Sarah Babbage talks about the immigration-enforcement crackdown and its effect on life on the U.S.-Mexico border.
So it’s a choice between corruption or a war between cartels and the army? You don’t see any kind of middle ground?
There seems to be no left-wing opposition to the cartels in Mexican society, a sort of union or Zapatista-type opposition. They’re either trying to get on with their own things, or they’re just like rabbits looking in the headlights. There also isn’t a sort of right-wing, Mussolini, law-and-order thing, either. What there is … is this extraordinary courage of priests, pastors, women. It’s a crass, materialist war about nothing. It’s all about brands and T-shirts and SUVs that get you this chica or that chica. Sounds banal, but that’s what it’s about. It took me a very long time in this materialism to find that the church, the clergy, the pastors, and the priests are the strongest opposition. And it’s a very male war; it’s to do with what an anthropologist would call a crisis of masculinity, and you can see that in things like mass murders of women.
