Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [59]
After decades of this thing called development, Juárez has in sheer numbers more poor people than ever, has in real purchasing power lower wages than ever, has more pollution than ever, and more untreated sewage and less water than ever. Every claim of a gain is overwhelmed by a tidal wave of failure. And yet this failure, I have come to realize, is not failure. The gangs are not failure. The corrupt police are not failure. The drugs, ever cheaper and more potent and more widespread, are not failure. The media is increasingly tame here, just as it is in that place that once proudly called itself the first world, a place now where wars go on with barely a mention and the dead are counted but not photographed.
Everything in Juárez will soon be state-of-the-art. For years, the prosperous here have bundled themselves into gated communities, and now these strongholds are not sufficient, and security has vanished from the life of the city. After all, this is a city where the publisher of the newspaper and the mayor and his family live across the line in the United States in order to feel safe. There is no job retraining in Juárez because there are no new jobs to be trained for. The future here is now, the moment is immediate, and the message is the crack of automatic weapons. All the other things happening in the world—the shattering of currencies, the depletion of resources, the skyrocketing costs of food, energy, and materials—are old hat here. Years ago, hope moved beyond reach, and so a new life was fashioned and now it crowds out all other notions of life.
Please be advised that there will be no apocalypse. The very idea of a Götterdämmerung assumes meaning and progress. You cannot fall off a mountain unless you are climbing. No one here is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. We shall not meet next year in Jerusalem. For years, I thought I was watching the city go from bad to worse, a kind of terrible backsliding from its imagined destiny as an America with different food. I was blind to what was slapping me in the face: the future. A place where conversation is a gun and reality is a drug and time is immediate and tomorrow, well, tomorrow is today because there is no destination beyond this very second.
Things can be fixed now if I can just find a clean needle. After all, heroin is cheap, and the purity is very high. Imagine a world with an absence of work that will pay your bills, a place where gasoline and electricity cost more than a simple fix for your soul. You don’t even dream about a room of your own. You don’t worry about retirement, either, or how you can pay that dental bill. You don’t fret about things like overpopulation. You don’t fret, for that matter. Nor do you accept things. You finally live, and life is about what is and what is stares up at you with orphan eyes.
The mayor announces a plan to put three thousand cameras in the banks and schools and businesses of Juárez. The police threaten to go on strike because of abuse from federal officers and from the army. They hold a vigil for two days with family members, and all of them wear masks for security reasons. Want ads in the newspaper recruit students—“We are looking for students with valid passports and visas to work during spring break. We offer well-paying jobs.” The authorities advise that these solicitations are placed by people in the drug industry who are seeking drivers to ferry drugs into the United States. The army seizes twenty-two employees of the Chihuahua state attorney’s office. They wish to ask them questions. This is in a news release. No report of the answers to these questions has surfaced. The city of Juárez announces a new urban anthem