NP-2666 and Charles Bowden

[rich]

The Virginia Quarterly Review has a piece by Charles Bowden in the
Fall 2009 issue of the VQR
http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2009/fall/bowden-crazy-place/

this quote I think encapsulates what Bolano was getting at regarding
Santa Teresa sections (Cuidad Juarez) in 2666

"In the last decade, something has changed in Juárez; I feel this in
my bones. The state still exists—there are police, a president, a
congress, agencies studded across various government buildings—but the
Mexican government increasingly pretends to be in charge and then
calls it a day. Thirty thousand Mexican soldiers are said to be
fighting the drug war. Yet the police have connected scarcely a body
to the cartels and the Mexican army has captured comparatively little
cocaine—this in a city with thousands of retail cocaine outlets. The
US beefs up the border, installs high-tech towers, tosses up walls,
and puts twenty thousand Border Patrol agents on the line to face down
Mexico. Still the drugs arrive right on time.

And, all the while, violence courses through Juárez like a ceaseless
wind, and we insist it is a battle between cartels, or between the
state and the drug world, or between the army and the forces of
darkness.

But consider this possibility: violence is now woven into the very
fabric of the community; it has no single cause and no single motive
and no on-off switch.

Violence is not a part of life; it is life."

Rich