Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields
Just across the Rio Grande from El Paso sits Juárez, Mexico, a city so overtaken with the violence of drug trafficking that its leading citizens—police, politicians, even the drug lords—find it safer to live in El Paso. Bowden, critically acclaimed author of Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing (2009), details the forces that have led to Mexico’s place in the multinational drug business. Hundreds of millions of dollars flow into Juárez each week, and the violence and corruption that follow yield 200 to 300 murders each year. Bowden laments the silence on both sides of the border that permits the slaughter that goes mostly unnoted and unreported. Behind the numbers, he details the lives lost or destroyed: a reporter fleeing for his life with his young son, a beautiful woman gang-raped, a killer for the cartels who is now being hunted. He chronicles a town that has been the site of numerous mass graves of victims and of monuments to fallen police that bear hit lists from the cartels. A stark, haunting look at the impact of drug trafficking on a town and its people. --Vanessa Bush