
But even he winces when a client asks to go to the Progreso neighborhood and down Avenida Solidaridad (Solidarity Avenue). Gangsters kidnapped his 17-year-old son there, along with a friend, in March 2011. They didn’t ask for ransom, and the boy’s body was never found. Marino holds on to the slim hope that his son is still alive, forced to fight for one of the county’s cartels in Mexico’s ongoing drug war.“We live in fear and terror all the time. It’s like we’re living in the Middle East,” he reflected. “It’s a real war there, while here it’s a war with narcos. The government against narcos.”This December marks ten years since Mexico’s government declared war on the country’s drug cartels. Since then, more than 150,000 people have been killed, and roughly 28,000 people disappeared, many of them victims of drug-war-related violence. In comparison, nearly 125,000 civilians died in Iraq between January 2003 and December 2012, according to the well-reputed Iraq Body Count project.

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