As I walked out one day onto the patio with my newspaper in hand there on the white tiles was a cockroach on its back with one feeler softly flicking the air. They are poisoned in the drains and cannot wedge through the cast iron grill. Despite this, sometimes, somehow, one escapes from this underground Alcatraz. I watched the solitary flicker as it clung to those last moments of life.

Cockroaches, like rats, have a bad name. I don’t usually like them. But they are lurking beneath those posh Hampstead houses, scuttling in the basements of the Palace of Westminster and wriggling around, most certainly, in the dark recesses of the governor’s house in Michoacán as much as the White House in Washington DC.  I think back to the jolly old corrida folk song, ‘cucaracha’ featured in the Open University language course. In one version the cockroach represented the betrayer of Madero, one of the heroes of the Mexican revolution, although the song - endlessly re-written - may go back to the bloody Spanish invasion.

I get back to the newspaper to read the latest news about the narco gangs. They are hanging bodies from the bridges of the motorways. The ankles are bound, the heads are drooped and the trousers pulled down. The photo is from behind so we do not see how the front of the corpses may have been mutilated in the execution. These bodies appear to have wavered slightly in the warm up-current from the eight lane traffic jam passing below. It’s daily news - but all those men have been loved and nurtured by someone, somewhere. A war it is, no doubt, with origins in poverty, trade, political collusion, and corruption between nation states going back two centuries. One of the gangs has written its own bible. The Nixon quick fix war-on-drugs and its descendents have perished. It is far too late for such simple tales. The death toll rises.

I don’t like cockroaches but I don’t like death either. I rustle the page. Next to the narco news there are details of the postponed marriage of two Hollywood starlets, the same old intrigues. Two days earlier we were driving happily on the autopista to a wedding ourselves, our best clothes wrapped in cellophane on the back seat, a bit late, listening to music. We were just 9 km from the final toll booth at the end of the road when the tailback on the blind curve forced us to a halt.  A man was waving a red flag on the double white centre line. A hatchback lay on it’s back, wheels and underside facing the sky, vapour rising. A doble semiremolque – those cantilever trucks pulling two wagons with 36 tyres – was jack-knifed across both lanes in a glitzy field of glass and metal shrapnel. A third car, just like ours, had been squeezed to the size of a tree stump. Inside, a body as thin as a stalk was covered in a white sheet. The penitent cars filed past at 10 kilometres an hour. The radio went dead.

The morning sun was burning the last moisture from the underbelly of the solitary cockroach on the white tile of the patio. That tiny feeler was still just waving faintly – or was it the breeze? Soon it was still and had become just carcass. I didn’t feel like reading anymore.