As the violence in Mexico rages on, with murder totals recently surpassing 28,000 since the start of 2007, it's easy for anyone watching or keeping up with the news to become desensitized. Daily stories of kidnappings and murder scenes, complete with photos of dismembered bodies piled in the backs of pickup trucks or lying bloody in the street, can make the whole scenario overwhelming and extremely hard to wrap your head around. Statistics, death counts, unsolved murders; all with seemingly no end, no beginning, and no point.
But occasionally an event or fact will strike that forces you to step back and consider the reality. The circus surrounding the arrest of Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez and the tale of his rise from American high school football player to ruthless cartel enforcer was one of those events. The mass murder of 72 migrants from Central America a few weeks ago was another. Kidnapped and brought to a remote ranch in Tamaulipas, they were reportedly given the choice to join the Zetas drug gang as mules and low-level soldiers or face immediate death. When they hesitated, they were unceremoniously gunned down on the spot.
These stories stand out against the endless tide of violence because, for a change, they are actually stories. Every day we hear of bodies found in mass graves. Grotesque beheadings and bodies dangled from bridges are commonplace. These go almost entirely unsolved and unexplained. And that's part of what makes the Mexican drug war so impenetrable. But what gives one pause about the Tamaulipas mass murder and distinguishes it from the relentless tide of deaths is the fact that these victims had a distinct story, which is fairly uncommon in the reporting about Mexican drug war murders. Sketchy as it was, the idea of these people migrating from Salvador or Guatemala, over the border crossings in Chiapas and up through Veracruz, seeking less-than-minimum-wage work in the United States only to be derailed by sociopathic madmen, is much more detailed than one is used to reading. It's their story that allows them to be humanized, a rarity in a campaign of terror that has the direct intention of dehumanizing its victims.
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