
True Grit
IN THINKING ABOUT a book to recommend now, I shy away from anything programmatic, because endless punditry is part of what brought us here. But one template for understanding our current situation is Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (2010). Writing in December of 2009, a year when the number of murders in the city exceeded 2,400, Bowden offers a poetic, brutal description of the centerless violence that has gripped Juárez since December 2006, when then-president Felipe Calderón declared a "war on drugs," to be led by the Mexican army.
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