little or nothing. Here,