The recent murder of Mexico's TV talk show host and the reactions it provoked reveal the growing disjunction between illusion and reality in Mexico. In that way, Mexico is becoming more and more like the rest of North America where the border between fiction and non-fiction, North and South, is blurring. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of Days of Obligation and essayist for the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, writes for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion section where a longer version of this article also appears.

In the Americas, few countries are as expert in the business of magic as Mexico. Romance, illusion, cocaine -- fantasy is Mexico's growing export, more important than burritos or the eager hands of its migrant workers.

Last week's mid-day murder of Paco Stanley, Mexico's beloved comic and TV talk show host, forced millions of Mexicans to recognize reality: Mexico has become a violent, criminal society. Over and over, Stanley's bullet-ridden minivan was shown on TV.

Within a day, it was announced by Mexico City's Attorney General that Mr. Stanley (in whose face was imbedded twenty six rounds) was in the possession of cocaine at the time of his death. Suddenly Mexicans were forced to wonder if Paco Stanley's real life was more complicated than his TV persona.

The disjunction between reality and illusion is not only a Mexican problem. Consider it, rather, a NAFTA problem. Just last month a masked Canadian wrestler, named Owen Hart, fell fifty feet to his death in a Kansas City auditorium. The audience imagined that the death was a stunt -- an illusion. They cheered.

Even while the U.S. Border Patrol has tried to stop Mexican peasants from slipping into San Diego, American teenagers have developed a taste for a style of professional wrestling known in Mexico as lucha libre. Luchadors specialize in sequins and bluster and high-risk acrobatics.

And, while some American nativists may still worry about Spanish becoming our second language, the more important language coming from Mexico is a surreal grammar of love. Or haven't you noticed? "Days of Our Lives" is suddenly starting to look like a Mexican telenovela with nuns and magic and the demonic -- all part of the drama of love.

On the other hand, watching soaps on Televisa, Mexico's largest television network, is like watching Swedish TV. Some years ago, a senior executive at Televisa justified the absence of brown faces on the screen by wondering who wants to see unattractive people on television?

Especially before cocaine was found on the corpse, Paco Stanley's murder sparked a very public argument about who was to blame. Some attacked the ineptitude of Mexico City's Mayor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, the nation's foremost leftist, expected to run for president next year. Others attacked the ruling party, the PRI, notorious for its ties to organized crime.

The discovery of the cocaine changed everything. For suddenly the popular Mexican habit of blaming someone else for the problems of Mexico was undercut by the possibility that the victim was also responsible.

But who could say? Perhaps, one Mexican friend said to me, the drugs were planted on the body? (By week's end, many Mexicans were safely back in realm of uncertainty, where rumors drift like ghosts.)

From Monterrey, economic powerhouse of Mexico, where capitalism's value for Mexico is daily evident, a professor phoned. Few intellectuals in Monterrey are much concerned with the television dramas of Mexico City, the professor said. Most Monterrey intellectuals, in the Mexican capitol of capitalism, are either Marxists or right-wing Catholics.

What else is new in Monterrey? I asked.

The rich kids and the poor kids are dancing together in the clubs, the professor said. Democratic decadence. And they are all taking cocaine because they think it is modern and it will make them more American.

It's an old habit on both sides of the border. Mexicans blame Americans for moral contamination. Americans imagine that Mexican drug lords have infected their innocent teens. The latter view, I think, has lead recently to a gringo romanticism for Latin toy boys, apparent in the sudden popularity of Ricki Martin.

There he was staring at us last week from the cover of "TV Guide": Mr. Martin, dusty blond and cute, is the sort of neighbor many Americans wish we truly had in Latin America, the ideal boy next door, nothing at all like the pock-marked Latin drug lords we otherwise fear.

Sixty years ago, grandpa dipped into "Tia'wanna" to find cheap sexual fantasy. Thirty years later, American hippies went into the desert of northern Mexico, looking for a brujo who might dispense the secrets of the enchanted mushroom.

More recently, American intellectuals, as well as middle-class readers, have grown fond of "magical realism." The best-selling Mexican novel in the United States was a novel called "Like Water for Chocolate." Lovers kiss and butterflies come out of their mouths. Old Indian women float.

Twenty years ago, after a Mexico City appearance of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I remember seeing long lines of Germans and Americans, waiting for the autograph of the master-illusionist. I wondered, then, why magical realism had become the easiest way for Europeans and Americans to read Latin America.

The fact is that more and more North Americans are becoming, like Latin Americans, seduced by magic away from reality. To that extent the border between fiction and non-fiction, North and South, is blurring.

Las Vegas, our capitol of mirage, is the fastest-growing city in America. Televisa, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the world, specializes in blond.

Two weeks ago, in Canada, several thousand people showed up for the funeral of pro wrestler, Owen Hart, whose fall from the stadium rafters had been real, after all. Mr. Hart had played a villain in recent years within the surreal fiction of pro wrestling.

In his real life, Hart was 34 years old and the father of two small children.

Last Tuesday, Paco Stanley's fans came to his funeral. It was a scene out of Nataniel West. Gravestones were overturned by the grieving mob. Family and relatives were pushed by the crowd. At one point, the crowd nearly overturned the coffin.

Outside the crypt, the crowd chanted, demanding "justicia." Inside, a television camera had been installed so that the nation could bid its beloved comic a last goodbye.