The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  From the first days of its new role in Juárez, the army’s overzealousness, and at times abuses, quickly created significant tensions between it and the press. Most of the coverage, especially by the Juárez newspapers, appeared fact-driven and fair. Unlike the false report in El Heraldo de Chihuahua, the local papers were covering the army’s actions, good and bad, with professionalism, which meant that they not only covered the successes of the army and other federal law enforcement, but also the complaints against them. For example, a woman who lived next door to the first safe house had filed a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission claiming that the soldiers had not obtained a search warrant and had broken the lock on her front door and looted her home. Similarly, in a separate incident, a woman accused the army of breaking into her home at three o’clock in the morning and taking her father and husband away. Neither, she protested, was involved in the narcotics trade. In most instances, there was no way of determining the validity of either the accusations or the denials. But the discourse that defined those first months of 2008 was already enveloping the army’s operations in controversy; the very legal basis for what was taking place was questioned, even as the army’s actions were applauded in some quarters. “We all see ourselves as potential victims, that’s why we want the heavy hand [of the federal forces],” one editorial read, citing, simultaneously, the need to guarantee civil rights. That was the double-edged reality of the situation in Juárez. People wanted protection from the drug cartels and their gangs and the wave of violence they had unleashed upon the city, yet they also wanted their civil rights safeguarded.

  Patricia González, the state attorney general, told Omnia, a weekly Chihuahua magazine, that the use of the army to carry out policing functions was a violation of the Mexican Constitution. The governor took a similar stance. González voiced support for legislation pending in the Mexican congress that would enhance the municipal and ministerial police forces, allowing them to investigate organized crime, which at that time fell under the jurisdiction of federal forces. She further argued that seeing the army patrolling the streets “generated a climate of emotional instability among the citizenry.”

  The violence in Juárez, where there were daily executions, and elsewhere in the state of Chihuahua cast an ominous shadow over everything. González’s call for judicial reform and improving municipal and state law enforcement turned a blind eye to the present crisis. In Mexico, there had been calls for such reforms for decades, but the Mexican congress was a body of quicksand that first slowed any proposal of substance down to a halt before extinguishing it altogether by sucking it under. Even forward-looking proposals that at first glance appeared innovative and transparent, like the new laws governing oral arguments at trials and the presentation of criminal evidence, were being perverted, perpetuating a system in which most criminals were simply walking free. The country was hopelessly mired, unable to move forward on this front. Substantive reform was indispensable to Mexico’s future, but so was putting an end to the web of corruption and violence that had allowed criminal organizations to become power players in broad swaths of the country.

  In Mexico City, the respected daily Reforma called for a recognition that within the emerging “Calderónista” war there had been “almost imperceptible” signs that the Mexican Army’s role in the current political system was changing. The army was playing a new role in the realm of public security, the editorial noted, and this role “had no precedent” in Mexican history. The editorial further warned of the constitutional risks inherent in this strategy, as well as potential risks to the reputation of the Mexican military.

  Reforma may have been correct in its analysis, but the problem was that Calderón had no good alternatives. Any objective appraisal of the national situation could not miss the conclusion that significant portions of the Mexican border states (states that were the economic dynamo to the country’s financial well-being) were already under the control of one or another of the cartels. There was no municipal or state law enforcement agency in any of these states that could meaningfully counter the presence of the cartels. In fact, as was true in Juárez, most of these police forces were controlled by the cartels. In many places, the political structure in these states was also heavily influenced by the cartels. The same was true for a number of important states in the interior of Mexico, such as Michoacán, Durango, Guerrero, Quintana Roo, Oaxaca, and Sinaloa, among others, where powerful cartels operated. In many instances these cartels had been deeply entrenched for decades. The deployment of the Mexican Army raised a slew of important questions, but given the national crisis there were no viable alternatives.

  . . .

  The main body of the federal forces that had been promised after the mayor’s meetings with Patricio Patiño and General Juárez Loera started making their way into the city on the twenty-eighth of March 2008. They came in long convoys arriving from Mexico City and other parts of the country. The olive-green trucks sparkled in the morning sun of the Chihuahuan desert, and the sight of twenty-five hundred troops in full gear, weapons at the ready, was impressive. The Mexican Army was sending its best forces into Juárez.

  The army units immediately started patrolling the city and once again, right away they produced results. Everything that one might expect in a city that was an international hub for drug trafficking was suddenly happening: there were almost daily reports of army arrests and there were significant confiscations of drugs, cash, and weapons. The military had swagger and a sense of confidence and, most importantly, they did not appear to be intimidated by the cartels.

  The army’s successes translated into good publicity, too. One El Diario story noted that in its first ten days the army had already confiscated more cocaine than the combined law enforcement agencies in Chihuahua had managed to confiscate over the course of the preceding year. The army’s successes gave further credence to the view that the Chihuahua police forces had been protecting drug shipments rather than interdicting them.

  Some of the army’s tactics were bold. When a drug trafficker named Gerardo Gallegos Rodelo was killed in a firefight with other narcos, the military surreptitiously tracked the funeral cortege to the cemetery. In a surreal scene, two helicopters suddenly appeared above the gravesite, landed, and disgorged troops who in short order forced the gathering of stunned mourners to the ground.

  The army was looking for a well-known trafficker named Pedro Sánchez, an important Juárez cartel operative. They‘d been given to believe that Sánchez and his crew would attend the funeral, because Rodelo had been one of his people. The soldiers proceeded to search the mourners, and to the shock and outrage of some, they even opened Rodelo’s casket, either to ensure that he was indeed in it or to see if it contained something of interest. The army then searched the vehicles, where they reported finding eighty packets of marijuana and numerous handguns. Seven men were arrested, but Pedro Sánchez was not among them.

  The out-of-the-box operation took the narcos by surprise. So accustomed were they to operating in the open and without fear that the stealth of such military operations caught them unaware. Many in Juárez applauded the army’s actions (an opinion poll in El Diario found that 80 percent of the citizens favored the military’s operations). There was no memory in the city of such aggressive tactics against the drug operators, and they brought a sense of hope that perhaps the city’s agony might be relieved, that the oppressive weight of the cartels might at last be lifted.

  However, not everyone was pleased by accounts of military helicopters descending on funeral processions, caskets being pried open, and mourners being treated roughly. While many citizens delighted in the creativity of the military’s unprecedented tactics, others criticized the desecration of Rodelo’s casket and the warrantless searches of cars and people who had gathered to pay their last respects to the deceased. Rodelo’s mother complained to the media that the army had come to her home and torn it apart searching for drugs and weapons; she filed a human rights complaint
. In fact, the army’s operations brought a flood of such complaints, ranging from rough treatment during warrantless incursions into people’s homes to the lifting of people who accused them of torture. Some families claimed that their loved ones had been killed while in army custody.

  For the mayor of Juárez, there was the hope that the military’s operations would finally bring a measure of stability to the city. One thing was clear: Reyes Ferriz had crossed the line as far as the Juárez cartel was concerned. “When I put in the army, they took that to mean that I was supporting El Chapo [the Sinaloa cartel],” the mayor observed. That could only mean one thing: the Juárez cartel would now be gunning for José Reyes Ferriz.

  CHAPTER 11

  La Línea

  A Juárez business executive told me that as much as 50 percent of the city’s economy was in some way linked to the vast American drug profits pouring back across the international bridges through El Paso into Juárez. The figure was impossible to verify or document, and it certainly suggested hyperbole (with 50 percent of the economy related to the maquiladora industry, that would have meant all other commerce in the city was drug-related, which was obviously not the case). But the statement spoke to a prevalent perception that no doubt contained a measure of truth: whatever the actual percentage, a meaningful portion of the economy was driven by narco-interests. Saulo Reyes, for example, owned multiple businesses, including fast-food franchises and restaurants, and was well positioned to launder narco-dollars. (Of course, these did not include the fronts that Reyes had purportedly used for his sweet insider-business dealings with the city during Héctor Murguía’s tenure as mayor.) Saulo Reyes might have been first among equals, but there were lots of people in Juárez who, like him, benefited in one way or another from the narco-trade. “New money,” they called it. Saulo Reyes and his ilk were the white-collar workers of the drug business, the people who lived in places like the upscale Campestre neighborhood, where they were members of the tony golf club and where beautifully manicured lawns surrounded mansions and gleaming SUVs of every make, including more than a few Hummers, were parked behind tall iron gates.

  La Línea, the Juárez cartel’s armed wing, represented the part of the Juárez cartel world where people got their hands dirty. There were no layers of distance between the players who were part of La Línea and the raw edge of the drug trade. They ensured that shipments of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, or heroin got to where they needed to be and that cartel product was safeguarded until it was time to sell it or move it across the river. No one interfered with La Línea: they were the ones who lifted people and took them to the houses of death, where they met unspeakable fates; they were the ones paid to snuff other people out. Most of the members of La Línea were current or former state and municipal police who knew power in a way that few ever do. No rules applied to them, and they answered to no one except their cartel bosses. Many believe that it was this culture of malevolence that bred the infamous Juárez femicides of the 1990s: that La Línea was the central force in the killings of Juárez’s young working women, and that they did it for sport and as an outlet for their sadism. Their violence knew only the bounds of their private whims. These cartel collaborators within the city’s municipal police and the state’s ministerial police were highly feared. An aura of evil hung over anything associated with La Línea, which operated like a secret society in Juárez.

  Whenever a citizen of Juárez encountered someone in a police uniform, be it a state ministerial police officer or a city municipal police officer, there was ample reason for fear. The shadow of La Línea infused those perceptions. There was no way of knowing if the policeman was just another officer looking for a bribe or whether, instead, he was one of the truly evil ones. Those lines were never clear when it came to the police.

  . . .

  There were only fifteen hundred municipal police officers on the force, which, for a city of 1.3 million inhabitants, was paltry. Chicago, as a point of comparison, was almost twice the size of Juárez (2.8 million inhabitants), but had a police force that was more than ten times the size (approximately sixteen thousand officers). The size of the Juárez force had remained unchanged for almost three decades, even as the population had tripled over the same interval (the city was also far-flung, encompassing seventy-two square miles). The fact that the number of police had not kept apace with the city’s growth was a testament to the general neglect of city services, but it was also not necessarily useful to La Línea and the Juárez cartel to have an expanded police force. That just meant more people who might get in their way or more people who needed to get paid for work that the cartel was already managing with the present “membership” levels. A smaller police force gave the Juárez cartel greater control.

  The relationship between law enforcement and the Juárez cartel had evolved over time. Initially, in the mid-1990s, law enforcement was more powerful than the cartel, which had to negotiate with law enforcement officials for protection so that it could move its drugs through the city. The narcos controlled the pushers and the distributors, but they had to answer to the police. By 1998, however, the relationships between the cartel and the police had shifted dramatically, fueled, in part, by the cartel’s enormous wealth, which also helped it gain more influence on state and federal politicians. That influence gave the cartel increased leverage when it came to the Juárez police. The cartel and the police came to occupy more equitable positions, with ex-police forming part of the cartel leadership, while the cartel continued to have outright control over pushers and distribution. But by 2004 the relative power differential had flipped altogether. The cartel had become so powerful and dominant that the police came to occupy a clearly subordinate role. The police now answered to the cartel bosses and had to carry out their directives as rank employees. “For the cartel, the police became ‘disposable’ players,” is the way one source described it. Those who did not do as they were instructed were simply executed or lifted, and their replacements were then pressured via threats and inducements to do what the cartel wanted them to do.

  Not all police were members of La Línea, but the cartel did not need to control every police officer in order to run its operations, it just had to be strategic. “My police budget was $60 million a year,” mayor Reyes Ferriz observed, “but the cartel was able to completely neutralize the force with, say, $300,000 a year.” The mayor was referring to the fact that the cartel only needed to buy off certain commanders and certain operations people to control the force. “For $50,000 pesos a month [less than $5,000 dollars] they could own a commander, and that person controlled what went on within his area. Operations people they could buy for anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000, depending on what they did.” The mayor recalled a case in which the cartel had executed a policeman who had been working for La Línea but had run afoul of them for unknown reasons. The victim was one of three officers who had been working together and who were supposed to be passing information to the cartel regarding such things as which police were patrolling what areas of the city. Each of these officers was being paid $10,000 to $15,000 pesos per month. The execution of the first policeman had raised suspicions about the two other officers, prompting an internal investigation. “We shifted the two officers to other assignments while they were being investigated,” the mayor continued. The reassignments meant that the officers no longer had access to the information for which they were being paid, but the cartel did not countenance excuses. If you accepted money, you were expected to deliver. Both of the reassigned officers were executed shortly thereafter, even though their failure to comply was obviously beyond their control.

  La Línea also waged a war of terror upon the hapless beat cops and the ordinary riffraff within the department who weren’t part of their mafia, not to mention the occasional honest officer. Bullying them for information or forcing them to collude and take part or look the other way was not difficult when they all knew the cost of not going along. The commanders had control of all assignm
ents, schedules, and pay; they could also fire people at will. In addition, the threat of brute force or even execution was ever-present and very real. All of these elements made it relatively easy for the Juárez cartel to keep the police in line. Easy, that is, until the Sinaloa cartel had begun using the same tactics of intimidation and coercion to win over the very police officers who for years had been part of the Juárez cartel organization.

  . . .

  By the 1990s the Juárez cartel had become the most important cartel in Mexico, moving tons of Colombian cocaine, in addition to Mexican marijuana and heroin, from Juárez into El Paso, Texas, and points beyond (until relatively recently, methamphetamine was primarily a Sinaloa cartel product, although that’s no longer the case). The cartel arranged to get bulk cocaine shipments delivered to Juárez, where they were broken down into lots of various sizes depending on where they were going and to whom they were allocated. These drugs had one of two destinations. One was El Paso and beyond, the other was the Juárez retail market. The profits were obviously significantly higher for the product that made it across the river, but so were the risks. Local distribution generated fewer profits, but was a cakewalk by comparison.

  Hernán, Elena’s paramour, was one of many in the chain of operators who helped the Juárez cartel move product across the border. He was something of an entrepreneur who ran his own crew, recruited his own mules, and sometimes invested his own money in his deals. He operated as a franchise of sorts, although he was under the control of the Juárez cartel and took orders from them. Once the Juárez cartel got the product to the city, operators big and small, people like Hernán, got it across the river.