Around fifteen minutes after clearing the city limits, travelers who take the highway north from La Eternidad see the landscape turn rocky. Tropical vegetation gives way to miles of yellow, sun-scorched brush. Just outside Ciudad Miel, the land turns to desert. Suddenly, the only things along the side of the road are huge, bright green cacti growing in forms so strange they’re like something from another planet. This sight goes on for five or six miles, and there’s nothing else like it. People used to stand in front of those neon green plants, their eyes wide with wonder and a smile frozen on their faces, hoping to catch those extraterrestrial beings in the middle of a conversation, maybe just as they reached an important conclusion about life on earth.
But that was then. Now, no one driving along that road notices the vegetation. What catches the eye instead are the wrecked cars riddled with bullet holes.
That’s how things are, here.
That’s how things are, now.