‘Over Sixty Hours without an Execution.’ When PM, the biggest tabloid in Ciudad Juárez, can’t find a corpse to put on its front page, it has to come up with something. On 21 November last year it announced that ‘the city has just experienced an unusual outbreak of peace … the longest for three years. Newspaper statistics show that from 29 December 2008, fifty hours passed without a killing. From 29 October 2009, Juárez recorded 41 hours without any violent deaths.’ Luis, a local journalist who meets me at El Paso airport, across the border, jokes about it: ‘Today, Juárez is very calm. Boring even. We used to have fifteen or twenty deaths a day. Now it’s just three, five, seven.’ The term ‘boring’ is relative. The first cover of PM that I see shows a photograph of a corpse whose head is no more than a skull: the man was burned with acid ‘while still alive’, the article says. It gives the usual details: name and age (José Gallegos, 22), circumstances of the crime (‘kidnapped at 2 a.m.’), relatives’ reactions (‘screaming in horror and despair after seeing the condition in which their loved one was found’). Police investigators will take statements and collect the body, but there will be nothing else: no follow-up, no investigative report, no arrest, no trial, not even a rudimentary explanation of why unknown persons saw fit to immerse José Gallegos’s head in acid. In subsequent issues of PM, his photo will be replaced by photos of other corpses. ‘What drives people crazy,’ Roberto Alvarez Gutiérez, a municipal police officer, explains, ‘is that there’s no follow-up. The files pile up and nothing is resolved. Sometimes mothers have to carry out their own investigations.’

LRB 7 June 2012 | PDF Download