In this week’s issue, William Finnegan writes about the drug war in Guadalajara, and the steady westward march of the Zetas, “the most feared organized-crime group in Mexico,” into what had previously been one of the country’s safer cities. The Mexican photographer Eunice Adorno’s long-term project “There Is No Such Place,” which examines how drug violence has emptied the streets and shuttered the shops of Mexico’s worst-affected cities, dovetails seamlessly with Finnegan’s piece, so we commissioned her to make a new set of photographs for the article, in Guadalajara’s Jalisco state.
We connected Adorno with Victor Hugo Ornelas, himself a journalist and one of the main subjects in Finnegan’s piece. Together, Adorno and Ornelas visited several of the neighborhoods that Finnegan describes in his piece, Ornelas acting concurrently as Adorno’s guide and subject. “I could not stop thinking about the recent death of another journalist,” Adorno told me, “bringing the total number of journalists killed or disappeared to eighty-three in the last ten years,” according to Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights. “Yet Victor has a strong temper,” she said. “He is always watching and taking notes, and that was very impressive to me.” Here is a look at some of the places Adorno and Ornelas visited together.
