Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (32 page)

The boy had been in treatment before, and failed. Then, last Friday, the family could tell he was on drugs again, and so they took him next door and put him in the center. He’d basically been raised by his grandmother. After the shooting, the boy was one of the wounded put in a van for transportation to the hospital. He didn’t make it and was left on a street corner. His grandmother found him and wailed. His head was a mess, he was covered with blood, and he seemed very still to her. He was gone. The old woman had planned to take him out of the center that Saturday. Thursday morning, she was taken to the hospital with a heart attack. And now, at the wake on Friday afternoon, everyone is quiet and tired and the mother shrugs when explaining what ambition her son might have harbored.

There is nothing puzzling at the wake next door to the slaughterhouse. The killers give no reason for killing, they simply fire. The army parks down the street and does nothing. The neighbors hide during the fifteen minutes of murder. No one wants a real name publicized. The police do not come, the ambulances stay away. Gang kids paint a sheet, drift into and out of the wake, and look at the body with blank eyes. The girl, maybe sixteen years old, is pregnant, and she sips Seven-Up a few feet from her boyfriend’s body. The mother answers questions with a flat voice. And a whisper begins: that the church deacon killed had a premonition that he should not come. That he froze when he was to read a Bible verse and could not speak. Soon other signs will be remembered, and somehow the blood and the flies will be erased and made smooth by legend. The baby leaning over the coffin—the glass top now covered with rosaries brought by local people, the base surrounded by carnations and gladiolas and daisies and roses—will grow up learning tales and stories and miracles associated with the killing, and this will be part of being alive on this street with the dust in the air. After all, one pregnant woman at the meeting survived—the dead deacon’s body was draped over hers. She will be proof of God or the devil or some force besides the flies and dust and sun, the water that fails, the electricity that comes and goes, the police who might kill you, the army who might kill you, the gangs that might kill you. And the gang that is all you have or ever will have in your short life. After all, there is that photo of you and your friends taped on your coffin lid, and you are all tossing out gang signs with your fingers.

So much depends on a blue carnation and fingers flicking messages into the void. The white carnations have a blue dye by the body resting in the coffin. And I think, okay, this is what it is about, doing the best, the very best one can do under the circumstances. So much depends on the people in the neighborhood, who say the gunshots could be heard for blocks and blocks. About the time of the killings at the center, the government announced that there have been about 839 murders in the Juárez area this year, but only eighteen people have been charged.

So much depends on the worker at the center who is busy loading the vans so that all can flee Juárez, and I ask him, just what do you think is going on here? and he says, “Something evil. Something very, very evil.”

To ask what your son wanted to become is to imagine a world that is not a thought in the yard with the dust, the canvas hoisted on poles for shade, the vine wilting on the fence in the afternoon sun, and the coffin resting in the kitchen by the dirty pots and pans.

On the kitchen wall, the tear-away calendar has stalled at August 13/14, the night of the killing. But of course, time goes on, and the boy in the box will not be the last to die, nor the last member of Locos 23. We are in a place without beginning or end, and all the ways to tell the story fail me and repel me. There are many dead, and they each have a tale. Beyond that, the efforts to explain are to me efforts to erase truth or deny truth or simply to tell lies. I don’t know what is going on, nor do the dead or the living. But there are these stories of the killings, there is the tortured flesh, the individual moments of horror, and I rest on those moments because they are actual and beyond question.

Dead Reporter Driving

The woman and Emilio
collect his son. They stop by his house to get some clothes and then flee to a small ranch about six miles west of Ascensión, where he can hide. He is terrified. Later that night, a friend takes him back to his house once again. He wears a big straw hat, slips low in the seat. He sneaks into his house and gets vital documents. A friend delivers a small black car out at the ranch.

All day Sunday, he tries to think of a way to save his life. He comes up with only one answer: flight. No matter where he goes in Mexico, he will have to find a job and use his identity cards and the army will track him down. He now knows they will never forget his story from 2005, that he cannot be redeemed.

He tells his boy, “We are not going back to our house. The soldiers may kill me, and I don’t want to leave you alone.”

Monday morning, he drives north very fast. He takes all his legal papers so that he can prove who he is. He expects asylum from the government of the United States when he crosses at Antelope Wells, New Mexico.

What he gets is this: He is immediately jailed, as is his son. They are separated. It is a common practice to break up families to crush the will—often jailing men and tossing the women and children back over the fence. He is denied bond, and no hearing is scheduled to handle his case. He is taken to El Paso and placed in a private prison. Had he entered the United States illegally and then asked for asylum, he would have been almost immediately bonded out. But since he entered legally by declaring his identity and legal status at a port of entry and applied for asylum, he is placed in prison because Homeland Security declares that Emilio has failed to prove that “he does not represent a threat to the community.”

It is possible to see his imprisonment as simply the normal by-product of bureaucratic blindness and indifference. But I don’t think that is true. No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum, because if the U.S. government honestly faced facts, it would have to admit that Mexico is not a society that respects human rights. Just as the United States would be hard pressed, if it faced facts, to explain to its own citizens how it can justify giving the Mexican army $1.4 billion under Plan Merida, a piece of black humor that is supposed to fight a war on drugs. But then, the American press is the chorus in this comedy since it continues to report that the Mexican army is in a war to the death with the drug cartels. There are two errors in these accounts. One is simple: The war in Mexico is for drugs and the enormous money to be made by supplying American habits, a torrent of cash that the army, the police, the government, and the cartels all lust for. Second, the Mexican army is a government-financed criminal organization, a fact most Mexicans learn as children.

Emilio Gutiérrez becomes a new kind of man, one who has lost his career, failed to protect his son from jail, a man with no clear future. He is deloused, given a blue jumpsuit, and set to work scrubbing floors for a dollar a day or an apple. He has tried to enter the United States legally and now makes less than what the illegal migrants who work in the country make. He also remembers all those bribes, all those
sobres
, he refused for years. He thinks, “If I had taken bribes, I wouldn’t be here in prison.” And of course, he is right, because if he’d been dutifully corrupt, he’d be safe inside the system and still living and writing in Ascensión, Chihuahua, with his son. Instead, he is surrounded by 1,200 to 1,300 Africans, Middle Easterners, East Indians, Russians, and, of course, Mexicans swept up in the increasing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. The Mexicans are forlorn because the raids have separated husbands from wives and parents from children.

“The Mexicans,” he explains, “are treated the worst. The staff curses us and calls us rats, narcos, and criminals. The work of the prison is done by the Mexicans and Central Americans. It is ironic, the illegals are arrested for working and then put in prison and made to work for nothing.”

When he crossed, he imagined that the U.S. government would take him to some safe house, perhaps guard him and protect him. He did not expect jail. Now he feels impotent. He is angry at the United States because they criticize other nations for human rights abuses, and when he flees for his life, they treat him like a criminal. He has nightmares of being deported. And he is desolate because he cannot learn anything about his son. He remembers those moments he loved: making his son’s breakfast, washing his son’s clothes. Now he can do nothing for him. Emilio cries a lot.

For a month, he is not allowed to speak to his son. He is tormented by the fear that the boy is being mistreated. He worries that older boys might molest him. The prison officials refuse to tell him anything. Finally, he gets a ten-minute phone call. The boy says he is doing okay. Emilio tells him they will not be able to go back to Mexico. He can sense his son is bitter—he has lost his home, his friends, even his dog. Emilio wants to hug him and kiss him as he did each day at home.

Eventually, they get to talk briefly twice a month, and the boy has his fifteenth birthday in a cage. Emilio finally gets a lawyer, but often he cannot even talk to him when he visits because he is too depressed.

The lawyer explains the facts of life to him. He says, “Maybe the United States does not want you, but we know Mexico does not want you. Think of your son.”

The prison is haunted by a Cuban ghost. Twenty years before, the man hung himself in the shower. And now at night, sometimes all the showers come on, or the toilets are emptied of water. Security cameras see the Cuban in the library in the middle of the night reading. There are sounds of a guitar playing. The ghost is a message that tells Emilio what prison can do to a man.

His son is released to relatives in El Paso after a few months in jail. He tells his father not to give up. He tells the press, “I really miss him, and I miss my home, too, but for me, my dad is more important. Because if something happens to him, I think that I would die. Because he is the only person I have, and I love him more than anyone in the world.”

At the end of January 2009, Emilio Gutiérrez is suddenly released from prison without any warning. When they called him to the office, he assumed he was being shipped to another prison in the American gulag. His lawyer, Carlos Spector, also had no indication of the release.

Now Emilio sits in the sun and tries to teach me Mexico as it is today. He has a hearing coming up in March, but this could be postponed because the U.S. government loves postponing such hearings in the hopes that migrants will give up and go back home. Emilio cannot even work, because the U.S. government has yet to give him a work permit. He stays with friends.

“Mexicans,” he explains, “know the army is a bunch of brutes. But what is going on now is a coup d’état by the army. The president is illegitimate. The army has installed itself. They have become the government. They are installed in all the state governments. They control the municipal police. They are everywhere but the Ministry of Education—after all, they are too illiterate to run that. The president has his hands tied, and he has tied them.”

But Emilio is a creature of hope. He does not think he will be deported. He has faith in the new U.S. administration because “the race Obama belongs to has been enslaved. I think he shares this history of discrimination with Latinos. And he will realize the huge human rights abuses in Mexico. There are thousands of people like me here. There are thousands of abandoned homes in Juárez alone. If I am sent back to Mexico, I might live a day or a few years. The army may kill me immediately or wait for my case to grow cold.”

But if he loses his asylum case, he does have the right to pick a third country for his deportation. He is thinking maybe Cuba or Venezuela because perhaps they will take him for the pleasure of humiliating the United States on human rights grounds.

He is a man who has moved into a reality I cannot reach. He is almost beyond everyday concerns because he has lost everything and eventually may lose his life.

He tells me, “I have learned to like myself, to be thankful to God, to love my son even more. The only happy people in Mexico are the politicians and the army officers.”

Two days later, Emilio holds a press conference with two other Mexican nationals, Jorge Luis Aguirre, the creator of a Web site of gossip and news in Juárez who has also fled for his life, and Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, the supervising attorney for the State Committee of Human Rights in Chihuahua. They are forming an organization, Periodistas Mexicanos en Exilio (Mexican Journalists in Exile, or PEMEXX). They all say the same thing: that the Mexican army is terrorizing the nation and killing people out of hand.

One reporter asks Jorge Luis Aguirre if he will also apply for asylum, and he answers that he has to think carefully about it since Emilio was jailed for seven months. He says that there is a kind of discrimination by the American government toward Mexican journalists in terms of asylum. Aguirre was on his way to the funeral of a reporter murdered in Juárez when he received a call over his cell phone saying he would be next. He promptly fled to El Paso.