Eventually, the United States succeeded in cajoling the relevant countries into signing bilateral agreements permitting the coast guard and navy to interdict vessels flying their flags on the high seas. This resulted in the dramatic surge of cocaine seizures and was the final blow to the Caribbean as the preferred conduit of South American cocaine into the United States. The Colombian cartels turned to Mexico instead, and the cocaine that had been flowing into the U.S. through Florida and the Eastern Seaboard started flowing in through Mexican border crossings, creating an unprecedented boon for the Mexican cartels and paving the way for them to become the most important players in the cocaine smuggling business.
Almost all of the cocaine was entering Mexico via the West Coast, through the ports of Manzanillo, Lázaro Cárdenas, Acapulco, or Salina Cruz, in addition to dozens of smaller towns and fishing villages along the coast between Oaxaca and Sinaloa. Some of it also came overland through Guatemala. Once on Mexican soil, the cocaine made its way to Tijuana, Mexicali, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros, depending on the cartel that happened to own the shipment. The shipments might arrive in Mexico in quantities as large as a ton or more, but they were quickly broken down into more manageable quantities as they made their way to the key transit points into the American drug market. The shipments that arrived in Juárez varied in size as a function of how they’d been shipped up to the border. There, they were broken down further depending on the cartel operatives and how much weight they could move.
. . .
In the narco-world, having paramours and mistresses and leaving your women with children all over town was simply part of the culture. Narcocorridos often celebrated the fact that the big capos left so many women pregnant; such expressions of virility were a staple of the show-the-world-you’re-a-macho narco-culture. Hernán’s brothers and other relatives knew about Elena and Pedro. In fact, sometimes Hernán and Elena vacationed with his brothers and cousins or with his associates. Sometimes the men brought their wives and other times they brought their girlfriends. Even Hernán’s mother knew about Elena. It was all loose, boundary-less, and dictated by the whims of macho men who felt entitled to have their way.
Hernán could be charming, effusive, and indulgent. He often catered to Elena’s whims. Their son was never lacking in toys and Hernán constantly brought him gifts; keeping Pedro pampered and spoiled was one of his pleasures. He could be that way with others, as well. “He could be very noble,” is the way Elena described it. One afternoon they had been out to eat and were driving home from the restaurant when they stopped at a light where a woman was begging, asking for money to feed her children. Hernán reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. Rolling down his window, he beckoned the woman over. “Here,” he said. “Now go back to your house, señora, to be with your children.” The woman started crying and thanked him.
Such gestures touched Elena. They made her trust Hernán, made her believe that he had a good heart. She saw those qualities, too, in the way he interacted with Pedro and with his family. He was very devoted to his parents, for example. At one of our meetings, as she reflected on Hernán’s character, on the kind of man that he was, she summarized it all cogently: “As a son, friend, and father, he was very noble and good. As a man, he was a son of a bitch.”
The latter was a reference to a darker side of Hernán, an abusive, authoritarian man that she characterized simply as being “a macho’s macho.” For all the ways he could be indulging, he was equally capable of being vicious, aggressive, and controlling. He could come home in an expansive, manic mood when things went well, but when they didn’t, he blew in like the wrath of God, demanding, provoking, and attacking at the slightest perturbation. And Elena’s nature was anything but submissive. When she felt that he was being unreasonable she stood her ground. She did not coddle him or engage in obsequious efforts to smooth his feathers. That was completely against her nature. She talked back. She shouted as loudly as he did. She told him to go fuck himself.
At these times Hernán often insulted her and sometimes beat her, which only served to mobilize Elena’s fury all the more. She threw things at him or tried to hurt him. On one occasion she almost gouged his eye out, requiring a trip to the emergency room to save the eye. Hernán’s abuse also took the form of a need to have Elena under his control. He had his police goons park on her block and in front of her house. He wanted to know where she was at all times. He did not like for her to leave the house even if it was to go grocery shopping. When she went out, he checked on her obsessively, insistently, by repeatedly calling her on her cell phone. But there was also a tender side to their relationship, and Hernán had the capacity to take her into his confidence and share parts of his business world with her. It was one of the features of their relationship that allowed Elena to know that she mattered to him.
Hernán and Elena lived lives of combustible desperation within the middle rungs of the Juárez cartel. Elena’s restless instincts and combative nature played off of Hernán’s macho disposition in ways that created unanticipated, and perhaps unacknowledged, balance between them. At the time, and within her frame of vision, there was little that Elena wished for beyond what she had. Her life already exceeded what most from her background could have hoped for.
CHAPTER 9
The General
In mid-March, as the 2008 Holy Week neared with its imagery of death and rebirth, there was an abundance of death in Ciudad Juárez but no sign of renewal. Executions had jumped to unprecedented levels. The tally of the dead was running at three, four, sometimes five executions per day and it was pressing hard upon the city and making daily headlines. The assassinations of police officers were having an especially unsettling and demoralizing effect within the force as well as upon the city as a whole. It was as if the veil behind which horror lurked had been torn away, unmasking something ever so raw and brutal.
In the aftermath of the discovery of the “unbelievers” list at the police monument, Guillermo Prieto, the chief of the Juárez municipal police, like all of his commanders, feared for his life every moment of his waking day. The police executions and the ever-present threats of more to come had brought Prieto to the breaking point. The chief had been an officer for nearly twenty years, but the pressure had become unbearable. “Let me go to El Paso to sleep on the weekends,” he’d asked mayor Reyes Ferriz. It was the only way to get relief, even if temporarily, from the stress of knowing that he was being hunted.
Tension permeated the air at the police department’s six command centers. The narco-list of “those who still do not believe” was weighing heavily on everyone. The threat could not be ignored, because it was a threat being made good. So unbearable was the anxiety that at one point there was a mutiny, with officers refusing to leave their command centers. “They were afraid that they were going to be killed if they left their stations,” the mayor recalled. That meant that there was little police presence in the streets, a circumstance that could quickly deteriorate into all-out mayhem. In addition to the cartels, there was no shortage of garden-variety criminals in the city—the usual cast of scammers, thieves, carjackers, extortionists, and rapists. The city could not operate without a police force.
On the Thursday before Holy Week, Prieto called the mayor to tell him he was going to resign. “I can’t do this, the risks have become too great,” he said to Reyes Ferriz. The announcement hit the mayor hard. He had an ally in the chief, someone he trusted within a police department that he knew to be riddled with corruption and infested with cartel penetration. There were only a handful of people in the department in whom the mayor had confidence.
“What do you think about Antonio Román [the second in command] succeeding you?” the mayor asked Prieto, but the response he received only served to further unnerve him: “No,” the police chief told him. “Román is going to resign before I do!”
The two key players in the department were walking out on him, and Francisco Ledesma, the third in comm
and, had already been executed. “So who’s going to take your place?” he asked Prieto. The police chief ’s response left the mayor cold: “There isn’t anyone. All of the commanders are resigning.” The Sinaloa cartel had succeeded in sowing panic within the ranks of the Juárez municipal police. The force was on the verge of implosion.
Despite the high levels of anxiety, the mayor succeeded in persuading his chief of police to stay on until he could find a replacement. Reyes Ferriz also promised that there would be more federal support. Prieto, in turn, helped calm nerves among the police commanders, at least temporarily averting their mass resignations. But the mayor knew the entire operation was hanging by a thread, a thread that could well be snapped by the next execution of a police officer, and there were plenty of names yet to go on the infamous Black List, as the “For those who still do not believe” list was now being called.
As the end of March neared, an atmosphere of dread saturated the entire city. The local media was brimming with stories related to the security crisis. Every conversation seemed to revolve around the dark fate that had overtaken Juárez. There was a collective sense of helplessness, frustration, and fear. At his Holy Week convocation, the Catholic bishop asked that everyone pray for their city.
. . .
There were other signs that the city was devolving into a state of anarchy, where the very structures that organize lives were yielding to something unspeakable, and where evil was sucking the life force out of Ciudad Juárez. At the end of January, just days after the Sinaloa narco-message had been left at the police monument, a tip to the federal police led officials to a house where the remains of nine people were found buried in pits in the back yard. Nearly a ton of marijuana was also seized at the location. Five complete bodies were exhumed from four separate pits, as well as the dismembered remains of at least four other victims. It was unclear if the latter victims had been dismembered as they were being tortured, or after their deaths. It was another “house of death,” a macabre genre for which the Juárez cartel had become infamous.
The term “house of death” had been coined in Juárez back in 2004 by neighbors of a house in which a grisly discovery had been made. A dozen bodies had been found there, buried in the back yard of a modest house in a residential subdivision. Most showed signs of torture. Although it would become clear that there were many “houses of death,” the 2004 case had attained special notoriety when an intrepid Dallas Morning News correspondent named Alfredo Corchado and Bill Conroy, an equally intrepid journalist who ran an electronic news site called Narco News, had written extensive stories about the horrors that had taken place at 3633 Calle Parcioneros. An informant for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a man named Guillermo Eduardo Ramírez Peyro, who was a former Mexican Highway Patrol officer, had played an active role in the crime. It was later learned that Ramírez Peyro had infiltrated the Juárez cartel on behalf of American law enforcement. In fact, there was evidence to suggest that the Americans may have been aware of what was taking place at the house on Calle Parcioneros.
A month after the January 2008 discovery of the most recent house of death, a second site was found in a Juárez neighborhood called La Cuesta. Here, the federal police initially discovered a cache of weapons and drugs. Two men were also arrested at the house, which was located on Sierra del Pedregal Street and surrounded by a tall wall. The information provided by the two men prompted the federal police to bring two police dogs trained to detect human remains to the property. They also brought a backhoe. When they started digging in the backyard they immediately discovered three bodies interred in a six-foot grave. Over the course of the next two weeks, federal authorities eventually found thirty-six bodies buried in sixteen different pits in the backyard of the house in La Cuesta. Neighbors told the federal police that men driving late-model cars had been using the house for the last six months. Some neighbors pleaded for police protection for fear that the sicarios might return after the federal police left.
The houses of death were basically safe houses where the Juárez cartel did a great deal of its dirty work (the Sinaloa cartel operated its own death houses once it made its move on the city). The primary requirement for these houses was that cartel operatives could enter and leave covertly, which meant tall gates or garages with doors. This way, sicarios could come in and out and victims could be unloaded without being seen. The houses also required space. Rooms were needed to hold kidnap victims (who were being held to extort money from their families) as well as individuals who had been lifted—competitors, snitches, and people who were not following orders or who were otherwise uncooperative. Before killing them, the cartel often tortured those who had been lifted to extract information or simply to make them pay for their misdeeds. Some of the cruelty seemed to be inflicted for mere sport. The safe houses were also places where drugs were stored, weapons were stockpiled, and cars were secreted. Lastly, many of the safe houses had patches of ground where those whose agonies had come to an end could be secretly buried.
The safe houses were typically in working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods, where people went to work, where families lived in the shadows of what was taking place, and where sometimes the screams of the victims were insufficiently muffled. The late-night comings and goings of strangers in typical narco-vehicles—SUVs, pickup trucks, or stolen cars with no license plates—made what was taking place behind the walls all too transparent. Often, neighbors lived in fear that they might inadvertently see or come to know too much, a fear, in other words, that a misstep might turn them into victims as well. The people in these neighborhoods were completely defenseless; they had no recourse—there was no one to call and no one to whom they could turn. Everyone knew that the municipal police were complicit. It was also universally known that the city’s 066 number, the so-called Anonymous Tip line, was anything but anonymous—officers in the pay of the cartel staffed it. Whenever a citizen called with information that the cartel might find inconvenient, a call was placed to cartel cell phones. Tip line callers with cartel-related information often ended up either brutalized or dead. There was no authority; the institutions that normally protect and serve the public welfare were all but nonexistent. The notion of law and order meant nothing in Juárez. That brutal fact made the residents of these neighborhoods hostages; they were unprotected and vulnerable. And all over the city the narcos had their safe houses from which they reigned their terror.
. . .
Everything in Mexico closes down for Holy Week. Next to Christmas, it’s the biggest national holiday. José Reyes Ferriz took his family1 to the El Conquistador hotel in Tuscon, Arizona, a five-star resort with world-class tennis courts, a golf course, and an expensive spa, among other amenities, nestled up against the Santa Catalina Mountains. Notwithstanding the sumptuous surroundings, Reyes Ferriz was completely distracted and preoccupied with his predicament. “I was trying to figure out what we were going to do,” the mayor recalled. That Saturday morning the mayor received his customary call from his chief of police to report on the state of the city. “How are you, mi Presidente?” Prieto said, using the honorific for the mayor. “If you give me a number that’s fewer than five, I’m fine,” was the mayor’s response (meaning that he hoped there had been less than five executions in the city over the prior twenty-four hours). There was something different in the police chief ’s tone. After a moment, the mayor asked the chief how he was doing. “Me, I’m fine,” Prieto responded before dropping his bomb: “I’m here watching my ranch and feeding my pigs,” he said. “I’m not coming back.”
Prieto’s words hit Reyes Ferriz hard. The burden of his position weighed heavily on him; he’d been worrying about saving the city from itself for months now. Even as he clicked off his cell phone, the chief of police’s statement continued to reverberate in his head. “I was alone,” the mayor noted. “There was no one who could fix this for me.” The mayor returned home on Easter Sunday, immersed in worry.
At 10 a.m. on Monday morning,
as he was meeting with his chief of staff, his personal secretary buzzed. “You have a call from General Juárez Loera,” he said. Loera was the commander of the 11th Military Zone, a vast area of northern Mexico that included the important border states of Chihuahua and Coahuila. The general had a reputation as a tough, no-nonsense commander not given to niceties or trivial conversation. He also had a penchant for raising the hackles of civil libertarians by making such pronouncements as, “My search warrant is the sledgehammer.” Loera was constantly at odds with human-rights activists seeking to make him accountable for army violations spawned by his iron-fist, tough-on-crime philosophy. At an opening ceremony to mark the initiation of a guns-for-food-vouchers exchange program that spring of 2008, the general had chided journalists who questioned him about army abuses in Juárez: “I’d prefer it if when journalists write of ‘one more dead’ they’d say ‘one less delinquent,’ instead,” he suggested. The general was criticized for implying that the lives of narcos were worthless.
The mayor had already decided that he would ask the general to recommend someone to replace Guillermo Prieto. “Señor Presidente,” the general said, “Clear your agenda. I’ll see you at 2 p.m. at the army garrison.”
The mayor’s calendar was already full. He was expected at an important meeting in El Paso at that same time. The Mexican foreign secretary, Patricia Espinosa (Mexico’s counterpart to the American secretary of state), was coming to negotiate a new rail bridge across the Rio Grande west of Juárez so that trains would no longer have to come through the center of the city. The mayor of El Paso, the Mexican consul in El Paso, and the American consul in Juárez were all to be in attendance. “Mi general,” Reyes Ferriz responded, “I have something at 1 p.m. in El Paso with the secretaría de relaciones exteriores.” But the general was intransigent: “Clear your agenda,” he repeated. “What I have to tell you will be of greater importance to you than anything madam secretary has to say.”
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 10