The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  Farther on, a man driving an old, battered truck spotted us and pulled to a stop midstreet. “Que pasa, Ray?” he shouted moments before he and Raymundo exchanged a knuckle-bump, slap-punch greeting through their respective windows. We were in Raymundo’s gasping lime-green Toyota Tercel. The driver’s-side mirror casing dangled against the door, barely attached by a single cable, the mirror itself long gone. The car’s front grille was missing, too, exposing the black, dust-covered housing of the radiator fan. The front-right tire wobbled hideously any time our speed exceeded thirty miles per hour, which was frequently. The back seat was a pile of old newspapers, consumed water bottles, and a child’s car seat (Raymundo has young children). A “Press” sign was taped to the inside of the car’s windshield, giving Raymundo parking access at official events.

  Raymundo’s friend was indifferent to my presence. He told Raymundo that he’d been clean for a year and that he was going to church at a rehab center. “That’s good,” Raymundo said, right arm draped across the steering wheel as the Tercel sputtered, “that’s real good.”

  After a few more minutes Raymundo said goodbye to his childhood friend and we pushed on through the wind-stirred dust along the streets of his old neighborhood. “That guy’s been in and out of prison all his life,” Raymundo volunteered once we were on our way. “He was a big-time user, doing petty chores for you know who,” which I took to be a reference to the Juárez cartel. He never mentioned the cartel by name; that was part of his discipline. Raymundo paused. “He’s never gotten his act together. I hope it sticks this time,” he said.

  Raymundo took advantage of the fact that we were in his old neighborhood to ring the doorbell of a woman who was his mother’s best friend when he was growing up and whom he still visited on occasion. She was in her late seventies and lived in a small compound comprising several structures, one of which, like Raymundo’s childhood home, was constructed from wood pallets lined with cardboard and tarpaper. The freestanding room was askew and appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The woman broke into a radiant grin the instant she saw that it was Raymundo at the door. She was wearing glasses with gray frames and had a matching shock of gray hair. Her ankle-length black dress gave the impression that she was a widow.

  The three of us stood in the street in front of the house while Raymundo and the woman caught up on his brothers and sisters, the woman’s children, and what had become of the neighborhood. “I’m sick of it,” she volunteered. She told us that the gangs were out every night and that they had taken to pressing her to pay them $100 pesos a week (the so-called and increasingly ubiquitous cuota) in exchange for safe passage from the bus stop to her house. “It’s extortion,” she exclaimed. “I only make $300 pesos a week,” she added. She told Raymundo that the neighborhood had gone to hell. The gangs were giving everyone the squeeze and there was no relief, she told us with a tone of resignation. It was an established fact that in Juárez the neighborhood and midlevel gangs now imitated the cartel strategies to increase their non-drug-related revenues. The difference was that the cartel gangs were extorting bigger businesses, while the neighborhood punks were extorting maquiladora workers, small shopkeepers, and street vendors.

  Down the street we turned a corner and Raymundo pointed out graffiti marking a local gang’s territory. “That gang’s been here since I was a kid,” he told me. At the time, there were gangs every two or three blocks—anywhere that there were ten or fifteen kids living in proximity. “We fought neighboring gangs, but it was fistfights, sometimes maybe sticks and rocks, that’s the worst it ever got. We didn’t kill each other,” Raymundo volunteered. The gangs also didn’t rob or terrorize the neighbors. On the contrary, the gangs were about the neighborhood; that was the source of their pride and identity. “Mostly we hung around and smoked cigarettes and drank beer and talked all night. Kid stuff.” But some of Raymundo’s friends had gone off in other directions, including some who ended up in “the business” and quite a few who ended up addicts, in jail, or dead.

  . . .

  Within the Juárez Municipal Police Department, Francisco Ledesma’s charge, in part, was to address these facts of life given that gangs were a problem all over the city. Ledesma met with the group of parents on the morning of January 21, 2008, four days after Patiño’s visit to Chihuahua. The meeting took place in a neighborhood that was indistinguishable from the one in which Raymundo had grown up. It was a neighborhood where parents worried about the gangs that were swarming all over the colonia, intimidating residents and acting as if they owned the territory. As the public face of the municipal police, Ledesma was the front man who did the meet and greets and told agitated parents and community leaders about the department’s plan to rescue them from the grips of the gangs that were increasingly crushing them, threatening them even within their own homes. Ledesma talked as if he knew the ropes, as if he understood the game. He gave them facts and information about gangs and how they operated and what the Grupo Puma was going to do to take back the night in their communities—how it was going to put an end to the fear that had come to reign upon their lives.

  But the next day Francisco Ledesma was dead. At 7:45 a.m., as he was leaving home on his way to his weekly Monday morning meeting at the Babícora police station, a commando team appeared out of nowhere and cut him down in a barrage of gun fire. Two men had waited patiently in a white Chevrolet Express van for Ledesma to leave his house. As Ledesma got into his car, the van pulled up and one of the men exited, briskly walking over to Ledesma before drawing a pistol from his coat pocket and assassinating the officer in full view of several witnesses, including a woman who was walking her children to the nearby elementary school. The van would be discovered a month later parked at a safe house; it had been stolen in El Paso almost four years earlier, in August of 2004.

  Every morning, José Reyes Ferriz had a standing 7 a.m. phone appointment with his police chief in which Guillermo Prieto reported the events of the last twenty-four hours. The Ledesma assassination occurred after the daily report, so the mayor was not briefed on it. Instead, he was briefed on the murder of a police officer who had been hunted down and killed the day before. Later in the afternoon on the day of Ledesma’s assassination, a third municipal police officer had been gunned down. His name was Julián Cháirez, and he came from a family with deep ties to the Juárez cartel. One of his brothers, also with the municipal police, had been assassinated a year earlier while traveling with a state ministerial police officer who was also executed (the then–director of operations, Saulo Reyes, had been unable to explain to reporters why it was that one of his agents had been traveling in a ministerial police vehicle, a fact that was highly irregular). In addition, acting on a tip from U.S. authorities, the federal police had apprehended another brother, Leonel Cháirez, in July of 2007. (American law enforcement had arrested an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent named Margarita Crispín, whom they charged with accepting bribes from Leonel Cháirez, who was smuggling opium, cocaine, and marijuana across the border.)

  The day’s execution of police officers wasn’t finished. That same afternoon yet another officer, this one with the state ministerial police, was gunned down in a hail of bullets that left fifty holes in him and in his vehicle. Almost concurrently, across town, there was an attempted assassination of a fifth law enforcement officer, a member of Agencia Estatal de Investigaciones, the state’s investigative agency. He survived, but he was gravely wounded. In just two days, five law enforcement officers had been ambushed in Juárez and four of them assassinated. That tally nearly matched the total number of police killed over the course of the entire previous year.

  . . .

  At his offices at the Presidencia Municipal, José Reyes Ferriz was feeling in the grip of a process that would soon envelope and consume him. In the aftermath of the assassinations the tension was beginning to permeate the entire city. Some speculated that the wave of police executions was related to the arrest of Saulo Reyes in El Paso, suggesting th
at perhaps the Juárez cartel was executing those who had betrayed him. Alternatively, it was hypothesized that the cartel was executing anyone whom Saulo Reyes might have given up. A young man with a wife and family accustomed to upper-class comforts might easily be induced to talk under threat of years in prison now that he was in the hands of the DEA, so the thinking went. Perhaps the cartel was cutting its losses by executing people who might now be pressured into revealing more information about its operations, some speculated.

  On January 23, two days after Ledesma’s assassination, El Diario published the truth. It cited “unofficial sources” to the effect that “the criminal organization of El Chapo Guzmán” had authored the attacks against the police. The article further stated that the attacks were aimed at “destabilizing” the police force in order to wrest control of the plaza from the Juárez cartel. The El Diario article also revealed that a few days prior to the recent attacks on Ledesma and the others, El Chapo’s people had contacted commanders in the ministerial and municipal police offering them an undetermined amount of money in return for their collaboration. Apparently, some them had not signed on.

  It was evident that the police killings had not been arbitrary or random: someone had tracked these officers and taken them down one by one. The executions also appeared to be the work of professionals (they’d succeeded despite the fact that all of the assassinated police were experienced and armed). In fact, the executions were the beginning wave of a systematic, strategic plan to take over the Juárez cartel’s territory by striking at the heart of its operational structure: La Línea, the cartel’s enforcement wing, which was composed primarily of the Juárez municipal police and the state ministerial police. For Mayor José Reyes Ferriz, the waiting was over; the assault on Juárez by the Sinaloa cartel had begun in earnest.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Strategist

  From the remove of Mexico City the developments in Juárez were being viewed with increasing alarm, drawing the attention of president Felipe Calderón’s security cabinet, which met weekly at Los Pinos, the Mexican equivalent of the American White House. Guillermo Valdés Castellanos was one of the strategists charged with developing a policy for addressing what was taking place not only in Juárez (the violence was just beginning there) but also in the rest of the country. He was the director of Mexico’s national security agency, the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (or CISEN, its Spanish acronym). “There were three drug wars going on when this administration took office,” Valdés observed the first time I interviewed him. He was referring to the violent battles and executions taking place between La Familia and Los Zetas in Morelia; between the Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels in Tijuana; and between Los Zetas/the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa cartel in Nuevo Laredo. These battlegrounds had produced dramatic confrontations that were terrorizing communities and leaving many casualties all over Mexico, and not just in the most contested areas, because the cartels had extensive networks and operations in multiple states. Tijuana alone had claimed in excess of six hundred lives in 2007.

  Valdés’s office was deep inside a heavily fortified compound on the southern end of Mexico City—the exterior walls were twenty feet high, and there were checkpoints within the compound with heavily armed sentries guarding access to the building housing Valdés’s office. My car was met at the gate and escorted to the compound by a CISEN vehicle. A tall man with a pale complexion, Valdés was in his shirtsleeves and not wearing a tie. He has a penchant for chain-smoking Delicados (filterless Mexican cigarettes that are more commonly smoked by factory workers and cab drivers than top government officials) down to a nub. In fact, Valdés seemed to eschew the bureaucrat’s penchant for formalism. There was something disarming about his lack of pretension, given that he was one of the most influential men in President Felipe Calderón’s administration.

  Valdés mapped out the government’s three-point strategy against the drug cartels: “Mexico has to recover lost territory,” he told me. That required denying the narcos their current ability to operate at will. It was a telling point, for it acknowledged that significant cities and, in some instances, entire regions of Mexico, were effectively under the control of the narcotraficantes. The second part of the strategy against the cartels was to “break up their patterns and organizational structures.” Finally, Valdés underscored the need to strengthen the country’s institutions, especially law enforcement and the judiciary. Valdés concluded our first interview with a declaration that echoed what president Calderón was saying in his speeches to the Mexican public: “We’re going to the root of the problem and there is no turning back.”

  The facts on the ground in Mexico made for enormous challenges in implementing the strategy that Valdés outlined that day at the CISEN headquarters. There were three basic tiers to Mexican law enforcement, though some of these had specialized units within them: the municipal police, the state ministerial police, and the federal police. Of these, the federal forces were considered the most reliable by far. For almost a decade, the Mexican government had been attempting to clean up the notoriously corrupt and infamous federal judicial police. Genaro García Luna had spearheaded those efforts during Vicente Fox’s previous administration, which had created the Agencia Federal de Investigación, touted as the Mexican counterpart to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation. Cleaning up an institution that for decades had operated in collusion with organized crime when not operating as a criminal organization in its own right was a difficult and challenging task, and there had been several high-profile cases in which AFI agents were found to be working for the cartels. Nevertheless, García Luna moved forward with the implementation of a more professionalized federal law enforcement agency. Increasingly, AFI agents were required to have college degrees, they received better pay, and their careers in law enforcement were not dependent on the whims of new commanders who were changed out every six years with the election of a new president. All this created a more professional atmosphere within federal law enforcement, notwithstanding the intermittent successful efforts by the cartels to enlist the collusion of AFI personnel.

  Felipe Calderón decided to focus on cleaning up the federal judicial police. They were consolidated under the Secretariat for Public Security and eventually renamed the federal police, with García Luna at the head, while the AFI remained the law enforcement wing within the federal attorney general’s office. A major obstacle to the success of the federal police was the simple fact that there were so few of them: a mere sixty-five hundred officers throughout the country (perhaps ten thousand officers, if one included the agents temporarily assigned to the federal police from the army, CISEN, and other law enforcement agencies). García Luna set out to radically expand the force. By law, the federal police are only permitted to work criminal activity that falls within the federal purview, which includes things like organized crime, weapons, and explosives. Ordinary crime such as burglary, car theft, and murder (that is to say, the day-to-day work of local police forces), is outside the purview of the federal police except in cases where organized crime groups are committing these crimes. The federal government could send the federal police to do battle against the cartels, but one obvious problem was that their numbers were small, just 1 or 2 percent of the nation’s law enforcement personnel. In addition, it was not always easy to differentiate organized crime from ordinary local criminal activity. If a man was executed in the streets of Juárez, for example, who was to say that it was the work of a cartel (thus bringing it under federal jurisdiction), as opposed to the work of a gang member assassinating a rival gang member in a territorial dispute or even simply a crime of passion (crimes falling under local police jurisdiction)? There were legal structures governing the activities of each of the three tiers of police work in Mexico, but, on a pragmatic level, these legal structures represented significant obstacles to effective law enforcement work given the character of what was taking place in the streets of Juárez, Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, and many other Mexican c
ities where the cartels were creating significant challenges.

  The restrictions on the state ministerial police and local municipal police forces posed similar but actually more grave problems. By law, municipal police, the police in Mexico’s cities and towns, were not permitted to investigate crimes. That was considered outside of their area of operation. For this reason, municipal police forces were called “preventive” police, because their primary charge was just that: to prevent crime by patrolling the streets, to arrest people caught in flagrante delicto, and to respond when citizens called to report crimes. The state ministerial police forces were the law enforcement units charged with gathering evidence and collaborating with the district attorneys who oversaw the investigation of criminal cases. In other words, there were legal and structural impediments in place that ensured that police work in Mexico was arbitrary and profoundly inefficient, setting aside the matter of corruption. It was also the case that ministerial and, especially, municipal police were the lowest paid, the least trained, and the most susceptible to influence and corruption. Though the Juárez municipal police distinguished themselves when it came to corruption, corruption was a disease that had spread deeply into every facet of the country’s municipal police forces. Even before the rise of the cartels, many of these police agencies had already been operating as criminal organizations.

  One problem that the Mexican federal government faced, then, was that it simply lacked the law enforcement resources, in terms of both reliability and raw numbers, to take the now-declared war to the many states and regions where the drug cartels were operating. These were significant areas of the country where cartels functioned with impunity and where, typically, they were using municipal and state police forces as proxies and as a private reserve of foot soldiers to carry out myriad activities, from protection to transport to detaining and/or executing adversaries. From a strategic standpoint, in other words, the municipal and ministerial police forces in these areas were not only unreliable; they were, in essence, cartel troops. It was common knowledge that in the states where the drug cartels had the greatest presence, like Sonora, Sinaloa, Michoacán, Chihuahua, Durango, and Tamaulipas, among others, the cartels owned state and local law enforcement; in fact, over the years these police forces had become woven into the cartels’ very organizational structures. From the standpoint of the stability and viability of the Mexican state, this arrangement had reached a critical point and there was no force in these areas to serve as a counterweight to the power and influence of the cartels. It was this circumstance that dictated another key strategic decision by Calderón’s government: the use of the Mexican Army. The army was the only recourse available to the Mexican government, given that the federal police had insufficient numbers to assume what would have otherwise been its natural role. The army had the numbers (approximately 240,000 troops), and it was far less compromised (though not altogether untainted) by the corrosive influence of the drug cartels.