2666 Ciudad Juárez

I confess, I haven’t started “2666.” (I’m currently working on “The Savage Detectives.”) But I couldn’t let the discussion pass without mentioning a great book on Ciudad Juárez, the real-life basis for Bolaño’s Santa Teresa. Charles Bowden’s “Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future” (Aperture, 1998) follows several local news photographers through the city. Some, like Rafael Cota, known as La Pantera (the Panther), who fumigates by day and films crime scenes by night, hold more than one job and find little time to sleep due to their steadfast commitment—addiction, even—to the Juárez underworld. Their subject matter ranges from the women who work for dismal wages in foreign-owned maquiladoras, or factories, to narcotic-trafficking-related deaths and shootouts and gory, mutilated corpses left to rot and disintegrate in the desert—often the bodies of maquiladora girls.
Fearless in their pursuit, the Juárez “shooters” have an uncanny ability to arrive at the scene of a crime before the crime itself. In a way, they remind me of Weegee, the street photographer who captured New York City’s underbelly in the nineteen-thirties and forties, and who was known for having a sixth sense. However, Weegee’s high-flash images have a signature composition and aesthetic, whereas the Juárez “school” of street photography employs an anti-aesthetic visual language. The pictures are raw and ugly, perhaps because life in Juárez is that way. To quote our commenter lauerjeremy once more: in an aesthetic sense, “they prefer to fail, while thinking clearly, than to be absorbed in the blind romantic vision of life that has so benighted the lives of millions.”

Keywords

• 2666;
• Bolano;
• Charles Bowden;
• Ciudad Juarez;
• books

Taken from:
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/02/ugly-and-true.html#ixzz0eb5IHaDy

From Wikipedia you can read:

"Unfortunately many websites and publications, including the book Daughters of Juarez, deal (when they deal with facts and not merely rumours) with the earlier years. Of course, meanwhile, Juarez is suffering from other murders. The same newspaper, on the same date, reports 2660 murders during 2009, mostly drug war related. Norte, on page 3, for January 5, 2009, reports already 37 murders for the first four days alone of 2010. Murders are now so common in Juarez that "Fourteen People Assassinated" rates only page 3 coverage, and not the front page it would receive in any other city, even in Iraq or Pakistan."