Just before the execution unit began slaughtering 16 teenagers at a party in Ciudad Juarez on the US-Mexico border on the night of Jan. 31, one of the killers apparently suggested that girls and children be allowed to leave before the killing began.
No, said another: “Denles parejo ... ya valieron todos” — give it to them all the same.
The massacre of the teenagers made headlines across the world, but it was merely the latest piece of horrific news from Juarez via the only reliable source — collated daily by Molly Molloy at New Mexico State University for her Fronterizo List of subscribers.
Last month, Molloy counted 59 murders in Juarez over the first week and a total of 227 for the month, putting the city on track to beat its own record of 2,657 deaths last year. Molloy also gave a statistical foundation to the phrase journalists like to use, describing Juarez as the “most dangerous city in the world”: 192 homicides per 100,000 citizens, well ahead of second-ranking San Pedro Sula in Honduras (119), with New Orleans and Cape Town on 69 and 60 respectively.
There is a grotesque, almost perversely inventive, aspect to the killing going on in Mexico. From another source came pictures of the contents of a vehicle abandoned in Sonora. The torsos, severed heads and limbs crammed inside had been laid out by the authorities across the floor of a hangar.
In the same town, 36-year-old Hugo Hernandez was abducted on Jan. 2; his body turned up in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, though not in one piece. His torso was in a plastic container in one location, his severed arms and legs were found elsewhere in a box with his skull. But his face was missing; it had been flayed off and was later found near city hall, stitched to a football.
I spent four months last year in Juarez and along the US-Mexico border, writing a book to be published in the autumn, which among other things tried to answer the question: What on Earth is going on?
It would be a fool or a windbag who tried to answer that question conclusively. But certain themes are inescapable. This brutality defines a war very much of its time, the first 21st century war, because it is, in the end, about nothing.
We have lived in a world where Arabs fight Jews, Hutus fight Tutsis, communists fight fascists, Serbs fight Croats, and British and US troops fight Islamist fundamentalists. They do so for a cause, faith or deeply etched tribal identity, however crazy.
But Mexico’s war (some do not like calling it a war) has no such purpose. Mexicans are mutilating, decapitating, torturing and killing each other, ostensibly over money and the drug smuggling routes that provide it. But most of the violence revolves around the smaller profits of the domestic market and the street corner. It is meted out for its own sake. Yes, there are regional and clan allegiances to the states of Tamaulipas, Michoacan or Sinaloa, but they are fluid and subject to far too many whimsical alliances and betrayals for the war to be compared to, say, tribal conflict in Rwanda.
Some would argue that all wars are fought indirectly over money and resources — be they 19th century wars of empire, or of ideology or religion in the 20th century. But Mexico’s war has no ideological pretensions or window-dressing — its only cover is that it was originally fought, like other, lesser, mafia wars, over now diversified product lines that get the US (and Europe) high.
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