The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  Just below Francisco Ledesma’s name, the heading “For those who still do not believe” marked the second section of the narco-message. Beneath that heading were the names of seventeen other Juárez municipal police officers, next to which were noted the precincts in which they worked and their code names. The name at the top of this second group was listed as “Román Z-1.” The author of the poster had underlined Román’s name in red and placed a red cross next to it. Román’s was the only name highlighted in this fashion. Antonio Román was the operational director of the municipal police, the second in command, who just a few weeks earlier had sat next to Ledesma at the Police Academy when they’d participated in the course on the new judicial procedures.

  In Chihuahua, the two law enforcement organizations most associated with the workings of the Juárez cartel were the state ministerial police and the Juárez municipal police, of which the latter was the more important. The officers working for the cartel within each of these agencies were known as La Línea, or “The Line.” For days now, several state ministerial police commanders had been receiving anonymous calls to their private cell phones warning them “not to take sides.” Whatever ambiguity there may have been regarding the meaning of those calls was resolved on that morning of January 27, when the narco-message left at the Monument to Fallen Police was discovered—all of the officers on the “For those who still do not believe” hit list belonged to the municipal police. It was apparent that Sinaloa cartel operatives were trying to create fissures within La Línea by going after the Juárez municipal police, the core of La Línea, and warning the state ministerial police to stand clear. The fact that the Sinaloa people had the personal cell phone numbers of the state ministerial police commanders was an indication of their effective intelligence work. What the narco-message made clear is that the five officers had been killed as part of a deliberate effort to neutralize La Línea. The narco-message was, in essence, a public declaration of war.

  . . .

  The problems within the Juárez police seemed to evolve with every day that passed, like a puzzle or a conundrum that takes on new dimensions of complexity the deeper one explores its contours. For generations in Mexico the idea of corruption within police forces has simply been a given, a fact so pervasive and universal that it was accepted as a matter of course, as a reality of life. But what was going on within the Juárez police force took the familiar paradigm to an entirely different level.

  Reyes Ferriz first grasped the extent of the problem not long after he assumed office on October 6, 2007. At the time there were an estimated one thousand picaderos in the city, the so-called “shooting galleries” where addicts got their drugs and sometimes went to get high. They operated openly in many of Juárez’s working-class neighborhoods. During Reyes Ferriz’s campaign in the spring and summer of 2007 he had given speeches about attacking the picaderos. “I started getting messages saying, ‘Don’t even think about it,’” Reyes Ferriz told me one afternoon in his office. “The police would tell people close to me: ‘Tell the candidate not to get involved in this.’”

  Once elected, Reyes Ferriz instructed his newly appointed police chief to move on the picaderos, but the difficulty of the situation became immediately evident: “I was at home one night when Guillermo Prieto called. ‘We have a problem,’” the police chief said. The police had arrested four suspects and were in the process of taking them to a nearby precinct when four Hummers had arrived. “They were brand new, and there were sixteen to eighteen guys with automatic weapons in them,” Reyes Ferriz recalled. “They surrounded the patrol cars and demanded that we turn over the people we’d detained.” “What do we do?” the police chief had asked the mayor. “Release them,” was Reyes Ferriz’s reply. “They’re just going to kill the police.”

  What had most troubled Reyes Ferriz about the incident was the narcos’ brazenness; he found the ease with which they displayed their power in public and their utter disregard for municipal authority to be revelatory. And there was something else: it was impossible to avoid the troubling suspicion that perhaps some of the police officers had themselves alerted the Juárez cartel to the operation as it was taking place.

  “That’s when we saw clearly the nature of the situation,” Reyes Ferriz would later recollect. The police were in the hands of the drug traffickers. And the narcos had vehicles, automatic weapons, and the capacity to mobilize quickly and at will. “We’d only been in power one month . . . That’s when the light went on in my head. . . . I’d known that the police were infiltrated, but the extent to which they had been delivered . . .” The mayor paused midsentence as if to transmit the full weight of his bafflement. He’d come to understand that the narcos controlled virtually everything within the force.

  . . .

  The “unbelievers” listed on the narco-message were municipal police who apparently had not accepted the fact that “La Gente Nueva” (The New People, as the Sinaloa operatives in Juárez sometimes referred to themselves) were now a force with which to be reckoned. The prevailing assumption was that the officers on the list were aligned with the Juárez cartel, but it was impossible to know with certainty that every officer on the list was a narco-cop; some may have been on the list because they had not acceded to the Sinaloa pressure.

  It was clear that an operation was underway for control of the Juárez municipal police. For Reyes Ferriz, the post-Christmas meeting in his office with the federal intelligence officer, just a month earlier, was taking on a different meaning. Far from an abstract possibility, that war was now something irrefutable and concrete, a shift captured in the bullet-riddled bodies of the recently assassinated police turning up dead in the streets of the city.

  The Sinaloa message targeted the shock troops of the Juárez cartel. La Línea served the cartel in myriad ways. Their most important function was that they were the cartel’s muscle: they coerced and they threatened people, they lifted and they assassinated people as directed by the cartel. La Línea enforced discipline and settled scores, and in Juárez they were deeply feared by the citizenry because of their ruthlessness and brutality. At the time, the municipal police were the only force in the city. There were but a handful of state ministerial police or federal police, and although the army had a garrison in the city, they only patrolled the countryside. Thus, whoever controlled the police, controlled the city.

  The Sinaloa cartel was targeting the Juárez police as a raw military move: attempting to defeat its enemy by eviscerating its forces. They viewed the municipal police both as an obstacle and as a strategic asset. If Sinaloa succeeded in taking over the police by “turning” its members (by force and intimidation or by offering sweeter deals), or if it could insert its own operatives into the force, the Juárez plaza would belong to them.

  . . .

  There was something haunting about the poster board left at the monument. The calligraphy, in particular, was evidence of its creator—obviously a person in some clandestine safe house who’d followed instructions like a schoolboy doing homework. It was somehow different from the tortured bodies and bullet-ridden corpses; the narco-message lying inertly at the monument, anchored by a large stone so as not to be blown away by the desert winds, bore the mark of something more personal. That morning, when Reyes Ferriz went to the monument to see the narco-message for himself, he found the experience unsettling. “We had never seen that kind of a communication from the cartels,” the mayor would later tell me.

  The narco-message turned out to be a public relations coup. The following day every newspaper in Juárez carried the story on its front page and it was the lead story on every television station. As a piece of public relations the narco-message was a stroke of genius: in one gesture the Sinaloa cartel had boldly announced its presence in the city.

  The wreath that Reyes Ferriz had laid during the recent ceremony at the monument was still there, the flowers now withered and desiccated. One of the reporters covering the narco-message, apparently unaware of the recent wreat
h-laying, had written that detail into his story, suggesting that the narco-commando had left the dead flowers as some sort of a symbolic statement. That’s how things went in Juárez. It was often impossible to tell facts from people’s imaginings. Fantasy readily became entwined with reality.

  Monument to Fallen Police, Ciudad Juárez. Photo copyright © Ricardo Ainslie.

  . . .

  Notwithstanding the sway that the Juárez cartel had over the city, I found no one over the course of countless interviews who suggested that José Reyes Ferriz had links to the cartel. The mayor claims to have never had one of those legendary plata o plomo (silver or lead) moments where he was offered money under the penalty of death if he did not accept what was being proposed. But early on there had been certain interactions that appeared to be cartel soundings. After Reyes Ferriz had won the mayoral election, but prior to his taking office, someone had come to him saying that there were “rumors” that he was going to sell the police. Reyes Ferriz took this to be a thinly disguised effort to feel him out. His response was to contact several attorneys who were known to represent the cartel’s interests in the city and tell them that such rumors were mistaken. “The problem with organized crime,” Reyes Ferriz would later tell me, “is when you accept money from them and then don’t deliver.” He wanted to set the record straight and prevent any “misunderstandings” from the outset.

  When I subsequently asked the mayor why the Juárez cartel had permitted his election, his answer was simple: “They didn’t need me. They thought I wouldn’t be an issue for them because they already had control of the municipal police,” he said. Later, I had the opportunity to interview a person who had worked with Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the man who had transformed the Juárez cartel into Mexico’s most powerful cartel back in the 1990s. I asked him the same question. His response was different: “They thought he was going to be weak,” he said. “They thought they’d either be able to control him or that he’d steer clear of them and give them free rein.” Perhaps the incident with the Hummers had solidified that perception, given that the mayor had instructed the police chief to back off. If so, it was a premature reading; the mettle of José Reyes Ferriz had yet to really be tested.

  . . .

  By the end of January, with the assassination of several police officers, including Francisco Ledesma, the number-three man in the department, and with the narco-message at the Monument to Fallen Police, the extent of the problems within the Juárez municipal police took on new urgency for Mayor Reyes Ferriz. And they also took on new complexity. Having a corrupt police force was one kind of problem, but having two cartels vying for control of the force was a different problem. Mayor Reyes Ferriz trusted his police chief, Guillermo Prieto, whom he’d known for many years. But beyond Prieto, the ground fell away precipitously in terms of the mayor’s confidence in the police. There was no way of knowing who could be trusted. It all came down to a matter of faith.

  CHAPTER 6

  Patiño

  Although federal intelligence was signaling a potential increase in violence in Juárez, in January of 2008 federal authorities were primarily preoccupied with what was going on in other parts of the Mexican republic. For example, over the course of the previous two years they had dispatched some three thousand federal police to the state of Tamaulipas, bordering southeastern Texas, to help quell the violence that had been taking place there as Sinaloa cartel operatives battled the Gulf cartel in Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and other communities. At the time there were only a few dozen federal police stationed in Ciudad Juárez. Neither were the governor of Chihuahua or the state attorney general doing much to respond to what was taking place in Juárez; notwithstanding the fact that the prior year had set a record for executions, there were only eighty state ministerial police assigned to the border city, and their presence was halfhearted—the officers were all from Chihuahua City, which meant that during the week they were housed in temporary quarters, mostly local hotels, and they went home on weekends.

  The emerging crisis in Ciudad Juárez prompted Genaro García Luna to send Patricio Patiño, the undersecretary for police strategy and intelligence for the federal police, back to Chihuahua on February 8, a Friday, for a follow-up visit. Patiño landed in the state capital where he had met with Patricia González, the state attorney general. As if to welcome the federal officer, two men were executed in Chihuahua City on the morning of his arrival. Patiño also briefed members of the state’s Chamber of Deputies, making a declaration linking what had become a national epidemic of burglaries and theft to drug trafficking: “Robberies are eating the nation up alive,” he declared. “Organized crime is a school where a criminal begins robbing hubcaps but his aspiration is to become a drug trafficker,” Patiño added. He also made another striking revelation: he reported that approximately twenty-seven hundred people had been executed in drug-related crimes during the first fourteen months of the Calderón administration. Of those, only 3 percent of the bodies had been claimed by the victim’s families. Either they feared reprisals or they feared drawing the suspicion of law enforcement agencies, Patiño speculated.

  Following his meetings in Chihuahua City, Patiño boarded his federal plane and made his way up to Ciudad Juárez. Because the recent assassinations of police officers and the Sinaloa cartel’s open threats had created a pervasive sense of alarm throughout the city, a security meeting had been organized that included the city’s key business, civic, and religious leaders, in addition to Mayor Reyes Ferriz and Governor José Reyes Baeza. The meeting took place later that same day, at a large, upscale venue called Cibeles, on Tomás Fernández Boulevard, which hosted everything from quinceañera parties and weddings to the annual Ciudad Juárez Press Association Awards Ceremony.

  When he stepped up to the podium at the Cibeles meeting, Patiño outlined the federal government’s security analysis and strategy for the region. Specifically, he said that in Mexico the emerging war between the drug factions was no longer exclusively to control the border access points to American drug markets, but rather it was increasingly for control of specific neighborhoods, schools, and streets. Patiño said that competition over retail markets was spawning the spiral of violence throughout the country. Patiño also told the civic and religious leaders something that most Mexicans did not understand at the time, namely that gradually, over the course of the last decade, the country had ceased being merely a transit point for drugs and had become a significant consumer of drugs as well. “The cocaine that isn’t being sold over there is staying here with us,” Patiño noted, making reference to the United States. He observed that for the first time in Mexican history, cocaine consumption had become a national problem, from large cities to small towns.

  This new epidemic of domestic cocaine consumption was the centerpiece of the federal government’s analysis of the national crisis. The violence that was emerging on a national scale had as much to do with seizing and controlling retail drug markets as with the traditional efforts to control the border cities that were key access points to the American drug market. Patiño concluded his comments at the Cibeles meeting with the sobering observation that violence had spread to virtually every corner of the country: “No one is exempt from this maelstrom, but you can be certain that it is not a problem that is unique to Chihuahua.” Places where historically it had been rare to find evidence of retail drug sales and violence were now facing those very problems. Even states like Yucatán, Campeche, and Aguascalientes, which had long enjoyed reputations for being among the most peaceful regions of the country, were facing similar challenges. “People in every state are being victimized [by drug crime],” Patiño noted.

  One other observation that the federal intelligence officer made at the Cibeles meeting may have gone unnoticed by most in attendance. It had to do with the drug cartels’ growing media and public relations sophistication. Patiño noted that the cartels were beginning to use production techniques to enhance video material that they were disseminating via the
Internet, tactics similar to those being used by insurgents in Iraq. “These videos are being used to sow fear among citizens as well as among the police,” Patiño stated. Although he made no specific reference to it, it is likely that he was thinking, among other incidents, about the Sinaloa cartel’s calculated, media-savvy “For those who do not believe” message at the Monument to Fallen Police just two weeks earlier. Virtually every newspaper in the country had given the incident extensive coverage.

  Still at the podium, toward the end of his talk, Patiño turned to mayor Reyes Ferriz to pointedly urge him to clean up the Juárez municipal police. Before the assembled audience, Patiño offered to have the federal police administer “Confidence Tests” to the entire force: “If the mayor is in agreement, we need to see how ill the patient is so that we can give him the necessary medicine,” he said. Confidence Tests included drug and psychological testing, polygraphs, and other tests to evaluate the honesty and reliability of police force members.

  As Patiño spoke at the podium before the city’s business, civic, and religious leaders, it would have been difficult to miss the fact that he was putting pressure on the mayor. The two men did not know one another; Reyes Ferriz had not participated in the Chihuahua City meetings. The situation suggested that the federal authorities were not exactly sure where Reyes Ferriz stood, a circumstance that may have been further accentuated because Reyes Ferriz belonged to the PRI, whereas president Calderón’s party was the PAN. There was no ambiguity, however, regarding the audience’s response to Patiño’s remarks about cleaning up the Juárez police: a thunderous applause erupted from those in attendance. The people of Juárez were fed up with the status quo, and Patiño had touched on something deeply pent-up and charged. Everyone in Juárez knew what was going on within the police force. It was at that precise moment that Patiño chose to invoke the already-infamous Saulo Reyes affair: “We all lived, at a national level, the case of the ex–director of operations who was detained across the river,” Patiño said. “And how is it that we weren’t aware? No? So, that’s what it’s about,” he concluded, referencing the proposal to clean up the police once and for all.