Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s second largest border city, is clogged with rubbish, fouled with car exhaust and, increasingly, flooded with narcotics.
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s second largest border city, is clogged with rubbish, fouled with car exhaust and, increasingly, flooded with narcotics. Mexican drug cartels are now so deeply ingrained in the city’s political and social fabric that not a single bar or shop remains ‘un-narcotised’. Mexico in the 21st century, according to Ed Vulliamy, is a nation shadowed by gangland enterprise and the rat-tat-tat of Kalashnikovs. To live on the US-Mexican border, how ever, calls for special qualities of endurance.
The four US states bordering Mexico — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California — have long nurtured a bandit identity founded on firearms and the right to self-defence. Many an American outlaw (John Wesley Harding, Billy the Kid) has escaped to Mexico’s cacti- prickly frontera.
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