Ah, the Crimes. Bye bye, crimes. What I have gleaned from your voluminous horror is that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and that while we devalue women and throw the in the trash in death, we spend not one moment thinking about their lives in the maquiladores. We benefit from the economic system in which they are disposable, and then we are horrified when they are disposed.

Good, good times, international economy.

And while the violence against men is much more frequent, we hole it up in prisons and boxing matches, creating a compartmentalized culture of viciousness that we then shug off and romanticize. Raping and murdering women is somehow both terrible and ignorable, while raping and murdering men is at once terrible and expected.

Good, good times, penal system. Panopticon, indeed. Fetishizing gaze and violence…yeehaw.

Finally, in the congresswoman’s story, we get to the center of at least one of the murders…actual investigation, revelations, seedy underbelly of a culture. But even that ends without resolution, unsatisfactorily.

Frustrating.

“Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you’re shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don’t hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you’re off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?” (511).