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

I had delayed this read since I knew about this book because it is painful to read what your country has become and has no way to fix in the nearby future. Some excerpts:

"If 'the political domain' [...] of death [...] was key to the formation of the modern State', what does the explosion of bloody and unleashed murders say about the contemporary Mexican State? What does the informal authorship of the State, tells us about those murders? If these facts point to a weakened State, where is the fracture? Or can we ask: what is the nature of that lesion or the sickness that causes this weakness?"

[...] "It is not necessary that someone comes over and threatens you - says Javier Valdez Contreras, [murdered by a gunman in 2017] journalist and cofounder of Ríodoce -. The situation is already a threat. It is as if someone  was pointing a gun at you all the time. The narcos, control many parts of the country; they control governments and control editorial offices. When you write a story about the narco, you don't think about your editor. You don't think about your chief of information. Nor about the reader. You think about the narco, if they're gonna like it or it will become a problem or if they are waiting for you to 'be taken'. The narco controls all editorial offices."