Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (34 page)

Another guy says,

Let’s finish off the fifth of January. No name, doesn’t matter much now, anyway. Two in the head. Found me in a vacant lot.

I realize this show is going to take a while. But no one waiting to speak seems anxious or fidgeting. They all look relaxed, especially when you consider the large number of the cast with holes in their heads. Miss Sinaloa is harder to figure. She seems attentive, and yet I cannot read her lovely face at all. I can’t tell if she is merely being polite, or if she is caught up in the play.

Mario Antonio Martinez Hernandez, thirty-eight. Owned a junkyard. The wife came to pick me up, and I climbed in when suddenly two guys got out of a black Yukon and tried to open my door. I grabbed it and held it shut. This was January tenth. They stepped back and started firing.

I lean back and close my eyes. I simply listen and swim in the stories that fall from the pale lips.

Look, I went down the next day. They dumped me in a vacant lot after the torture. Some nines in the head. No name, please.

I took some rounds in the chest. I hobbled over to a security guard and asked for help. Then I died.

Enrique Enriquez Armendariz, fifty-one. A lot of torture, but I’ll skip over that. Hands and feet tied with duct tape. Dumped near a subdivision.

It’s a family thing. I’m a cop and so was my brother—he caught his back in May 2007. I took twenty-two rounds of 5.27x28 mm. I’m Police Captain Julián Cháirez Hernández, thirty-seven. I was on patrol at that moment.

I was coming out of my house to go to work when this van rolls up. Took thirty-five rounds from an AK-47. Never made it to the job. Francisco Ledesma Salazar, thirty-four, city police. Back then I drove a Ford Expedition.

They came for me on January twenty-first, ten of them wearing ski masks and toting machine guns. It was over a week before anyone found me. Some nines were scattered around my body. My name is Fernando Javier Macias Rivera, twenty-three.

They found my body next to his. Luis Carlos Contreras, twenty-one.

José Luis Piedra, thirty. They kidnapped me and then gave me six from a .380 in my neck and head.

I was just driving. They pulled me out of my car at an intersection. Seven in the chest. Juan Garcia Vazquez, thirty-two. That’s about it.

I guess I’m the change of pace. Javier Leal Saucedo, thirty-three. Beat me to death.

Me too. Bernardo Rafael Hernandez Vasquez, thirty-nine. Beaten to death.

Look, I don’t even know if I should talk. I was out driving with my wife in my white pickup. Then they took me. No reports about me since then, so I think I’ll leave it at that.

Well, I’m different. Raymundo Daniel Ruvalcaba, twenty-nine. They put a plastic bag over my head and duct-taped my hands and feet. Then they wrapped me in a blanket. The people who found me saw pools of blood around my body.

I open my eyes, and it looks as though there are still hundreds waiting their turn to speak. I notice the brevity of the people speaking. Name, age, wounds. They don’t really say much. Maybe they think no one cares. Or maybe they think everyone already knows. You will die. You will not really see it coming, no matter what warnings or signals you have received. You will ignore the warnings because you will think bad things happen to other people and not to you.

Jesus Duran Uranga, thirty-one. Put me in the trunk of a ninety-five Ford Escort. Finally, the neighbors complained of the smell, and that’s how I got found.

I’m thirty. Francisco Macias Gonzalez. Shot in the head in my Dodge Ram with a Hemi. Hands tied behind my back with those plastic handcuffs the cops use.

Look, I work for the state prosecutor’s office. I drive a Durango. That’s where they shot me.

So you will die and be surprised, and yet you will die and expect to die. The explanations other people crave hardly matter to you because the cause of your death is just a detail. You fucked up, or someone wanted your business, or maybe, just maybe, you looked too long and too hard at the wrong woman. That would actually be kind of nice—to die for love. But in the end, you will die because killing is part of life here, and all the things called motives and reasons don’t tell you much in the end, because you can imagine a different kind of place where you behaved in the same way, and you would not be murdered in this other place.

I drift off. I listen and don’t listen, in the same way a person sits in a bar and takes in the band and yet is hardly aware of the music.

Of course, nothing Miss Sinaloa knows matters to most people. Just as the dead of Juárez will vanish from memory.

As I watch the new
Our Town
in the abandoned rehab center, I see one little image in my head, a fragment that whispers of a murder. There is a barrio near here where people scavenge old televisions and bits of metal from both Juárez and El Paso and sell them. The barrio is poor and is a place that eats the cast-off entrails of a richer world. A man sells cocaine on the street, and he is warned to stop, but he is in his thirties and has no other livelihood. So he persists and then armed men come with masks and blow his brains out, and he falls on the street near his mother’s house. That is not the image in my mind. What I see is his mother. It is night now, the body has been taken away, and there is a light on, the screen door is pushed open, and an old woman with a blank face stares down at the street, and she is there all alone and her son is not coming home, and her face is as inscrutable as a block of stone. Her arms are crossed, and she is a portrait of grief Juárez-style, silent, enduring, and doomed.

I am eight years old. They poured two hundred and fifty rounds into my dad’s truck and killed him. They shot my arm off. And then I died.

I am a disabled police officer in a wheelchair, my partner is legally blind, and we were making sure no one was using parking spaces for the handicapped when we were machine-gunned.

My name is David Miranda Ramirez, I’m thirty-six, and I was driving patrol in an industrial park at 10:30 A.M. when at least twenty rounds ripped through my car and my body.

I have no name now. They found my body in a kettle used for frying pork.

December’s children arise. First, four cops killed in their stations and cars in a coordinated attack during the night. They say they were merely doing their duty. They sit with over sixty dead cops slaughtered during the year.

Four guys sit near them, also machine-gunned during the same day as the four cops. One holds his head in his lap, the severed skull wearing a Santa Claus hat. It is nearing Christmas, and everyone has the spirit. The kills have streaked past 1,500 for the year.

This program will take some time.

Miss Sinaloa tosses her hair and takes in the show.

God brought her to this city, you know, so that she would suffer and lose her mind, go to the crazy place and meet her true love, who slipped food into her cell and talked sweetly to her. It was meant to be. She knows this. And may know other things.

Did I tell you about her eyes? They see through you to the other side. Scent wafts off her as we sit and listen and yet do not listen. We are being told what we already know and, in my case, refuse to understand.

Of course, Miss Sinaloa is different.

Her skin is so white, her hair long and glossy, the lips red as ripe fruit.

Murder Artist

He is calm now.
The kidnappings, the tortures, the killings, brought back a sense of self he could not control, the workman’s pride that fills a man when he sees the wall, the house, or perhaps even the church he has built. True, he would express regret, tell me such things give him nightmares, and he tries as a rule to put them out of his mind. He would indicate that he is revisiting this evil time simply for my benefit.

He takes his various drawings—how to do a hit, where some people were buried in a death house—looks at the green schematics he has created and then slowly tears them into little squares until the torn heap can never be reconstructed.

His life is relatively peaceful until late 2006. He worked all over Mexico for different groups, and the various organizations generally got along. There were small moments such as when others tried to take over Juárez, and it was necessary to burn their heads with tires. But his life in the main was peaceful.

So peaceful, he did not need to know certain things.

Such as who he really worked for. Such knowledge could be fatal.

“I received orders from two people. They ran me. I never knew which cartel I worked for. Now there is Vicente Carrillo against Chapo Guzman. But I never met any bosses, so when the war started around 2006, I did not know which one I did the killing for. And orders could cross from one group to another. I am living in a cell, and I simply take orders. In thirty minutes in Juárez, sixty well-trained and heavily armed men can assemble in thirty cars and circulate as a show of force.

“Then at my level, we began to get orders to kill each other.”

He is kidnapped but let go after an hour. This unsettles him, and he begins to think about escaping his life. But that is not a simple matter, since if you leave, you are murdered. As the war quickens, he begins to distance himself from people he knows and works with. He tries to fade away. By this time, a third of the people he knows have been disappeared—“they were seen as useless and then killed.”

He doesn’t know the boss, he is still not even sure who his boss is. He drinks at home. The streets are too dangerous. New people arrive, and he does not know them. He is not safe.

So he flees.

He confides in a friend. Who betrays him.

He pauses at this point. He knows he is guilty of a fatal error. He has violated a fundamental rule: You can only be betrayed by someone you trust. So you survive by trusting no one. Still, there is this shred of humanity in all of us, and in the end, we feel the need to trust someone. And this need is fatal. It is the very need he has exploited for years, the need he used when he put people in the police car and told them they would be all right if they cooperated, would be back with their families in no time if they were calm. And by God, they did trust him and rode across Mexico, went through checkpoints and said nothing, never told a single soul they had been kidnapped. They would trust him as they were tortured in the safe houses. They would promise him fine things when they were returned to their families. They would help mop the floors, clean up the vomit and blood. They would compose songs. They would trust him right up to that instant when he strangled them.

So his friend gives him up. He is taken at 10 P.M., and this time, he is held until 3 A.M.

But something has changed within him. And some things have not changed. Four men take him to a safe house. They remove all of his clothing but his shorts. They take pool balls in their hands and beat him.

But he can tell they are amateurs. They do not even handcuff him, and this is almost disturbing to him. He is the captive of third-raters. As they beat him, he prays and prays and prays. He also laughs because he is appalled by their incompetence. They have not bound him, and their blows do not disable him. He sizes them up and in his mind plans how he will kill them, one, two, three, four, just like that.

And at the same moment, he is praying to God to help him so that he will not kill them, so that he can stop his life of murder. He has been sliding toward God for some time now, brought to the fact of Christ by one of his first mentors when he joined the state police and became a professional killer. As he sits in the room, sipping coffee and recalling this moment, his face comes alive. He is passionate now. He is approaching the very moment of his salvation. Some people pretend to accept Christ, he says, but at that moment, he could feel total acceptance fill his body. He could feel peace. And yet there was this tension within him. He prays so ardently, and still at the same time he cannot stop laughing at his captors. He knows that in the Christian faith, the lamb is a symbol of belief and of redemption. But he also knows he can never be a lamb. If he is to be a Christian, he must be a Christian wolf.