So Far from God
When we got to Michoacan I called my sister. She knows Mexico well and told us we had to see Morelia, a 17th century Spanish mining town with a spectacular colonial plaza. [...] We walked the narrow streets of the ancient town and there we found an old convent which housed a restaurant in which we had an amazing meal of squash flower soup and fish in a delicate pumpkin seed sauce. Slowly we returned to the zocalo where we strolled and watched people making all manner of use of that central square, holding hands or arguing, kissing in corners or ambling, our kids joining all the small children joyfully playing, and chasing and screaming and running in that plaza.
Three years later, on Independence Day, September 15th, 2008, a grenade was tossed into the central square in Morelia, the very place Michele and I had sat in with our children just a few years before. It was then that everyone knew things had turned. Everything had shifted. This was not an internecine narco battle confined to the players of the warring factions. This was a violence upon the very fabric of Mexican life, it's very active public life.