War in the Hinterlands
Approaching the Front In August of 2021, I traveled with an American friend and a Mexican photojournalist to the frontlines of an active war zone in a country without a war. Technically speaking, that is. Ten years earlier, there had been plenty of headlines about cartel-related violence in Mexico, and journalists made frequent references to this so-called “criminal insurgency” south of the US border. But that was then. Today, cartel violence in Mexico rarely makes internatio