by Azam Ahmed ★★★★★
In January 2014, a young woman named Karen Rodriguez was kidnapped by the Zeta drug cartel in the town of San Fernando, in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. Karen's abduction was by no means uncommon -- the Zetas used kidnapping and ransoms as yet another income stream for their operation. They demanded a ransom from Karen's family, which they paid. They demanded a secondary ransom, which they paid. Yet still, Karen was not returned to her parents.
While this scenario happened thousands of times, what made this particular abduction different is the determination of Karen's mother, Miriam. After weeks, and then months, went by with no sign of Karen and no further contact from the Zetas, Miriam began to slowly make uneasy peace with the likelihood that she would never see her daughter again. However, she made it her life's mission to track down every person who had played a role in abducting her daughter and bring them to justice.
Author Azam Ahmed meticulously researches and documents the details of Karen and Miriam's story, while also presenting a 360° picture of the state of affairs in San Fernando in the mid-2010s. He includes background history of the Mexican drug cartels, from the early days of the Gulf Cartel through their initial partnership with the Zetas and the eventual violent split between the groups. He explains how a once peaceful town was overrun and chronicles how San Fernando and much of Tamaulipas degenerated into a lawless land ruled by intimidation and horrific crimes. Amazingly, almost ten years after Karen's abduction, Ahmed is able to recreate detailed accounts of the events and conversations leading up the abduction, what happened to Karen, and Miriam's years-long mission to bring the Zetas involved to justice.
In addition to shedding light on the effective rule of the state by the drug cartels, the book presents an embarrassing portrait of the Mexican government. Its decades of failure to protect its citizens from the violence of the cartels and the general ineptitude and inefficiency of the government are all on painfully stark display. The Mexican government have dug themselves a hole so deep it seems impossible to undo the decades of failure, and it has created a loss of hope for many who still live in San Fernando and the other areas of Mexico overrun by the cartels.
On a positive note, Miriam's approach to decoding and working with the mess of the Mexican government provides a bit of a Rosetta Stone for other families dealing with the disappearance of a family member. Miriam figures out a way to get things done despite the inefficiency and fear present in government officials, and she shares that knowledge broadly, expanding her efforts to not only bringing Karen's abductors to justice but also helping other families find closure who are in similar situations. While most pf those families are resigned to the fact that they will never see their missing loved one again, never knowing what happened to them or being unable to recover their remains makes moving forward even harder. As Ahmed writes, "If the toxic trauma of a disappearance was unending grief, the psychic hole left by a vanished body, then the antidote was finding and burying the missing loved one." And, in Miriam's case especially, "punishing those responsible."
The title of the book comes from a quote by Miriam. One of her friends, Chalo, "admired Miriam for being perhaps the only person in San Fernando not silenced by fear: She had told him once that fear was just a word." I think there is also some measure of that statement that applies to Ahmed as well. San Fernando is not a pleasant place, still, and him poking around the details of this high-profile disappearance must have put him on the radar of some very violent Zetas. Despite that, he had the courage to research and document the events at a granular level of detail, and he was able to get enough people to speak with him so that he could fully reconstruct Karen and Miriam's story. It's a memorable tale and an impressive journalistic achievement that's definitely worth a read.