I roamed the world in the nineties and passed through my fair share of questionable outposts. Mexico was one of them. I first crossed at Mexicali, a dusty little border town, and eventually drifted into Tijuana. Everyone knows Mexico’s reputation—half legend, half obituary.
It was there I met a Mexican who gave me a truth I never forgot. “Most murders,” he said, “happen between the cartels. Stay out of their world, and you’ll never taste their worst.” And he was right. I had no interest in their games, no desire to dabble in the powder or the blood, and so I was invisible to them.
Violence on that scale doesn’t erupt for no reason. It’s never random. It’s a system, a machine, and if you want to silence it, you must dismantle the engine. El Salvador’s cancer was its gangs—an infection of the soul as much as the streets. You don’t negotiate with that. You don’t manage it. You cut it out, root and stem, or it spreads until the entire body is lost.
And if you can’t—or won’t—do that, then the rules are simple: steer clear of their orbit, live outside their gravity, and hope the storm never notices you.