Sergio González Rodríguez’s The Femicide Machine and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

This is a fascinating book about the horrific femicides of Ciudad Juárez, a city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The scale of the misogynistic violence is astounding – a recent Reuters article noted that: “Although official figures vary, the city this month likely surpassed 10,000 homicides in the past four years. That’s more than Afghanistan’s civilian casualties in the same period and more than double the number of U.S. troops killed in the entire Iraq war.” In this book, González Rodríguez tries to explain why. He provides a history of the city, going through its growth in the 1940s from sex tourism, the foundation of the large-scale assembly-factories, the population explosion, the lack of basic services, the drug cartels, and the problems of being a border-city. All combine to create one nightmarish area of hyper-modernization and hyper-capitalism, based on double standards, complicity, and violence. This has created, in turn, “a femicide machine: an apparatus that didn’t just create the conditions for the murders of dozens of women and little girls, but developed the institutions that guarantee impunity for those crimes and even legalize them.” Ciudad Juárez is, he tells us, “the world reduced to a crime tabloid article.” It is a place of “normalized barbarism”, where girls as young as 8 years of age are kidnapped, raped, and dumped in parking lots. The police never investigate, as a rule. Generally the perpetrators are members of gangs and cartels; witnesses see girls being taken, see them taken into certain buildings affiliated with certain criminals, and nothing more is known. The book ends with an epilogue which gives the case details of just one of the 10,000 victims. It is quite a shocking read.

González Rodríguez is a columnist for Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper. As a journalist, González Rodríguez found out that the police chief of Ciudad Juárez was involved in covering up the femicides and placing innocent people behind bars after forcing witnesses to testify against them. In the summer of 1999, his reporting began to suggest that the policemen, government officials and drug traffickers of Juárez were all connected to one another, and to the femicides. Assaulted and kidnapped by unknown assailants in Mexico City in 1999 and banned from the state of Chihuahua, he continues to write on these subjects. The Femicide Machine is the first book by González Rodríguez to appear in English translation, and was written especially for Semiotext(e) Intervention series. The Femicide Machine synthesizes González Rodríguez’s documentation of the Juárez crimes, his analysis of the unique urban conditions in which they take place, and a discussion of the terror techniques of narco-warfare. The result is a gripping polemic. Of course the reality of the situation to which this book refers is what is paramount. But what we can do, by thinking, appreciating, pausing, is perhaps give the horror its full weight, and begin to shock ourselves into some kind of rectification of the problems this book highlights, problems endemic in modern capitalism.

With poets such as Keston Sutherland and novelists such as Roberto Bolaño referring to it, Ciudad Juárez and its femicides seems to have become a motif of modern literature. González Rodríguez appears as Sergio González in Bolaño’s 2666. Bolaño corresponded with him to acquire details for his book; no wonder, then, that González Rodríguez found 2666 difficult to read because of its accuracy. Bolaño died from liver disease in 2003, aged 50. 2666 was his final work, his magnum opus. It is a wonderful book, which articulates the ineffability of the world in a very simple way: there are no simple answers, and no simple linear narratives in this book. However, it flows wonderfully, with very quick episodes and longer digressions intermingling easily. Many readers note the sense “apocalyptic foreboding” that the work produces, but perhaps it is saying something even worse: that we are in a hellish reality. One character wonders: “Isn’t reality an insatiable Aids-riddled whore?” The reality it draws our attention to is the events of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Ciudad Juárez.

Reading a copy of Bolaño’s 2666, one could be forgiven for remaining ignorant of the fact that the horrifying murders of the fictional Santa Teresa are based upon real events. ‘The Part About The Crimes’, the unifying element of this sprawling epic, is a brow-beating litany of hundreds of murders of girls and young women which wears the reader down. The book can easily be compared to other nightmarish works, such as Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. No note or addition highlights the fact that it is based on the femicides of Ciudad Juárez. Many reviewers of 2666 fail to acknowledge the book’s basis on reality or Bolaño’s careful research fully; rather they remain ignorant of the wider picture. Most reviews merely mention Ciudad Juárez in passing, if at all.  In a sense the reviewers are cushioned from the terrible reality of the world just like the critics in ‘The Part About The Critics’. It is quite terrifying to think this kind of thing can just go on and on, despite media attention. But it does, and this should tell us something. It is unlikely that the killers of these women will ever be caught or punished. The corrupt system remains in place.

One senses in 2666 that Bolaño is truly blazing a path into the great unknown. The loose digressive style is thrilling, foreboding, and infinitely malleable. He mercilessly uncovers the terrible reality of the human condition, from the Holocaust to the killings in Ciudad Juárez, and its perverse nature. Bolaño has a bleak view of the world, but it is less a view than a scrupulous adherence to reality. Rather than painting a pretty picture to distract us, he brings something real to our attention, and grinds our nose in the shit, as all great art should.

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