Murder
About six years ago I was assigned to cover a news conference at UCLA where a professor was to reveal new information about the killings in Ciudad Juarez. That's what the press release claimed. At the time, the drug wars were building - from our present perspective the deaths were climbing - and the unsolved killings of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez provided the news angle.
Sure enough, several television stations sent cameras, some with reporters to boot. A couple of radio reporters, including myself, showed up. I don't think the L.A. Times sent anyone. The professor - the accomplished Chicano Studies scholar Alicia Gaspar de Alba - announced that she'd visited Ciudad Juarez and that her findings would be part of a forthcoming book. Who did you interview? Who's commiting the murders? We didn't like her answers.
What genre is the book? We asked. Mystery, she said. Fiction or non-fiction? Fiction, she answered.
Longtime KTLA T.V. reporter Warren Wilson was there. In his 30-something year career he was famous for having the most people in trouble with the law surrender to him. I can still see his furrowed brow of frustration as the press conference moved into the reporter Q&A. Who killed these women? What's the news? I agreed. How can a work of fiction shed light on these unsolved murders? We left in frustration to write our newscast stories.
Journalist Charles Bowden has helped me understand what that press conference was all about. Bowden spent years traveling to Juarez for his book Murder City and profiles the killers, the killed and those cleaning up the psychological mess left from the killings. He talks to a repentant hit man and the founder of a shelter for sexually abused women. The murders will not be solved, according to Bowden. When he sat down for the first time with the drug cartel hit man Bowden writes that he told him, "I want the story of your life because you and the others like you are phantoms. I am not here to solve crimes. I am here to explain how the world works."
Accepting that the murders will remain unsolved is a big step to take. The rule of law is, after all, the U.S. standard for a civilized society. A guilty or not guilty verdict is the victim and the legal system's closure on murder, the capital offense against society. It is not an explanation, which is what brings a broader closure. The break-down of the judicial system in Juarez renders moot any calls for solving the murders of thousands of people in and around the border city. That's where the narrative journalist, the novelist, and the poet come in. Gaspar de Alba published, Desert Blood, a book that her UCLA web site touts as an important work of mystery and Hispanic fiction. The killings in Juarez are a centerpiece of Roberto Bolano's novel Savage Detectives. In the future, will these books have more to say about the Juarez violence than the investigative reporting?
Bowden writes about a city where speaking out against the murders will get you killed, where people gather around a corpse under a sheet and then move on to the mundane as if nothing happened. If no one tells the stories, then in fact nothing happened.
I'll be sitting down with Charles Bowden to talk about Murder City and Ciudad Juarez at an author talk at the Taper Auditorium in downtown L.A.'s Central Library this Wednesday at 7:00 p.m.