CHARLES BOWDEN Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields April 20, 2010

In 2008, 1607 people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. In 2009, the murder total was 2660. 2010 will probably be worse. Many are raped and murdered women. How did this once-peaceful border town become such a horror show?

Charles Bowden is the author of eleven books including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Dog; Down By the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family; Juarez: The Laboratory of our Future. He is a contributing editor of Esquire, and he writes for other magazines such as Harper's and The New York Times Book Review. Winner of the 1996 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He has been extensively covering Mexico's drug war. His article in Mother Jones Magazine described a Mexican reporter seeking political asylum in the U.S. to escape threats from the Mexican military, and another in Harper's Magazine was a profile of a Mexican police commander who worked as a paid assassin for drug cartels.

Bowden reports: "The US government is pretending the Mexican army is some partner in some war against drugs. In fact, what's going on in Mexico is a war for drugs as the economy collapses. The army has moved in and taken over police departments all over the country. There's 8000 to 10,000 federal troops and federal police now in Juarez. Every place they've gone they've terrified the people ... Twelve thousand people have died since December 2006 in this initiative. That's far more than we've lost with our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan..."

"A thrillingly good writer whose grandness of vision is only heightened by the bleak originality of his voice." - New York Times Book Review

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