Mexico City

In my country we’ve been learning under extreme duress to live in a different nation from the one we grew up in. Some 30,000 people have died in Mexico in the last four years in a grotesque carnival of shootouts, beheadings and mutilations; the city of Juárez has emerged as a worldwide symbol of lawlessness and horror; tens of thousands of children have been left orphaned and permanently embittered against the state. But what happened in August and unfolded throughout September and the fall was something else.

In the northern state of Tamaulipas, on an abandoned ranch some 100 miles south of the American border, a young Ecuadorean man escaped from beneath a pile of bodies to tell his story. The previous day he had been on a bus with 73 other people traveling north to the United States, most from Central America, a few from Brazil and Ecuador. The bus was hijacked and driven to the abandoned ranch. There, the migrants  young men, for the most part, but quite a few young women as well  were tied up in groups of four and systematically murdered. Only the young Ecuadorean and a Honduran man escaped.