The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  Reyes Ferriz called the Mexican consul in El Paso and arranged to greet Patricia Espinosa prior to the scheduled lunch, and then headed across the river for the meeting, which took place in an elegant, Spanish colonial revival–style building from the 1920s called the Cortez Building. The Cortez, where a series of conquistador heads stared out from roundels above the first floor, had once been a hotel but was now an upscale office building. During a break, the mayor stepped out into the hall and called governor Reyes Baeza to let him know that he was going to ask General Juárez Loera to give him a military person to serve as chief of police. An incredulous voice on the other end of the line simply said, “You’re militarizing the police if you do that.” Both men were attorneys who’d been steeped in the concept of the separation of civilian and military rule. “I did not see any other way out,” the mayor would later tell me. He conveyed that sentiment to the governor, who ultimately endorsed the mayor’s direction, albeit with considerable reluctance.

  Following his meeting with the Mexican foreign secretary, Reyes Ferriz raced back across the river via the so-called Dedicated Commuter Lane, or the Express Line, which required drivers to be certified on the Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI). This bridge obviated the lines that made crossing any of the other Juárez–El Paso bridges a time-consuming and tedious affair. The army garrison was a forty-minute drive from downtown Juárez to the south.

  General Loera held his meetings in a spartan conference room with white tablecloth–covered tables arranged in a square. When the mayor arrived he left his bodyguards outside and entered the meeting room alone, taking a seat at the table toward which the general had gestured. General Juárez Loera was an old-school military man. He had an oval, jowly face and he combed his thinning hair straight back, a hairstyle that along with a moderately receding hairline gave his forehead prominence. The general wore bifocals and had the weathered look of a man who spent a great deal of time outdoors. Loera was gruff, direct, and spoke with a gravelly voice, but there was something reassuring about his solid, commanding style. His troops respected him. At sixty-two, he was nearing the end of his career but he was coming to the finish line at full stride: the 11th Military Zone was one of the most important of the army’s sectors, given that the states within this territory, Chihuahua, Durango, and Coahuila, were key routes for the drug trade, where many cities and towns were controlled by one cartel or another—the entire region was awash in cartel operatives.

  “We’re coming to help, Señor Presidente,” the general said. He told the mayor that president Calderón would shortly announce that he was sending twenty-five hundred troops to Juárez to help stabilize the situation in the city. It was big news indeed. For the beleaguered Reyes Ferriz the general might as well have been the Savior. The mayor’s back was to the wall, and this news exceeded the mayor’s expectations by a significant measure. It certainly lived up to the general’s statement that what he had to say was more important than anything that might have happened in El Paso. But there was more; over the course of the meeting General Loera agreed to help the mayor find a current or former army officer to take over as chief of the Juárez municipal police.

  On his way back into town, José Reyes Ferriz felt tremendous relief. For days his situation had seemed utterly hopeless, without remedy, and he’d felt a tremendous isolation in the face of his predicament. He was certain that the infusion of army troops would change the dynamics of what was taking place in Juárez. With some of his fifteen hundred officers refusing to leave their stations and the police department teetering on the brink of chaos, twenty-five hundred soldiers patrolling the streets seemed like a game changer. The fact that the general was disposed to help him find a replacement for Prieto was an added bonus. These were very promising developments in Reyes Ferriz’s view. His immediate priority was to find a way of forestalling the mass resignations that Prieto had told him were imminent, a development that for all intents and purposes would leave the city without a police force. The mayor called Prieto in transit and asked to meet him at city hall. Reyes Ferriz hoped he could convince Prieto to stay on until his replacement was on board.

  “It was a very candid and open conversation,” the mayor recalled. The two men had known one another for many years; they liked and trusted each other. They spoke using the more personal “tu” rather than the more formal “usted.” “We stood at the big window,” Reyes Ferriz remembered. “I explained to Guillermo what the army was going to do and how they were going to intervene. And I asked him to stay on until they could find a replacement.” The conversation had that look-you-in-the-eye character that comes to the fore in moments when the subject matter involves great risk and the stakes are absolute: life and death. Both men knew that the threats were real. It was no small thing what the mayor was asking when he urged Guillermo Prieto to stay on. In the end, out of a sense of loyalty and professional obligation, Prieto agreed.

  At their meeting at the army command center, the general and the mayor had mapped out a course of action for the immediate days to come. Guillermo Prieto, assuming the mayor could convince him to stay on temporarily, would begin the long-planned cleanup of the police department while General Loera searched for his replacement and the identified army units were mobilized for their deployment to Juárez. The offer that Patiño had made at the Cibeles meeting to have the federal police oversee the administration of Confidence Tests to the entire police force had been more than an offer, it had been a precondition for the federal support that was now on its way to Juárez. The analysis remained the same: without a reliable police force overseeing the city, there could be no security in Juárez.

  Note

  1. The mayor is married and has two children. He was adamant that they not be portrayed in this book for fear that they might become victims of a reprisal against him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Twenty-Five Hundred Soldiers

  The Juárez municipal police continued to be rife with tension. There had been more assassination attempts on the officers whose names had appeared on the “unbelievers” list. One of these, Casimiro Meléndez Ortega, a thirty-three-year-old officer who had been a close friend of the recently executed Francisco Ledesma, had spotted two suspicious cars as he was leaving for work one morning. Meléndez Ortega had drawn his service revolver just as sicarios jumped from one of the vehicles, spraying AK-47 fire as they ran toward him. The officer had returned fire and managed to repel the attack. Miraculously, he survived the attempt, shaken but otherwise unscathed, although the entrance to his house was pocked with bullet holes. Panicked neighbors had tried to call the city’s emergency response number to no avail: despite repeated attempts, no one answered the line. Following the attempt on Meléndez Ortega, Guillermo Prieto placed the force on red alert, which meant that the police patrolled in teams of three and wore bulletproof vests, but it did little good: by the end of February the Sinaloa cartel had executed two more police commanders from the “unbelievers” list, and another had been lifted. The latter’s whereabouts were still unknown, although part of his uniform had been found with blood stains in an empty lot, evidence that militated against a positive outcome to his abduction.

  In addition to the violence directed against the municipal police, the announcement of the coming federal Confidence Tests, which would presumably ferret out those who were colluding with one or the other cartels or were otherwise engaged in criminal activity, was stirring unease. There was almost daily press coverage of the coming effort to clean up the department, and officers had begun deserting the force like rats jumping from a sinking ship. In the month of February alone forty-one police officers had tendered their resignations. “It’s unprecedented in my years in law enforcement,” Guillermo Prieto told Proceso magazine in reference to the resignations. Asked if the resignations were a symptom of police complicity with the cartels, Prieto would only venture to say that some had perhaps resigned for fear that their criminal activities would be revealed,
while others had resigned because their families were pressing them to do so out of fear that they would be killed. The chief proffered an estimate of the number of corrupt officers on the force at 10 percent. It was an absurdly low figure; virtually everyone in Juárez would have scoffed at it.

  For mayor Reyes Ferriz, the world seemed to be closing in. His police department was being decimated by assassinations, resignations, and work stoppages. The state police were hardly present in the city and the governor’s responses to the mayor’s petitions for additional support continued to fall on deaf ears. Reyes Ferriz increasingly found himself besieged from all sides and with few alternatives as the city descended into darkness and anarchy. The circumstance pointed toward a single, inevitable conclusion: the mayor had to put himself, and the fate of Juárez, into the hands of the federal government. Yet the costs to him of such a move were painfully clear. For one thing, it increased his personal risk significantly. There were also sure to be political costs, given that the decision to bring in the federal forces had already created tensions between himself and governor Reyes Baeza. There were many ways in which Juárez was at the mercy of the governor and the state legislature (which the governor controlled). The legislature was the source of funding that the city required to sustain services and projects whose budgets were already strained to the limit.

  . . .

  During the month of February 2008, while the mayor negotiated strategies for reinforcing local law enforcement and cleaning up his police, General Juárez Loera, whose 20th Militarized Cavalry Division was already garrisoned in the city, instructed his army units to take off the gloves. The five thousand troops in Juárez were part of the country’s border defense, given that Mexico does not have either a Border Patrol or state National Guard–style militias. Officially, their primary duties involved the interdiction of smugglers moving people and drugs in the border zone, and, historically, the army’s style had been low-key operations that did not receive a great deal of media attention. The military preferred it that way.

  That had first changed on January 21, following the attempted assassination of a man named Fernando Lozano, who was a regional commander with the Agencia Estatal de Investigaciónes, the investigative division of the state police. Lozano had received extensive training with international police agencies. At around 8:40 on the evening of the twenty-first, Lozano left the state police command center in his armored Jeep Cherokee on his way to visit a relative at Juárez’s Centro Médico de Especialidades, a respected local hospital. En route he realized that he was being followed by what appeared to be a cartel commando team. Lozano attempted to make his way back to the command center, but in his efforts to elude the sicarios he ran into another car and hit a bus-stop bench. The gunmen jumped out of their car and started raking Lozano’s vehicle with automatic weapons fire. In the fury of the attack, Lozano exited his vehicle, pistol in hand, and shot back at his attackers. The assailants fled, leaving the severely wounded commander on the street. Lozano managed to flag down a passing motorist, who drove him to the nearby Centro Médico de Especialidades.

  There is evidence to suggest that Lozano may have been collaborating with American law enforcement. His training had brought him into contact with many American law enforcement branches, including the FBI and the DEA. And as he received emergency surgery (a four-hour procedure to remove two bullets lodged in his thorax and lung), the Mexican Army maintained a perimeter of tight security around the hospital, including heavily armed guards posted at all entrances. This was highly unusual; it would have been typical for the municipal police to play this role, not the army. The police obviously could not be trusted to protect Lozano. Several days later, once Lozano’s condition had stabilized, he was transferred to Thompson Hospital in El Paso under tight security. There were concerns that assassins might attempt to ambush Lozano’s ambulance to finish the job, so a brand-new ambulance, one that presumably matched Lozano’s social station, was used as a decoy. The empty ambulance left the hospital and headed for the international bridge under heavy army escort that included armored military vehicles with 50-caliber machine guns at the ready, while Lozano and a medical team, who were actually aboard an old junk-heap of an ambulance, trailed the convoy at a short distance. Authorization for the Mexican ambulance to cross the bridge into the United States is said to have come from high-level government authorities in Washington, DC. Once at the Thompson Hospital, Lozano remained under heavy guard by U.S. marshals and the El Paso Police Department. Lozano would never return to Mexico.

  Within minutes of the Lozano assassination attempt, the army began patrolling the streets. The army set up intermittent roadblocks on main transit points hoping to catch people with weapons and drugs. Mexico’s constitution prohibits citizens from owning weapons that are “for the exclusive use of the military,” such as AK-47s, AR-15s and other assault-style weapons, as well as grenades, bazookas, and rocket launchers. Similarly, drug trafficking and organized crime are also federal offenses in Mexico. Thus, focusing on these specific crimes provided the legal cover (an inadequate basis, some would argue) that allowed the army to take to the streets and engage in what was, essentially, police work, even though the army was not involving itself with “ordinary” crime.

  Almost immediately, the army’s deployment produced successes. In the first week the military arrested Gabino Salas Valenciano, head of a Juárez cartel cell in the Valley of Juárez, when he was stopped at a military roadblock. In one raid in early February the army discovered a significant cache, including twenty-five automatic weapons and five handguns, seven fragmentation grenades, fourteen bulletproof vests, communications equipment, and five vehicles. Although the Juárez media described the site as a Juárez cartel safe house, the fact that three of the five confiscated vehicles bore Sinaloa license plates suggested that perhaps it was the Sinaloa cartel occupying the safe house.

  A few days later, the army, along with the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI), raided another building in which one of the cartels was processing cocaine and other drugs for retail sales. The army and the AFI appeared to have arrived just as something significant was about to take place, given that twenty-one individuals, some of them reputedly hit men, were found gathered in the building. Here, too, they found many weapons, but they also found 13,700 individual doses of rock cocaine and two kilos of “cocaine base,” as well as 136 boxes of plastic sandwich bags and bicarbonate powder, which was used to cut the pure cocaine prior to packaging it in doses. The authorities also discovered both army and AFI uniforms in one of the rooms, presumably used for impersonating law enforcement. The twenty-one men were led from the building in blindfolds, Iraq War–style, and taken to the federal attorney general’s compound for processing. Tellingly, all three of the vehicles seized at this second site also bore Sinaloa plates, although once again the authorities speculated that the site was a Juárez cartel operation.

  These successes came on the heels of the army’s seizure of nearly two tons of marijuana at the end of January. Near Juárez, the army had laid siege to the small town of Buenaventura, where they found a narco-armory with nine thousand bullets of different calibers, sixteen AK-47s and AR-15s as well as military-style sharpshooter rifles and tear gas grenades, thirty-one AK-47 silencers, thirteen handcuffs, Kevlar helmets, and, again, a stock of federal law enforcement uniforms.

  Mayor Reyes Ferriz and other city officials were quick to applaud the army’s successes. City council members who were part of the city’s Public Security Commission praised the actions, lamenting only that the army had not been mobilized sooner. The fact that the army was receiving anonymous tips, which they credited for leading them to the two safe houses, also suggested that the people of Juárez were responding to their presence, even as negotiations were underway to secure even more army troops for Juárez (the troops in the streets were those who had already been stationed at the garrison).

  However, the army’s activities immediately drew criticism from some quarte
rs as well and, at times, misinformation. For example, El Heraldo de Chihuahua, a newspaper from the capital city, asserted that the army’s seized narco-lab had actually been a facility run and protected by the army. The federal attorney general’s office immediately repudiated the allegation, noting that there had been armed people arrested and a cache of weapons and drugs seized. No other Chihuahua newspaper carried the Heraldo’s version of this story, but it revealed the media crosscurrents in a state where newspapers were sometimes in the pay of the cartels.

  The army also did little to endear itself to the press. One night shortly after the narco-lab bust, the army arrested two groups of people in a rural area along the U.S.-Mexico line. One group was in possession of 57 kilos of marijuana, while the second was carrying 107 kilos of marijuana. In all, ten men were detained in the two incidents, five of them carrying assault weapons. However, when reporters from El Diario arrived to cover the second action, there was a confrontation with the army. An armed man in civilian clothes wearing a ski mask flagged the journalists’ car down and demanded to see the driver’s press credentials. He told the driver that the “commander” wanted to speak to him. The situation appeared dangerous—the reporters were unarmed, it was the dead of night, and there were no witnesses. The driver refused, at which point the man tore the press identification from the reporter’s hands and ran off with it. In a third incident involving the media, the army raided yet another safe house in Juárez, where numerous vehicles were stored. The army arrested three men inside the property, where they’d again found weapons and a modest amount of marijuana. As the cars were being impounded, a man walked up to a soldier and complained that one of the cars being impounded belonged to his brother. The man was taken into custody, but reporters covering the incident clearly thought he was innocent. They called out to him to give them his name, and in the published accounts he was described as someone who had merely happened upon the narco-house during the army’s operation.