Published in 1998, "Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future" is essentially an expanded magazine article by Charles Bowden on his impressions of Ciudad Juárez as reflected by various freelance photographers. The focus is primarily on a series of ongoing and infamous female homicides (often associated with the ubiquitous maquiladoras), with additional musings on narcotraficante violence, economic privation, and the unrelenting pressure that NAFTA and border policy continue to exert on the people of Cd. Juárez. Many of the photographs included in the book are meant to shock the conscience; the operative assumption being that certain gruesome realities of the rape, torture and murder can best be understood viscerally.

I was interested in reading this book as a kind of supplementary companion to Roberto Bolaño's novel, "2666" (a purpose for which it seems particularly well-suited). Bowen's writing is both lyrical and blunt, evocative of the universal despair attendant to most incidents of systemic poverty on a grand scale. The overwhelming impression is that Juárez represents something ghastly, inescapable and prophetic for human society generally. The vagueness of Bowen's existential insights are actually (and oddly) more acutely truthful than the detailed political harangues that bookend the text as its Preface (Noam Chomsky) and Afterward (Eduardo Galeano). ( )