City of Omens

For decades American hungers sustained Tijuana. In this scientific detective story an award-winning public health expert reveals what happens when an entire city''s heartline is brutally severed.Despite its reputation as a carnival of vice Tijuana was until recent years no more or less violent than neighboring San Diego to which it clings across a filament of border. But then something changed. Over the past thirty years Mexico''s third-largest city became one of the world''s most dangerous. Tijuana''s murder rate has skyrocketed producing a staggering number of female victims. Hundreds of women are now found dead in the city each year or bound and mutilated along the highway that lines the Baja coast.When Dan Werb began to study these murders in 2013 rather than viewing them in isolation he discovered that they could only be understood as one symptom among many. Environmental toxins drug overdoses HIV transmission: all were killing women at overwhelming rates. As an epidemiologist trained to mine data to uncover the hidden drivers of a population''s health Werb sensed the presence of a deeper contagion targeting Tijuana''s women. Not a virus but some awful wrong buried in the city''s social order scything down its most vulnerable citizens. Werb''s five-year search for the ultimate causes of Tijuana''s femicide casts new light on immigration human trafficking addiction and the true cost of American empire. It leads Werb from slums and drugs dens all the way to the corridors of cartel power and police corruption as he follows a thread that finally takes a surprising turn back over the border northward.