"Mexico’s city of dogs" is a piece written by Michelle Garcia and Ignacio Alvarado for Al Jazeera America. It takes on the meaning the high population of stray dogs might harbor in Ciudad Juarez, whose social fabric has been notably shredded after being the training field for the military offensive President Felipe Calderon launched against the cartels in 2006. What surfaces in the inquiry into the roaming of these abandoned dogs are the city’s shattered hopes from its former vocation as a buoyant manufacturing center.
The work of both journalists has been shedding light the intricacies of the way the war against organized crime in Mexico. They both stress, individually, that the conflict has been constructed upon the persistent idea that the enemy is extremely fierce, while ignoring the deeper social, geo political, and financial implications.
Militarization of several parts of Mexico, with the support of United States' funded Plan Merida, has been sustained upon the prevalence of the convenient popular belief that there is a strong and untamable adversary that needs to be crushed no matter what. Given that this is the focus of discussion, street dogs seem to be the least urgent topic on a citizens’ or government’s agenda. However, there is much that can be said about the persistence of their wandering. As government and financial priorities shift, the bond of non-human animals and canines seems to wilt. This seems to reflect the way Juarez’s inhabitants have turned away from each other too.
Photographs by Julian Cardona complete the narrative of the piece. In the end it is a question of “what to do” with these dogs. Dogs are the ones that smell death, find homes in the abandoned corners of failed residential complexes like Riberas del Bravo and all of Nuevo Juarez, and are the targets of brutal violence that has gone viral on Youtube. Many of them are sacrificed in rabies control centers. Cadavers of dogs are even piled alongside garbage with bulldozers and used to power street lamps, as they also produce methane gas.
An extraordinary story, both for its capacity to delve into the complexity of the conflict and its narrative technique, “Mexico’s city of dogs” is an example of how to shine forth the often forgotten aspects of the war by conferring dignity to those who suffer the most.
The prior and future work of these three journalists ought to be followed closely.
The piece:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/4/city-of-dogs.html
