Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (27 page)

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe that room has skeletons, bones centuries old, and these gleaming white forms run everything and are beyond party or deals or moments, and are—like the sounds and smells of the city—simply part of the very fabric of the thing called life. They are death, these skeletons, and they are life, and so we avoid going into that room because we want an explanation that does not involve our lives and our souls and the very ground we stand on. We want peace and quiet—that tranquility the mayor says is lacking in the city—we want blue skies and the breath of summer as we sit in the shade of a tree and the rose blooms by the doorway. But mainly we want to not know what we know, to forget that this thing within us has always been there, a virus lurking in our being that has now slipped out into the flow of life and ravages not the city, not the people.

But the imaginary life we have always led and now must realize was a lie.

A puddle of blood seeping into the brown earth by the roadside.

The body has just been taken away by the authorities.

I lean over and flies rise up off the blood.

Below, a herd of goats searches for food in a garbage dump. The hillside gleams with shards of broken glass.

The flies rise to my face.

And I can only decide whether to face what I see.

Or turn away.

We are high on the hill in Salt Lake City, and this is good. El Pastor is considering a deviled egg when I point out its name in English and suggest it may be satanic. He laughs, and this is a good sign. It is October now, and Juárez has had about twelve hundred murders so far this year. The business community worries that tourists have stopped crossing the bridges for a visit. So they have put up a new billboard on the U.S. side: “Juárez, Land of Encounters.”

In the last, two months, El Pastor has had three messages.

The first time, the federal police came to his office at 6 P.M. Then they returned at 9 P.M. Nothing was ever said.

After that, the phone calls began. A person would say he was with the federal police and he understood El Pastor had a lot of money. After all, it must take a lot of money to run the crazy place in the desert. The second call was similar. And the third.

El Pastor had been given a very nice new car by a man who believed in Jesus Christ, or wanted to believe in Him. This man was a friend of a state policeman in Juárez, a law enforcement agency that handles public safety, killings for the cartel, and also moves drugs. El Pastor began to worry about his fine car because everyone told him that only a narco could own such a car.

So he stopped driving it.

And he stopped coming to Juárez on a schedule.

Now he comes without warning and leaves without warning and struggles to create no pattern. He has long kept his wife and family across the line, where there is less violence. Now he stays home more than he had planned.

And so he is in Salt Lake City giving talks to raise money for the people in the crazy place. He tells the audiences of Jesus, he tells them how Mexicans only want to come north to do dirty jobs Americans do not like.

He asks people, “Do you want to go to the fields and dig potatoes? We will. I don’t think you will.”

He also laughs a lot and smiles and explains how he was a drunk and drug addict and chased a lot of women, and finally the U.S. government got weary of his escapades and threw him back into Mexico. And then he lived on the street, was very dirty, did anything he could find, ate out of garbage cans. Until Jesus saved him.

He feels good here. True, almost everyone is white, and El Pastor is brown. And no one here even knew there is a secret city within this city until one day, when at least eighty thousand illegal Mexicans marched in the streets of Salt Lake asking for a little respect and a lot less pressure from the U.S. government. We are both taking a little holiday from death. Not an escape, because the power of Juárez and the scent of Miss Sinaloa always draws us back.

We sit in the nice house on the hillside, while the fall leaves rustle in their last frolic before the killing season comes and they tumble down yellow and brown and taste life no more. In this exact moment, the poetry of Juárez continues ceaselessly in the daily newspaper of the
ciudad
:

Body
found in western Juárez
A man turned up dead
in an abandoned lot
of the colonia
21st century
in the western part of the city
around
2:00 P.M.
The victim’s hands were tied
behind his back
and he was thrown face down on the ground.
Personnel
from the Forensic Medical Service
arrived at the scene
to take away
the body
and collect evidence
that might have been left
around him.

There is a beauty in this killing, music, a sonata perhaps, but an extremely loud sonata.

Yet people here listen to El Pastor’s message in the safe city in the safe valley where harm is outlawed—everyone says so—by the flag, by God and the local police. When they see images of the people living in the crazy place, they feel bad, and they give him money. When they see the video of him in the yard at the crazy place calming people with his embrace, they give him money. And when he goes into one of the rebar cells and tells an enraged toothless woman to be calm “in the name of Jesus,” and she slowly stops screaming and yelling and follows him out into the yard as he chants the name of Jesus—when the people at the fund-raiser see that footage, they don’t know what to say, but still they give him money—a hundred here, a hundred there.

And no one here is threatening to murder him, or calling on the phone with scary messages.

El Pastor is reconciled to death and being reunited with his Savior. After all, he has it all planned—the huge barbeque, lots of meat, music, and song.

He can handle death because it means he will be with Jesus.

It’s just that when the car comes, and they take him away to be murdered, he hopes they do not torture him.

He hopes they will not apply fire to parts of his body or stick in an ice pick and run it along the bone in a local ritual called bone tickling. And should they desire to cut off his head, as some do, he hopes that at this point, he is dead. He also hopes he is dead when they decide to cut off his hands or feet.

He can handle being murdered.

He will then be with the Lord.

But the torture part, that makes him very upset.

We have the numbers. Since January 1994, there have been 3,955 murders in Juárez. Since January 2008, there have been 540 murders. It is the last day of June, and there is still time. The numbers that give us comfort, those dates and tallies, these numbers are still tumbling in. We can write them in columns on white paper and install order in our minds.

But still, that door must be opened.

On the last day of June, bees attack seven people. On the last day of June, a fifty-four-year-old woman pulls into the parking lot of a convenience store after withdrawing eleven thousand pesos from a bank (found on the body) and is shot dead with ten rounds. On the last day of June, a man says his wife and children are missing. On the last day of June, the total number of murders for the month hits 139, and the total for the year reaches 541. Or 543, depending on which paper one reads. The numbers blur now. No one knows how many people have been snatched, nor what became of them. Just as no one knows where to file the corpses from the two houses of death.

On the last day of June, I see and taste and feel the fully mature culture of death. Death from low wages, death from drug deals, death from unknowable wars, death from going to the bank, death from riding down the street, death from every direction. Death is blamed on all the factories that have brought the poor to the city where they now live in a carpet of slums. Death is blamed on the drug industry that has brought violence to the city as heavily armed men move white powder and billions of dollars. Death is blamed on the Americans who want cheap goods and so create warrens of slaves, who want strong drugs and so create cartels of machine guns. It has taken decades to transform a sleepy border town into a city of death, but now the work is done and the thing has a life of its own and that life is murder. Death has aged and is now the bony hand on the shoulder, the culture when the sun rises and when the sun sets.

The city is fiestas, dust, cantinas, discos, and people savoring the weekends and dreaming of the nights when love will find them. There is song in the air. The culture of death becomes a life. The slaughtered die fast, the rest grind out time in dust, poverty, and bouts of terror. Only six months ago, everyone was horrified when forty people were slaughtered in one month. Now a hundred a month seems acceptable because in the culture of death . . . life goes on.

In March, according to a poll, 90 percent of the people of Juárez supported the army. By the end of June, 30 percent of the local people, according to a poll, said the military occupation of the city was of little or no consequence. The general in charge said that those who questioned the army’s success were either narcos or worked for narcos. Besides, he thought narcos probably paid for the poll.

Life goes on.

The family comes with the body, and they are a half hour late for the funeral. They do not come into the church but have a benediction said in the parking lot. They are afraid more people will be killed if they linger with the corpse of their murdered family member.

She sits on the piano bench, her black hair clean and shining as she bends over the keys. The moon is full and rides the sky hunting for more bodies. Two days ago, they killed seven. Yesterday, in the afternoon sometime in October, six went down. Or was it seven? It is getting very hard to keep track of the daily or monthly count. Even the grand total for the year seems like a smear of blood on a wall. No matter how hard I work at my tally, I fall behind. I write down numbers in my black notebook, and then take a sip of coffee in the dawn light, and before I return the cup to the immaculate white saucer, the number is gone. Juárez, even now as I sit in the room, wine in hand, moonlight playing off the walls, yes, at this very moment Juárez marauds through my mind: corpses, ghosts, bullets, knives, severed heads, all manner of carnival moments, a parade from a lively hell, shapeless, formless, and often meaningless. She leans forward flicking her fingers on the white keys as the rhapsody pumps so much energy and hope into the room.

So I sit, glass of wine in hand, as she strokes the keyboard and plays “Rhapsody in Blue.” The opening is bold, the bellowing of a young century and a cocksure country. She stumbles on parts and apologizes, but there is no need for such comments. Her playing is beautiful, as her black hair and fair skin glow in the moonlight washing over the dark room. The moon walks through the window and plays on the white wall. Branches and leaves dance as shadows.

It was like this. Three cars arrive and empty out. Six human beings are lined up against the wall of a gymnasium in the bright light of the afternoon. Or the dimming light of early evening. Facts are slippery here, perhaps, because of the blood. The men were taken from Colonia Azteca and brought to this location. One of them is said to be a former policeman, but we cannot be certain of this. Here is what we can be certain of: Six men line up against a wall, their faces turned to the blocks. Children are playing in the street. There is a settling of accounts about to take place. The men are in their twenties or thirties, they wear jeans of various colors and T-shirts. Except for one guy in gym shorts. Then, the guns fire and now the men lie side by side on the ground. Spent cartridges, at least a hundred spent cartridges from AK-47s and AR-15 rifles and .40-caliber and 9 mm pistols litter the ground around the bodies.

The locals later remember a few things. They said the shooting lasted ten minutes, but my God, they insist, it seemed like ten hours. The police are called, but it takes them a very long time to arrive.

Later, one local says, “We don’t understand how it is that the police did not catch them, because the bullets sounded very loud, and it went on for a long time.”

What fills the air is not sirens but this: cries of pain, voices begging for mercy, the roar of guns. Then silence. But this pure and sacred silence is broken by moans and screams. And so more shooting is required. Finally, it is finished.

The shooters have thoughtfully brought a sign that they leave by the bodies.

MESSAGE FOR RATS: THIS WILL CONTINUE.

About the same time, in another part of the city, a carpenter sits outside his house. Neighbors later report that the carpenter was a peaceful and hard-working man. This could be true. It hardly matters. Reasons are for people who seek to avoid the killing. The rest of us, those truly committed to death and slaughter, we need no reasons.

So a man has lived forty-three years and he is a carpenter. A car comes down the street and moves very slowly.

When the police finally do bother to come, they find eleven cartridges.

And the body.

But, I am remiss in my counting. I need the wine, the music pouring from her fingers as she strokes the keys and fills the room with that famous rhapsody in blue.

Because then I forget what I see and smell and feel. I forget that it is cold in the night now, and the woman is twenty-two and she has four small children and one is six months old and another one died last year at birth and, ah, tell me if the lovers are losers in the shacks and rough lanes, go ask the twenty-two-year-old who was raped as a child and now has doomed children to fill her hours and she lives in a city where the rapist is free, more free than she will ever be, since he was never charged and he has never carried a child and feeds no young and hungry mouths, and the woman has no man and all of this loving family goes hungry and the floor is dirt, there is no heat, and I must listen to my rhapsody, the one called blue, maybe code blue, and enjoy the wine and refuse all explanations of the violence as the city storms into my mind with the hunger that will never be filled by anything but screams.