Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Ken Ellingwood's Nov. 8 report in the Los Angeles Times about the deadening influence on the collective psyche of gruesome crimes related to the drug war is a prime topic of conversation today at a bilingual conference on border violence in Laredo, Texas.

In "Dismembered Bodies, Warped Minds" Ellingwood reports that the extreme violence produced by the drug war is seen as a form of social disfigurement, in which Mexican values get more distorted each time a mutilated body is found.

"Mexicans have watched the carnage — at first with horror and disbelief, but increasingly with a stunned fatigue as drug-trafficking gangs try to one-up rivals or scare authorities with new heights of savagery," Ellingwood writes.  Some experts worry that people will adapt to the violence as a new kind of normal.

Sponsored by Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Dart Center, the bilingual workshop is focusing on issues related to border coverage, including telling stories amid chronic threat and how to better cover immigration, government corruption and crime.