Facebook When the black SUVs roll through town, Ladydi and her friends burrow into holes in their backyards like animals, tucked safely out of sight. This is from the novel Prayers for the Stolen - set in the mountains of Guerrero, a part of Mexico where the drug lords are kings, and the girls hide to avoid being kidnapped and sold. It's a novel about cartels that have expanded their business beyond drugs.
Whereas a bag of drugs you can only sell once. Getty Images: Luis Acosta Girls hide in corn fields from narcos Mexico's drug war is a decades-long, slow-burning conflict that has transformed parts of the country into the private kingdoms of drug lords. Few stories come out of here. Journalists are routinely murdered and the violence underreported, the victims often forgotten unless they are tourists.
In December, two West Australian suffers were killed on a gang-plagued road in the Sinaloa district - home to a cartel that was being led by the most powerful drug kingpin in Mexico.
Here are some statistics that show how dangerous it is to report on Mexico's drug war: Journalists murdered in the past decade: 80 People imprisoned for killing a journalist: 0 Estimated kidnappings in , Reported kidnappings: The drug war has created it's own literary genre - what's called narco literature. Supplied It began with a chance conversation - Jennifer had been interviewing the women of drug traffickers, and learning how girls kidnapped in Mexico are taken to ranches close to the US border.
There they are sold and then trafficked into the US to be sex workers. She met a woman from Guerrero and asked how things were. The women explained families dug holes in which to hide their daughters, in case the narcos spotted them. That was the image that gave birth to the novel. Intensely violent and very scary. It's a war zone but a war zone without ideology. It's pure capitalism. It's all about money. The ingredients to make methamphetamine are impossible to get. The cross-border trades are symbiotic: a river of drugs and sex workers flows in one direction, and a river of guns flows in the other.
