A GRUESOME RECKONING

Librarian Sifts Mexican Press to Tally Drug-Cartel-Related Killings in
Juarez

LAS CRUCES, N.M.-Molly Molloy keeps a grim diary. "Eight killed in
night club," reads her April 28 entry. "Pregnant woman killed during
soccer match," she noted on May 4.

Ms. Molloy, a 54-year-old librarian at New Mexico State University
here, spends most mornings sifting reports in the Mexican press to
create a tally of drug-cartel-related killings in Ciudad Juarez,
Mexico. She is striving to fill a widening information gap about these
homicides in Juarez, some 50 miles southeast of Las Cruces, across the
Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. There is no official count of the
people killed in Mexico's escalating drug wars-whether the victims are
drug traffickers, police or civilians. A government estimate puts the
total at about 22,000 in all of Mexico since late 2006. For Juarez,
Mexico's deadliest city, state officials keep their own tally, but the
swift pace of the killings, as well as distrust of authorities, has
prompted reporters and such observers as Ms. Molloy to keep their own
counts.

Some Americans who attempted to count the killings were overwhelmed by
the carnage and gave up. But Ms. Molloy perseveres. The death toll has
risen above a thousand in Juarez so far this year, according to her
count. "I don't think there's a phenomenon like that in the world
unless it's a declared war," she said.

Mexican government officials say they aren't deliberately withholding
information on the killings. They say determining which homicides are
linked to criminal gangs involves lengthy investigations and a level
of coordination among various agencies that isn't automatic. The
Mexican news media, however, distinguish drug-related killings from,
say, domestic violence, by using information collected by reporters at
crime scenes. Ms. Molloy tallies their reports and makes her findings
available for free to anyone who wants them. Her material is used in
news accounts and scholarly studies in the U.S. and beyond, as
universities and some U.S. newspapers curtail travel in Mexico because
of concerns about the violence.

More than 300 people subscribe to Ms. Molloy's daily news and analysis
emails, including congressional staff, U.S. and Mexican human-rights
watchdogs, local and international reporters, and border observers
from as far away as Norway.

U.S. reporters covering crime elsewhere in Mexico bemoan the lack of
tools like Ms. Molloy's emails.

"It's really frustrating not knowing what is going on," said Jared
Taylor, a crime reporter at the Monitor newspaper in McAllen, Texas,
just across the border from Reynosa, Mexico. Local crime reports are
getting thin in Reynosa as journalists themselves become drug-cartel
targets, as they have in other cities in northeastern Mexico.

Ms. Molloy consults a stream of articles online from her home in New
Mexico, as well as copies of newspapers she purchases during trips to
Juarez, where reporters are still covering drug-related crime. She
copies relevant articles into an online archive, which she uses to
compose her email reports. Ms. Molloy said her long-term plan is to
build a more comprehensive archive at her university's library to
document Juarez's bloody years. She hopes future readers will be able
to track, in the news clippings, longstanding problems she and other
scholars believe are contributing to today's violence: the migration
of poor workers from Mexico's interior searching for manufacturing
jobs; the growth of shanty towns; and more recently, a generation of
uneducated youth lured by the gangster lifestyle. "Ten years from now,
people are going to ask 'What happened in Juarez?' " Ms. Molloy said.

Her interest in Latin America started in the 1980s, when she
translated articles into English at a newspaper run by the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua. These days, she is charged with keeping her
school's library well-stocked with Latin American Studies titles, and
she did research for "Murder City," a book by journalist Charles
Bowden about the killings in Juarez. Ms. Molloy said she feels partly
responsible for the cartel mayhem, which is supported by the money
spent by Americans on illegal drugs smuggled into the U.S. from Mexico.

"It wouldn't be unfair to say that we're the major economic stimulus
for the drug business," she said.

Beto O'Rourke, an El Paso councilman and subscriber to Ms. Molloy's
emails, said they were useful for planning purposes, since many
refugees from the violence are settling in El Paso. He tried to keep
his own tally of the dead but quit because it took so much time.

Ms. Molloy said her work also could help the refugees. Earlier this
year, a lawyer representing a person seeking U.S. residency asked Ms.
Molloy for documentation of a body-and a severed head-deposited near
the client's home. Ms. Molloy found an article on the incident by
searching her database for "decapitated."

The client's visa was approved.