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Description
Sunset
This society is in free-fall.

I'm sitting on my fifth story balcony, overlooking the city as the sun sets. A smoky summer orange descending on the horizon, it tints the streets and the whitewashed walls of the new highrises on the outskirts in a translucent shade of red. It is the heavenly, luminescent cousin of the dull red streaks and stains that fleck the sidewalks with their morose and earthly splatter.

I smoke my cigarette and think of the time when people used to die for a reason instead of a triviality, when a man could go about his daily business without being armed, when a girl could run two blocks from the corner store to her home without the constant fear that stalking eyes were on her, waiting to drag her into an alley and beat her, rape her and kill her. The lucky girls are just left for dead where they fall. The unlucky ones are the ones who walk away, who make it as far as a police station where they're taken in by the cops and the beatings and the rape happen all over again.

There was a time when things were better. Back then the drug runners would come through town and make their deals with the police and the boarder guards. They were simply another part of the way things worked. The gangs would roam around after dark and if you got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, then you were going to be robbed for sure and had to count yourself lucky if they didn't beat you to the ground too. But they saved the killing for each other. The bark of guns in the alleyways, flashing muzzles and screaming teenagers writhing on the ground with blood spurting through their fingers and all the excitement replaced by terror and pain. If any of those kids ever grew up, they'd be as old as me now, but I don't think they did. They either died or were crushed beneath the advance of time in a world that has no place in its heart for those who try to repent.

There is a sign that stands at the side of the plaza at the center of town. It is made from a piece of scrap metal hauled from one of the many junkyards that surround the city with their stink and their piles of trash higher than half the homes that the poor people are forced to live in. Written on it in thick, waterproof marker are two lists. On the left, under the heading "Those who do not believe" is a list of names that gets longer every few days or so, sometimes by one, sometimes by a few at a time. On the other side, "Those who do" is another list, made up entirely of names from the left. You have to be crossed out on the left in order to move to the right, and you have to be dead to be crossed out. A name gets crossed off every Saturday night. In a saner place, the killer would never advertise his intentions in such a way. It would be too easy to end up caught, or at least too easy for the cops to protect the threatened victims. But not here. Here the cops are too scared that their names will end up on the list.

The police were never part of the solution but they weren't always part of the problem. It used to be that they just took their bribes and their payoffs and went about things as if nothing was going on. And you could even expect them to help you, if you had the money and you were in the right kind of trouble. That all changed when the army came in. The soldiers were sent by the new government to crack down on the flow of drugs, to run the narcos out of town and to make things look clean and presentable for the foreign powers across the borders. It was an audacious move. For a while, it even worked. Things were shaken up, the narcos didn't know how to react, and things seemed to pacify. Foreign investors came in and brought thousands of jobs with them--all the jobs that people in their countries wouldn't do because the pay was too low. Factories rose around the city and the highrises went up to house the people who came from all over to work in them. But it was all an illusion that masked what was to come.

The drug lords fought back in the most insidious way they knew how. The cartels set aside their rivalries and streamlined their operations. Just like the foreign investors, they kept their eyes on the goals of maximizing profit and cutting out the waste. They bought the police and let the gangs kill each other off or be hunted down. They focused on moving the big money drugs across the boarder and let the lesser stuff sit where it was. Here. And so we went from being the place that all the bad stuff went through on its way elsewhere to being steeped in it ourselves. The foreigner governments told our men in office to fight harder, but their investors saw where things were headed and decided to pull out. The big companies moved their operations elsewhere, to countries where they didn't have to deal with this problem and the people would work for even less, and the factories here closed. The highrises closed--nobody could afford to live in them anymore--and were bought by the cartels and used to store their stuff. A hundred thousand people out of work, sitting on nothing but their misery and piles of drugs.

Here's how you make a living nowadays: you can try for honest work and pray to God that you will squeak on by. You can deal on the side, poison your family and neighbors for ten times that much. Or you can help the cartels kill all the people who did them wrong or raised a voice against them and earn ten times that again. We all pray for things to change, but nobody has any illusions anymore.

I put out my cigarette and grab the black duffel bag with my tools inside, making sure that the black, waterproof marker is there on top. It's Saturday night, and I have to go to work.

Description
Sunset
This society is in free-fall.

I'm sitting on my fifth story balcony, overlooking the city as the sun sets. A smoky summer orange descending on the horizon, it tints the streets and the whitewashed walls of the new highrises on the outskirts in a translucent shade of red. It is the heavenly, luminescent cousin of the dull red streaks and stains that fleck the sidewalks with their morose and earthly splatter.

I smoke my cigarette and think of the time when people used to die for a reason instead of a triviality, when a man could go about his daily business without being armed, when a girl could run two blocks from the corner store to her home without the constant fear that stalking eyes were on her, waiting to drag her into an alley and beat her, rape her and kill her. The lucky girls are just left for dead where they fall. The unlucky ones are the ones who walk away, who make it as far as a police station where they're taken in by the cops and the beatings and the rape happen all over again.

There was a time when things were better. Back then the drug runners would come through town and make their deals with the police and the boarder guards. They were simply another part of the way things worked. The gangs would roam around after dark and if you got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, then you were going to be robbed for sure and had to count yourself lucky if they didn't beat you to the ground too. But they saved the killing for each other. The bark of guns in the alleyways, flashing muzzles and screaming teenagers writhing on the ground with blood spurting through their fingers and all the excitement replaced by terror and pain. If any of those kids ever grew up, they'd be as old as me now, but I don't think they did. They either died or were crushed beneath the advance of time in a world that has no place in its heart for those who try to repent.

There is a sign that stands at the side of the plaza at the center of town. It is made from a piece of scrap metal hauled from one of the many junkyards that surround the city with their stink and their piles of trash higher than half the homes that the poor people are forced to live in. Written on it in thick, waterproof marker are two lists. On the left, under the heading "Those who do not believe" is a list of names that gets longer every few days or so, sometimes by one, sometimes by a few at a time. On the other side, "Those who do" is another list, made up entirely of names from the left. You have to be crossed out on the left in order to move to the right, and you have to be dead to be crossed out. A name gets crossed off every Saturday night. In a saner place, the killer would never advertise his intentions in such a way. It would be too easy to end up caught, or at least too easy for the cops to protect the threatened victims. But not here. Here the cops are too scared that their names will end up on the list.

The police were never part of the solution but they weren't always part of the problem. It used to be that they just took their bribes and their payoffs and went about things as if nothing was going on. And you could even expect them to help you, if you had the money and you were in the right kind of trouble. That all changed when the army came in. The soldiers were sent by the new government to crack down on the flow of drugs, to run the narcos out of town and to make things look clean and presentable for the foreign powers across the borders. It was an audacious move. For a while, it even worked. Things were shaken up, the narcos didn't know how to react, and things seemed to pacify. Foreign investors came in and brought thousands of jobs with them--all the jobs that people in their countries wouldn't do because the pay was too low. Factories rose around the city and the highrises went up to house the people who came from all over to work in them. But it was all an illusion that masked what was to come.

The drug lords fought back in the most insidious way they knew how. The cartels set aside their rivalries and streamlined their operations. Just like the foreign investors, they kept their eyes on the goals of maximizing profit and cutting out the waste. They bought the police and let the gangs kill each other off or be hunted down. They focused on moving the big money drugs across the boarder and let the lesser stuff sit where it was. Here. And so we went from being the place that all the bad stuff went through on its way elsewhere to being steeped in it ourselves. The foreigner governments told our men in office to fight harder, but their investors saw where things were headed and decided to pull out. The big companies moved their operations elsewhere, to countries where they didn't have to deal with this problem and the people would work for even less, and the factories here closed. The highrises closed--nobody could afford to live in them anymore--and were bought by the cartels and used to store their stuff. A hundred thousand people out of work, sitting on nothing but their misery and piles of drugs.

Here's how you make a living nowadays: you can try for honest work and pray to God that you will squeak on by. You can deal on the side, poison your family and neighbors for ten times that much. Or you can help the cartels kill all the people who did them wrong or raised a voice against them and earn ten times that again. We all pray for things to change, but nobody has any illusions anymore.

I put out my cigarette and grab the black duffel bag with my tools inside, making sure that the black, waterproof marker is there on top. It's Saturday night, and I have to go to work.