Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (8 page)

José Refugio Ruvalcalba was fifty-nine on November 27, 1994, when he turned up exactly on the line—midway on the bridge between the two cities—in his Honda Accord. He’d been a state cop for thirty-two years, and both of his sons were with him that day. All three were in the trunk, beaten, stabbed, and strangled. The father had a yellow ribbon around his head, one that flowered out of his mouth.

He knew where the line was and what happened if that line was crossed.

So do American political leaders, since they never seem to come here.

But everything else does.

The barrio where I look down from Juárez at El Paso is part of the puzzle of the violence in Juárez. These districts are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Most places are stuffed with people who work in the maquiladoras.

Later, I am with a man wearing black in a barrio across from the asylum that was once home to Miss Sinaloa. The white buses lumber past with the tired faces of the factory workers. The road is ruts. Most of the shacks lack electricity or water. The wind pelts everyone with dust. The houses themselves are a chaos of boards, pallets, beams, rebar, old cable spools, tires, bed-springs, concrete blocks, posts, scrap metal, car bodies, old rusted buses, stone, rotted plywood, tarps, barrels, black water tanks for the periodic deliveries, plastic buckets, old fencing, tires, bottles, stove pipe, aluminum strips, pipe, broken chairs, tables, and sofas—all this the raw material for the construction of the shacks. Like the asylum itself, the place feeds off what the city rejects.

People vanish. They leave a bar with the authorities and are never seen again. They leave their homes on an errand and never return. They go to a meeting and never come back. They are waiting at a bus stop and never arrive at their assumed destination. In the late 1990s, people began keeping lists of the disappeared. One such list hit 914 before the effort was abandoned out of fear. None of these lists covered very many years. Nor did any of the list makers ever think their work was a complete tally. No one really knows how many people vanish. It is not safe to ask, and it is not wise to place a call to the authorities.

Still, we love the hard look of numbers. So murders are tallied, and for fifteen years, until the bloodshed of 2008, Juárez reliably produced two to three hundred official murders a year. Of course, skeletons periodically turn up on the edge of town, and these do not enter the totals. And once in a great while—the FBI announcement of mass graves in Juárez in December 1999, the publicity by the the DEA over a death house in January 2004—homes are found where people are taken, murdered, and buried. Each time such a house of death is revealed, there is a great to-do, a sense of something extraordinary coming into the light of day. People always say they are shocked, the neighbors always say they noticed nothing amiss, the press always says the authorities are digging, digging, digging and will soon get to the bottom of things. Every effort is made to keep this extraordinary moment within the realm of order and to process the corpses so that numbers and structure can be felt and touched.

Forensic experts huddle in these digs at death houses. They have no names, and their bodies appear in the published images, but not their faces. There are few, if any, reports of their findings. They are the costume of order more than the substance of hard facts. For that matter, the various elements of law enforcement at these special charnel houses appear in the newspaper wearing masks. Only the cadaver dogs show up with clear faces.

And then public notices of the death house and its bodies vanish from the papers much as the dead vanished from the city itself. Memory ebbs, and the cavalcade of the vanished and of the dead disappears from sight and becomes some ghost column winding through the city streets that no one professes to see. Or the dead sit in the cafés where they had their last cup of coffee, belly up to the bar where they had that last drink, huddle in the dust and wind at bus stops where they awaited that last ride.

Sometimes, the vanished never reappear. Normally, there are killings because of the drug industry, and these executed souls are found at dawn on city streets like the litter that slaps the eye in the morning light after a boisterous fiesta. But there are periods when no such bodies appear with hands tied with duct tape and a bullet through the skull. There is no way the drug industry with its implicit contractual protocols can take a holiday from death. It is simply impossible in a multibillion-dollar industry that has no standing at law to collect debts or enforce discipline without murder. Sometimes the vanished never even become a name on a list. People fear reporting their missing kin—in one instance, twelve bodies were dug up at a death house and not a single person slumbering in that ground had been reported missing.

So, there are clearly two ghost patrols out and about in the city. Those murdered and secretly disposed of by the drug industry, and those who vanish for whatever reason and are never reported.

During the season of violence that swept through the city and brought me into the circle of Miss Sinaloa, I stopped at a convenience market to buy a bottle of water. Taped below a pay phone was the photograph of a cop with the date he went missing, his name and a phone number where someone waited for a message about his fate. I thought the city’s magical powers had reached a new level when even the police must seek anonymous tips to find one of their own. Just down the road was a huge billboard soliciting recruits for the very same police force, an image of a man in a helmet who wore a black mask and carried a machine gun.

Vanishing here is always a possibility and it gives the city a special aura. Kidnappings are frequent, but they at least mean someone wants to return the missing and is acting in a rational manner where a human has a value in money and a feasible transaction is possible. Vanishing means a page left half-written, a tale never fully told. It is more final than execution because it means not simply being murdered but being erased from any real memory or participation in the human community.

Certainly, the city police have become alert to this vanishing thing. Traditionally, they must leave their guns at the station house when they finish their shift. But now they are publicly complaining about this practice that forces them to travel home like any other citizen, without a weapon. They say this policy is now unacceptable.

The avenue curves down by the river and enters the zone in the southeast where Juárez has been migrating to flee its moldering core. The car flows past the giant flagpole erected in the 1990s by then President Ernesto Zedillo so that a gigantic Mexican flag would gently wash across the face of El Paso, but the Mexican park later became a popular dumping ground for bodies.

Finally, the neighborhood looms where the army has detained twenty-one men and seized guns, ammo, and other tools of the trade. It is a “narcolandia,” a place where those in the life build their dreams and live out time until their mostly early deaths. The streets have names like Michigan, Alaska, Arizona, Oregon, a roll call of states in the nation just across the river. Mansions rise up—one is three stories of gray concrete with the orange girders still uncovered and is a work in progress, maybe six thousand square feet or more. Next door, workmen install expensive wooden doors on yet another mansion. The men glare. No one is to come here unless they belong here. My friend will not come here alone, and as he drives down the
calles
, he cautions me about taking notes.

Many of the new houses are for sale—perhaps sudden promotions have prompted the owners to new quarters. But there is a second possibility. The killings constantly create vacancies. Just as some architects—and the rising narco-class is a keen market for architects in a city of grinding poverty—have vanished after finishing narco-mansions. No one asks why.

It is a blue-sky day and the sun hits empty streets. No one is out in the yards, no one is walking, no one is visible at all. It looks like a ghost town, but there is a constant feeling of being watched. In the 1990s, a photographer from the local newspaper vanished after taking images in such a district. When he appeared weeks later after his colleagues publicly protested, he had little to say. Except that it was a misunderstanding because he had simply on impulse decided to go to the beach in Sinaloa. A yellow sign tacked to a telephone pole advertises tarot card readings and amulets. This is a world of change and random fates.

We come upon it in a cul-de-sac, two and half stories, gray with dark trim. A black, wrought-iron fence protects the front. The gate and door are pad-locked. A colored flyer has been stuffed between the bars touting a furniture sale. This house is empty. Here the military found twenty-one men, a lot of arms, and what they claim was a factory filling little bags with drugs. The supply of drugs was modest. But in Mexico, seized drugs have a way of disappearing once in the custody of the authorities. Sometimes, tons vanish—in the 1990s a full-bodied jet filled with cocaine somehow fell into federal hands, and yet, within a week, by some kind of sorcery, the load was being peddled on the streets of Los Angeles, according to U.S. agents.

The houses are orange, red, green, yellow, blue, and purple, the columns rise at the porticos, the huge windows are tinted and some soar two stories. The garages stare out like blank eyes. Large dogs bark from within. This is “narcotecture,” the three-dimensional statement of the dreams of the poor who now prosper. There is no real effort to comprehend the scale of the business here. Officially, the population of Juárez is 1.2 million (or 1.4 million or 1.6 million—even something as simple as a census is hard to pin down here), but all urban populations are pegged by the federal government at a low number so that tax monies that are repatriated to the various cities can be kept low. In the case of Juárez, the population is possibly 2 million, but this is an estimate, just as no accurate map of the sprawling city and its squatter colonias exists. But taking this number of 2 million and making a conservative estimate that 5 percent of the population lives off the drug industry suggests that the minimum number of the people in the life and their dependents is one hundred thousand. By the mid-1990s, conservative students figured 30 to 40 percent of the local economy ran on laundered drug money—others set the figure at more like 60 to 70 percent.

Tijuana, a city officially at around 2 million, is credited with lower drug usage than Juárez. A recent study found over twenty thousand retail drug outlets in Tijuana, mainly cocaine and heroin. In Juárez, there are at least as many such venues. The peddlers earn three hundred dollars a week, there tend to be three shifts, so let’s posit for Juárez twenty-five thousand outlets (a conservative estimate) and figure a payroll of seventy-five thousand retailers, each earning three hundred dollars a week. This amounts to a bigger payroll than that earned by the two hundred thousand factory workers earning on average seventy-five dollars a week. And of course, the real money is not in the retail peddlers but in the organizations that control them and import and package their products. This is the economy of the city. This is supply-side economics flooring the killing ground.

The city is studded with narco-McMansions. They have bright colors and often feature domes with brilliant tiles. They are the reward for work.

The work is constant and wearing. The city of Juárez has a monument to fallen officers on a traffic circle, and suddenly that list appeared taped to it, naming cops who would die.

A few days later, four cops on the second list were killed. Forty cops have left the force since the first of the year. In February, a drive-by shooting at the house of a dead cop was accompanied by yet another list taped to the building. This list was not made public. But the police announced they would no longer be answering calls but preferred to stay in their station houses.

All this notice will vanish, that is what happens in this city. When the migration north was just beginning to pick up in 1993, the line between El Paso and Juárez was where the first real effort was made to block Mexicans, an operation that became the source for all the notions of a massively beefed-up Border Patrol. When Amado Carrillo was running a cartel that hauled in $250 million a week in the mid-1990s, Juárez was barely a speck in the mind of the American government or media. When he used the same private banker at Citigroup in New York as the then-president of Mexico, this, too, was of no interest. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed and went plowing into the lives of millions like a greed-seeking missile in the early 1990s, this city that pioneered using cheap labor to bust unions and steal American jobs continued to be ignored. Only brief flickers of interest in the dead women of Juárez captures any American audience, and that, too, is a hit-or-miss thing, something that lives in the limbo land of issues rather than of solutions or actions. Only as the killing of 2008 accelerates does Juárez get new press attention and finally draw attention to a simple fact: It is dying.

On February 26, Ricardo Chacon was in Ciudad Chihuahua, the capital of the state. He’d left Juárez even though he was second in command of the unit once headed by Comandante Lozano, the man who survived a fifty-one round barrage and was now hiding in a U.S. hospital. Chacon planned to quit his job. Instead, he was shot in the head and killed. Two days later, Juárez officials decide to address the problem of crime. They launch a campaign against jaywalking in the city.