Book of the week: Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden

(Nation Books, 320 pages, $27.50)

When Charles Bowden writes about Mexican drug wars, he deserves our attention, said John MacCormack in the San Antonio Express-News. The 64-year-old journalist has been filing dispatches from the streets of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for the past 15 years, and his dramatic new book examines the recent explosion of violence that transformed the border city into the murder capital of the world. Bowden writes in an “exaggeratedly macho and melodramatic voice” that occasionally gives the book’s descriptions of shootings, torture killings, and gang rapes “an almost voyeuristic, pornographic feel.” But Murder City is an “important” work because it rejects conventional thinking that holds drug cartels responsible for Juárez’s ghastly violence. Bowden blames the United States instead.

Bowden points out that American appetites have put Juárez’s residents in an impossible predicament, said Meredith Blake in NewYorker.com. Sixteen years after the enactment of the NAFTA trade agreement, U.S. firms operate hundreds of factories in the area. Yet workers in those plants are paid $75 a week at best. So a young man in Juárez can either make cheap consumer goods and live in abject poverty or he can find a position in the risky field of international drug trafficking and “live like a king��� for as long as he can survive. The violence in Juárez got far worse when Mexican President Felipe Calderón sent thousands of soldiers and federal police to the city in 2008. Bowden calls Calderón’s decision to crack down “the match in the powder keg.”

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Bowden contends that the Mexican army is so corrupt that it’s no different from the cartels, said Oscar Villalon in the San Francisco Chronicle. Though the author never “convincingly corroborates” most such claims, he’s “asking the right questions” by trying to figure out who, if anybody, runs Juárez and the rest of Mexico. Yet because almost no one else is writing about these horrors, we need Bowden to do more than just string together a few strong character sketches into an “impressionistic” portrait of a troubled city, said Andrés Martinez in The Washington Monthly. His powerful writing may make Bowden the “poet laureate” of Juárez’s suffering, but for now readers will also “have to look elsewhere” to understand Mexico’s drug war in all its dimensions.