Amexica: War Along the Borderline

Ed Vulliamy is a British investigative journalist and war reporter, known above all for his coverage of the siege of Sarajevo and the genocide in Bosnia. He worked for many years as a correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer. He arrived on the Mexican-American border in 2009, setting out on a journey from Tijuana to Matamoros — the entire length of the border, from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. The result was a reportage that changed the way the English-speaking world understands the drug war.

“Amexica” — a neologism joining America and Mexico — is the name Vulliamy gives to the borderland as a separate civilisational entity: a place that belongs simultaneously to both countries and to neither. He describes how in border cities — Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo — drug cartels wage war over smuggling routes, leaving tens of thousands of civilian dead. Particularly affecting is his account of the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez — feminicidio as a systematic crime of industrial proportions.

Vulliamy does not confine himself to reporting violence. He traces the border’s economy: how drugs finance luxury estates on both sides, how people-smuggling is organised on a corporate scale, how the growing popularity of American celebrity culture coexists with decay and death just over the fence. He also follows the flight of the Mexican middle class northward — and the paradox of a country that simultaneously fuels and destroys its own borderland.

Vulliamy’s reportage is the product of years of work, built on hundreds of conversations conducted on both sides of the border — with police officers, cartel bosses, victims’ families, pastors, journalists, lawyers. Its strength lies in its refusal of easy narrative: there are no clear heroes, no clear villains — only the endless machine of violence, fuelled by money from both sides.