Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (24 page)

9. Cops hide behind masks as they protest their torture and kidnapping by the army.

10. They kill you on the way to the mall.

11. They kill you in front of your home and then signal their gang loyalties.

12. The doctors protest their extortion and kidnapping.

13. The woman washes cars on the street and her friend grieves her murder.

14. The university student is slaughtered by soldiers.

15. She is pregnant and learns that her husband has been killed.

16. They kill a professor.

17. He rests at the morgue with gang tattoos and wounds that mark his journey.

18. And then a child goes into a mass grave.

19. Then ten go down at another clinic and the government says the dead are criminals.

20. And red roses for a blue city.

If I could get into that room, I would finally find someone to talk to who is not a liar, someone quite different from me.

Someone who really knows the score.

Someone who would stop inventing explanations and give me the sensation of rounds from an AK-47 ripping through their hide, and did it sound loud or was it like being underwater? And when they cut your balls off before they killed you, what were you thinking? And tell the expressions on their faces and give the character of their eyes. And were they wearing uniforms, and if so, what kind—Mexican army, federal police, state police, city police, or their allies from the street gangs?

And does the beer still taste good and cold when you are dead?

They are leaving, and now this fact is finally noticed. By late June, after months of the president of Mexico periodically announcing that the fabled cartels are on the run, after months of the mayor of Juárez periodically announcing that the city is fine, that only bad people die, that there is a lack of tranquility but that peace and joy are on the way, after months of the press timidly probing corpses and finding in their entrails proof positive of cartel connections, the official lid suddenly comes off . . . because they are leaving. The people with money are fleeing to the United States.

The mayor of Juárez keeps a home in El Paso and one in Dallas. The rich are hiring U.S. lawyers to get political asylum. Turns out the burning bars and restaurants are getting demands for protection—or else. Turns out that no one feels safe in Juárez even with the Mexican army close at hand. Turns out the city is in a state of terror.

Except the imaginary city, the golden city, the beautiful city that for years everyone in Juárez clings to when blood flows in the streets. This city is dynamic and fun, full of fragrances and laughter—the real city—everyone has said this for years. The huge slums where the factory workers live, they are not the real city. The bodies left on the street from drug deals gone bad, they are not the real city. The filth, the potholes, the buses spewing black exhaust, they are not the real city. The real city is a tiny zone with nice restaurants and discos, gated communities with armed guards where the rich live in huge houses.

And now the rich are fleeing. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are moving into the United States, where they have always kept their money, and now they plan to store their lives, also. They have papers, and if they don’t have papers, they have something else the U.S. government understands and respects: money. So they move and fill out little documents and live as the rich tend to live everywhere: They live very well. They have been scooting out of Mexico for years, building up their bank accounts in U.S. vaults, buying homes in nice cities, preparing for the day when someone notices that they have all the money and almost no one else has any.