Murder, he wrote

Before moving to Mexico at the age of 55, I´d never known a single murdered person, nor had I any connection to one.

Getting murdered in Mexico, however, is not that rare an event, sadly.

Two of my Mexican wife´s brothers have been murdered. Two separate events with no connection at all.

One was shot dead by a lunatic adopted brother. The other, a policeman, was shot dead on the street by some malcontent.

The father of one of my brothers-in-law was shot dead as he responded to his doorbell one night. It was believed to be an error. Apparently, the bad guy was really gunning for the dad´s brother with whom he had some quarrel.

The brothers resembled one another, it is said.

And if you don´t get murdered, and you likely won´t, there are other common ways of meeting your maker prematurely. You can simply drop dead in your 40s, as has happened in the past year, to two friends of one of my sisters-in-law.

Or you can die in childbirth in your early 30s, as happened to my wife´s mother. Maybe she would have been one of those hard-ass mothers-in-law. But I doubt it. Consider her daughter.

There´s lots of death on the highways, too. The byways are strewn with little crosses and tiny shrines to traffic fatalities. The 12-year-old daughter of a friend of my wife´s died in a car wreck not too long ago. This is not surprising.

See the Highway lunacy posting above.

However, before moving south, I did know three people who committed suicide. Nobody here seems to commit suicide.

I guess they just get murdered first.

We kill because life -- our own or another´s -- is of no value.
-- Octavio Paz.