Barrios Beats and Blood

This morning I watched, again, this documentary about young men in Ciudad Juarez who use hip-hop to talk about the violence and corruption suffered by their city.

It's brilliant and apt, especially watching it in London now. The young people of Juarez, generally aged between 15 and 30, are known as 'Ni-ni' (neither-nors): 'ni escuela ni trabajo' (no school nor work). Their situation is very extreme, but the fingers of free market capitalism (encouraged by the much-maligned North American Free Trade agreement) have played a massive part in the undoing of these young people's lives, as the very agreement which Mexico willingly signed to allow the US an Access All Areas pass to its resources and labour force, is the the same agreement whose porous borders permits the drug trade to hoover up swathes of lives and aspirations from the coca leaves of Colombia up to, finally, the noses and pipes of the world's biggest cocaine and crack market, the United States of America.

Northern Mexico, essentially a zone of vigilante justice, where there are as many criminals in the police force as there may be on the streets, has the highest murder rate in the world. Yet it has shamefully little coverage. Two prominent massacres - the most recent within the Juarez jail - receive little attention in international media, least of all neighbouring United States. It truly is a war; and not just over drugs, as President Obama and Felipe Calderon would have you believe.

The war, of which narcotics have become the symbol, is actually a battleground where the results of adopting a free market economy tumble and scream and slide: voracious and unchecked globalisation of capital; privatisation of welfare services; overwhelming emigration of cheap labour forces; the conversion of society and community ties themselves into a 'free market'; the resultant alienation, lack of legal employment.

Equally disturbing is the fact that the femicide in Juarez - a big campaign for Amnesty and other human rights and women's rights groups at the end of the last decade - has been forgotten outside the North Mexican desert.

Hundreds of women, many of whom were immigrants working in the maquiladoras, some as young as 12, installed the Mexican side of the border for their cheap labour costs, were found dead, usually showing signs of rape and mutilation, dating from as early as 1993, until around 2008. The frequent appearance of new bodies, murdered with almost a complete lack of motive, led many to label them the result of 'blood sport' in which men who felt free to act outside the law - policemen as well as cartel members - would ride around Juarez, and rape, kill and dump women's bodies for fun.

It is essentially one of the biggest 'unsolved' mass murders of all time - in which the identities of several perpetrators are not a mystery at all, but are in burned or buried case files; despite brave campaigning, it seems that a fear of violent retribution, and a murky legal process rife with misdemeanour, means that the authorities keep the case open, and the truth closed.

This is important. Real. And happening now. So why does nobody want to watch this here in London? These factors are at work in the society in which we live - we made it so because we adopted the same policy, the same economics - and we cannot simply ignore Mexico because it is 'culturally' different.

Is there a way that the virtual media, that we often use to distract us, or to facilitate or ignorance of what is physically occurring on our streets or on the bus (we can cloud it all out with an iPod!), can actually tell these real stories?

In a town where words and deeds are themselves corrupt and corrupting, music, dance, sport, performance, seem to be the few ways of practically, honestly allowing the Ni-Nis to communicate with those in their town. And photo and video documentary, made by journalists like Rancho Aparte, seems to be one of the most practical, honest, ways of sharing these troubles with the world. This photo blog here is one case in point.

Barrios, Beats and Blood demonstrates the extent to which a real and perceived lack of support, trust, and governance in the official and municipal fabric of the city has allowed such corruption and doubt to unravel. These young men are perceptive, intelligent and funny. They talk and joke with each other (Axer lists the weapons he used to carry 'a 38mm...no, 2 38mm...and a few grenades...' he kids) with the resilience and innocence of youth, but the stories they tell and their insight makes them seem like the only adults with cool heads in a world where authority figures and institutions are either completely corrupt, or struggling against a mentality which now perceives them as corrupt and untrustworthy.

And weirdly, the presence of the camera, for which of course we all perform, feels candid. It somehow invites smart observations from its interviewees - and makes smart observations of its own, simply by being moved around. And because it isn't a person, it doesn't have its own voice which is inherently corruptible, it somehow becomes trusted. An object that can capture, and be confided in.

Ultimately, what keeps me coming back to this film is that the life within these young MCs fights that cynical notion presented by Mexico's media and politicians that in Juarez, it's lose lose. It is hell and there's little to save it - you try to find a way to make peace in hell and they say you must be the devil.

That 'lose-lose' perspective in the UK has also resulted in some pitifully reactionary shit being spouted by local citizens to the Prime Minister, about how to 'deal' with the apparently violent, mindless criminals terrorising 'our Britain'. Behind those reactionary missives is the message to the young people of the UK that they're in hell, they made it, and there's no way out.

A complex problem, one which requires care and, more than anything else, attention, simple attention to the circumstances which created it, is turned into a doctrine. You are bad, you're a devil, or you are good; that's what the coalition is telling us. The bad will be punished. The good will prevail. Just when we discover how brutally economic policy has mutilated social, ethical and working life in urban Britain, the government is going to bury the case file, and call this a moral crusade. A simple battle between good people and bad people. Nothing to do with money, or any of those complicated things, at all.

Yet just one glimpse at Ciudad Juarez is enough to show us all how laughable that ideology is.