![]() ![]() The greatest dread is of the narcos themselves, who show up in their black Escapades to kidnap whichever girl catches their eye. ![]() Nearby poppy fields draw army helicopters carrying herbicide, but since the soldiers are in cahoots with the narcos they drop their poison elsewhere, drenching those who happen to be outside. Their community is rent in two by a tourists’ highway, on which speeding cars now and then collide with their animals and their grandmothers. Life would be hard enough amid the scorpions, black widows, snakes and red ants, in a climate so hot that pillows are kept in refrigerators, but this is one of the many corners of Mexico where the rural poor are afflicted by those who have and want more. She shares a dirt-floor hut with her embittered, hard-drinking mother, who named her after the British princess not out of admiration or aspiration but to assert that all men fail their women. Hers is a village without men coming of age they leave to be gardeners in the United States or hitmen with the cartels, and they rarely come back. ![]() Ladydi lives on a hardscrabble mountain slope outside glitzy Acapulco. But what of those victims whose experience of violence is less bloody and more routine? We seldom hear their voices, even less if they are teenaged girls. When we count the cost of Mexico’s drug wars, we think first of the number of dead and next of the bereaved. ![]()
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