Days of the dead: how the international drug trade turned a sleepy town on the U.S.-Mexican border into a war zone.

• Author: Martinez, Andres
• Position: On political books - Murder City: Ciuded Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Book review

Murder City: Ciuded Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden Nation Books, 352 pp.

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Even as a child growing up four hours due south, it struck me that few places were as aptly named as El Paso. Not that I was aware of the drugs flowing north and the bundles of cash flowing south, or the fact that this was the place from which Mexico's revolution was launched, the border crossing where a motley band of exiles reentered the country a century ago to march south. Nor did I fully understand the degree to which Ciudad Juarez, El Paso's then-peaceful sister city, had become an extension of U.S. industry, host to dozens of low-cost assembly plants. Parts passed from north to south; finished goods passed from south to north.

For me and my family, "the Pass" was the gateway we passed through to access the First World--the world of gleaming freeways with crisply clear green signs, clean public restrooms, late night with Johnny Carson, aboveboard cops, and all that. Every voyage north entailed a drive that culminated in the dusty sprawl of Juarez, the long wait in bumper-to-bumper traffic that preceded the sight of the Stars and Stripes halfway across the Bridge of the Americas over the less aptly named trickle of the Rio Grande, and all that beckoning tidiness beyond.

The formality of a proper crossing was just that for many people back in the 1970s and '80s, before the border patrol cracked down in and around El Paso. At various places along the city, mom-and-pop operations supplemented the three official points of entry with boat rides across the river for 10 or 20 pesos, maybe 25 if you wanted coffee for the trip. These "lancheros" were part of the scenery back then, part of "el folklor" of the one great binational city on the border. (Tijuana and San Diego have never been one integrated metropolis in the same way.) Juarez was playfully raffish where El Paso was staid, the place where Americans went to party, eat better, get divorced, or find affordable medical care.

No longer. Juarez today, as detailed in Charles Bowden's haunting chronicle Murder City, has become a different type of gateway--a stopover on the way to hell. Juarez has become ground zero in Mexico's drug wars, and one of the world's foremost urban killing fields. A city of some 1.5 million people, less than 2 percent of Mexico's population, Juarez accounted for more than a third of all homicides committed in Mexico last year, more...