He needs it, he’s tired.

Exhausted, really.

If anyone would ask how Pablo Mora is these days—not that anyone does—he’d say that he’s physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted.

And morally, maybe, if there’s such a thing as moral exhaustion.

There is such a thing, he decides.

You start by being idealistic, morally strong if you will, but then the rock of your moral strength is eroded, bit by bit, until you’re, well, exhausted, and you do things that you never thought you would. Or you do things that you always feared you would.

Or something like that.

You’d think that there would be a breaking point—a decisive moment—but there is no single moment or event that you can put your finger on. No, it’s not that dramatic—it’s the dull, monotonous process of erosion.

Maybe it was the day when twenty-five people were killed in a single afternoon. With one of the now tedious narcomantas hung by the bodies: ADÁN BARRERA, YOU ARE KILLING OUR SONS. NOW WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOUR FAMILIES.

Maybe it was the next slaughter at a birthday party—fourteen machine-gunned to death. Or the two decapitated bodies of the shooters found the next day.

Or maybe it’s just the dull, predictable sameness of it all, that the bizarre has become the norm, like the way Juarenses now unconsciously step over bodies in the street on their way to work.

The unrelenting radio calls, which have now taken on an even more perverse twist as first the cartels took to playing narcocorridos over the police band to celebrate the assassination of a rival cop. So now you could tell which side had done the killing by the anthem they played.

Then, in that way that had become the strange normality, the cartels took to playing the songs before the killings—just to spread terror through the potential ranks of the victims.

Maybe it was the rituals that now attended the coverage of the killings. The reporters would arrive first, but if the narcos were waiting around for the victim to die, the reporters had to hang back. If the victim was dead, the narcos would either give the okay to cover the story and take photos, or tell them to píntate—beat it. Or sometimes the killers would leave a note for reporters on the corpse, telling them what they could write and what they couldn’t.

The next on the scene would be the funeral home directors, there to drum up business, dressed in black and looking for all the world like ravens at a roadkill.

Then the police might arrive, depending on the identity of the victim, and then the EMTs, who would only come now once they knew that the police were already there. More than once, Pablo had sat with the EMTs as the killers kept them away at gunpoint until the victim bled out. Then the narcos would wave them in with the words, “Come and get him.” Other times, the narcos would get on the EMT radio frequency and simply order the medics not to come to the aid of certain victims.

Maybe it was the sorry fact that he could no longer feel anything when he watched the wife, the mother, the sister, the child, scream and weep. Or that he no longer felt shock or even revulsion at the shattered or dismembered or decapitated bodies. Heads and limbs scattered around his city like so much offal, dogs in the rougher colonias slinking away with bloody jowls and guilty looks.

Six bodies…

Four bodies…

Ten bodies…

The army arrested four La Línea members who confessed to a combined tally of 211 murders.

The “New Police,” carefully vetted and polygraphed, were mustered in Juárez to great fanfare. One of them—a policewoman—was shot to death on a bus as she rode to her first day of work.

Eleven more people were killed the next day.

Eight the day after.

Everything apparently was going so well in Chihuahua that its state attorney general was promoted to be Mexico’s new federal drug czar.

Erosion, Pablo thinks.

Erosion of morality.

Erosion of the soul.

It brings up the question, why?

Not in any grand existential sense—Pablo is beyond thinking he’ll get an answer to those questions—but as a practical matter.

After all, the war is supposed to be over.

That’s what the politicos have told us—their operations have been so successful that they withdrew the army from the city and handed it over to the “New Police.” So if the war is over, why does the killing continue?

Even when you look at the more realistic explanation as to why the war is over—that the Sinaloa cartel won and now controls the Juárez plaza, why does the slaughter continue unabated? Why is there no peace dividend of a day without killing?

And why, again, are the victims mostly the little guys—the poor, the street dealers, the beggars, the driftwood?

Pablo knows the answer.

He just hates what it is.

It has to do not with the cross-border drug trade, but with the internal market. It’s not good enough to just blame the U.S. market anymore. The sale of drugs in Juárez is small compared with the volume that goes across the border, but it’s still significant.

Most of the killing now is to control the domestic market, especially in heroin and cocaine. It isn’t that Barrera wants or needs the money—chump change to him—it’s that he can’t let the remnants of the Juárez cartel have it. If they’re allowed to still dominate the sale of drugs in El Centro, La Cima, and the other colonias, the money would be a source of power that might fuel a comeback.

Barrera isn’t going to allow that.

When he has his foot on your throat, he isn’t going to lift it.

So the killing now is a mopping-up operation.

And the little guy, the nickel-bag street puchador, is caught in a vise between Los Aztecas and Sinaloa—if he sells for one, the other kills him. The tiny drug stands—the picaderos—are caught in the same vise. Even the addicts are trapped—buy from a Sinaloan and the Juarenses kill you, buy from a Juarense and the Nueva Gente wipe you out. The kids on the corners who are lookouts, the winos and the homeless, the beggars and the buskers, are all there to be killed just in case they’re helping the other side.

And the cops? They don’t give a fuck, Pablo thinks. Since when has anyone cared about these losers? No, the cops, the pols, the businessmen see it as almost an opportunity to sweep the streets of undesirables and tote it up to the “cartel wars.”

The mainstream media love it—they draw neat battle lines with colored zones of which cartel controls which plaza, which colonia. It’s easier that way, nice and neat and followable—you can even root for one side or the other—but it’s bullshit, at least in Juárez.

The truth is that there are no neat lines anymore.

When Barrera, the feds, and the army destroyed La Línea and Los Aztecas, they also destroyed any control over the hundreds of cartelitos, the small street gangs in the city, gangs who still are going to fight to sell drugs and practice small-time extortion, extracting the cuota from shopkeepers, bus drivers, cabbies, or even just women, children, and the old for the right to walk down the street.

Half the people out there doing the killing now are low-level kids who don’t even know which cartel they’re killing for. They just get an order from a boss one level up and they follow that order if they want to live. That boss might be Juárez, Azteca, Sinaloa, even Zeta. He might be one thing one day and another thing the next.

The killings might not even be drug-related—the violent chaos covers up murders that might come from an old feud, a jealousy, a lovers’ triangle, an unpaid cuota, anything.

So they go out and kill, and then they are killed, and then they retaliate, and the killing has a momentum of its own and the grim truth is that there are no generals in command rooms moving colored pins around a map as they direct a grand strategy.