Marcela Turati

San Fernando. ltima parada podr a ser una novela de terror. Lo m s terror fico es que no lo es. En este libro se cuenta la historia de una peque a ciudad, con una terminal de autobuses en la que desaparecen los pasajeros. La mayor a son hombres j venes que viajan a Estados Unidos en busca de un mejor futuro. Van ligeros de equipaje y de dinero. Cada amanecer, cuando un cami n llega a la parada, son bajados por la fuerza, llevados a brechas y asesinados. Por error, por capricho, porque s . Porque los asesinos tienen permiso. Luego son arrojados a fosas clandestinas. Cuando en 2011 se descubrieron las tumbas, el gobierno reconoci los restos de 193 personas. Y los volvi a ocultar. Culp a Los Zetas de las matanzas, pero no investig las complicidades. Este libro es un relato coral de esas masacres; en sus p ginas hablan las v ctimas, familiares, testigos, funcionarios; la autora nos conduce, como el Virgilio de Dante, por los c rculos del horror y la desdicha, pero tambi n de la esperanza y la alegr a cuandolas familias recuperan el cuerpo del ser querido ausente o se unen contra la maquinaria que desaparece personas. La obra nos gu a por un sitio tomado por la delincuencia organizada que act a a la luz del d a, con autoridades que los encubren o que voltean a otro lado para acentuar el silencio que deja la impunidad. En este pa s, nos dice Marcela Turati, la pol tica de Estado es la simulaci n, el ocultamiento. San Fernando es el epicentro de una l gica criminal que la periodista revela: una poblaci n en el desamparo donde los cr menes son autorizados y las consecuencias de la "guerra contra el narco" cobran cientos de v ctimas. Al desnudo quedan los mecanismos de la impunidad que permiten el horror que contin a hasta ahora. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION San Fernando. Last Stop could be a horror novel. The scariest part is that it is not. This book tells the story of a small town with a bus station where passengers disappear. Most of them are young men on their way to the United States, looking for a better future. They travel light in luggage and money. Each dawn, when a bus arrives at the station, they are forced off, taken to ditches, and killed. By mistake, on a whim, just because. Because those murderers have permission. Then they are thrown into clandestine mass graves. When those graves were found in 2011, the government identified the remains of 193 people. And hid them again. The government blamed the Zetas for the killings, but never investigated their complicities. This book is a coral tale of those massacres. In its pages, the victims, relatives, witnesses, and officials speak. The author leads us, as Dante's Virgil, through circles of horror and despair, but also of hope and joy when the family gets the body of their missing loved one back, or when they join together against the machinery that makes them disappear. This work takes us to a place occupied by organized crime acting in broad daylight, with authorities covering up for them or looking the other way to accentuate the silence left by impunity. In this country, as Marcela Turati tells us, State politics are but simulation, concealment. San Fernando is the epicenter of a criminal reasoning that the journalist reveals: helpless people live in a place where authorized crime and the consequences of the "war against the narco" claim hundreds of lives. The mechanisms of impunity that have allowed for the horror to continue to this day are now out in the open.

With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows. Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN PromotesVeering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernández and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio González Rodríguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.