Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

by Charles Bowden

  This fatigue with recording the deaths is a common experience. I remember my friend, photographer Julián Cardona, in early June after the machine-gunning of the twelve-year-old girl, telling me, “I can’t do this anymore, it is hopeless.” And so for a spell, he stopped taking photographs. And then, of course, resumed.

  I kept a running file of newspaper stories until around May or June, when it hit fifteen hundred pages single-spaced. And I threw in the towel.

  I crossed the bridge from Juárez to El Paso in June or early July swearing I would never return. But I did. And Julián Cardona and Molly Molloy also resumed their work.

  I want to thank my friend El Pastor José Antonio Galvan, who showed me the insane underbelly of the city and whose work with the destroyed minds of Juárez touches my heart. He is also, he says, building a cell for me at his asylum, and I am grateful that I will never be homeless.

  And I must thank Esther Chávez Cano, who stood up for the people of Juárez when the government of Juárez cowers and stands down.

  I want to express my gratitude to the reporters of Juárez. They kept at it under impossible conditions. Armando Rodriguez, for example, filed more than three stories a day until he was executed on November 13.

  What little record we have of this killing season is because of their work and their love of their besieged city.

  Copyright © 2010 by Charles Bowden

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  Photographs copyright © 2010 by Julián Cardona. All Rights Reserved. Research Assistance was provided by the Documentary Photography Fund at The Nation Institute.

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  eISBN : 978-1-568-58622-9