The Exchange: Charles Bowden on Juárez, “Murder City”

For fifteen years, Charles Bowden has been writing about Juárez, the Mexican border city of 1.5 million whose name is synonymous with faceless, all-consuming violence. It’s a place where death has a gravitational pull, where people disappear and bodies appear with mundane frequency. Most recently, the violence—a grim fact of life for Mexicans, and a sensationalist distraction for most Americans—garnered headlines here when three people tied to the U.S. consulate were brutally gunned down.

Bowden writes about the incomprehensible levels of killing in Juárez with an austere lyricism, and has been called “a blood and guts journalist with a poet’s sensibility.” In his latest book, “Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields,” Bowden follows three of the city’s inhabitants—a “sicario” contract killer, a beauty queen driven to insanity after a brutal gang rape, and a Mexican journalist fleeing for his life—over the course of one violent year. An edited version of our conversation appears below. You can listen to Bowden read an excerpt from “Murder City” in his wonderfully craggy, Sam Elliott-esque voice here.

Your writing style is spare and matter-of-fact, almost impressionistic. Can you explain the choice to write this way, rather than in a more “straightforward,” or descriptive journalistic manner? Was the style driven by a need for anonymity, or did you have other motivations?

If you read the newspaper accounts of violence in Juárez, they fail to convey the pain, the fear, and the ruin of the city. I wrote of murders, tortures, and rapes in a spare manner because a flat tone conveys agony better than a herd of adjectives. Many people in the book are unnamed lest they be killed. For example, one person in the book was filmed later by a documentary maker. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, a lifelong resident of Juárez, he was very upset. He said, “That footage could get the man killed.”

Juárez has been a rough place for sometime now, but you pinpoint January 2008—when Felipe Calderon became president and began to engage the Mexican army in the so-called war on drugs—as the city’s definitive tipping point. Do you think the violence would decrease if Calderon disengaged the military? Are there other changes that could positively affect the situation, or is the culture of killing simply too pervasive at this point?

The year 2007, with three hundred and seven murders, was the bloodiest in the history of the city—about twenty-six killings a month. January 2008 had over forty—the total for the year ran one thousand six hundred and sixty. In 2009, two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three were killed. This year, as of the morning of May 18th, nine hundred and seventy-three had been slaughtered—a sixty-per-cent increase over the same period in 2008. Federal agents and the army have poured in during the same twenty-seven-month period, and as they arrive the killings rise.

There are five hundred to nine hundred street gangs now of armed, murderous, unschooled and unemployed young people. The drug industry is thriving—even the D.E.A. admits drugs have never been cheaper, of higher quality, or more widespread in the U.S. Nothing can immediately roll back the violence, because it is now part of the fabric of the city, a place where in two years twenty-five per cent of the houses have been abandoned, forty per cent of the business shuttered, at least a hundred thousand jobs lost, and where a hundred and four thousand people have fled. Three things would over time lower the slaughter of people in Juárez and all over Mexico: legalize drugs, rework NAFTA so it provides a living wage, protect workers from toxic materials, protect unions, and cease giving the Mexican army half a billion dollars a year: it is the largest criminal group in Mexico and a growing player in the drug industry.

You have said that the killings in Juárez don’t have a “center,” that contrary to conventional wisdom they are not all tied to the drug trade or human trafficking. Instead, you argue that the abuses of free trade have spawned an unstoppable culture of violence. For those who haven’t read your work, can you explain this idea? In your opinion, is it simply the lack of economic opportunity that has led to violence, or is it something more insidious and pervasive—a state of mind?

I’ll make this simple: there are four hundred foreign, mainly American, factories in Juárez, they pay at best seventy-five dollars a week, the cost of living in Juárez is about ninety per cent of what it would be on the U.S. side of the border. In addition to this obvious point—that the factories play slave wages and have a turnover on average of one hundred to two hundred per cent a year—the city has now had at least two generations of kids raised pretty much on their own as their parents work five and a half days a week in the factories. It was primed to explode. Calderón’s initiative using the army to prove his power became the match in the powder keg, and now no single capo or general of politicians can put out the fire.

The president of Mexico says ninety per cent of the dead—over twenty-four thousand in Mexico since he launched his program—are dirty, meaning somehow connected to drugs. This statement is false. Most of the dead are poor people, not capos. And besides, what does it mean to be “dirty” in a city of a million that harbors one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand addicts?

In “Murder City,” you express frustration at the focus on violence against women in Juárez, rather than the disintegration of the city as a whole. Why do you think the news media and Hollywood are so interested in these types of crimes? As reprehensible as it is, is the story of violence against women easier to accept—and to take a stand against—than the sort of systemic rot you you write about?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com