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Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future

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Driving south to El Paso you come over a rise and the first thing you see is a vast sprawling city choking the Rio Grande valley. If you were on vacation and had never been there before, you would think El Paso is a much larger city than what your map indicates.

But as you descend further and draw nearer you notice the rat maze of shacks covering the hillside along the valley and realize it looks like no other American city you have ever seen before. Then you grasp the reality.

The hillside is Mexico. The rat maze of shacks is a cardboard colonia. The city, of course, is Juárez. Charles Bowden calls it "the laboratory of our future," where free-marketers are loose to test the human and environmental limitations of money.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) just marked five years of no-holds-barred commerce between the US, Canada, and Mexico. According Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch "do-no-harm" test, the pact has failed in every respect.

"NAFTA at 5: A Citizen's Report Card" (12/98) shows failing marks in nine categories ranging from US job creation to economic impact on Mexico. In just five years, "Free Trade" has become synonymous with pollution, poverty, crime, and corruption. Now free trade simply means unfettered foreign investment anywhere that guarantees substandard wages and absolutely no environmental regulations; a place where capital moves freely and labor is held hostage.

All these places, writes Charles Bowden, "...are growing quietly like mold on the skin of the planet."

Nowhere is the impact of free trade more evident than in border cities like Juárez, and nobody understands better NAFTA's impact on Juárez than Charles Bowden. In Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, with its 100 disturbing photographs of death and despair, Bowden transforms our first-world dream of the future into a third-world nightmare of reality.

"Politicians and economists speculate about a global economy fueled by free trade. Their speculations are not necessary. In Juárez the future is over thirty years old, and there are no questions about its nature that cannot be answered in this city."

In Juarez, with essays by Noam Chomsky and Eduardo Galeano, Bowden reports on the disparate relationship between El Paso and Juárez at ground zero, and its compounding effect on the larger alliance between Mexico and the US. It is a sad story that first surfaced in an acclaimed article written for Harper's magazine a couple of years ago. Here Bowden wends his words around the poignant and often brutal images of thirteen Juárez "street shooters," a group of unknown guerrilla photojournalists who work for little more than film and the satisfaction of exposing the city's deep malaise.

Charles Bowden's powerful narrative and wry first-person style, combined with these photographs of human and environmental devastation, create a tormenting text. The free-traders in Juárez (US-owned multinational corporations) make no qualms about exploiting human labor for a profit, and their NAFTA boosters are quick to point to America's surging economy to justify its sordid history. To paraphrase Bowden, They reluctantly admit to the object, but steadfastly deny any subject or verb.

Today there are more than 300 foreign-owned factories (maquiladoras) employing over 200,000 Mexican workers, mostly women, who work 6 days/48 hours for about $9 per day. (Ironically, under NAFTA, the new jobs created in Juárez are almost equal to the high-paying manufacturing jobs lost in America.)

Americans routinely justify these substandard wages with a belief that the cost of living is less in Mexico. In reality, prices in Juarez are 85-90% of those in El Paso, only 50 yards away, where your average Texan earns ten times more.

But jobs and wages at ground zero are just the tip of the iceberg in the maquiladora economy. NAFTA's other promised benefits of prosperity and environmental cleanup have failed miserably. The treaty instead has exacerbated social decay and public-health problems on both sides of the border.

In Juárez the petri dish bubbles over with a toxic brew of evil elements that has poisoned an entire city. People seethe with fear of violent gangs, narcotraffickers, smugglers, corrupt cops, and now even US soldiers along the border to help keep NAFTA's mess contained.

"In Juárez," Bowden writes, "you cannot sustain hope."

The veracity of Bowden's thesis is born out by Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch report. Juárez stands as a scathing indictment of American free-trade policy.

I've twice been to the Colonia's of Cd. Juarez. I have not, thank God, witnessed the violence.

I have seen the poverty.

The photographs in "Juarez, the laboratory of our future" are painful to view. The work of skilled local photographers, the pictures jump from the pages and into your heart. Life in a Colonia is a nightmare.

As the text makes clear, the causes of the poverty and violence are complex. But it is certain that we, the consumers of cheap goods, are adding to the pain when we buy the product output of Juarez, but bar the producers from escaping their Hell. The people in the Colonias are living lives very the close to those suffered by WWII slave laborers in Europe and elsewhere.

Where are the liberation forces?

We, as a society, ignore too much, and are far to isolated as to what the rest of the world is like. We surround ourself with junk, the media feels that Bill Clinton's sex life is what we need to know about, and people fight over bean bag toys. Yet just to the south of our decaying scciety is a place where people, at times, will do anything to either A) live in the US B) Kill each other for a handful of dollars. The images presented in this book are stark and real. The photos are not "titillating", but are harsh, and they are pushed in your face. Bowden's text is superb, and presents mind images that equal or surpass the work of the photographers. Books like this should be required reading for the fools that think NAFTA et al, are good for the world.

"Lost in Juarez and its eastertime too", Bob Dylan shrieks and after reading Bowden's masterpeice you can feel the connection. This is one of those efforts that stay with the reader long after the book is put down. It's haunting photos and depictions are hard to forget. From the pictures of the forgotten dead to the photo of a young wife bending over her husband who had just shot on a busy Juarez street. It is said that photographs don't lie, however, sometimes they tell an awful truth. Bowden captures the futility and danger of Juarez in every photo and what makes this effort unique is that the prose accompanying the photos actually enhances the effect. Wonderful work.

In picture and word, the ugliness is now real. The stories will make you think: peace and justice, what have I done to make it this way? Can I sit by while my brothers and sisters suffer?

I am speechless. The book is amazingly grueling. Rather than an attack on Juarez, it is an attack, a challenge to our humanity, hoping that we wake up and see the horrors so that we may stop them.

Gritty and revealing photographs and text show a side of life in Cd. Juarez, Mexico, that many Americans don't want to see. Helps understand a city caught not just between two worlds but between many worlds, material, economic, political, social, cultural, and spiritual. Winner of Border Regional Library Association 1998 Southwest Book Award.

Published in 1998, "Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future" is essentially an expanded magazine article by Charles Bowden on his impressions of Ciudad Juárez as reflected by various freelance photographers. The focus is primarily on a series of ongoing and infamous female homicides (often associated with the ubiquitous maquiladoras), with additional musings on narcotraficante violence, economic privation, and the unrelenting pressure that NAFTA and border policy continue to exert on the people of Cd. Juárez. Many of the photographs included in the book are meant to shock the conscience; the operative assumption being that certain gruesome realities of the rape, torture and murder can best be understood viscerally.

I was interested in reading this book as a kind of supplementary companion to Roberto Bolaño's novel, "2666" (a purpose for which it seems particularly well-suited). Bowen's writing is both lyrical and blunt, evocative of the universal despair attendant to most incidents of systemic poverty on a grand scale. The overwhelming impression is that Juárez represents something ghastly, inescapable and prophetic for human society generally. The vagueness of Bowen's existential insights are actually (and oddly) more acutely truthful than the detailed political harangues that bookend the text as its Preface (Noam Chomsky) and Afterward (Eduardo Galeano).

This was originally in The New Yorker years ago, but I just got the book. Bowden provides a voice to the voiceless here, as we see the work of the photographers of Juarez. Content is king here, and it seems like they are witness to the apocalypse. One could get into the politics involved here and border issues, but I'd prefer to ignore that...its just a lovely book.

Great word and image combination that is as disturbing as it is thought provoking, all politics aside.

This book focuses on all the ugly and evil aspects of this border town, and omits anything positive about the place. If you are a reader who has not spent considerable time working or living in Cd. Juarez, this book will grossly distort reality and scare you from setting foot into Mexico. I almost want to write a photo-book myself of all the virtues of the place. Yes, Juarez has it's share of problems, but as the citizens will tell you, things are always getting better. The writing seems very politically motivated, and definitely one-sided. I think someone could write a book just as disturbing while only focusing on slums in american cities. This book doesnt give Cd. Juarez a fair shake. But if you like photos of dead bodies, you will still enjoy this book.