The Sorrows of Mexico

With contributions from seven of Mexicos finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary it has the power to change the worlds view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the countrys many sorrows.Supported the Arts Council Grants for the Arts Programme and by PEN PromotesVeering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The socalled 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 Mexicos street children. Anabel Hernndez and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the disappearance of fortythree students and the murder of a selfeducated land lawyer. Sergio Gonzlez Rodrguez 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 physicaland intellectual courage needed to oppose it.