John Gibler, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War

"And yet people across Mexico still challenge this reign of silence, this bullet-imposed public ban on facts. As a result they often find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun into the eyes of silence. Journalists, human rights activists, family members of murder victims, rural guerrilla fighters, and occasionally, honest government officials are those most often within the crosshairs of silence. Their speaking is a combat tactic in the battle against anonymous death; theirs is a true battle, not against plants and those who like to use them to get high, but against the insidious regime of illegality and impunity that makes the drug business such good money, and that imposes the death and silence necessary to keep it that way. These are people who still, despite all the blood and broken promises, believe in some form of justice—if not the justice of the state, of the law, of police and courts and legislators, then the justice of knowing, for speaking and contributing to knowledge are forms of rebellion against silence and murder. The bloated profits to be had in the illegal narcotics market require that vast and complex networks of human activity—farming, processing, packaging, international shipping, warehousing, distribution and sales, arms trafficking, surveillance, money laundering, and extensive political protection—remain submerged in a nebulous space of constant talking and perpetually enforced ignorance."