Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [85]
—CHARLES BOWDEN, Murder City
THE WIND OFF the Mexican desert was cold and gritty. A pale winter sun slipped away, and the shadows of Juarez reached long across the streets. I was riding with a Mexican army patrol in a military truck that bounced and lurched across the broken terrain. Cinderblock shacks sat scattered haphazardly over the steep little hills and gullies. We were driving around and around waiting for violence. That is what the soldiers do here: drive in loops, then stop for snacks, then drive some more. Soon a bullet-ridden corpse would turn up. Several do every night, because this is one of the most violent cities in the world.
A gum-chewing soldier in the back of the truck, holding his G3 rifle in a gloved hand and the truck roll bar with the other, had a plan for Juarez: “martial law.” He scanned the flat rooftops through pale yellow wraparound shooting glasses. “A curfew. House-to-house searches. Take all the weapons. No mercy.”
They say there is a war in Mexico, and the body count makes it look that way. Close to thirty thousand people have been killed here since 2006, when President Felipe Calderón deployed the military into the border cities to fight the drug war.1 By 2009, more than eleven hundred of the dead were soldiers, police, and security officials. A classified Mexican government report described 2009 as the deadliest year to date with over ninety-six hundred killed; the next year was even worse.2
At the end of 2009, when I spent some time drifting around the border region, Juarez—shabby, grime smeared, semiabandoned—clocked a staggering twenty-six hundred killings.3 Many of these incidents also involved kidnapping, torture, and mutilation. El Paso, on the other hand, counted only four murders. Some Juarez murders happened one at a time, some in massacres of up to eighteen victims at once.4 Some happened in the dead of night, others during noontime traffic jams. New Year’s Day 2010 began with a mass killing: more than a dozen gunmen attacked a house party of middle-class high school students, killing thirteen and wounding two dozen.5 Then two US embassy officials were ambushed and murdered. By late April 2010, twenty-nine police officers had already been killed in Juarez; then gunmen ambushed two police vehicles in the middle of town, killing seven more cops. Around the same time, gunmen raided the customs office on the Mexican side of the international bridge linking Camargo, Mexico, to Rio Grande, Texas. The same day, in La Union, Guerrero, police were attacked with grenades. A police chief and two deputies were executed in the farm town of Los Aldamas, Nuevo Leon. The police chief of a nearby town was decapitated. Then, around the same time, gunmen ambushed and killed the assistant police chief of Nogales, Sonora, and his bodyguard. In the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, dozens of narco gunmen launched simultaneous attacks on two army garrisons; eighteen of the attackers were reported killed. A car bomb went off in Juarez, and seventeen migrants were massacred in Tamaulipas about one hundred miles from Brownsville, Texas.6 These days, Mexican mayors, police officials, and drug-rehab patients are all routinely murdered in shockingly large numbers. The list of strange atrocities could go on and on.
Political Teleconnections
At first glance, this crisis of violence seems to have little to do with climate change—drug dealers do not murder cops because the Intertropical Convergence Zone is off kilter. But, on closer examination, the meltdown of northern Mexico provides another illustration of the catastrophic convergence: policies that create poverty and violence are now colliding with the new realities of climate change, and together these three forces are creating socially destructive forms of adaptation.
As I explored Juarez, it became clear that climate change is already an important factor in the crisis. First and foremost, climate change is undermining agriculture and fishing. Along with neoliberal economic policies, it is driving rising