Why a Booktrail?
1990s: The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl.’
Prayers for the Stolen
What you need to know before your trail
On the mountainside in rural Mexico where Ladydi lives, being a girl is dangerous. Especially a pretty one. If the Narcos hear there is a pretty girl on the mountain, they steal her. So when the black SUVs roll into town, Ladydi and her friends hide in the warren of holes scattered across the mountain, safely out of sight. Because the stolen girls don’t come back.
Ladydi is determined to get out, to find a life that offers more than just the struggle to survive. But she soon finds that the drug cartels have eyes everywhere, and the cities are no safer than the mountains.
Travel Guide
Mexico
The landscape of fear from the drug barons…
“If I were a girl then I would be stolen. All the drug traffickers had to to do was hear that there was a pretty girl around and they’d sweep onto our lands in black Escalades and carry the girl off.”
The state of Guerrero
The land where they live is one of “rubber plants, snakes, iguanas and scorpions, the blond transparent scorpions which were hard to see and that kill. Guerrero had more spiders than any place in the world..
This is a place where girls are stolen and where none of them ever return. One girl however Paula does manage to return but she is broken and never speaks of what she went through. They make their girls into boys make them fat so no one will want to take them. One mother thinks of hiding her daughter in a hole in the ground.
The fear of seeing one of the narcos coming, in their big black cars with tinted windows and guns inside is real and palpable ever day of their lives.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Prayers for the Stolen
Destination : Mexico Author/Guide: Jennifer Clement Departure Time: 1980s
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