This morning on my way to work, I heard a KPCC story by Adolfo Guzmán about the English translation of “Los Muertos” a poem by María Rivera about the thousands of victims of drug violence in Mexico. The poem reads like a litany of cities, towns, victims and the violent acts committed against them. [Los Muertos/The Dead English translation]

In the afternoon, shortly before I left work, I saw Daniel Hernández’s tweets about several deaths after arsonists started a fire Monterrey casino.

“Four armed persons entered and began to say: ‘Everybody leave! Everybody leave!’ ” she said. The woman said she ran out a door to a parking lot, but many others fled to the second floor of the casino.

The witness said the attackers, wearing white masks, did not fire weapons or hurl grenades, as some early news reports had suggested. “They started to throw gasoline. There was no grenade attack,” she said.

A line from Rivera’s poem came back to me “… their bodies burnt.”

#yabasta