NP-2666 and Charles Bowden

[Joseph Tracy]

  Bowden has made himself a witness of what is going on in this arena  
and his writing is superb. The recent article in Harpers is also very  
troubling, the testimony of  a cartel  hit man who worked as a cop  
and said at least half the police work for  the cartels.
On Jan 15, 2010, at 6:51 PM, rich wrote:

> 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