Puebla, MEXICO-My hotel on the outskirts of Puebla, a city of 1.3 million in central Mexico, looks out over a rolling golf course lined with palm trees and beyond that a busy highway flanked by Mazda and Mercedes car dealerships. The historic downtown has colonial Spanish architecture. Newer areas of the city boast gated subdivisions, Home Depot outlets, and strip malls. I came to attend a technology conference, "Ciudad de las Ideas," now in its third year and featuring such international luminaries as Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson as speakers. This is first-world Mexico, as swanky and cosmopolitan as anywhere in the United States or Europe. The slice of elite Mexican society at the conference sports iPhones and Chanel bags, sips Starbucks coffee, and, upon hearing that I'm American, waxes on about vacations in Miami and San Diego.
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In other words, I'm not in newspaper Mexico: the Mexico that has been so obviously ravaged by the country's brutal drug wars over the past half decade. Mexico's chattering classes are removed not just geographically but, it would seem, psychologically, from the more grisly images we've seen on the news this year, mostly from northern Mexico: 13 young people slaughtered at a birthday party in the border town of Juárez; teenage drug-cartel recruits wielding machetes in homemade torture videos; beheaded bodies left on the white-sand beaches of Acapulco; the bullet-ridden corpses of six blind-folded former drug-runners rotting beside a coastal highway with hand-written notes from the killers (a tactic to intimidate rival gang members). Since 2006, an estimated 30,000 people have died in violence arising from the activity of increasingly powerful Mexican drug cartels. "It is not only the amount of violence that's terrible; it is the spectacular nature of the violence -- the elaborate style of the executions," Mexican journalist Sergio Sarmiento told me. In the largest outbreak of violence since the Mexican revolution 100 years ago, both the recruits and the victims appear to be getting younger -- giving rise to talk of a "lost generation."
About 90 percent of the violence has taken place in a handful of northern counties, far away from the swimming pools and gated villas of Puebla. Yet, these two Mexicos -- the privileged and the desperate -- are not so far apart as it may seem. Drug violence doesn't often come to Puebla, but drug cartel leaders -- like other successful Mexican businessmen -- do. In September, one of the country's most notorious cartel leaders, Sergio "El Grande" Villarreal Barragan, was arrested in Puebla by 30 Mexican marines. "Puebla is perceived as a place that is largely free from violence -- which, surely, must be as attractive to a drug lord as it is to me," Pedro Ángel Palou, a Puebla-based novelist, wrote in the New York Times. Yet that perception is changing: "We too, in a sense, are trapped in Puebla. In my neighborhood, where the roads are still unpaved, we live behind high walls and electrified or barbed-wire fences ... no matter the lengths we go to preserve our tranquility, violence infringes."
In Mexico City, I spoke with Gabriella Gomez-Mont, an artist and senior TED fellow, who explained the cultural echoes of drug violence this way: "To see death and violence every day on the TV and newspapers, you think it doesn't affect people? Some people feel directly threatened, but for others it simply opens up an imaginarium of violence. There is a sense of impunity people feel. Even crimes not related to drugs ... are becoming more violent."
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