“All the parties have a bias toward Sinaloa,” Ana says. “I mean, the Zetas practically declared themselves their own government.”

“We don’t need to print that,” Óscar says.

“Esta Vida will,” Ana says.

“Let them,” Óscar snaps. “It’s irresponsible ‘journalism’ as its worst. Unedited rumors and innuendo pandering to the basest instincts.”

Pablo understands his bitterness. El Búho has spent his life in mainstream newspapers producing quality journalism, believing that a free press is the lifeline of a democracy. Now he has to sit and watch as the public turns to websites and blogs to get real information on the narcos.

It has to be galling.

“I would like to give ‘Wild Child’ a good spanking,” Óscar adds before he limps back to his office.

“Well, there’s an image,” Ana says.

“If we knew who El Niño Salvaje is,” Pablo answers.

“Did you see this morning’s post?”

“Horrible,” Pablo says.

Horrible.

—

Pablo hits the streets in his fronterizo, which has maybe one more year in it. The air-conditioning is shot, more of a wheezing protest against the heat than any true cooling, so he keeps the windows rolled down and just sweats as he makes his way from El Centro to Anapra, Chaveña, and Anáhuac.

He could already predict the favored candidate by the relative wealth of the neighborhood. The rich sections of Campestre and Campo Eliseos will vote their wallets for PAN. The working-class—or unemployed-class—colonias will vote PRD, while some of the older, more genteel neighborhoods like Colonia Nogales and Galeana will likely go PRI.

Some of the neighborhoods don’t exist anymore, he thinks sadly as he drives around. Riviera del Bravo, for instance, once a thriving new section of apartments and strip malls, is a virtual ghost town of abandoned houses and graffiti-sprayed walls, the inhabitants having fled from the incessant violence. The old Mariscal red-light district has been bulldozed, scraped clean, if you will. His route takes him past Benito Juárez Stadium, where his beloved Indios used to play until the city’s financial demise caused the owners to shut them down.

Another casualty, Pablo thinks, of the war on drugs.

He goes back downtown, buys a torta from a truck, and eats his lunch in Chamizal Park as he watches kids play fútbol in the bone-dry canal or taunt the Border Patrol agents on the other side of the fence.

There’s no putting it off, Pablo thinks. He gets back in his car and drives across the bridge. The line in the express lane isn’t too bad, and he’s in the U.S. before he wants to be.

Just another Juarense on the way to El Paso, he thinks.

The mayor lives in El Paso now, for safety. So do the chief of police and the editors of two of the city’s newspapers.

Not Óscar, Pablo thinks with some pride.

You couldn’t pry El Búho out of his Chaveña house with a crowbar, and the editor views El Paso as a redneck backwater with no cultural life. Óscar is anclado, “anchored,” a Juárez fixture, but a lot of people who can afford to move have and now drive across the bridge in the morning and back before dark in modest cars that hopefully won’t draw the attention of potential kidnappers. They’ve started social clubs, restaurants, country clubs, private schools, and fueled an El Paso real estate boom.

Pablo can’t help but think of them as traitors.

He knows it’s a stupid attitude—El Paso and Juárez are and always have been joined at the hip, and most people in both cities have family on the other side. A lot of Juárez women go el otro lado to have their babies, so the child will have dual citizenship and better choices. If you sneeze in Juárez, someone in El Paso will say, “Gesundheit,” and for a lot of people the border doesn’t exist as a reality but more a mere annoyance, a technicality.

For Pablo, the border exists.

As a reality and a state of mind.

For one thing, the reality is that the border is the raison d’être of the cartels. No border, no profit, no “plaza.” No violence.

For another, the border is the reason for the maquiladoras. The largest consumer market in the world is a mile north, over that border, so what better place to make those consumer goods?

Well, China now, but the mushrooming of the maquiladoras changed the landscape of Juárez forever, creating the vast colonias where the people who can find jobs now struggle to survive on a third of what they used to make. Their poverty makes them targets for narco recruitment, their despair makes them customers for the narcos’ product.

And their lives are cheap.

That’s the reality.

And the reality is that there’s a different state of mind on the other side of the border. You live in El Paso, you’re a pocho, an Americanized Mexican, and no one can tell Pablo that it doesn’t change you. You shop in malls instead of mercados, you watch football instead of fútbol, you become another consumer in a giant machine that consumes consumers.

Dios mío, Pablo thinks, Óscar would throw that sentence in the garbage, but it’s true nevertheless. There’s a different state of mind in the States—no, it’s more than that—there’s a different state of soul.

As he expected, outside El Paso’s barrios no one gives a shit who’s going to be the new president, and when he asks the question in the affluent West El Paso neighborhoods with names like “The Willows” and “Coronado Hills,” the answer is usually, “Romney.”

I don’t think so, Pablo said to himself, primarily because the “Latino” vote will be almost as crucial in the United States as it will be in Mexico. Being in the U.S. always makes Pablo feel vaguely uncomfortable, like an unwanted guest at a party whom everyone wishes would leave. He knows how North Americans feel about Mexicans, and it’s the same way that many Mexicans feel about Juarenses.

We’re the “Mexicans” of Mexico.

Well, fuck ’em all.

He drives into Barrio El Segundo, the original breeding grounds of the Aztecas, and finds a congenially dark bar where he can sit and have a beer without feeling that he doesn’t belong. The anxiety that he’s felt since reading Esta Vida this morning won’t leave him, and the three cold beers don’t chase it away.

It only gets worse as he leaves and crosses the bridge back into Juárez.

Call it paranoia, or the insecurity from being el otro lado, but Pablo can’t escape the feeling that someone is following him. It’s ridiculous, he thinks as he looks into the rearview mirror, but he can’t help but think of the other reporters ambushed in their cars, in their driveways, outside their offices. Murdered on the spot or driven off somewhere to be tortured and killed, and now the sweat is not just from the heat, it comes from fear as well and smells different—a detail he thinks that he should put in a story somewhere.

Pablo drives out to Las Misiones, the new shopping mall across from the U.S. consulate, and walks the polished marble floors and new “fitness center” and then stands outside the new twelve-screen IMAX theater to ask people their opinion of the upcoming election. Not surprisingly, the mall-goers are overwhelmingly PAN or PRI.

This is the “new Juárez,” Pablo thinks—suburban, affluent, and soulless just like its counterpart across the river. But this is what we aspire to be, Pablo thinks. We took all that “new money” and built a faux U.S. He’s leaving the mall when Ramón walks up to him.

“Hola, ’mano.”

“Ramón. Hi. What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. You sick, ’mano? You’re sweating like a pig.”

“No, I’m good.”

“We have a job for you.”

“You know I can’t write—”

“No one’s asking you to write shit,” Ramón says. “Some people at the end of the alphabet are very angry at this morning’s blog post. You’re going to tell us who El Niño Salvaje is.”