The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  The tug-of-war between the mayor and the federal police continued for several weeks, with the mayor insistent that the federal police handle the firings and the federal police equally insistent that under federal law they had no jurisdiction over municipal workers and hence could not legally fire them. In the end, Reyes Ferriz broke the impasse by hiring a Mexico City law firm to handle the firings as official representatives of the municipality. In Mexico City, the federal police gave the legal team the test results for the entire Juárez police force, and on October 16, 2008, the team flew to Juárez, where they spent a nervous night at a La Quinta hotel. The next morning, city staff delivered severance packages for every single officer on the force to the attorneys. The intent was to underscore the fact that only the Mexico City people knew the test results indicating who was to be fired and who was to be kept on. The police were simultaneously mustered at each of the city’s six precincts, with the team of attorneys distributed accordingly, announcing who had passed the test and giving severance packages to those who had failed. The process was sloppy, tense, and unwieldy, but at the end of that day 334 police officers had been dismissed for not having passed the federal government’s Confidence Test. Another 227 police had left the force since January out of fear of being executed or having their cartel alliances discovered, and a score had been assassinated.

  Since spring, the police radio frequency had been in constant use by the narcos. These were analog radios, and anyone could purchase the requisite technology at a Radio Shack for a few hundred dollars. Thus, in addition to the police, the narcos and Juárez journalists could listen to the police frequency, and the narcos themselves also sometimes communicated on the frequency. At first, every time a police officer was assassinated, the narcos would play a narcocorrido on the frequency, all the while mocking the victim and threatening others. The Sinaloa and Juárez cartels had their respective narcocorridos, making it easy to know which cartel had carried out the execution. Into the summer, the cartels had taken to playing their narcocorridos prior to executions, sowing panic within the police force. There had been many threats against José Reyes Ferriz on the police frequency that spring, but the Confidence Tests took them to a new level. “You’d better watch your boss!” the narcos would shout onto the radio waves, referring to the mayor. “Throughout the day I fired the police I kept asking my bodyguards, ‘How are the radios doing?’” Reyes Ferriz would later tell me. There had been a flurry of threats all day. “It was no game,” the mayor said. “We knew it was dangerous.”

  That night was the first that José Reyes Ferriz slept with a loaded AR-15 assault rifle under his bed. He also started posting a municipal police patrol car outside the gates to his residential community (he’d already been sleeping with guards posted at the door to his house for months). One night an ominous-looking Hummer parked nearby. The police suspected that the occupants were waiting for another resident to pull up so they could tailgate behind them and gain entry into the gated community. The police managed to drive them off, but the next day the officers came to the mayor with a proposal: “Let us park inside the gate, otherwise they’re going to kill us,” they said. From then on, the patrol car stood vigil all night just inside the tall iron gate. The mayor had been driving in a “Level 4 Plus” armored vehicle. These could withstand an AK-47 assault but not that of an AR-15, which was increasingly the weapon of choice for the narcos. So the city purchased three “Level 5” armored vehicles: one for the mayor, another for the chief of police, and the third for the new director of operations. Not long thereafter, the army apprehended a sicario in the town of Villa Ahumada, seventy-five miles south of Juárez, a known Juárez cartel stronghold. The man was in possession of a copy of the floor plan for Reyes Ferriz’s house, which he had obtained from the public registry.

  . . .

  Not long after the conclusion of the Confidence Tests I had the opportunity to meet an ex–police captain who had been fired from the force because he’d failed the test. He was presently working in a small, dilapidated office next door to a down-at-the-heels restaurant that had a daily comida corrida lunch for a fixed price (that day it was beef in ranchera sauce, rice, and beans, along with a mountain of still-hot tortillas wrapped tightly in a cloth towel like a swaddled baby). Iced fruit juices ladled from large glass jars, sodas, and beer were available for an additional charge. We sat at a flimsy metal Corona table, and I was struck by the fact that the man across from me did not seem quite as hardened or malevolent as I expected given the infamous reputation of the Juárez municipal police. I’d come primed to find a dark edginess in the former officer, who was in his early forties and balding, but he showed few signs of it.

  The ex-captain described a police force that for the last year had been living in a state of panic. The executions of fellow officers had created a pervasive disquiet that permeated everything that went on, he said. He claimed not to have had direct involvement with La Línea, “but we all knew who the players were,” he told me. He acknowledged that everyone on the force knew what was taking place although none dared speak out about it. In his telling, less than half of his fellow police officers were actively involved in La Línea activities. “They were the ones with the fancy watches, the ones with cash in their pockets,” he said with a trace of envy. “The rest of us just watched and kept our mouths shut.” Officers worried about their assignments. If you were placed in an area that was of use to the cartel you would be pressed into collaboration. “If they pushed you, you had to comply, you had to say yes, there was no alternative, no way out.” Of course, there were also those who sought out such “opportunities.”

  He had worked in the gang unit, tracking neighborhood graffiti and complaints from people in the colonias, but he stuck to the minor-league stuff. He did not touch the big gangs, the ones allied with the cartels, the ones that had a stranglehold on the city. Those were off limits. No one needed to tell him to steer clear, he said. “You just knew not to tread on that ground. You might get a warning if you strayed into their things, but you might not” (meaning you might simply be executed). It depended on what you knew and what you did with the knowledge.

  He’d worked closely with Francisco Ledesma, the third in command who’d been assassinated in January of 2008. He liked him, he told me. When I asked who it was that had killed Ledesma, the ex-captain grew visibly stiff, claiming not to know. He also refused to speculate. “All of that is too dangerous,” he said, looking at me intently across the table. “They must have had their reasons. Whether its that he got in with the wrong people or that he wouldn’t go along with what someone wanted, I can’t say.” It was obvious that he did not want to delve further into this line of inquiry. He looked me in the eyes as if to say, “What do you want?” He brought this thread of the conversation to a close by describing life in the police department for those who were not involved with the cartel as something akin to battered children living in terror of their abusive parents. “Being silent, feigning ignorance—that was the only way to stay alive,” he said grimly. It was clear that he was still living that code of silence.

  The former municipal police officer told me that he had presented himself to take the Confidence Test in a cavernous room at the old maquiladora plant, where both federal police and military people were running the operation. The Juárez officers were informed that they were in a federal building and were thus required to obey orders from federal personnel. There was an adversarial tone to the process, he told me; “They treated us arrogantly,” he complained. After completing some paper-and-pencil tests, one by one the men were called to a series of cubicles where federal agents were performing the assessments. At the first station, he was asked to say a series of words like “town” and “lake” into a microphone. He was told that, like a vocal fingerprint, voice-recognition software would be able to identify him were he intercepted making calls to cartel operatives, negotiating with kidnap victims’ families, or attempting to extort someone over the phone.

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nbsp; “They made us ‘play the piano’ at the second station,” he said, adding, “That’s our vulgar term for taking fingerprints.” In addition to fingerprints, the federal police also took the officers’ palm prints. At yet another station, a social worker asked him about his interests and hobbies, how much he earned, his wife’s salary, the family budget—things of that nature. Next came the lie detector. “They asked me if I’d committed any crimes, if I’d been unfaithful to my wife, and if I’d ever taken drugs, among other questions,” he remembered. Lastly his urine was tested for the presence of drugs, and he was given a vision test and a general physical. He was least happy about the physical, claiming that the physician had “handled him excessively,” adding that he suspected the physician was gay.

  The ex-captain complained that he’d received no explanation as to why he had failed the test, and he asserted that the entire process was a sham, an “inside deal” to find sacrificial lambs to take the fall so the department would look like it was doing what it was supposed to be doing. He knew for a fact, he said, that some of the officers with known cartel ties had not been dismissed from the force.

  As we talked in the restaurant, he seemed tense. He kept looking up, glancing behind me toward the entrance as if someone might show up. I found it unnerving. That kind of paranoia is infectious. I also found it difficult to bracket out the awareness that he had been a member of the infamous Juárez municipal police, and throughout I kept thinking that there was no way for me to assess the truth of the ex-captain’s statements. As the interview drew to a close he volunteered that it was good to be out. His time with the municipal police had taken a toll on him. He’d developed ulcers, he told me, but he was feeling much better now that he didn’t have to live under those pressures. The number of sliced raw chilies that he’d heaped on his lunch was evidence that his ulcers were, indeed, no longer bothering him.

  . . .

  In the aftermath of the Confidence Tests, the executions, and the resignations, more than a third of the police force was gone. Almost immediately, a new crime wave broke out in the city; kidnappings, extortions, car thefts, bank robberies, and assaults surged. The theories were many. Some argued that the arrival of the army had so disrupted cartel activities that they had turned to other income-producing strategies. But the prevailing thesis was that it was the fired police who had gone on a crime spree. There were accusations that in dismissing so many police, Mayor José Reyes Ferriz had left the city defenseless.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Journos

  It was an unseasonably warm fall afternoon, and the streets of Juárez felt worn and heavy. Cars, buses, and trucks were up and down the boulevards: horns honking, music blaring, brakes groaning, gears grinding. The smell of exhaust and oil was in the air. I was with Raymundo Ruiz, the El Norte photographer, who was unusually quiet. Ruiz traveled at all times with two cell phones: a Nextel two-way phone1 and a police scanner. The scanner’s chatter was an ever-present backdrop to his life; he turned it off only when he went to bed for the night.

  This day the police scanner had been squawking incessantly. Even knowing many of the codes (Ruiz had given them to me and I’d written them down), I missed half of what was being said over the scanner because voices were garbled and static-filled, and the people communicating on the police frequency continuously stepped on each other’s lines, talking over and through one another. Ruiz had a sixth sense for the scanner. He could be in conversation, or talking on one of his phones, but the scanner world was always with him. Most of what was coming through this afternoon was the drudgery of day-to-day police work: “Motivo fifty,” the scanner barked (an officer was pulling someone over for speeding); “Motivo one” (traffic accident). There were even codes to describe the gender of the offenders or victims. In the current scheme, “ninety-one” meant that the subject was male, “ninety-two,” female.

  When a “Motivo fifty-nine” came through the scanner, everything else came to a stop for Ruiz: it was police code for an execution. The dispatcher had given the location as an intersection in southeastern Juárez, and Ruiz started tracking it down. He called his crew, the fellow journalists with whom he was in constant contact, making sure they, too, had heard the “Motivo fifty-nine” and that they knew how to reach the location—no one knew this city better than Raymundo Ruiz.

  Ruiz drove through the city as if he were racing in a rally; he was indifferent to speed bumps, stop signs, or stoplights. The car’s gears were grinding and the brakes fumed and protested. Over and over again the bottom of his worn-out Toyota Tercel scraped the ever-present speed bumps as we made our way through the back streets of dusty neighborhoods to the execution. I worried that he was going to hit an unsuspecting pedestrian or that someone with the right-of-way coming from a side street would ram us, but Ruiz seemed impervious: his driving was governed mainly by intuition and instinct.

  The payoff for this bit of insanity was that we were among the first to arrive at the crime scene—a gas station at a busy intersection. The army and federal police units had cordoned off the area, but even from behind the yellow crime-scene tape the body was clearly visible through the partly ajar car door of a recent-model Ford Explorer. A printed sign at the fuel pumps read: “By disposition of the management, we do not accept $1000 peso bills.” The black SUV looked glossy, obviously recently washed and waxed. The thud-thud of a hail of bullets had activated the driver’s airbag, which, now deflated, had fallen to the ground through the space between the door and the car, its snow-white end resting almost casually on the oily pavement. The victim had apparently just pulled up to the pump when a sicario had approached and emptied his pistol into him. The bullets that burst through the tinted glass had left a tight pattern with but a few wayward rounds falling beyond the perimeter of the fist-sized hole created by the volley: the hit was clearly the work of a professional. Inside the vehicle, a man’s body could be seen still slumped between the steering wheel and the console, his sky-blue, short-sleeved police uniform multiply perforated with bloody holes.

  The victim was a captain with the Juárez municipal police from the Delicias station. “He’s from the old guard,” I overheard one of the other journalists at the scene say in hushed tones to one of his buddies. Someone else said, “That’s three [executions] in the last hour and a half.” The blood was flowing freely in Ciudad Juárez today.

  . . .

  Later that evening, I was with a family gathered to say a rosary in memory of one of the Juárez dead. This was the fifth night that the family had come together like this; there were four more to go to complete the novena, the nine-night ritual of Catholic mourning.

  There were eighteen of us in the modest working-class home where living room, dining room, and kitchen were pressed together into a single space. Most were family members of the deceased, including school-aged children and elderly relatives. Those that could were sitting in the dining table chairs that had been placed around the room and on a sofa. The rest of us stood. Our number filled the entire space and our bodies were close together; the room was hot, the air heavy. A family friend, a woman in her fifties, led the prayers, holding a rosary in her hands with the casualness of someone for whom this ritual was all too familiar.

  The woman made the sign of the cross, and at the first bead she led the assembled in an Our Father prayer. “Forgive us our sins . . . ,” the words floating in the collective murmur. The Hail Marys followed, ten for every Our Father. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” That came to five Our Fathers and fifty Hail Marys. A sense of mystery pervaded the space.

  Bead after bead, the prayers slid into the room, one after another, becoming an all-enveloping chant. “Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .” Voices wrapped themselves around each other and echoed across the room . . . “now and at the hour of our death” . . . bead after bead moving nimbly from finger to finger, keeping track of place lest the chants became perpetual and infinite. Her hands moved through the b
eads slowly. Children and adults chanted in unison, and the woman’s voice was like a drone within which we had become enveloped. The prayers bounced from the walls across the room and back in an invisible wave until our voices dissolved into one another: “Pray for us now . . . pray . . . pray for us . . . now . . . and at the hour . . . the hour of our death . . .”

  Every night at the end of the rosary there was a reflection on one of the five Glorious Mysteries. Tonight it was the Resurrection: “The risen Jesus has proved that man, together with Him, can have power over sin and therefore death . . .” The woman read; we listened. The reflection changed the tone in the room as it became silent save for her reading. But the silence was broken by restless children and by barking dogs out in the street as well as people shifting in their chairs, all of which brought relief from the lingering hypnotic echoes of the chanted rosary. I found it to be an intense experience.

  My mind drifted from the reading of the reflection. If for every execution in Juárez a family did a novena, I thought to myself, that would mean that already thousands of rosaries had been chanted in rooms like this one all over the city. And the cartel war was little more than a year old.

  . . .

  The Juárez journalists were an embattled group. They suffered the typical professional rivalries and jealousies, but conflicting pressures also tore at them. On the one hand they had their journalistic ideals and commitments, on the other the brutal reality of intimidation and possible assassination. All knew that there was a line they could not cross in their work, but its location shifted on the whims of the cartels, making it an unreliable reference point. The federal authorities were not enamored of the media, either. Antagonizing them could mean confiscation of equipment, a beating, or arrest. Adding to the volatile mix was the fact that some of the local journalists worked for newspapers that were said to receive subsidies from the Juárez cartel.