A cartel hitman turns to God when the cartel turns on him. A reporter flees the country because the army, tired of what he’s writing, decides he might as well die. A beautiful girl comes in from the country, is beaten and gang raped by policemen, and loses her mind.
These are not plotlines from the new David Simon show, but the three threads of a terrifying non-fiction account of one year in the murder capital of the world—Ciudad Juárez, right across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Charles Bowden’s Murder City is a catalogue of horrors, presented in simple language through which the author’s extreme bitterness only occasionally shines. It is an astonishing piece of reporting. It’s also, in the end, unsatisfying—which says more about the grim subject matter than Bowden’s skills at weaving a narrative.
The death rate in Ciudad Juárez exploded in January 2008, when 46 died—a quarter of what was typical for a year. And then it got worse. Mr. Bowden spends most of that year in and around the city, trying to understand why. He gets cozy with assassins, the threatened, and the families of the dead, putting his life in jeopardy just by listening to them. Slowly, he becomes used to the fear. By August, when 228 die, both he and the town’s surviving residents are numb.
The conventional wisdom is that the exploding death count is the result of warring cartels. But the government is so saturated with drug money that there is no division between the authorities and the narcos. The police skirt a murder scene until they’re sure the killers are gone. Soldiers disappear at the sound of automatic gunfire. Cops kill narcos; narcos kill cops; narcos kill soldiers; soldiers kill cops.
Bowden interviews a hitman, a professional murderer and kidnapper—a sicario—who never knew which cartel he worked for but knows they want him dead. After testifying that he has given himself to God, the killer starts to reminisce, and ends up giving all sorts of practical advice on killing—how to bind their hands, how to organize a drive by. Like many sicarios, he was also a cop, in charge of an anti-kidnapping detail. When the victims went missing, it was his office phone that rang.
Mexican reporters who get too close to the story disappear. To stay safe, if they even write about the killings, they give nothing beyond the names of the victims and descriptions of the killer’s cars. As such, newspaper stories—dozens of which are reproduced in the book’s appendix—assume a hauntingly elegant simplicity. Many begin, “A body was found…” and don’t go much further. In his retellings of these deaths, Mr. Bowden mimics that structure, and his prose gives us details and not much else.
That is deliberate. Pretending to know what’s really going on—other than murder upon murder, until it morphs into something like white noise—would benefit the book at the expense of the truth about Juárez. Bowden does offer up three main narrative threads—the insane raped girl, the reporter fleeing for his life, and the incredible interview with the half repentant killer—but unwillingness to impose an overarching narrative means his story can be hard to latch on to.
This is frustrating but, you can imagine him saying, so is Juárez. Its villains are invisible and everyone is corrupt. The police wear masks, the witnesses are anonymous, and only newspapers give names to the dead.
