Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (18 page)

A teenage girl from Juárez crosses into El Paso with six large cans of hominy and jalapeño peppers. U.S. Customs finds that the containers hold twenty-five pounds of marijuana.

Jonathan Lopez Gutierrez heads a forty-year-old charity, Emmanuel Ministries, that runs a shelter for one hundred children in Juárez. He crosses from El Paso on March 19 with a van full of roofing shingles. U.S. Customs finds six .223-caliber high-powered rifles and a .50-caliber semiautomatic under the roofing material. He confesses that since June 2007, he’s brought at least fifty weapons into Mexico.

There is punishment for police failure in Juárez. The cop assigned to guarding the monument of fallen officers, the man on duty when hooded men came in a pickup truck and left a funeral wreath with the names of recently murdered cops and of the seventeen cops they planned to murder, well, he is arrested for thirty-six hours. And then charged with negligence. Of course, he is probably simply grateful to be alive. Also, the city police go before a local judge and ask him to stop the army from torturing them. The final kill tally for March hits 117, with the government figuring 60 percent of killings as gang violence over retail drugs.

The government offers up a scorecard on murder so the hometown fans can keep track. It goes like this and insists on a drumbeat: For the year 2008, there are 211 killings through March 31, for all of 2007 there were 301 killings, 2006 had 253, 2005 had 227, 2004 had 204, 2003 had 186, 1995 had 294, the year I first find my Juárez, as everyone will in good time, and baby won’t ya follow me down?

The forty-five bodies found in the two death houses are difficult to assign since no one knows the exact year of their murders. So are the twenty people, according to official reports, who have been snatched from the streets and who have not returned. The dead and missing linger like bitter wine on the tongue of the city. Besides, no one knows where these remains have been moved—the authorities remain silent about the secret new bone yard—so fuck ’em, the dead, and the officials that won’t let us embrace our dead.

But now that the military patrols the city, all is well. On March 31, the Juárez paper captures the new calm: The police fear the army, two dead bodies are found, tortured, strangled, with bags covering their heads, the military arrests five and confiscates drugs, there is an assault on a perfume store, a man is severely beaten in an attack, a man and woman are beaten to death in houses next door to each other, a municipal employee tries to hang himself in a shopping mall, the secretary of public security pleads with the public to care for their children after four cases of child rape in the city, and a drunk is run over in the street yesterday before dawn. Within ten days of the army patrols of the city, forty-seven cops have officially fled the force, thirty-seven cops have been busted by the army, three female police officers are rumored to have been raped, and a silence descends on the community.

The town feels emptied out even though the church is full of flowers from a big, expensive wedding. Padre José Abel Retana stands in his vestments as the bride and groom beam on the church steps, a mariachi band playing them into their new lives. The padre is a short, solid man who looks a lot like El Chapo Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel that is credited with many of the murders going on in the area of Palomas, a dwindling community on the border just below Columbus, New Mexico.

“Yes,” he softly smiles, “many people tell me that. Let me change into my jeans, so I look
guapo
, handsome.”

And then he disappears to change. His flock is now a bloody mess. In May, Padre Abel held funeral masses for nine murdered men in one week—two for a father and son slaughtered on the main street of town on a Friday, five more for men leaving their wake on a Sunday. At the burial, soldiers stood at arms since more killings at the cemetery are a real possibility in the current climate of Mexico.

For decades, the town fed off tourists who came for cheap dentistry, medicine, glasses, and the drug trade—when Padre Abel arrived five years ago, he remembers how each week, a shipment of three to five tons of marijuana would roll through and pass, without a problem, right into the United States. In the late 1990s, people smuggling boomed, and today, the town is rimmed with ghost motels, big units thrown up for storing people for shipment and now empty. Also, on every street there are houses for sale, and big houses on dirt lanes stand abandoned. As the border tightened, people smuggling moved away and Palomas starved.

But the killing boomed. By late May 2008, this small, broken community had witnessed thirty-seven murders, mainly drug executions, that year, and seventeen more locals had been snatched and disappeared. Now the Mexican army is here, camped on the edge of town.

In a town this small, the killers and the slain know each other. And Padre Abel tends to all of them. He has two churches: an old, small stone one facing the plaza built in 1948, when work meant ranching, and a new, large one with many big stained-glass windows built a half dozen years ago, when work meant drugs, people smuggling, and slaughter.

Padre Abel’s office is in this new church, and that is where we sit.

He is a very serious man. He comes from Jalisco, a drug center in Mexico, and has been a priest for twenty-two years. Before Palomas, he served the migrant community for years in Chicago, a city he loved. The padre out of his clerical clothing looks like the guy you meet in the store on Saturday toting a twelve-pack, after a week of toil, but in his case, the toil is too bitter and harsh for a good Saturday night.

I’m here because on May 11, 2008, he gave a sermon against the killings, naming names in the drug industry and saying this must stop. The newspaper account notes everything in the sermon, but does not print the names. Such announcements are generally fatal for reporters and priests. Padre Abel says that no one will kill a priest and insists the naming thing was overblown, that he mentioned only a few, and that everyone knew who they were and so forth. I can hear the door closing as it often does in Mexico—there is a brief moment of truth, then this is followed by a growing silence, and then the memory of the truth vanishes and is no more.

“It started last year in April,” the padre says softly. In one case, a car with four men drove up to U.S. Customs full of bullet holes. Three of the men were dead, including the driver—“And then it got calm and it came back in January and we are not just talking about dead people, but the disappeared, a lot of people, they just take them away.”

He seems to sink into himself as he rolls through the history and nature of the business, how each place has a man in charge, and how this person controls all the smuggling and killing and it has always been that way, and yet this tidal wave of blood is without any precedent and so something is new.

“The plaza,” he offers, “belongs to the Juárez cartel, and it seems like Chapo Guzman wants this area. The army drives around, but they don’t do anything. There are a few cops here, but when the hit men come, it is like a thousand against ten.” He suddenly becomes animated and imitates the burst of an AK-47. He is fumbling now, reaching out for conventional explanations—a cartel war, the army, hit men—things that worked in the past, but this is not the past.

He almost sighs and he says, “I think the government is causing more insecurity . . . because the army does nothing. There is a shoot-out and the army does not come because they say they don’t have orders to get close. I don’t know if the army is killing or the hit men, but whoever it is, we think the government is behind it.”

I leave the office and now I stand three blocks from the church in front of a big disco named Los Tres Amigos. The padre’s words ring in my head—“There was a person taken from here and he saw the faces of his kidnappers and they said, ‘We don’t care, we’re going to kill you, anyway,’ but he escaped and he knows that some of them are from here.” The Tres Amigos features a logo with a frog, crocodile, and parrot—all three animals slang terms for cocaine. The man who saw the faces and escaped owned this place, and he vanished during Carnival in early March. The doors of the business still tout a big party on the lip of Lent.

The man is okay. He was left alone for a spell, broke a glass, cut his plastic handcuffs, and fled. He now lives in Phoenix. The padre is okay for the moment. He believes no one will kill a priest.

A week after our conversation, a man crawls into the U.S. port of entry at Columbus. His body is burns. Someone had spent a week pouring acid on his skin and applying hot irons, all this while the padre and I talked about the slaughter.

The army claims it has killed fourteen in a shoot-out in early April in Parral in southern Chihuahua and one of the dead is from a town, Villa Ahumada, a little south of Juárez. At the funeral, two hundred people gather. And then the military blocks off the burying ground and helicopters hover overhead and command the mourners to hit the ground. Soldiers search the cars of the grieving; they also open the casket and search it. This goes on for three hours. Children are allowed to leave, and they stand outside the cemetery crying for their parents. The body is finally buried at 7:30 P.M. They are searching for nothing. They are delivering terror.

The mother of the dead boy cannot be found. Her house is empty, the lights are on, and the doors are open, the contents are in disarray. She is somewhere out there under the protection of the Mexican army, or at least the last time she was seen she was with them.

A block from a death house, and the city hums with its little bits of business. The faces of the people are about work and bills and Friday night and that first cup of coffee in the morning. It is the same a block from a murder. The killings are tiny tears in a huge tapestry called Juárez. When I walk across the bridge into El Paso, there are no murders and Juárez becomes a mural covered with dust that lacks events.

Success has come to Juárez. Thanks to the army’s vigilance, there are only 52 murders in the month of April, a 55 percent drop from March. Officially. Of these murders, there are zero arrests. This brings the score for the first four months of 2008 to 262 dead and compares with 101 for the same period in 2007, 70 in 2006, 71 in 2005, and 64 in 2004. If this success rate holds—the army has announced it plans to be around indefinitely—that would produce a slaughter in Juárez of 600 souls every twelve months, double its recent kill rate.

A drink in hand is necessary for thinking about this military achievement. First, no one knows who is doing the killing, but two thousand soldiers and six hundred federal police have managed to bring Juárez to its highest annual murder rate in history. Second, there are no arrests, and it seems strange that such a massive force with roadblocks all over the city cannot, even by accident, bag one single killer. Third, there is the matter of the army torturing cops, raping female cops, and answering to no one. And finally, there is the thing whispered in the city, the thing no media on either side of the line will publish: that the army is doing the killing and, hence, sees little need for arrests since the cases are not mysteries to it.

Violence in Juárez always has an ability to become invisible. Since no one trusts the police, crime statistics are often guesswork because citizens of the city do not report what has happened to them. Since the police are often criminals, there is little incentive for them to fight crime. Since torture is the basic forensic tool of law enforcement, the elements of law and order have developed few, if any, skills in solving crimes. Since virtually everyone arrested confesses after enough beatings, there is a patina of crime fighting to disguise the actual business of a gangster state. Since all of this is obvious, it is almost never said and very often not even consciously believed. In most instances, the criminal police and the citizens both share in a fantasy that the crimes are being investigated, the criminals being tamed, and the person standing before them in a uniform and carrying a badge is part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

In the past, violence has flowed through the city like a river of blood, and sometimes the river ran on the surface and at other times, in order to make a political point or calm public apprehensions, the river went underground—literally—with the dead tossed into holes in the desert or buried in town in the backyards of death houses. But given the poverty, the corruption of the police, and the needs of the drug industry to enforce deals, the killing was fairly constant. No one wished to believe this fact. When murders declined, especially drug executions, there was a feeling something had passed by and now that it was behind everyone, a new kind of Juárez had evolved. When the killings got bad and the bodies were left in the streets like ornaments decorating the city’s secret way of life, then everyone said that it hardly mattered because only those in the life died and they were only killing each other. Few wished to consider what the expression “in the life” meant and how much of the city was either given over to the drug industry or fed off it.

Now the killing is more public than ever and the numbers keep climbing, and no one can explain why, except by claiming the tools of the past—the cartels are responsible and they have suddenly gone crazy.

Everything is supposed to get better. This conclusion is never explained, it is simply asserted. The economy will always get better, and this will make every single human being better. The drug consumption will go away, and all the bodies will glow with new health. The energy systems that drive human communities will morph from one form to another form, but they will always deliver the amount of energy desired at the price that is bearable. Eventually, with some more work in the laboratories, we will live a hundred, maybe two hundred years, maybe forever. We must be patient, but this future is certain. Places without factories will get factories, places that have seen factories close will get something even better for employment. No one will be hungry, no one will be fat, no one will be ugly, and no one will be without love. Education will spread like a plague, and everyone will know more because information is the future—not fabricating metals, or digging in the earth, or plowing fields, or sewing clothes. The distinctions between the sexes will erode, and rights will be equal for both man and woman. Tribes will melt away. So, too, will nations. Wars will cease, and peace will come. Democracy will win. There is no other choice: It is written. Tragedies will not be performed, because they will have no meaning. There will be no sacrifices; such acts will be unnecessary and unintelligible.