Exodus/Éxodo is a new book (Amazon) with words by Charles Bowden and photographs by Julián Cardona . Excerpt:
Consider this: you get up at 5 a.m. You live in a one-room shack and pay $59 a month in rent. Your address is on the outskirts of the world’s second largest megalopolis, México City. You share this shack with your woman, a niece and your child. At 5:30 a.m. you’re on the bus, a ninety-minute ride for $2.45 a day roundtrip. You work in a tortilla shop for $1.64 an hour, eleven hours a day, six days a week. A gallon of milk at the store, the electricity that lights your shack, the fuel running the bus, all these things cost more than in the United States. Basically, everything costs more than in the United States — except labor.
…
Mexican civilization existed before the American people were even a thought. Americans have come to the game very recently, and like so many new arrivals believe they possess all the answers. At the moment, human beings are moving all over the planet to save their hides. Things have been upended, the moon rises at a strange hour, it is blood red, and dripping with hunger.
Scott Carrier and videographer Lisa Miller visit “El Pastor.” José Antonio Galván is a born-again preacher in Juárez, Mexico, who cares for homeless drug-addicted, mentally ill street people with no place to live but El Pastor’s shelter (Albergue Para Discapacitaros Mentales), out in the desert just south of the U.S. border.
On NPR ATC tonight: A half-hour of “Mexico’s 1968 Massacre” from Radio Dairies. “In the summer of 1968, students in Mexico began to challenge the country’s authoritarian government.”
[Scott Carrier is working on an HV Hour about the murders in Juárez, Mexico, starting with his NPR series, then moving onto the current much, much worse situation. The following are some emails from Scott…]
Yesterday Armando Rodriguez, the journalist who’d written most of the stories (901) on this year’s executions in Juárez Mexico, was himself executed:
A Juarez journalist known for his work as a crime reporter for El Diario de Juarez was gunned down Thursday morning in front of his home, the newsapaper’s Web site reported.
Armando Rodriguez was preparing to take his daughter to school in Juarez when a gunman approached his car and fired several shots at point-blank range, according to accounts provided by the newspaper. Rodriguez reportedly died at the scene.
The assailant then fled to a waiting car carrying other men and sped off in an unknown direction.
Rodriguez was the police beat reporter for El Diario de Juarez and had become an expert on the brutal drug cartel violence that has gripped Juarez for the last several years.
“He was a good person and a good reporter,” said KINT-TV (Univision Ch. 26) reporter Pedro Villagrana, who has worked closely with Rodriguez for more than a decade.
Word of Rodriguez’ slaying quickly spread throughout the Juarez and El Paso journalism community. Some members of the Juarez media including his colleagues at El Diario de Juarez gathered at the crime scene to mourn his death, according to the newspaper Web site.
Juárez has always been a violent place. No rule of law. People get killed and nobody is arrested, not even an investigation. What’s new now is the rate of murders. There are more than 100 executions each month in Juárez, 1300 this year alone. Last year there were about 300.
“Mexico’s Red Days” by Charles Bowden in GQ on the escalating Juárez, Mexico murders:
The killings have the cold feeling of butchery in a slaughterhouse, and they are everywhere: done in broad daylight, on streets, in markets, at homes, and even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Women, children, guilty, innocent—no one is safe.
A Tale of Two Countries: In “Sasabe,” a Sonora, Mexico border town, Scott Carrier talks to immigrants on their hazardous, illegal desert crossing, and to the border patrol waiting for them in Sasabe, Arizona.
Luis Alberto Urrea reads from his books Vatos and The Devil’s Highway, about death in the desert.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña imagines “Maquiladoras of the Future,” fantasy border factories.
“And I walked…”, by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler, is a sound-portrait of Mexicans who risk their lives to find better-paying jobs in the United States.
Exodus/Éxodo is a new book (Amazon) with words by Charles Bowden and photographs by Julián Cardona . Excerpt:
More from Juárez: NPR 
A Tale of Two Countries: In “Sasabe,” a Sonora, Mexico border town, 
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