For most of my time in Mexico, I wrote about violence and corruption as though they were facts of life, an assumed part of life for the more than 120 million people that required no context or explanation. And they are, to some extent. But I always struggled with how Mexico came to be so broken, the sort of place where horrific murders and brazen acts of corruption just came with the territory. The kind of place where a mother can be killed for the act of seeking justice for her disappeared daughter.

Miriam’s story was a way to offer readers an intimate look at the social cost of the drug war. But it also felt compelling enough to sustain an exploration of how things got to be so bad in Mexico, which required a dive into the nation’s historical archives. In the end the hope was to take this story and use it to explain what had happened to Mexico in the last several decades, and how an empowered criminal class had come to dominate the nation.

When I speak with politicians or businessmen, almost anyone with means and power, the assumption is on the record. When I am speaking with traumatized populations, victims of violence or people who don’t really understand the media or how it works, I take the opposite approach. That means that literally dozens of people I spoke to were too afraid to share their stories publicly. But I was fortunate in that Miriam’s family, and her friends, wanted their stories told. They wanted those moments recorded, and their names along with them. Without that, the book would have been impossible to write.

I didn’t go to Mexico looking for parallels, and the societies and contexts are so fundamentally different. There are in broad strokes similarities—for instance the endemic corruption that affects everyone, the acts of violence that terrorize populations, the problematic, and fundamental, role of the United States in both nations. But Mexico is a conflict born of economic opportunity, whereas the war in Afghanistan was about religion and ideology. I suppose any similarity in my reporting would say more about me than those nations, or their conflicts.