Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (33 page)

And then Carlos Spector says, “This is precisely the reason we formed this organization. Jorge’s fear is legitimate and his concerns are real. . . . We couldn’t even talk about this until we got Emilio out. This was part of the Bush administration’s ‘Guantanamization’ of the refugee process. By locking people up, especially Mexican asylum applicants, and making them, through a war of attrition, give up their claims there at the camp. I’ve represented ten cops seeking asylum, and not one of them lasted longer than two months. Emilio lasted seven months. On the basis of he had his son and he knew he was going to be killed. There was nowhere that he could go and practice his profession.”

There are forty reporters in El Paso—print, radio, and television. Only one or two tiny reports are published by any of them. And the matter of the Mexican army killing innocent Mexicans is not mentioned at all. Like the U.S. government, they apparently believe the Mexican army is some force of light in the darkness of Mexico.

Spector is a man on fire. He is fifty-four, red-haired, big, El Paso born and raised. He has built an immigration practice. He’s half Jewish, half Mexican in ancestry. In his twenties, he moved to Israel under the law of return and lived on a kibbutz. But eventually, the border claimed him. He has been looking for a case like Emilio’s for years, a case of a clean reporter seeking political asylum from the government of Mexico. Now he thinks he has it and can make precedent.

When Emilio was taken into U.S. custody, he was interviewed at length on his motives for fleeing Mexico. He gave a long statement about why he believed the Mexican army would kill him and why he could not stay in Mexico in any capacity and stay alive. Accidentally, without knowing U.S. law, he made Carlos Spector’s case.

Political asylum is only possible under U.S. law if the applicant has some immutable characteristic—say, the person is a homosexual in a place where government persecutes homosexuals, or has a religion whose members the government slaughters. A policeman fleeing for his life would not be eligible, because the U.S. government would insist the cop could become, say, a plumber and live happily ever after. But Emilio’s deposition gave him an immutable characteristic: those three stories he filed in 2005 about the army. After that, he apologized. He ceased writing anything bad about the army, even when he witnessed them killing and disappearing people in his town in February 2008. None of this helped him. When the army returned in force in April 2008, they came after him and planned to kill him.

Spector says, “The concept of revenge is part of the Mexican political system. Emilio has insulted the institution, and it has an incredible memory. The only thing worse he could do, he has done also—to leave the country and denounce it.”

So Emilio Gutiérrez has an immutable characteristic: He wrote the truth about the Mexican army, and now they will kill him, even if it takes forever. He just told the truth about the Mexican army to the U.S. press, and they will ignore him forever.

Surely, such a man cannot be allowed to live in my country.

After all, a man whose high school classmate was raped, tortured, and murdered by the Mexican army, who has taken note as people were murdered in his town and disappeared by the Mexican army, and who has been sentenced to death by the Mexican army cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

But what lingers in my mind is not that he cannot live in Mexico but that he cannot live within any American understanding of Mexico. He is the unacceptable face of the border. He can be championed by U.S. organizations devoted to defending the rights of reporters, but what he says about corruption in Mexico—corruption in the government, corruption in the military, and corruption in the press—this remains out of bounds and falls on deaf ears.

On Tuesday, March 3, four Mexican army officers visit a friend of Carlos’s in Juárez. At that instant, Spector moves from knowing Mexico to feeling its breath on the back of his neck. In the photograph that the Mexican army officers show to his friend, Carlos is wearing a blue suit and entering the El Paso county courthouse. The photograph was taken the previous Thursday, when he appeared for a hearing.

The officers say, “Your friend is a criminal, and we are looking for him. Tell him to get a hold of us.”

Outside the house, more men wait in a Hummer.

Carlos takes the call from his friend and falls through space into his new life. He is a knowing player, he spent half his childhood living in Juárez. He is the man who moves freely and easily in two worlds. And now this seamless web is slashed in half.

He must think, he decides. So he drives to a Starbucks and has a cup of coffee. He looks out the window and notices two Ford Expeditions full of men, and then he remembers them behind him in traffic as he drove here. He leaves, and suddenly they are in his rearview mirror and the men in the vehicles are on their cell phones. He turns sharply and then executes a U-turn, and suddenly, he is behind the Fords. They bolt, but he notes the Chihuahuan license plates.

He is learning new facts.

His problem is all connected to representing Emilio Gutiérrez.

This problem is real—his friend in Juárez flees with his family to a distant part of Mexico.

And he can no longer have the life he once enjoyed.

“It feels like an out-of-body experience,” he says.

He has joined his client, and they live in a place beyond courts and laws and the illusions of the United States of America.

He has become a Mexican, body and soul.

Emilio says, “Carlos is now an exile, also.”

Yes, we will have
the performance here at the abandoned rehab center. Surely, ghosts can’t take up that much space, and if we run short of space, we can use the kitchen next door since the boy will be in his grave in a few short hours. It will be a quiet performance—the voices soft, the audience will not applaud, and music will not be played this time. The street noises will also fall away—the backfires from old cars, the rumble of buses, the random gunshots, the shouts, and, especially, the suffocating sound of all the silence that cloaks the city after the killings begin.

We will not allow anyone with answers to be present. Explanations will be killed on sight. Theories strangled by my own hands. No one can speak of cartels if he is not a member of a cartel or, at the very least, has not spoken on the record with a member of a cartel. No one will be allowed to speak of the army’s war with the cartels unless he has taken a combat role in that war. Academic commentators must show video of themselves at the killings or having beers with the killers before they will be allowed to say a single word.

No, it will be a different kind of show with a different kind of speaker. Just bodies, severed heads, bullets, these can attend. It is time to listen and look and feel.

There are a few ground rules. If you say, the killings make you sad, well, you will be killed—a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is terrible how people live in Juárez, how the poverty is awful, well, you will be killed—a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is all caused by American imperialism, you will be killed—a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is really an issue of femicide, you will be killed—a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is all the result of NAFTA, you will be killed—a bullet right into your head. If you blame American drug consumers, you will be killed—a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is all because of a war between cartels, you will be killed—a bullet right into your head.

There is no telling how long the show will go on. Every hour new cast members are created. Just now as I sit here, four men turn up. They were kidnapped and then, a few moments later, taken to a vacant lot by an industrial park in Juárez.

They are between twenty-five and forty years of age.

They are arranged carefully on the ground.

They have all been shot multiple times—twenty empty cartridges are found by the bodies.

They each received a shot to the head, the
tiro de gracia
given as a courtesy.

They shuffle to the end of the line that already reaches far out the door and trails off into the city.

Ah, in back are three guys from a good home. One of them is a motocross champion. The fine home is gray and rose-pink with white bars on the windows and a clump of three fine palms in front. The lawn is green and neatly manicured. This is the safe place in a city of violence. All the big houses have huge garages.

The doors and bars on the windows have been pried loose, according to the police. The three men have been shot in the head.

Now one by one they roll out on gurneys and are wrapped in white sheets. The attendants bounce them down the steps in front, boom, boom, boom, and even this does not stir them from their slumbers. The late afternoon light feels soft on the street, and the colors on the fine houses glow, the green trees and grace seem to embrace life and wrap around every human being and give comfort. A cluster of city cops with their blue uniforms stands in the street talking and staring back at the killing ground. All is being taken care of.

Lights, blue and red, flash atop police vehicles.

The dead go down those steps one bump at a time.

The forensic people arrive to haul the corpses away for further study.

There are men with guns and uniforms and helmets. There are men with clipboards, and they wear fine latex gloves and note down everything so that this incident of blood can be translated through records into an incident of order.

The three men, of course, shuffle to the back of the line and await their turn to speak.

Or it is a poor neighborhood and the body lies in the street wrapped in a white sheet.

The light is much harsher here.

Men in blue stand at a distance and talk. A white bus hauls people to the factories as if to say the work of the city must continue. The official vehicles are here also flashing red and blue lights.

A car drives past the corpse, the woman in the passenger seat has black hair, dark skin, and she stares at the body without expression.

A boy rides by on his bicycle.

There are very few trees here, and everything is dust.

The body has seven bullets in the chest and one in the head.

The body wears Nike shoes.

And blue jeans.

The corpse in the white sheet also takes his place at the back of the line.

It will be a long night at the performance.

The city evolves just as scholars have always told us. The basic institutions falter—police, fire, government in general. Even the Red Cross recedes. First, when gunmen came and killed four at their emergency care center, they began shutting the facility at 10 P.M. Then, their ambulance drivers began getting radio warnings not to come the scene of shootings, or they would also be killed. Now they ride with cops. The next step, of course, is not to come at all, a response that is already advanced in the police and army.

I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts, and she will remain a mystery. Her perfect face will be blank. So will her beautiful eyes cocooned in makeup. By now her hair will have grown out, though I doubt it will cascade to her fine ass. The handprints on her buttocks will have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her fine time at the Casablanca when she was doing cocaine and whiskey and then was gang-raped for days. Perhaps she will share with me her memories of the crazy place.

The dead sit in rows and wait their turn to speak. They look more alive than the audience because they are totally committed to the play. It is the major performance of their lives, and I can tell they don’t want the curtain to come down. Also, they are confident of their lines.

My name is Ernesto Romero Adame, and I am thirty-three. I was driving my 2007 black Volkswagen Jetta and the bullets entered my neck and chest. It was New Year’s Day.

Then I hear another chair scrape, and a voice says softly,

Braulio Omar Casillas Arrendondo. And on the fourth of January, I was twenty-five. They wrapped my head and hands, as you can see, with duct tape. And then put some nine-millimeter rounds in my brain.

He sits, and slowly another form rises:

They never figured out my name, and so I’m not going to tell you. It was simple: January fifth, maybe two hundred feet from the Avenue of the National Army, a couple of nines right in the head.

This other guy stands up next to him and says,

Same day. Bunch of nines in the heart. Name—Luis Alberto Villarreal Vargas, twenty-five, and no longer counting.

A man cuts him off and says,

My hands are bound with wire. Took some forty-fives to the chest. Drove a Dodge Intrepid. Jesus Felix Laguna, every day of thirty-six.