Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (26 page)

They tell him they are looking for guns and drugs, and separate him from his stunned son. When they leave, the commander advises him, “Behave well and follow our suggestions.”

On June 14, he steps out of his house and waters his small garden of squash, cantaloupe, watermelon, and cucumbers. He has a pear tree, also an apricot tree and three roses blooming pink and red. He is going to make his son breakfast, a task he enjoys. It is a Saturday. He notices five guys in a green pickup seventy yards away. They look like soldiers and they are watching him. But he is not certain because there is a store down the block where the soldiers come to buy cocaine, and so he thinks just maybe their presence has nothing to do with him. Then, they start the truck and cruise slowly past him. They are short, dark, and clearly from the south of Mexico. A while later, they come back, but this time in a white vehicle. And they park and watch his house.

Still, he thinks this cannot really be happening. He has behaved properly. Local drug people have offered him money, not to mention the
tiendas
selling cocaine.

He’s told them, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to pay me. I am not going to write about them.”

Besides, he knows that both the army and the police are involved in the local drug sales, so just who is he going to inform about these illegal businesses? Instead, he’s picked up his extra money by writing publicity releases and selling ads for the newspaper.

But he knows, “The hardest part of the job is to survive on the salary. That is why
sobres
exist.” It has been years since he completely trusted anyone he works with.

He goes inside and makes
machaca
with eggs for his boy. He tells his son that he is going to his office and that the boy should keep an eye on the house.

He reads the papers at his desk, then goes three blocks to the police station to talk to a drunk the police have arrested, the usual small moments of a small-town newspaper. Outside, the green pickup is back and watching him. He leaves his office around noon and stops by a friend’s welding shop. This time, he realizes the white vehicle is trailing him. Now he is worried, so he and his friend go to a little store, buy some beers, and return to the shop. There is a place nearby where people buy cocaine, and he sees a guy from the green pickup go in there and then come out. He does not like what he is seeing.

He calls home to make sure his son has showered, because he must be at church at 4 P.M. Emilio heads home and brings some food for his son. Then he returns to his friend’s welding shop. After a while, he goes out to get some more beers and now the white car is back. It pulls up right in front of the store he is in. Upset now, he calls his friend and tells him to come around to the back of the store. He escapes, and his friend takes him back to his house. A few hours later, Emilio ventures out and retrieves his own truck.

His son goes to church and then down to the plaza to be with friends. Emilio stays at his friend’s house, and around eight o’clock, a woman calls and says, “Emilio, I have to see you right now. Where are you? I can’t talk over the phone.”

He is entering a place he will only recognize later: denial. He is trying to pretend none of this means anything and none of this has anything to do with him.

She comes over and tells him she is dating a soldier and the military people all talk about how they are going to kill him. She is crying. She says, “Emilio, you have to leave now. They are going to kill you.”

It is late June 2008,
the solstice has passed, the heat is on, the city boils at over a hundred degrees. The churches of El Paso announce they are going to pray for an end to the violence in Juárez. Over the weekend, at least twelve die. Some guys are drinking, and one of them is machine-gunned. There is a fiesta to celebrate the baptism of a baby. Two are killed at the party. Some guys approach a college student, and they ask him to hold some stuff for them. He refuses. They beat him to death. Most are fairly routine butcheries—a hail of bullets from machine guns, the thud as a body hits the ground. Around 3 A.M., a man staggers across the bridge to El Paso. He is full of bullet holes and would like some medical attention.

On Monday, June 23, a corpse is found on the western edge of the city. Nearby is a black daypack. It holds the head. There is no identification on the corpse. He is about thirty-four years old, and he rests on the side of a Catholic church. Anapra is a place where people squat in shacks on land they do not own, steal electricity from high-power lines, buy water off a truck, and work in American factories. They seem to eat sand since the ground here is largely sand. The woman who lost her sister in 1998 to rape and murder and started the campaign to paint utility poles with pink paint and black crosses to memorialize the city’s penchant for killing women, well, she was raised here. The sprawling slum also hosts train robbers who regularly hold up the U.S. trains that pass just a few feet across the wire on its northern edge. One dirt track links it to Juárez. Anapra is home to tens of thousands of people who do not exist to those who govern the city.

It is also a touchstone for me, a place where all the pieties of free trade and hands across the border and growing the economy become grit in my mouth. It abuts the United States, and so its residents stare at a world they cannot touch.

But the body by the church, well, the head is really severed and in the daypack. So also the legs and arms, and they are scattered over an area of about ninety feet. The feet wear black socks. Someone has covered the torso with a blanket—green, brown and yellow. The clothing was in a white plastic bag. Children found the body. Adults in the area saw a car going by Sunday night with a man who appeared to be a captive. Someone really cared and put in the extra work.

The authorities say they are investigating.

There is delirium induced by the heat.

I am slowly ceasing to function.

The bodies all blur. The killings merge into one river of blood.

I have reached a serene state where things no longer make sense but simply exist. So much depends on a decapitated corpse with the head in a black daypack in the white heat of June.

The killers hardly matter. What would a solved case really tell me? It would be like having the men who raped Miss Sinaloa explain to me their motives. Because they could. Because they wanted to have her. Because the air is dusty, the city is hot, the houses are small, the smell of sewers is everywhere, the police are not useful, guns are available, killings are possible.

And besides executions, the city kills in other ways. Social services are a phrase, not reality. Blanca Edna Paez Orozco is twenty-two when she dies. Her brother Abel is twenty and he survives. They are both playing with matches and the house catches fire. This is very bad because they had been tied to the bed that morning when the father, also named Abel and sixty-five years of age, had to leave the house in order to earn a living. The brother and sister are retarded and social services in Juárez mean being tied to a bed with a rope. A small death in the tidal wave of gore.

I think if I ran into some local criminologists, say, on my way to a bar, I would kill them with my bare hands in order not to hear their explanations. I have dreamed of burning the newspapers in both Juárez and El Paso to the ground so that they could write no more stories about mysterious armed commandos or drug cartels that are having a big dust-up in the city, cartels that have not made a single public utterance but somehow are apparently well known to the press and whose motives and members and actions are transparent to those toiling in newsrooms. I have also considered torching the nearest DEA office since it offers battlefield reports on the killings in the city without visiting the battlefield.

Imagine a city with five hundred corpses and not a single shred of evidence explaining their slaughter. No one even knows where those people from the death houses have gone. This last thing gnaws on me. It seems reasonable to me that someone—say, a newspaper reporter or maybe one of the local intellectuals who coat the op-ed pages of the paper—might ask the powers that be just what they have done with forty-five stiffs that came out of the soil of the city.

But I am not bitter. I like heat. And I am focused, like a monk in a Zen garden, on the sheer physical feel of things. I take my bodies one at a time. I do not question why they have been killed. I do not wonder who the killers are.

It is the twenty-fourth day of June, the clock is running out on the first six months of death, and so far 518 have died, 16 of them women. Now I wait for an arbitrary time span, the first half of the year, to end, and an arbitrary measure of life—murders in Juárez—to be tallied.

Like the murdered, I have stopped learning. Yesterday afternoon, in the dull heat two guys entered an insurance office. They left an employee dead. A reporter leaves a bar and takes twelve rounds. The owners of junkyards are being kidnapped for ransom. They complain to officials. The relative of a U.S. congressman is kidnapped and released when the money is paid. The press totes things up and announces that 28 percent of all the executions in Mexico happen in Juárez.

The old man is walking his dog in his neighborhood in Juárez. Thieves keep breaking into his place to steal the copper pipes. Just a week or so ago, someone blew up a car right in the front of the house. So he and the old lady seldom leave the house together. Someone must stand guard. Just down the street lives an ex-cop. The old man walking his dog sees a white van pull up full of armed guys, and they drag the ex-cop out of his home, and then one of the armed guys says, “
No es él
, it’s not him,” and they let him go.

On June 21, twenty-one people are murdered in drug killings in Chihuahua, thirty-eight in all of Mexico. Eighteen of the deaths are in Juárez. On June 26, the fifth top commander of the federal police to be slaughtered in thirteen months goes down while having lunch in Mexico City. The killer escapes. Witnesses notice a man videotaping the murder. Then walking calmly away. On June 28 in Juárez, four men are executed in the afternoon. Earlier in the day, a woman’s body was found—she was killed inside a burrito café. Another man also took a barrage in his home, plus two fragmentation grenades.

A city policeman explains to American radio listeners how he gets to work: Never obey a stop sign or a red light, because if you do, killers will pull up beside you and pump you full of bullets. This matter-of-fact account purrs across the airwaves on National Public Radio, a lonely message from a forgotten city.

Esther Chávez by June is looking to build a second women’s shelter near downtown. Her current facility on the edge of the city is a two-hour bus ride each way for many of the poor. The city tells her of some vacant land she can have. She drives there to discover a bustling slum built out of pallets from the loading docks of the American factories.

No one can keep track of things here, not even of vacant land.

June is running out, and I can’t tell if the murders this month are at 120 or 130. Nor can I bear at the moment to go back over my tally. I’ll wait for the month to end, and then, as is the custom, the Juárez papers will briefly announce the slaughter, and then, as is the custom, it will vanish from memory.

The woman in the burrito café was forty-seven when the man entered and killed her. Six months ago, I might have wondered about her story. Did she know him? Was he a husband or lover? What did she look like? And was she frightened as she entered the café shortly before midnight? I would have had questions and feelings and sought answers. Now I do not. There are too many, that is part of the problem. But also, the answers seem a way to erase what is happening, a way to explain a death so that in a real sense, it does not matter because, given the explanation, it is inevitable, unique, and irrelevant to my life or your life.

And so, I do not ask. The deaths blur, the names go by too fast. I sit here blinded by the storm and ignorant of the lives that led to the deaths.

The air, feel the air, the sun, rising and warming the skin, the broken sidewalk underfoot, the sewage wafting down the lane, the sounds of cars and buses, there, take it all in, absolute, finite, actual. Swallow the sensation of the city whole, and this will stop the blurring, steady the mind, and make it possible to believe in order and calm. Each murder is explicable. There is a body, and there are killers, there is a time of day or night, the gunman has a reason, or the gunmen were sent by someone with a reason, and even the innocent bystander mowed down by accident, this corpse, too, has an explanation and can be made sense of by tracing the trajectory of the rounds, the entry point of the bullet into the flesh.

But then it breaks down. Over five hundred murders in six months, and still, no one seems to make sense of the murders, and no one seems able to say the names of the killers or to explain who they are, who they represent, and what they want. No matter how many facts and details are assessed, the killings overwhelm simple explanations. There are too many authors writing too many short stories on bodies, there are too many styles of handwriting, and forensic specialists get baffled by all the murderous forms of cursive writing. No matter how clever the examiner, still, there is a door behind whatever explanation is offered. The gangs are sent to kill, but who sends them? The cartels are killing, but who in the cartels gives the orders and why? The army slaughters, but who is behind the army? And what if a person finds the door and opens it and finally gets in the room where the orders are issued, the deaths decreed, yes, walks into that room. And finds nothing but dust, cobwebs, and a cold cup of coffee?