CITY OF OMENS

An epidemiologist investigates the rash of female deaths in and around Tijuana.

For the past decade, Tijuana has seen a drastic uptick in crime, most notably in the deaths and suspicious disappearances of women. After completing his doctorate in epidemiology and biostatistics in 2013, Werb traveled to the city to “dive into the purgatories Tijuana could produce,” including the region’s sex trade at Zona Norte and the arid, festering River Canal area. The author began his probing examination with a visit to a needle-exchange initiative. As a white Canadian, Werb stood out as he was escorted through the toxic cityscape to meet the indigent and drug-addicted people who call the storm drainage shafts and canal tunnels home. The author’s steely focus and smooth, vivid prose make his encounters, which are often heartbreaking, come fully to life. He writes about how overdoses, murder, and rampant, untreated HIV have caused unprecedented deaths and disappearances in recent years, much akin to a surge that occurred in the late 1990s, when women vanished or were found dead by the roadsides. Illuminating the desperation of the area, Werb profiles a variety of residents—e.g., an aged sex worker participating in drug-injection studies and an elderly “shooting gallery” gatekeeper—and chronicles his collaborations with public health officials. The author also identifies known informational roadblocks, such as Tijuana’s health care bureaucracy and police and amorphous Mexican cartel syndicates. Very little of Werb’s spadework “tracking deaths backward in time” makes for easy reading, but his text shines a necessary light on Tijuana’s epidemic of “femicide” and its unrivaled drug and poverty problems. While the statistics are increasingly staggering, the author, utilizing his epidemiological expertise, was able to uncover a “new syncretic agent of death” in the form of a lethal variety of street heroin.

Werb cuts through the desolation to get at the truth of the region’s vexing problem, but the solutions remain frustratingly elusive.