Luke Coppen, our editor, drew my attention in his Catholic must-reads to this rather sad story from the Brownsville Herald. Brownsville, which is a place little mentioned in the British media, is a Texas town on the border of Mexico, on the Gulf coast. Just over the border is Matamoros. The glory days of Matamoros occurred in the American Civil War, when, thanks to the Unionist blockade, all Confederate imports and exports had to be re-routed through the Mexican port. Nowadays Matamoros, like most of the towns that sit up close against the US border, is a place tourists do well to avoid. All these towns have a symbiotic union, but not in a good sense, with their American counterparts. The most notorious of them is Ciudad Juarez, which is the Mexican part of El Paso, Texas, an ugly industrial place, making things for export, and the serial killer blackspot of Mexico. I have never been to Brownsville, but I assume it is much like the rest of America, quiet and law-abiding, and to the people who read the Brownsville Herald, a world away from what goes on in Matamoros, specifically the violent death of an innocent priest caught in the crossfire of the never-ending war on drugs. Yet Matamoros and Brownsville are contiguous places, separated by a border fence, economically interdependent. This drugs war is happening on America’s doorstep. Poor Mexico, as they say, so far from God, so close to the United States! Poor Mexico indeed. The continuing drug war – summed up here - is costing it dear.