Collateral Damage: As Juárez Falls

An in-depth piece of journalism from The Nation on the destruction of Ciudad Juarez

As Juárez Falls: "These are the desolate remains of Riberas del Bravo, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez. The city, opposite El Paso, Texas, is the fulcrum of the US-Mexico borderline and the kernel of the war that rages throughout Mexico. Some 28,000 people have been killed—many of them with perverse cruelty—since President Felipe Calderón mobilized the Mexican military in December 2006.

The conflict is usually described in shorthand as a war among narco-trafficking cartels for control of smuggling routes into the United States, and this was indeed one of its initial causes. But much of the killing in Juárez bears less resemblance to warfare between cartels than to criminal anarchy." Dec. 9, 2010, The Nation