Sometimes, couriers flew west in the opulent comfort of now-defunct MGM Grand Air. Even those at the bottom of the chain, the human mules who risk their own hides to deliver loads into the United States earn wages they couldn't hope to match in Mexico's legal economy. But while drugs go north, decadence and crime, he said, flow south. Hermosillo, a state capital 350 miles from Phoenix, has been transformed from a religious city to a haven for contraband, greenbacks, guns and gangs from Arizona. Kids sniff paint as a sedative to hunger, then discover a better high with cocaine and money.
Radio stations play corridos, or ballads, in honor of narco-lords.
In Juarez, the Chihuahuan city south of El Paso, citizens have lived in the shadow of violent cartel rivalries for most of this decade. This winter, U.S. and Mexican authorities began uncovering graves thought to contain some of the dozens of people kidnapped and killed by the Juarez Cartel. No matter how much blame is cast on Latino criminals, they could not thrive without U.S. collaborators and buyers, said Adolfo Garcia Morales, assistant state prosecutor for Sonora. If we attack the causes, it will be much cheaper and much more effective. Mexicans also resent the notion that corruption is unique to their country or culture.