A hell of a place to live

Review: Jennifer Hough

The stories, of mayhem, murder and torture, raise their ugly heads and filter into our consciousness every once in a while.

But such is the normality of death and destruction here that only the more sinister and unusual crimes make international headlines — such as recent reports that police were seeking a 12-year-old hitman who may be responsible for a string of killings.

The drug wars, along the 2,000-mile border territory, have spiralled out of control and statistics are shocking — in the last three years, 23,000 people have been murdered.

In 2009, after reporting from the border for many years, journalist Ed Vulliamy travelled the frontier from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico — the end product, Amexica, is the stories behind the statistics, telling of a lawless place where no life is sacred and no one can be trusted, yet where faith abounds and fortunes are waiting to be made and lost.

Death drips off the pages, for this is a vicious, indiscriminate war. Gangs compete to orchestrate the most gruesome killing. Bodies are dissolved in acid, women are tortured and murdered, children die in the crossfire.

Far from being a morbid read, Vulliamy, the former New York correspondent for The Observer, who spent many years as an international correspondent for the Guardian, makes this a compelling, fascinating journey.

He describes how the narco gangs work. He chronicles the smuggling of people, weapons, and drugs back and forth across the border. He tells us of the middle-class, American culture that is feeding the violence and the growing demand for drugs.

Vulliamy says the border “belongs to both the United States and Mexico, and neither, it is a place of opportunity and poverty, promise and despair, love and violence, wonder and fear, sex and church, family and hard grind. A border along which the US now builds a stockade against migration and violence — yet which is also the busiest commercial border in the world, across which a million people travel every day to shop, go to school, do business or visit relatives. And a place, above all, of boundless beauty and infinite sky.”

The juxtaposition of hopelessness and hope is stark. For not only is his Amexica a place of sorrow, depravation and death, it is also a place of salvation and hope for the thousands seeking out a better life by making the perilous journey across the desert.

This story, the one of escape and the promise of a new life, is as much a part of Amexica as the drug wars. Some make it, some are caught, others are never heard from again, perhaps having perished in the deserts.

But still they try. As well as portraying a contemporary snapshot of life in the borderland, Vulliamy provides a historical narrative as a backdrop to what is becoming one of the most dangerous places on earth.