The Sorrows of Mexico

by Lydia Cacho, Anabel Hernández, Juan Villoro, Diego Enrique Osorno, Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez

Overview

With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows.

Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN Promotes

Veering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up.

Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernández and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio González Rodríguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857056221
Publisher:	Hodder
Publication date:	04/28/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	613,980
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.00(d)

Editorial Reviews

The Sorrows of Mexico describes not only the bloody tragedy of this beautiful country, but also the struggle to make things better.—Ioan Grillo, Author of Gangster Warlords and El Narco.

Indispensable . . . What is striking about these essays is the sensibilities they reveal, the sense of exasperation, resignation and wry anger coursing through the collection—Scott Esposito, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

★ 2019-12-03
A steely band of courageous Mexican journalists respond to the violence and corruption overwhelming their country—to great personal and professional peril.

In a series of elucidating and chilling dispatches, expertly translated by a variety of translators, seven well-respected journalists reveal Mexico's "suppurating wound," as described by Elena Poniatowska in the powerful preface. Each of the pieces in this work shows an absolute assault on justice and human rights: narcotics trafficking, organized crime, sex trafficking, femicide, violent peasant land struggles, disappeared youth, egregious government coverups, torture, and widespread murder. A recent haunting crime that overshadows several of these dispatches is the Sept. 26, 2014, abduction and disappearance of 43 students on their way to Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in Guerrero, one of the most violent narcotics trafficking states in Mexico. In "Collateral Damage—Living in Mexico," Juan Villoro, a weekly columnist for Reforma, chronicles the horrendous violence that has overwhelmed the country since President Felipe Calderón's disastrous war on drug trafficking began in 2006. "The problem…had been around for a long time," he writes. "But the strategy failed. We were sitting on dynamite and Calderón lit a match to prove it." In a developing country like Mexico, where a handful of families control the wealth, there is little opportunity for youth to advance outside the cartels, which provide what Villoro calls a sense of "identity and shared codes." The crimes these journalists delineate seem to have no rhyme or reason save desperation and poverty—e.g., the young women pressed into sex slavery by boyfriends, documented by Diego Enrique Osorno in "Lily Sings Like a Little Bird." Marcela Turati's "War Made Me a Feminist" is a heart-rending look at how the violence has devastated women, mothers especially. With a recorded 94 journalists murdered in Mexico between 2000 and 2016 (documented in an appendix), the country has become one of the deadliest places to practice that profession.

Though brief, this collection of urgent reports deserves a wide audience—and not just in Mexico.

Kirkus Reviews