Vignettes from Bowden!

Charles Bowden, author of easily the best English-language book on drugs I've ever read, returns to Juárez for an article for the present issue of GQ. Juárez has descended into violence in 2008, and Bowden says the culprit is not battles between cartels, but the fighting among small-time drug dealers. There are a couple of reasons to be skeptical. One is that Bowden's article, a gripping series of vignettes, includes little in the way of official comments on his hypothesis, and nothing in the way of statistics. Second, 500 people have been killed in Juárez this year, a huge number for a bunch of street-side slingers. The level of intimidation of the police and politicians, which Bowden covers, also seems impossible without the cartels being intimately involved in the violence. Third, right now the cartels are rather famously undergoing a violent reorganization of alliances and smuggling routes, and the Juárez border crossing is one of the country's most important. It's only logical that this would generate a lot of turmoil. And four, Bowden ignores some stories that would contradict his thesis, such as the Zetas --the most notorious of the cartel gangs-- hanging banners in Juárez inviting soldiers to desert and join up with them.

Despite that, it's a beautifully written, thought-provoking piece. Mexico's homegrown drug use hasn't gotten enough official attention; up until Calderón launched an anti-drug use initiative last year, the response was almost always, "It's an American problem, we're just the trampoline." Drug abuse is on the rise in Mexico, which, even if you are unconvinced by Bowden's article, certainly could fuel a surge of violence like that of the late 1980s and early '90s in the US.