In this lecture I look at the ways in which two writers – the poet María Rivera and the journalist Daniela Rea – consider ‘killing’ in contemporary Mexico. Rivera’s poem ‘The Dead’ is by now considered one of the most significant pieces of writing on the victims of killings in the context of the so-called ‘drug wars’ and ‘war on drugs’. In the poem she evokes something like a 21st version of a danse macabre of those who were violently killed, and asks questions about the killers. Daniela Rea in her collection of chronicles No-One Asked Them for Pardon: Chronicles of Resistance and Impunity addresses in several pieces killings that were not actively carried out, but occurred because of a disregard for the lives of some sectors of the population; of a precarization of life, to draw on Judith Butler, that would lead for these precarized lives to be lost. I will here offer a close reading of how both writers in different ways show how the generalized precarization of lives and the impunity of the perpetrators turns ‘death’ into a horrific, and horrifically eternal, ‘killing’.