Belgium photojournalist Teun Voeten has been documenting some of the most heinous images across the globe for nearly a quarter century, from extreme poverty in Harlem to the little-publicized civil war in Sierra Leone that took some 50,000 lives. Sometimes he’s barely escaped with his life. His 2010 book Narco Nihilism – The Days of the Dead focuses on México’s bloody drug war. For a year, beginning in 2009, Voeten visited the epicenter of the violence, Ciudad Juarez, as well as other places in México where the conflict has entwined itself into daily life. It’s especially pertinent, considering that México seems to be losing ground to the cartels; in part because of that nation’s notoriously corrupt law enforcement entities, but also because of the strong appetite for drugs in the U.S. While people lament Whitney Houston’s allegedly drug-addled death, for example, she and others like Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and Darryl Strawberry could sit in the luxury of their own homes (or a hotel) and order up drugs in the same manner most of us would order room service without facing the gritty reality of a dead body. It’s the average citizen in México – and the U.S. – who doesn’t have the money or the power to fight back against the violence that drug trafficking brings who end up suffering the most.
