Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (22 page)

I ask him, “Tell me about your first killing,” and he says he can’t remember. I know he is not telling the truth, and I know he is not lying. We all remember the first killing, the first love, the first betrayal, and the first moment we knew we would die. But sometimes you cannot reach it, you open that drawer, and your hand is paralyzed. It is right in front of you, your nostrils fill with the smell, the gun is warm in your hand, the little quiver coming out of the throat as your hand tightens, but still you cannot reach it and so you say you don’t remember.

We sit there in the quiet room tasting the void that is now Ciudad Juárez.

He is the product of a religion called the global economy, the child of a poor family that had to flee the interior and become factory hands in the American mills of Juárez. The bright man who cannot afford the university. The eager pupil of the FBI.

He is law and order with his training and police uniforms.

He is a
sicario
, and it is trade like other trades. All those bodies found in the dawn, hands and feet bound with duct tape, sometimes the head severed, or the tongue cut out, often signs of torture on the torso—this requires work. The people vanished as if beamed up into the sky by an alien life form, yet more work. These things are seen as mysteries. Now he offers to explain the simple mechanics of the job.

He cannot explain Juárez, because he is too busy being Juárez. In his eyes, the current torrent of murders results from all of his work. The new killers are his children, and now they mimic what he did and operate as independent death machines. All the official explanations—a cartel war, a war between the army and the cartels, a war between the cartels and the government—remain a blur to him. He is one small cog in a big machine, and during his entire career, he never once got to see the whole machine. Nor did he ever know who, if anyone, controlled the machine. Nor was he ever certain who his real boss might be. Now he watches the city disassemble itself. The cars vanish into junkyards to be sold for scrap. The stores are all robbed. Everyone tries to extort money from everyone else.

Something has changed and yet nothing has changed. His life has spilled out beyond his body and now has become the life of the city.

“I will tell you horrible things.”

I am in Shadowland,
where things come briefly into view and then disappear again, and even the memory of what has been glimpsed is shaky and indistinct. By May 2008, over four hundred people have died. In five and a half months, the murders in the city exceed the number of the entire previous year.

One weekend in the middle of May, three men are taken from a nice apartment complex and turn up dead a few hours later. They are bound and gagged and show signs of torture. The family of one man, Carlos Camacho, says the army took the men. The wife of another man says the army took the men. And this is the first time the newspaper prints what has been on many lips.

Also, there is a story that says reporters track police radio in order to cover the murders, but that now, for the first time, voices are coming over these police channels and over their cell phones, warning them to slow down, to not arrive at the killing scene just yet. Because it is not finished.

The problem is that information only comes in fragments. You learn someone is breaking into police channels and issuing warnings to the press. And then you sit back and you think, Yes, but the report does not say who is breaking into these bursts of police communications. And then you sit back and you say, “But wait a minute, how do I know any of this is happening since the press in Mexico is always cowed and often prints deliberate fables?” And then, you realize how much of what you know is barely on the edge of fact.

When the three men (or more—one report says that the apartment complex has seven units and all the men were taken from each unit) vanish into the hands of what the surviving family members insist is an army unit, the newspaper carefully gives the make and color and year of every car in the parking lot. Why? Because in Juárez, it is a code for narcos, and this code is believed because in Juárez, good cars mean illegal income. But does it? And if it does, is the code accurate in this instance? You don’t get to know. The papers famously drop stories after a single mention, and the follow-up on foot can be difficult because survivors have a way of falling silent once the lethal air of the city again fills their lungs.

A long time ago, maybe two months or so before the boys vanished from the apartment complex, two women went to the police and reported that their boyfriends had disappeared. The women and their guys were all from Sinaloa. Then the mystery was solved. The three guys were in the tender care of the Mexican army—suddenly the paper contained a photo of them standing in the sun, looking a little worse for wear, and bracketed by soldiers. Turns out one of the boys allowed that he’d done about sixty executions in Juárez, and the other fessed up to twenty or twenty-five. And then the story vanished. Nothing more is heard of the girls or the boys or their frisky talent for killing.

For a brief moment over the weekend when Willy Moya takes a round in the skull at 4 A.M. in the parking lot of one of his establishments, the silence lifts. Moya, it turns out, lived in El Paso. His ex-wife talks to the newspaper on the record and says her ex-husband was alarmed by the level of violence in Juárez. And then the next day, at the funeral, a family member said, “Perhaps the family needs to know what happened in order to have a little peace and to see those responsible for this disgrace and grief punished by the authorities, but we know that this is not going to happen.”

But no name is given. The family has reentered Shadowland.

And we go back to Shadowland, the place where only fragments of fact surface and those fragments are always suspect. Just where are the sixty-five to ninety bodies these two boys say they murdered? And just how far off is the official killing record of the city? And what has the army done with these rascals, and where are the three boys now and are they alive? Or dead? Or are they back on the street working for whoever now controls those streets and patrols them?

“Who sent you?” asks the dying comandante.

I keep making little lists, and I pretend these lists impose some reason on the killing. They do not, but still I scribble them in my notebooks as I sit in cafés drinking coffee and pretending to understand.

On January 16, 2008, Saulo Reyes Gamboa is arrested in El Paso in a drug sting. He is a leading Juárez businessman. From 1998 to 2001, he was the chief of police in Juárez.

On February 19, four men were executed in Ascensión and Palomas in a twenty-four-hour period. The reports describe the killers as armed commandos.

In late February, close to $2 million is found in an SUV entering Mexico, mainly in five-dollar and hundred-dollar bills. The vehicle is driven by a family from Kansas City, Kansas.

On March 1, a man’s body is tossed off a cliff around 3 A.M. and lands in a Juárez backyard. The man’s hand, feet, and head are bound with tape.

In early April, the Mexican army arrests ten Juárez policemen. The army says they possessed drugs and illegal guns.

Twenty-two employees of the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office are taken in by the Mexican army for questioning. The army says it is looking for links to organized crime.

On May 6, a municipal policewoman comes to her door in Juárez. She takes thirty-two rounds.

On May 15, the police bring wounded men to the city hospital in Juárez. Then armed men come and kill four people. The hospital staff calls the authorities for three hours. No one responds.

A new list of police yet to be executed is found outside a police station. At the bottom of the list of names is a simple thought: “Thank you for waiting.”

On June 4, two city cops die in a barrage in front of a school as they are dropping off their four- and six-year-olds. The woman is thirty, the man thirty-five.

She is scared of the killings in Juárez and wants to go live with her mom in El Paso. But she does not get out in time. She is sitting in a park with two girlfriends when some guys in a nice new Tahoe snatch them—the men are being followed by killers and want the girls as human shields. The girls make a break for it, and two get away. But Alexia, twelve, doesn’t quite make it. She takes a round in the head. The killers disappear with the guys in the Tahoe, and nobody has seen them since. The girl’s father insists he is not a narco but a Christian. It is Monday, June 9, and summer has yet to begin.

On Father’s Day, three Juárez businesses burn in forty minutes. The newspaper notes that armed commandos arrive early in the morning and torch the places with Molotov cocktails. One of the establishments is the Aroma café where Chapo Guzman dined. The owner is very upset. He says his fine restaurant had only been open a year, and very fine people dined there, people like the archbishop of Mexico. He realizes that someone thinks Guzman recently feasted there. He does not deny this story, but he does say that rich families often come there to eat, and naturally, they arrive with bodyguards who stand outside the building. And sometimes, five or six rich families are dining, and so, one can understand how in such circumstances, there would be a lot of bodyguards standing around outside. People might see such a sight and then start a rumor, perhaps a story that Chapo Guzman is eating inside the Aroma. No matter, he has no time to discuss such stories. He insists that the authorities must restore tranquility. Meanwhile, he figures that he and his family will move to El Paso.

In the last few days, fourteen nice bars and restaurants in Juárez have been torched, many of them once owned by the late Willy Moya, though the Juárez paper fails to mention this fact. Just as the paper reports the kidnapping of a prosperous Juárez businessman. His assailants psychologically torture him for four hours—mainly by driving him around in a car while they point pistols at his head. The businessman notes a curious fact—his kidnappers know every detail of his banking business, all the account numbers and the amount of money he has in each account, facts he does not even share with his family. The story suggests this is only possible if someone inside the Juárez bank is cooperating with the kidnappers. But the newspaper fails to print the name of the bank that works with a kidnapping ring.

We must be careful. Saturday, two were machine-gunned. Sunday, five more. Monday, that lawyer was mowed down. And now, early Tuesday morning, a state cop in his fine Dodge Ram takes a lot of rounds. They have hauled him to the hospital, but this is not a good idea, considering the killers’ excellent follow-up capabilities. That is why at least seventeen people have fled to El Paso with their gaping wounds.

Also, the city and state are concerned that so very few Mexicans wear seat belts when they drive. Something must be done to educate the public.

At any time of the day or night, the machine-gun fire can cut you in half. This can happen anywhere. No need to watch your back, to keep eyes peeled. No need to be afraid. And of course, everyone but the authorities knows there is no need to wear a seat belt. Just go about your business and relax.

A few weeks ago, a man was machine-gunned just downriver from Juárez. His daughter went to his funeral. And she was machine-gunned. We do not know more. Nothing has been reported. Just as a few days ago, the government said it seized thirteen hit men in a tiny village just downriver from the city. But again, we have heard nothing more about them.

And then, this very morning, in the middle of June 2008, a group of businessmen put up a short video on YouTube. They demanded that the violence stop, that they would meet violence with violence. They demanded security, they demanded justice, they asked for an awful lot of things. And then, after one minute and twenty-seven seconds, they signed off and forgot to tell anyone their names. Or show their faces. But they did provide nice background music—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

The next day, leaders in the business community denied any connection with the announcement. Then, at six busy intersections, banners went up from people purporting to be the business community and announcing roughly the same warning. These were taken down almost instantly. The banners were puzzling. If they really did come from the well-heeled business community, they misspelled El Chapo Guzman’s name.

So I relax. It hardly matters that I go to a fine restaurant, and then it is burned. It hardly matters that I drink coffee in a café, and half a block away, a fistful of people go down in a burst of machine-gun fire.

The DEA and the Mexican authorities have told the newspapers that this is a war and it is being won. It seems that elements of the Gulf cartel and the Juárez cartel have joined with elements of the Sinaloa cartel in order to crush El Chapo Guzman and create a mega-cartel. And so once more, killing is done, order will return to the city and the nation, and we can all go back to a good night’s sleep. Either way,
la gente
cannot lose, don’t you see? Of course, not a single person quoted has spoken with one of the architects of this mega-cartel, and so our knowledge is based on something that we cannot really know. We must trust the authorities, even though they give us no facts that we can verify. Nor will they let us ask them questions. They simply announce things to the press, who then print these announcements for us. The only real facts are the dead people, and they are barely facts since we do not always learn their names, and more and more, we do not even learn that they have been killed.