AMEXICA: WAR ALONG THE BORDERLINE

Horrors unfold in this book like a revenger's tragedy, as lines in the
Mexican gangster's codebook are constantly crossed. It becomes
acceptable to target the spouses and children of a murdered rival in
the drugs trade. Then the guests who attend the funeral; then the
police investigating the case; then their families in turn. The
ripples of violence spread out inexorably. Bodies are left hanging
from traffic bridges for dawn commuters to see, often with a warning
message displayed beside them. Those are the bodies that have not been
dissolved in the acid baths.

Some 25,000 people have been killed in the hostilities since President
Caldero* of Mexico declared his war on drugs in 2006. Ed Vulliamy
provides a brilliant, rigorous analysis to explain quite how this
escalation has occurred. One contributory factor was the earlier
arming of the Contras by the Reagan administration, using cocaine to
barter for weapons and opening up Central America to Colombian trade.
At the same time, traditional drug routes into the US, such as Miami,
were closed, so trafficking increased along the long Mexican border
which is, in Vulliamy's fine phrase, as porous as it is harsh.

The length of the border explains much of the violence. So large is
the smuggling territory that it is impossible for any single gang to
control, the resulting war between the various cartels now exacerbated
by further confrontations with the army and police.

It had always puzzled me that so much of the violence centres on
Ciudad Juarez, which I remember from my own travels as one of the most
placid and least venal of the border towns. Based on its murder rate,
it is now the most dangerous city in the world. This is partly
because, as Vulliamy details, it lies halfway between the rival coasts
and gangs of the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico. So it is controlled by
neither and fought for by all, with 10,000 troops failing to keep the
peace.

The collateral damage from the drug trafficking has been deep. Like in
Afghanistan, another country where we forget that they are not just
exporting drugs, but battling a major epidemic of their own, "where
the river runs through, people will drink". Northern Mexico is ravaged
by crack and methamphetamine addiction. The subsequent corruption and
degradation has led to the brutal serial killing of young women
working at the maquiladoras, the sweatshop factories set up just over
the border by American companies.

Vulliamy is the ideal foreign correspondent to analyse the phenomenon.
He knows the border well and was one of the first to report on the
murdered women of Ciudad Juarez. He also refuses to find easy answers
to difficult questions. While some commentators have made glib
assumptions about the Mexican propensity for brutality, Amexica shows
that the crushing power of the multinationals in a low-wage economy is
a key factor. The Lear Company's only response to the murder of their
17-year-old employee Claudia Ivette Gonsalez was that "the murder did
not happen on Lear property".

In his journey across Mexico, Vulliamy also still manages to find a
lyricism amid the violence. It would be too much to ask a journalist
not to say that "this is no country for old men," but he also quotes
(and meets) the great balladeer of the El Paso badlands, Tom Russell.
He sings an epitaph for his beloved borderland : "everything's gone
straight to hell / since Sinatra played Juarez".

Hugh Thomson's 'Tequila Oil: Getting Lost in Mexico' is published by
Phoenix