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Reviewed by Michael Paul Mason
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American media coverage of the drug-related violence in Mexican border towns delivers a brief shock when reporters cite the incredible number of homicides. Few reports, however, take you into the center of the violence. In Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, author Charles Bowden doesn’t help readers make any sense of the terror; instead, he makes them feel it.
In 2008 alone, more than 1,600 homicides occurred in Juarez, and by the end of Murder City, you feel like you’ve read about every one of them. Combined with the disorienting tone that Bowden weaves into the book, Murder City has a tendency to numb you with the persistent cataloguing of dead women, children and men. Like all true works dealing with evil, there’s an element of banality mixed in between moments of sheer terror.
In a work that is more expressionistic literature than reportage, Bowden uses the ghostly characters of rape victim Miss Sinaloa, El Pastor, and a Mexican assassin he calls the Murder Artist to create a portrait of Juarez in a time of nightmarish violence, and the result is a meditation on murder that is almost too sickening to continue yet too thoughtful to resist. Take Bowden’s digression on the subject of fear, for example:
“Fear has been my pale rider. I have never faced an audience without it, nor gotten out of the car to do that first interview in some strange city without fear … The killer facing me over a plate of food is rational. He kills and sometimes feels nothing. There are such people, who are calm while taking a life. They do not induce the fear in me that I feel when around the fearful.”
Bowden’s encounter with the sicario, the Mexican assassin, is easily the most distressing and horrifying story I’ve come across in recent memory–perhaps ever. After a game of cat-and-mouse in an unnamed city, Bowden finally meets the killer face to face, who openly shares the darkest acts he’s witnessed. As the assassin boasts of his techniques, you also wonder if Bowden is courting his own murder by simply meeting the man.
Murder City‘s subtitle, “The Global Economy’s New Killing Fields,” is a bit misleading, making the book sound more like a CNN special report than the work of an artist at the top of his game. Don’t expect a clear picture of cartel players, Mexican army officials, or border patrol agents–given the fate of so many journalists, that story may never get told. Instead, steel yourself for a gritty submersion into the life and feel of a city utterly undone by murder.
Michael Paul Mason is the author of ‘Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury & Its Aftermath,’ published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. His work appears in magazines and newspapers, including Discover, The Believer, and NYT. Learn more at michaepaulmason.com