Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (20 page)

Or you are going to take that ride, join a gang, learn to flash the sign, do little errands for guys with more power, get some of that money that flows through certain hands, snort some powder, and have the women eating out of your hand for a few hours in a discotheque, and you’ll wear hip-hop clothing, have a short, burr haircut, never smile, stuff a pistol in your oversized britches. A big SUV rolls down the
calle
, you hop in, the windows are darkly tinted, and the machine prowls the city like a shark with its fanged mouth agape, and oh, it is so sweet when you squeeze the trigger and feel the burst run free and wild into the night air, see the body crumple and fall like a rag doll, roll on into the black velvet after midnight, and there’ll be a party, fine girls and white powder, and people fear you, and the body falls, blood spraying, and you feel like God even though you secretly stopped believing in God some time ago, and they tell you that you will die, that your way of living has no future, and you see the tired men and women walking the dirt lanes after a shift in the factory, plastic bags of food dangling from their hands, and you caress the gun stuffed in your waistband, and life is so good and the killing is fun and everyone knows who has the guts to take the ride.

Dying is the easy part.

Killing is the fun part.

Taking that first ride is the hard part.

They call him “King Midas” because he owns so many venues. Willy Moya, forty-eight, is a success as he exits his V Bar, one of his many huge nightclubs, at 4 A.M. May 18. The building is the size of a warehouse, and it is but one piece of an empire—Hooligan’s, Vaqueras y Broncos, Frida’s, Tabasco’s, Arriba Chihuahua, Willy’s Country Disco, and so forth—that he lords over in the swank part of Juárez. He is standing in the center of his bodyguards when the bullet enters his skull. His bodyguards are unharmed. He is declared dead at the hospital only a block away. Until he falls dead on the ground, he is considered untouchable because he is rich and he is connected to other men with power and money.

I stand in front of his closed empire, and there is a huge, white bow over the door, a framed photo of him by the steps, with a candle and some wilted yellow roses.

Carlos Camacho is a former member of the federal congress, the environmental representative for Chihuahua in Ciudad Juárez and a member of the president’s political party. He lives in a very good apartment complex, one with seven units and a parking lot full of fine cars. He is talking to his girlfriend on the phone when he tells her that the army is at the door. That is his last statement. The next day, he and two other residents of the complex are found dumped on the street, strangled, their bodies with signs of torture. No one wants to face this May killing. Camacho is the clean leader, a man widely known and liked. His family says publicly that the army is responsible. And then, they fall into silence.

It is just drug guys killing drug guys, and if it is not, then who is safe?

The Aroma restaurant is fine wood and mirrors and veal chops that go for forty-five dollars. I sample sushi, lobster bisque, and a forty-five-dollar bottle of Chilean red that would cost maybe six bucks in a U.S. supermarket. The café is on a plush avenue next to the rich district of Juárez, an area of mansions and guards and a country club. The rumor is that on May 17, fifty heavily armed men arrived here, took the cell phones of the customers, and told people they could not leave. Outside, the army guarded the serenity of the establishment. Then El Chapo Guzman swept in, dined, and left around 2 A.M. He paid everyone’s tab. He is a man with a $5 million reward on his head and is said to be at war with the Juárez cartel. Yet everyone in the city seems to know of this visit to Aroma and believe it. That weekend, at least twenty people were murdered in Juárez as Chapo dined and the government of Mexico waged war on drug cartels.

The waiter brings a form for rating the dining experience. I check off everything as excellent and sign myself as El Chapo.

He is bubbling with energy, but then El Pastor always seems as though he is about to OD on a vitamin B shot. We are sitting in the Golden Corral in El Paso—El Pastor likes a good feed.

But the violence in Juárez is on his mind.

“There is a terror there right now,” he says. “People are more kind. They don’t honk their horns.” Suddenly he is flapping his arms and going
honk honk honk
.

Lately, he’s been going with people at shift change to the local police stations in Juárez and leading prayers with the cops.

“They are frightened,” he explains. “I saw this woman cop get out of her car for her shift with her two little kids, and they were kissing her and crying because they were afraid she wouldn’t come back. They are sending
narco-corridos
on the police radios an hour or two before a cop gets killed. The
sicarios
, the hit men, are kids, so skinny. But they get an AK-47 and they are powerful.”

He broods about what drives the violence, where does all the death come from?

“They are fighting for power,” he says, and now he is entering that Mexican moment where suddenly an unexplained “they” shows up, that fog of language that protects one’s mind from what one knows. He sketches a world where the ruling party, the PRI, ran the country as a smiling dictatorship for seventy years and worked with, and yet had some control over, the drug industry. Then Vicente Fox upturned this order in 2000, when the opposition Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) took power and now, well, no one seems in control. This is a traditional view of things in Mexico, where the hard hand, the
mano dura
, is seen as essential to rule.

For El Pastor it is simple: “The police, the gangs, the governor, the state, now they all want the money. If the cartels agree, all the killings will calm down. We Mexicans know what is going on, but we cannot say anything, because if you say something, they kill you.”

He pauses and then changes tone.

“You see birds walking on the pavement in Juárez,” he explains, “and their heads dart from side to side because they are waiting for someone to throw a rock and kill them. This is the way it is for narcos.”

That is the way explanations of the violence always go. There is the body, or the experience, the woman cop is terrified and so are her children, the
narco-corridos
boom through the police radio, and death is waiting, things are out of control. And then the retreat, the belief that it is a cartel war, or that the government is behind it, no matter, someone is in control and eventually order will be restored. This is the safe place amid the killing.

But El Pastor, the street preacher, has a nagging memory. A man who worked for a nightclub tycoon came to him and said, How much does your work with the crazy people cost? El Pastor said, ten thousand dollars a month. The man said, I can get you twenty thousand. El Pastor said, Is this money clean? The man said nothing.

No matter. A few days later, Willy Moya was shot in the head as he stood amid his herd of bodyguards.

El Pastor told the man he could pray for Willy Moya, but he did not want such money.

“Probably,” El Pastor says, “Willy Moya wanted to clean his mind. He probably could feel death tapping him on the shoulder.”

Murder Artist

I wait for the phone to ring.
The first call came at 9:00 A.M. and said expect the next call at 10:05. So I drive fifty miles and wait. The call at 10:05 says wait until 11:30. The call at 11:30 does not come, and so I wait and wait. Next door is a game store frequented by men seeking power over a virtual world. Inside the coffee shop, it is calculated calm, and everything is clean.

I am in the safe country. I will not name the city, but it is far from Juárez and it is down by the river and it is electric with the life and quiet as an American dream. At noon, the next call comes.

We meet in a parking lot, our cars cooped like cops with driver next to driver. I hand over some photographs of Juárez murders. He quickly glances at them and then tells me to go to a pizza parlor. There, he says that we must find a quiet place because he talks very loudly. I rent a motel room with him. None of this can be arranged ahead of time because that would allow me to set him up.

This is the place he lives, a terrain where the simplest things can kill him. He always studies his rearview mirror. He never turns his back on anyone. Nor does he ever relax. Or trust.

He glances at the photographs, images never printed in newspapers. He stabs his finger at a guy standing over a half-exposed body in a grave and says, “This picture can get you killed.” And then he tells me the man in the photograph is Number Two, the strong right arm of the boss.

I show him the photograph of the woman. She is lovely in her white clothes and perfect makeup. Blood trickles from her mouth, and the early morning light caresses her face. The photograph has a history in my life. Once, I placed it in a magazine, and the editor there got a call from a terrified man, the woman’s brother, who asked, Are you trying to get me killed, to get my family killed? I remember the editor calling me up and asking me what I thought the guy meant. I answered, “Exactly what he said.”

The next time the photograph came into play was at a bar in San Antonio, where I was having a beer with a DEA agent. He told me he knew her, that he’d been watching a stash house in El Paso when she came by. A few hours later, they took down the stash house, and the next day, her body was found in Juárez. He figured they thought she’d snitched off the stash house. But she had not. Her visit was a coincidence and had nothing to do with the case.

Now, he looks at her and tells me she was the girlfriend of the head of the
sicarios
in Juárez, and the guys in charge of the cartel thought she talked too much. Not that she’d ever given up a load or anything, it was simply the fact that she talked too much. So they told her boyfriend to kill her, and he did. Or he would die.

This is ancient ground. The term
sicario
goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Celotas, used concealed daggers to murder (
si carii
meaning a dagger carrier) the Romans or their supporters.

Silence is my old friend here, a thing that feels like a hand at the throat choking off all sound. It is not the silence of the grave or the silence of the church, but the speechlessness of terror. Words barely form in the mind. And after a while, even thoughts lose shape and float like ghosts. Things are explained, but the sentences have no subject, only a hint of a verb, and after a while, even the object is a muddled thing. Two men are found dead, showing signs of torture never clearly stated, spent brass around the bodies. Elements are killing people in the city. The authorities express outrage at mayhem and disorder. All this is a form of the silence. Juárez is a place where a declarative sentence may be an act of suicide.

He leans forward and says of the cartel leaders, “Amado and Vicente could kill you if they even thought you were talking.”

Yes. Shortly before our talk, a woman—the daughter of that lawyer who posted the sign against dumping bodies or garbage—stands in front of the hotel owned by her family. She is cut down. Federal police are sleeping in a hotel. The building is strafed. But no one fires the bullets, they simply fly, tear through flesh, and eventually, the gunfire dies away and is absorbed by silence.

This photograph can get you killed. Words can get you killed. And all this will happen and yet you will die and the sentence will never have a subject, simply an object falling dead to the ground.

Sitting with the
sicario,
I feel myself falling down into some kind of well, some dark place that hums beneath the workaday city, and in this place, there is a harder reality and absolute facts. I have been living, I think, in a kind of fantasy world of laws and theories and logical events. Now I am in a country where people are murdered on a whim, a beautiful woman is found in the dirt with blood trickling from her mouth, and then she is wrapped with explanations that have no actual connection to what happened.

I have spent years getting to this moment. The killers, well, I have been around them before. Once, I partied with two hundred armed killers in a Mexican hotel for five days. But they were not interested in talking about their murders. He is.

What does he look like?

Just like you. Or me.

You will never see him coming. He is of average height, he dresses like a workman with sturdy boots and a knit cap. If he stood next to you in a checkout line, you would be unable to describe him five minutes later. Nothing about him draws attention to him. Nothing.

He has very thick fingers and large hands. His face is expressionless. His voice is loud but flat.

He lives beneath notice. That is part of how he kills.

He says, “Juárez is a cemetery. I have dug the graves for two hundred and fifty bodies.”

The dead, the two hundred fifty corpses, are details, people he disappeared and put in holes in death houses. The city is studded with these secret tombs. Just today, the authorities discovered a skeleton. From the rotted clothing, forensic experts peg the bones to be those of a twenty-five-year-old man. He is one of a legion of dead hidden in Juárez.