Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue: The Global Supply Chain’s Grisly Lost & Found
Nine Nameless Refrigerators and One Shared Hangover
A Global Dispatch From the Morgue in Tijuana, Population: Everyone
TIJUANA, Mexico – If you’ve ever wondered what the end of globalisation looks like, it’s probably a stainless-steel drawer marked “John or Jane Doe #7” in a border-town morgue with a busted air-conditioner and a BBC crew poking around for colour. The nine bodies discovered here last week—five men, three women, one adolescent whose age is still being guessed by dental students—weren’t headline news in London, Berlin, or Lagos. They were simply the latest quarterly shipment of collateral damage from the planet’s longest-running clearance sale: cheap narcotics northbound, expensive weapons southbound, and a 20 % coupon for human life.
Let’s not kid ourselves: the Mexican morgue is the world’s most honest customs checkpoint. Every corpse is a manifest of international trade policy. The bullets were made in South Carolina, the fentanyl precursors in Wuhan, the cash laundered through a crypto exchange registered in Malta, and the grieving relatives now live-streaming their grief on TikTok from Toronto. The supply chain is so efficient it would make Jeff Bezos weep into his rocket fuel.
Globalisation’s marketing brochure promised frictionless borders; it simply forgot to mention the frictionless bodies that slide right along with the avocados. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates the transnational narcotics market at $650 billion—roughly the GDP of Switzerland, plus or minus a few cantons. Switzerland, you’ll note, has excellent morgues, but they’re mostly stocked with aged bankers who died peacefully of chocolate overdose, not teenagers with cartel tattoos and two bullets in the occipital lobe.
The BBC’s decision to file a despatch from this particular fridge is, of course, impeccably timed. The UK is currently renegotiating its post-Brexit trade deals and needs to reassure voters that chlorinated chicken is still the worst thing coming over the border. A quick segment on Mexican corpses makes the Channel Tunnel look like a church picnic. Meanwhile, Washington is debating whether to classify certain cartels as terrorist organisations, a semantic manoeuvre that will allow drone strikes south of the Rio Grande without having to call them “election-year distractions.” The irony is exquisite: the same governments that can’t keep fentanyl out of Ohio high schools are now volunteering to run Mexico’s public-safety campaigns. It’s like asking the Titanic’s band to give swimming lessons.
Europe, for its part, has adopted the time-honoured strategy of purchasing moral indulgences. Spanish NGOs fly in trauma surgeons to patch up the survivors; German foundations sponsor “alternative livelihood” workshops teaching ex-hitmen to bake gluten-free bread. The workshops are held in fortified conference centres with barbed-wire bunting, which somehow undercuts the lesson that violence is optional.
And then there is the tech angle, because every tragedy now needs an app. A Silicon Valley start-up—founded, naturally, by a Stanford dropout who once took a selfie with a mariachi band—has begun offering blockchain-based body identification. For $99, relatives can upload dental records to an immutable ledger, ensuring their loved one’s corpse can be cross-referenced even if the local mortician decides to rent out the drawer next week. The promotional copy promises “decentralised dignity.” The venture capital term sheet promises 40x returns.
What does it all mean? Simply this: in the great bazaar of late-stage capitalism, death is just another SKU. The Mexican morgue is merely the fulfilment centre nobody wants Prime delivery from. And yet the orders keep coming—nine at a time, neatly stacked, temperature-controlled, bar-coded for your convenience. We keep refreshing the page, waiting for someone, somewhere, to leave a one-star review that finally ends the sale. Don’t hold your breath; the queue is long, and the freezer’s still humming.
