The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  When Patiño returned to the proscenium, he and mayor Reyes Ferriz exchanged some brief words. “I happened to be seated next to Patiño,” the mayor later recalled, making the encounter appear serendipitous. “I asked Patiño to send me some support and he said, ‘I’m going to send you two hundred federal police.’” The promised reinforcements were nearly a threefold increase over the number of federal police presently in the troubled city, and to Reyes Ferriz the promise of two hundred crack federal police seemed like an entire army.

  Patricio Patiño made many astute observations during his speech in Juárez, and he was effective in outlining the challenges the Mexican state faced in relation to the drug war, but one thing that Patiño did not do publicly, either in his address or in the subsequent press conference, was promise a massive infusion of federal forces. On the contrary, during the press conference following his Cibeles talk, Patiño said that at present he saw no need to increase the current force level of five hundred federal police deployed throughout the state, noting that these forces were primarily engaged in intelligence work to support the state ministerial police and underscoring the strong spirit of collaboration that existed between the federal and the state police forces. While Patiño did indicate that there was a contingency force of two hundred federal police available for mobilization, especially to Ciudad Juárez, for reasons that are unclear he chose not to share with the press the commitment he’d made minutes earlier in his private conversation with the mayor.

  While Patiño’s speech drew ovations inside the Cibeles hall, outside the apparent reluctance on the part of the federal government to send a meaningful force drew an angry response from the press. One El Diario editorial headlined the question: “Who are they trying to hoodwink?” The piece chastised the federal Secretariat for Public Security, and, by implication, its director, Genaro García Luna, for coming into Chihuahua (by sending his emissary, Patricio Patiño) intent on convincing the state’s citizens that the appeal for federal help was due to overblown concerns. The editorial also took the federal authorities to task given that, by their own admission, the police forces in the state of Chihuahua were under-equipped, poorly trained, and underpaid, making them vulnerable to corruption. “It’s more than established that organized crime has infiltrated the police rank and file as well as their commanders,” the editorial observed, specifically referencing, as a way of underscoring the point, the still-fresh arrest of Saulo Reyes in El Paso. Given this state of affairs, the need for federal forces was obvious.

  Patiño appeared to be walking a fine line. What could not be said or acknowledged by the federal representative was that at that moment there were insufficient federal forces to address the emerging crisis in Juárez. Too many other cities were already in the line of fire. It seemed that Patiño had been dispatched to reassure the people of Juárez but was not in a position to deliver substantive assistance beyond the two hundred officers he’d promised the mayor, a force that, technically, was not an increase given that they were already allocated as reserves in the event of a crisis.

  One comment Patiño made during the press conference especially incensed El Diario. The federal intelligence officer volunteered at one juncture that the state’s crime problem was “more perceptual than real,” noting that several other states had higher indices of violence when compared to Chihuahua. It was clear that Patiño had gotten tangled up in his own words, and the farther he went to try to explain himself, the deeper he dug himself into a hole. Patiño noted that 73 percent of the crime in the state was robbery, while only 1 percent was assassinations, prompting El Diario to editorialize with a big dollop of sarcasm: “So watch out for the thieves, but never mind the sicarios!” (the common term for hit men). Since robberies were under the purview of the municipal and state police authorities while organized crime (and, hence, cartel-related executions) fell under the purview of federal authorities, the Patiño statements were taken to mean that the federal government was sidestepping its responsibilities. In the end, Patiño’s visit to Juárez failed miserably in its mission to reassure, drawing instead a flood of media criticism.

  The federal government appeared to be vacillating. On the one hand, they had taken the very significant step of informing Mayor Reyes Ferriz and, in a separate briefing, Governor Reyes Baeza, that according to their intelligence sources, there was a coming war. On the other hand, they were not mobilizing meaningfully to face the anticipated cartel violence, which was already at the city’s doorstep. It appeared that the federal government had yet to fully grasp the full implication of its own warning.

  The two hundred federal police started to arrive two days after Patiño left Juárez. For José Reyes Ferriz, that infusion represented a meaningful intervention. The state government, by contrast, continued to put the mayor off, remaining noncommittal and dragging its feet about increasing the number of state ministerial police units in Juárez. One detail from Patiño’s press conference seemed stuck in the mayor’s craw. He’d learned that on Patiño’s second visit a meeting had taken place in Chihuahua City, where the federal intelligence officer had met with the governor, the state attorney general, the head of the state ministerial police, and key state legislators. This was the second time in as many weeks that the mayor had been excluded from key meetings concerning the fate of his city. That fact did not sit well with Reyes Ferriz.

  . . .

  The arrival of two hundred federal police in Juárez in mid-February of 2008 at first seemed to catch the cartels off guard. There was a short-lived dip in the number of executions, as the cartels appeared to be taking a wait-and-see attitude toward this new development. But the respite was brief. Within two weeks that lull had completely evaporated.

  José Reyes Ferriz was an avid soccer fan. Sometimes when he had work commitments that overlapped with important matches, his wife called in periodic updates. He also used soccer metaphors when describing important events. For example, he’d once described the momentous election of Vicente Fox to the Mexican presidency in 2000 (the first time a non-PRI candidate had won, considered by most Mexicans as the juncture when Mexico began to emerge as a true democracy). “It was as if Mexico had won the World Cup,” he said.

  On the 23rd of February, a Saturday afternoon, the mayor was watching a soccer match on television when the broadcast was interrupted. “They cut to a firefight that was taking place on the street right outside of the television station,” he recalled. What viewers saw on their TV screens was sicarios firing 50-caliber machine guns at one another in broad daylight on one of the city’s main thoroughfares, which was lined with family restaurants chock-full of patrons. At the end of the skirmish, three of the establishments’ walls were pocked with bullet holes but, miraculously, no civilians had been injured.

  The incident betrayed a chilling indifference to the innocent people who might be caught in the crossfire. The cartels also evinced the kind of battlefield tactics typically associated with disciplined military units: “They left with their people, with their wounded and with their weapons,” the mayor remembered. The cartels were acting as if they owned the city and feared no one. “They even took their wounded to Star Medical hospital,” the mayor added with a tone of incredulity. Whatever the initial deterrence, it was obvious that the cartels were not the least bit intimidated by the newly arrived contingent of federal police.

  CHAPTER 7

  La Cima

  On a cold winter night, I traveled through neighborhoods on the poor northwest side of town, toward the city center. My route took me through La Cima, Juárez’s legendary drug quarter where for decades American soldiers were regular customers. No more. The city’s violence had forced American military authorities to declare Juárez off-limits to military personnel. La Cima sits at the top of a rise on the western side of the city, a barrio in the hardcore Altavista neighborhood. Any given evening a slow drive through La Cima (meaning “the top” or “the crest”) offered many an opportunity to buy hits of cocaine or heroin or any
other drug. A green pickup truck just ahead of me pulled to an abrupt stop midstreet in front of a house, and a runner delivered a small packet to the car window, drive-in style. The two men in the front seat of a battered, white Dodge van had chosen to pull over. They parked, and a runner appeared at the driver’s side window to take the order. Other people simply walked into one or another of the picaderos, where they could do their cocaine or heroin—syringes available for the asking—and hang out on the lumpy, moldy, stained mattresses scattered about until they came down enough to go home. No one would bother them. I spotted a young adolescent boy standing on the rooftop of a house on the corner; he was no older than twelve or thirteen. Kids like him were known as “falcons,” or “whistlers,” or “posts,” and they patrolled from the rooftops or other points with panoramic views, where they scanned the streets that ran through the neighborhood and sounded the alert when the army or (non-complicit) police made a pass through the area.

  This barrio had been the heart of the Juárez drug world for decades, but these days there were picaderos all over the city. Some were formal, that is, in houses and buildings, others informal—vendors, for example, who otherwise sold burritos or fruit or juices from small stands and mobile carts, or pushers who hung around parks and street corners. At least in Juárez, the thesis that Patricio Patiño had presented at the Cibeles security meeting that February in 2008, in which he’d argued that retail drug markets and domestic drug consumption were the new scourges of Mexico, was plainly in evidence. The picaderos were booming in Juárez, and the addicts were local. Juárez now had the highest concentration of drug addicts in all of Mexico.

  There had been roughly one to two hundred picaderos in the city until 1994, when the U.S. government launched Operation Hold the Line in El Paso in an effort to more aggressively intercept undocumented workers attempting to enter the United States. Whether by design or not, the operation had a direct impact on drug smuggling; it became more difficult for the cartels to move product across the river. In the span of just a few months, the number of picaderos in Juárez doubled to four hundred. There was a clear-cut cause and effect: in response to Operation Hold the Line, the cartel had begun paying its lieutenants partially in product, which in turn had to be converted into cash. That was the force behind the sudden explosion of retail drug markets all over the city (indeed, the country). By 2007, there were approximately two thousand picaderos in Juárez, depending on what authority you asked. It was anyone’s guess what the true number was, but they were everywhere. Juárez, a city that historically had catered to visiting customers from across the river, was now swimming in cocaine, heroin, and local addicts.

  There were essentially four tiers to the Juárez cartel’s operations. At the top were the capos and the lieutenants and their immediate people. A significant part of their work centered on the logistics of getting Colombian cocaine as well as Mexican-origin drugs across the border. Then there was La Línea, comprising the state ministerial police and the Juárez municipal police, who were the enforcement wing of the cartel. Beneath them were Los Aztecas, Juárez’s most powerful street gang. And, finally, below Los Aztecas were the scores of lesser gangs that Los Aztecas controlled. The cartel outsourced the local distribution and retail sales to Los Aztecas. The people selling drugs on the streets were not cartel members, they were mostly poor, unemployed neighborhood people who occupied the very bottom of the hierarchy; they were utterly expendable.

  Los Aztecas had their origins in American, especially Texan, prisons, where incarcerated Mexican and Mexican-ancestry inmates banded together to run prison rackets. Many gang members were from the Barrio Azteca in El Paso. Others were from Juárez and other parts of Mexico. The U.S. government had begun deporting many of the Mexican prisoners to Juárez, where they maintained their ties to their Barrio Azteca allies in El Paso. As Los Aztecas were again imprisoned in the enormous Juárez city prison (the Centro de Rehabilitación Social, or CERESO), they eventually took control of it, from which they managed a great deal of the criminal activity in the city. Mexican prisons are notoriously porous, and the Juárez CERESO was especially so. Between authorized conjugal visits and widespread corruption of guards and wardens, Los Aztecas had the run of the prison and ready access to what went on beyond it.

  By early 2008 Los Aztecas had been identified as the gang that was running the local retail drug markets as well as bringing in a significant amount of weapons across the border from Texas. An exposé on the gang that appeared in El Diario at that time noted that Los Aztecas exerted such complete control in Juárez that 80 percent of the local gangs were working for them in some capacity, helping Los Aztecas manage the distribution and sale of drugs in the city.

  Los Aztecas had structured their business in such a way that they could distribute thousands of doses a day, even when their workers were arrested or killed. The most important detail revealed by the El Diario article was that there were no longer any independent contractors in the Juárez retail drug world. Workers were paid 300 pesos a day plus commissions on sales (assembly plant workers in Juárez were making 500 pesos per week). The haphazard, incidental character of the prior independent contractor was replaced by a highly structured organizational scheme that included three eight-hour shifts per day. There were an estimated 120 distribution and retail centers in Juárez employing roughly twelve hundred people. Each of these, in turn, was in charge of several “runners,” and for every runner there were, on average, five puchadores (a Mexicanization of the term “pusher”). This same system serviced the more traditional picaderos as well. Each center had security people, who were responsible for watching over the venues where drugs were sold and monitoring to ensure that people stayed within their prescribed territories. These retail centers were all over the city now, but the area of greatest sales was the Zona Centro, downtown. El Diario’s source noted that it was especially evident downtown that the municipal police were protecting the vendors. La Cima and the neighborhoods immediately surrounding it were also a high-volume area, notwithstanding the fact that the police had placed a substation just three blocks from La Cima.

  A February 26, 2008, arrest of twenty-one Aztecas by the Mexican Army provided a snapshot into the workings of the local drug business. The Aztecas were working as operatives of La Línea and the Juárez cartel, and their duties included executions and lifting people, as well as protecting drug shipments that were distributed to the picaderos for retail drug sales. In other words, some of the jobs for which the cartel had traditionally used La Línea were now being subcontracted out to Los Aztecas. At the time of their arrest, gang members were found to have an arsenal that included ten AK-47s, a batch of federal police uniforms, police communications radios, twenty-three scales, thirteen thousand doses of cocaine, two kilos of cocaine base, as well as a “brick” of marijuana.

  One of the universally reliable equations in drug culture is that where there is a high incidence of drug addiction, there is also a high incidence of ancillary crime. That equation held as true in Ciudad Juárez as it did in New York City or Houston or Detroit. The explosion in the number of people addicted to heroin and cocaine in Juárez translated into an explosion in crime, from burglaries and car thefts to assaults and holdups. By the spring of 2008, crime was beginning to reach epidemic proportions throughout the city.

  Arrested Juárez gangbangers. Photo copyright © Raymundo Ruiz.

  . . .

  A vast amount of cocaine and other drugs moved through Juárez into El Paso. The city was the most important transit point for the Juárez cartel’s drugs, but it was also a vital point of passage for other cartels as well. Prior to the war, the latter had typically paid the Juárez cartel a fee to transit their product through the city, sometimes even under the protection of La Línea. One of the most telling details that betrayed the extent of police involvement in the Juárez drug trade was the fact that virtually no cocaine was ever confiscated in municipal police operations. Notwithstanding that Juárez was universall
y known to be one of the most important transit points for cocaine into the United States, a fact that should have translated into periodic interdictions of significant drug shipments, over the course of 2005 the police had only confiscated a paltry seventy-two kilos of cocaine. In 2006, the quantity had dropped to a mere sixty-one kilos; and in 2007 the amount of confiscated cocaine had dropped to a laughable three kilograms. Few of the cartel’s midlevel operatives, the tier that moved modest quantities of cocaine across the border, would have bothered to waste a “mule” on a paltry run of three kilos. In a city that the Mexican federal attorney general’s office had designated as having the third-largest retail cocaine market in the country, just behind Tijuana and Monterrey, one would certainly have expected commensurate cocaine seizures.

  The Juárez cartel had created an efficient, lean organizational structure, one that would have been the envy of any corporation managing the marketing and sale of its products. However, the Sinaloa cartel had initiated an effort to alter this convenient arrangement. In attempting to take over the city, the Sinaloa people could not leave this part of the Juárez cartel’s operations intact. Although media accounts of the ensuing violence would repeatedly characterize the conflict as between two cartels for control of access to the American drug market, this was only half of the picture. The other half was about the local retail business and the addicts it serviced. While net profits from the local Juárez drug trade were far less than those derived from shipping drugs across the border (the value of a kilo of cocaine doubled when it traveled from Juárez across the Rio Grande), Sinaloa could not ignore this segment of the Juárez cartel’s business because the network was now intrinsic to the very structure of the Juárez cartel’s operations. There was no way for Sinaloa to take Juárez without taking control of the retail drug markets as well—Sinaloa’s flank would have been left exposed and vulnerable. Out of this imperative would come the thousands of dead, the wave of executions that was about to wash over the city as rival gangs assassinated one another’s members as they vied for control of the city’s picaderos and the addicts they served.