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Time explores another drug-and-murder capital

By Mark Obbie

There's a depressing sameness to this Time story on Culiacan, and it's not the fault of the magazine or its writers, Tim Padgett and Ioan Grillo. In what the story calls "the sweltering cradle of Mexico's $25 billion-a-year drug-trafficking industry," Padget and Grillo -- with a powerful photo gallery on the Web by Anthony Suau -- competently and compellingly describe a town overrun with narco-murders and money. They put the battles and despair in the larger context of Mexican government crackdowns, U.S. aid, and the U.S. demand for cocaine that fuels the phenomenon in the first place. And it's done with typical Time fluidity: much is said in relatively few words. What's depressing are the facts, and the historical context that the story doesn't dwell on. But it's a context hard to ignore, when you consider that there have been countless stories on other drug-and-murder capitals in Mexico and in other drug-producing regions for decades on end. That doesn't mean that Time should ignore this one, or that every story has to propose radical, new solutions to the problems. It just means that we're allowed to be depressed at how this never changes.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on August 19, 2008 (boomark / email).