Adolescent Gangs: Old Issues, New Approaches Book

If you could reduce this book to one sentence, it would be this: The murder rate in Ciudad Juarez is now higher than any other city in North America--EVER--and with no significant change in demography or law enforcement procedure, it will continue to climb annually!

Imagine a continuum. On the far left is genocide. On the far right is municipal murder rate. The continuum only captures, say, the last 20 years. (This continuum does not include conventional warfare, where uniformed combatants meet on a battlefield and follow Laws of Armed Conflict.)

On the far left, fading to the right ARE
1983-2002: Sudanese civil war (2 million)
1988-2001: Afghanistan civil war (400,000)
1988-2004: Somalia's civil war (550,000)
1989-: Liberian civil war (220,000)
1991-97: Congo's civil war (800,000)
1991-2000: Sierra Leone's civil war (200,000)
1991-2009: Russia-Chechnya civil war (200,000)
1991-94: Armenia-Azerbaijan war (35,000)
1992-96: Tajikstan's civil war war (50,000)
1992-96: Yugoslavian wars (260,000)
1993-97: Congo Brazzaville's civil war (100,000)
1993-2005: Burundi's civil war (200,000)
1994: Rwanda's civil war (900,000)
1998-: Congo/Zaire's war (3.8 million)
2003-09: Sudan vs JEM/Darfur (300,000)

On the far right, fading to the left, are US MURDERS
1996: 19,650
1997: 18,208
1998: 16,914
1999: 15,522
2000: 15,586
2001: 16,037
2002: 16,229
2003: 16,528
2004: 16,148
2005: 16,740
2006: 17,030
2007: 16,929
2008: 16,272

At times the municipal murder rates may peak, like Miami in the 70's, New York in the 80's, Los Angeles in the 90's, and New Orleans in the 00's. However, these rates are for the entire United States, with a population of 300 million.

In Ciudad Juarez, a single city with a population of roughly 1 million, the number of murders are:
2008: 1607
2009: 2455

Extrapolate. This means that a single mid-sized Mexican city has 10% of the murders of an entire country 300 times its size! Read that again. This means that a single mid-sized Mexican city has 10% of the murders of an entire country 300 times its size! Compared to the US, Ciudad Juarez's murder rate is a perverse outlier. The number of murders represents TWO magnitudes of order multiplied by a factor of three. In other words, if the United States had a similar murder rate as Ciudad Juarez, then in 2008: 482,000 murders, and in 2009: 736,000 murders. At this murder rate would you be a concerned US citizen? You betcha would!

So where in that continuum would Ciudad Juarez best fit? Looks to me like it would be closer to the left side--near the genocides. The paper napkin math above is not provided by the author, but I think it makes the point. Ciudad Juarez has a problem. It's got a murder problem. And it's at genocidal proportions. You'd be safer in Mogadishu, Somalia or Kabul, Afghanistan.

Now the book. Charles Bowden has the cold facts as his disposal, yet he chooses to write the book somewhat like a diary. He wanted to reveal what this murder rate has done to the citizens of Juarez. An eerie malaise has descended on this border city. There has not been a single arrest for murder in 2 years; not a single killer brought to trial. Nobody talks about the murders--even if they have relevant information. The police are corrupt, the army is corrupt, the newspaper is corrupt, your neighbors are corrupt. The army is killing cops, the cops are killing informants, informants are killing dealers, dealers are killing each other, and the cartels are killing everybody. Collusion in Juarez is a 3-dimensional web that is perpetually being re-weaved. Women and children are being killed in great numbers. And the killings are peculiar in their brutality. Most of the bodies have signs of torture, strangulation, amputation, and decapitation. Mass graves of 30+ people are not uncommon. People who've simply disappeared are not part of the murder count--not part of the count, that is, until their bodies are discovered years later.

Brown writes in a trippy, Jim Morrison, Riders on the Storm type of riff that highlights the killings by exposing the absurdity of daily life in this broken town. Brown takes you on a ride through the heat, the haze, the dust, and the fear in Juarez. The murders happen with such spinning regularity that for 320 pages you feel drugged and listening to a long bass guitar and piano organ solo. Over and over the bodies keep appearing. Their crumpled, limbless bodies appear every morning like dead cicadas. Police take hours to arrive at the scene of a murder. Why? Because they want to make sure the scene is safe to approach. The maimed are not taken to the hospital immediately because the killers will invade the emergency room and spray a magazine of bullets to finish the job. The dead may be the lucky ones. Gang rapes, molestation, severe beatings, and cellar slavery happen every day. Sporadic in the book, Brown interleaves the obituaries of the unidentified dead. Life rolls on; the dead are forgotten; newspapers mention nothing; Riders on the Storm.

The overriding conclusion I draw from this book is that the US war on drugs has not--and will not--work in Mexico. Period. I make this conclusion independent of Brown's commentary. It's also my political position on our drug problem in the States. Oh, and if your wonder, murder rates in 2010 are staged to set yet another record.

I wish Bowden stayed in non-fiction territory, because his book has the feel of a long diary. It works, but it's much of the same, chapter after chapter. However, if this is the first you've heard that the Mexican border is dangerous, then this is mandatory reading for you.