A MURDEROUS SYSTEM

"As dawn broke over the desert, the body was still hanging beneath the overpass, having been suspended from it - decapitated and dangling by a rope tied around the armpits - at 4.30am. The sun rose ... and it was still there three hours later, swaying, headless, in the cold early morning wind which kicks up dust and cuts like a scalpel through the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez, the most dangerous city in the Americas, and probably in the world. This macabre murder takes the number of executions in the city of 2m people to about 1,300 this year, and the toll across Mexico - with most of the killing concentrated along the border with the US to about 4,300. The body count is the result of feral slaughter among Mexican narco cartels fighting for the plazas, or corridors, of narcotics flowing into the US."
(Observer Magazine, 7 December) RD