Reyes Ferriz felt trapped, like Sisyphus. No matter the effort, no matter the strategy, the result always appeared to be variations on the same: terrifying executions of police personnel. Within hours of the killing of Sacramento Pérez, a series of coordinated narco-messages surfaced throughout the city giving Orduña forty-eight hours to resign. The messages, left at a car dealership, a cell phone store, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken, among other locations, threatened to assassinate a police officer every forty-eight hours until the police chief complied.
At a news conference, José Reyes Ferriz told the press that he and Orduña were standing firm in the face of the new attacks. “We will not be terrorized by these criminals,” he declared. But forty-eight hours later, a municipal police officer named César Iván Portillo heard a knock on his front door. When he opened it, a lone gunman emptied his 9-millimeter pistol into Portillo, killing him instantly. A handwritten narco-message left next to Portillo’s crumpled body said, “The [forty-eight] hours have passed and the director of public security, Roberto Orduña Cruz, has not resigned.”
A prison guard was killed a few hours after Portillo’s assassination. These two deaths, and the assassinations of Pérez and his bodyguards, brought to six the number of law enforcement officers killed in just two days. Reyes Ferriz was again facing a crisis. “Orduña told me he was going to resign,” the mayor recalled. This would again leave the police force with no leadership. Reyes Ferriz did what he could to talk Orduña out of it, first appealing to his military pride: “We can’t allow the criminals to dictate to us,” Reyes Ferriz told him. But the entreaties were futile; Orduña had already made up his mind. The police chief responded in kind with a military analogy: “When someone retreats in the battlefield it does not necessarily mean the battle is lost, sometimes it’s simply a strategic retreat,” Orduña told the mayor.
At a hastily arranged press conference, Reyes Ferriz and the chief of police appeared together to make the announcement. Reyes Ferriz spoke first, stating that Orduña had tendered his resignation and praising him as a dedicated officer. Orduña then stepped up to the microphone. “I can’t put my professional pride above the lives of my men,” he said. “Respect for the lives that these brave officers risk every day on the streets for the residents of Juárez obliges me to offer my permanent resignation.” Mustering profound indignation, Orduña added: “To the enemies of Mexico I say, don’t misunderstand the action I am taking. Notwithstanding your initial reluctance [the chief gestured toward Reyes Ferriz, who was standing next to him], this is an intelligent step for life, not for death,” Orduña said.
Immediately following his resignation, Orduña left Juárez, seeking refuge across the border in El Paso just as his predecessor, Guillermo Prieto, had done almost a year earlier. For good measure, the Juárez cartel left another narco-message for the mayor: “It’s good that you have gotten rid of Orduña, but if you put in another asshole working for El Chapo we’re going to kill you.”
It was Friday, February 20, and José Reyes Ferriz found himself once again staring out his office window onto the streets of Juárez that lay below. Almost exactly a year earlier, Patricio Patiño had visited Juárez and the mayor had met with federal authorities for the first time. They’d sent two hundred federal police, they’d sent the army, they’d given his entire police force Confidence Tests and he’d overseen the firing of hundreds of officers, yet here he was again without a chief of police and with Sacramento Pérez, the second in command, executed. Scores of police had been killed over the course of the year, and the city was enveloped in a crime wave of such proportions that Juárez seemed to be devolving into anarchy. Sisyphus, the mayor thought as he stood alone in his office staring out the window: Sisyphus.
. . .
The cartels are strategic. They plan, they observe, and their actions have a clear and definite logic. The execution of Sacramento Pérez and the decision to oust Roberto Orduña were calculated moves, but the cartel wasn’t finished. They appeared to have received inside information about a federal plan to reinforce Ciudad Juárez. José Reyes Ferriz and the governor of Chihuahua, José Reyes Baeza, were to travel together to Mexico City on Sunday, February 22, to meet with Genaro García Luna, Guillermo Valdés, and the other key members of President Calderón’s security cabinet to seal the deal.
The Mexico City meeting was scheduled for Sunday evening. That morning, while waiting to catch a flight to Chihuahua City, where he was to rendezvous with the governor (they would fly to Mexico City together aboard a state plane), the mayor received a call from his communications director, Sergio Belmonte, informing him that there were narco-messages all over the city threatening to decapitate him and kill his family.
The Juárez cartel was raising the stakes for Reyes Ferriz on the eve of his meeting with the federal authorities. “It was the first time that they had threatened me so publicly and it was the first time that they had threatened my family,” Reyes Ferriz told me. The mayor had already moved his wife and children to El Paso as a security precaution. The narco-message made specific reference to that, indicating that there was no safe haven for them. Reyes Ferriz cancelled his flight in order to set in place the necessary security measures, calling the governor to say that he would catch a commercial flight and meet him in Mexico City later that evening. The governor informed him that there was no rush; the meeting had been rescheduled for Monday morning at the offices of the secretary of the interior.
Sunday night Reyes Ferriz arrived at the Marriott Hotel in the fashionable Polanco neighborhood in Mexico City. The plan was that he and the governor, also at the hotel, would convene to discuss their approach to the meeting with the federal people. Moments after checking in the mayor received a call from Governor Reyes Baeza’s personal secretary; the governor’s convoy had been ambushed in Chihuahua City and one of his bodyguards killed. Two other bodyguards had also been wounded in the attack. The Juárez cartel had obviously decided to send the governor a message as well. Though the governor was unscathed, Reyes Ferriz was informed that he had cancelled his trip to Mexico City. That meant that responsibility for decisions regarding federal involvement in Juárez would be the mayor’s, and the cartel had made clear how they felt about it. Once again, José Reyes Ferriz was alone.
The next morning, José Reyes Ferriz made his way to the Interior Ministry at Avenida Bucareli 99, near the city’s Centro Histórico. The ministry occupied an ornate nineteenth-century building surrounded by a lush garden, but its beauty belied the fact that within its walls some of Mexico’s most powerful men had shaped the destiny of the nation. Fernando Gómez Mont, the secretary of the interior, was of that mold; he played host to the members of Calderón’s security cabinet and Reyes Ferriz in the ministry’s richly appointed library, which had an exquisite antique conference table that could comfortably seat forty people. The cabinet members were aware of the death threats that the mayor had received and the prior day’s ambush on the governor’s convoy. Gómez Mont went straight to the question at hand: “Are you going to resign?” he asked Reyes Ferriz. The mayor’s response was equally direct: “Absolutely not,” he said, adding that while this was the first public threat, he had received numerous death threats since the outbreak of the narco-war in Juárez. Reyes Ferriz assured the security cabinet members that he planned to stay the course until the end of his term of office in October 2010. The federal people presented their plan to Reyes Ferriz: They would send five thousand more troops into Juárez, and the army would take over all policing functions in the city, in addition to other measures to shore up security.
Almost a year earlier, the governor had voiced his opposition to what he’d called the “militarization” of the police. That comment, and the fact that the governor had chosen not to be present for the meeting, left Reyes Ferriz on his own, but just as in the spring of 2008, he now saw no other alternative. The cartels had succeeded in thwarting every initiative that had been tried with the Juárez municipal police. The security cabinet ha
d not failed to see the obvious: there was little to show for the Confidence Tests and the firings of hundreds of Juárez’s police officers and commanders. They were going to have to start from scratch with the police force, and the added military presence would buy them time.
Before the meeting broke up Gómez Mont looked at the mayor and added something unexpected: “We need you to be the face, the front man for Operación Conjunto Chihuahua,” he said. Reyes Ferriz argued for appointing a spokesperson, but the federal people would not have it. In the end, the mayor agreed, knowing that in doing so he was increasing his personal risk exponentially. He’d been cast in the role of savior.
José Reyes Ferriz left the meeting at the Secretaría de Gobernación and headed back up the historic Paseo de la Reforma to his hotel. He knew he’d made a fateful decision, a decision from which there could be no turning back. There was a Starbucks across the street from the Marriott, and he ordered himself a cappuccino (a creature of habit, Reyes Ferriz always ordered the same). He called his two most trusted advisors, Sergio Belmonte, his director of communications, and Guillermo Dowell, his chief of staff, and laid it all out for them. The consensus was that his options were to try to keep a low profile, as he’d done with prior death threats, or, as the mayor put it, “enter the threat terrain.” In the past, the first strategy had lowered the level of threats against him, but those threats had not been public. They decided on the second course of action, to speak to the threats publicly. It was a calculation aimed at pressuring the federal forces into keeping his back. “Our thinking was that if I increased my public profile, it increased the costs to the federal government should something happen to me. They would have to make sure that I was protected,” Reyes Ferriz recalled.
In the aftermath of the death threats, Belmonte had been receiving many requests from national and international media for interviews with the mayor, but had not granted a single one. Now he opened the floodgates. From his table at the Starbucks, while sipping his cappuccino, Reyes Ferriz spent the afternoon giving interviews to the best-known nationally syndicated journalists in Mexico, including Denise Maerker, Joaquín López Dórgia, Carmen Aristegui, and CNN (Spanish), among others. “I sat in that Starbucks alone, without any bodyguards, wondering about every car that drove by,” he later told me. The mayor tried to position himself carefully in these and other interviews. “I did not personally go on the attack against the cartels, but I said I would collaborate fully with the federal government and that it was their responsibility to take care of this threat in Ciudad Juárez.”
Following the Mexico City meeting it became evident that something had changed in the relationship between the mayor and the federal officials. It was unspoken, unacknowledged, but the federal people henceforth moved closer to José Reyes Ferriz, treating him more as a partner. In equal measure, they appeared to distance themselves from the governor, who was clearly lukewarm to the whole enterprise for reasons that no one could know with certainty but which lent themselves to innuendo and suspicion. After all, he’d made the decision not to appear in Mexico City.
Note
1. In apparent retaliation for his campaigns against the drug cartels, General Jorge Juárez Loera was assassinated near his home in Mexico City on May 22, 2011, just weeks after he’d retired from the Mexican Army. He was sixty-five years old.
CHAPTER 17
Martial Law Undeclared
A few days after the Mexico City summit, the key members of President Felipe Calderón’s security cabinet arrived at the Camino Real hotel in Juárez under tight security. The team included the head of the Secretariat for Public Security, Genaro García Luna; the federal attorney general, Eduardo Medina-Mora; the interior minister, Fernando Gómez Mont; and the national defense minister, Guillermo Galván Galván, among others. Two dozen armored assault vehicles with 50-caliber machine guns were in position around the perimeter of the hotel as military Black Hawk helicopters hovered above. The Juárez airport received bomb threats and was temporarily shut down. There was no mistaking the fact that Juárez was a war zone.
The president had sent his emissaries to present his plan to save Juárez before an increasingly skeptical national public. Though the country had responded favorably to Calderón’s declaration of war against the cartels a year earlier, the president’s poll numbers were now falling precipitously. Calderón’s policies were being assailed as shortsighted, overly militarized, and failing to reduce the violence that was spiraling out of control not only in Juárez but also in many of the country’s narco-zones.
In Juárez, February 2009 ended with a record tally of 230 executions. Just a year earlier, the city had been shocked at the 301 assassinations registered for the entire year of 2007. Now, the city had almost reached that mark in a single month. On any given day an average of seven or eight bodies were turning up all over the city. José Reyes Ferriz had the additional twenty-five hundred army and a few hundred federal police personnel to manage the city, but that support was not having an appreciable impact on the violence. The police, those who had not been fired or resigned, were still on the payroll, but they were essentially useless. The mayor counted the days until the ides of March when the five thousand additional federal forces were due to arrive en masse.
. . .
On the morning of March 14, 2009, the anonymous tip line for the Juárez municipal police received a call reporting that there were bodies at a location southeast of the city. The area is open desert where sparse clusters of creosote, acacia, ocotillo, and mesquite dot a landscape populated by giant centipedes, scorpions, snakes, and the occasional Mexican prairie dog.
Protected by police escort, a forensic team arrived at the site, clad in white protective suits, rubber gloves, and surgical masks (the latter a futile attempt to dilute the stench of decomposing bodies). The team immediately went to work and soon found the first of the remains. In a smooth drift of sand that rose like a gentle swell in a grainy ocean, a single, tennis-shoe-clad foot protruded from the ground, its untied shoelace dangling gently in the wind. Not far away another body lay half out of the sand. Before their work was finished the forensic team would find five shallow graves, or narcofosas, as they were called in Mexico, containing nine bodies, some with telltale signs of torture (burn marks, cuts, limbs whose unnatural orientation indicated broken bones). At least one of the victims was handcuffed, his arms behind his back. Two appeared to be women, and one a child. Like archeologists searching for rare artifacts, the forensic team used a screen to carefully sift the sand around the remains. One shovelful yielded a telling piece of evidence: a police badge.
There was something haunting about the Fraccionamiento Villa de Alcalá, the terrain where the narcofosas had been discovered. The area was a well-known dumping ground for those whose lives had been extinguished by one criminal element or another. Over the course of the last decade, hundreds of young women were murdered in Juárez (most of them maquiladora employees), their remains left in the desert, many near this very spot. The femicides brought ill fame to Ciudad Juárez, attracting news organizations and human-rights groups from all over the world. There had been countless newspaper accounts, documentary films, books, and television programs covering the femicide story, from Geraldo to CNN. Every major American newspaper, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post had been down here as well. There had even been scholarly articles written about the femicides, in which the authors expounded about the complexities of gender, class, and power. What there hadn’t been were answers. Few if any of the more than four hundred cases had been solved. But then, that didn’t surprise anyone in Juárez, where arrests were the exception and impunity the norm, no matter if the crime was a street corner holdup or a brutal murder. Most crimes went unsolved and therefore unpunished in Mexico. That was the defining characteristic of the Mexican judiciary system.
Now that the cartels were also dumping many of their victims out here in the desert, there was no expectation that the a
uthorities would solve these crimes, either, although that didn’t stop people from engaging in the sport of speculation, assembling a picture, no matter how flawed, from the available puzzle pieces. In fact, Juárez was abuzz with theories as to the identities of the bodies discovered in the narcofosas. The police badge lent itself to the view that among the victims were one or more of the municipal police officers who’d been lifted and disappeared without a trace over the last year. Jesús Enrique Solís Luévano, an agent assigned to the Babícora district, had never arrived home after completing his tour the morning of February 3, 2008. There was also Juan Hernández Sánchez, who’d been with the force over ten years before three vehicles intercepted him in Barrio Alto, a well-known narco stronghold. Hernández’s bloodstained uniform had been found in the street days later, but there was no other trace of the officer. There were also other officers who had similarly disappeared over the last year.
The day after the discovery of the shallow graves, I met with a news director in Juárez, a man of strong opinions who told me right off that this was one of those crimes that would never be solved. The city morgue was overrun with bodies, he told me: “They don’t even know where to put them.” In addition, the victims’ bodies were going unclaimed because families feared that the authorities would link them to the activities of the deceased. “It creates problems for them,” the news director noted. Many of the victims were also found without identification. Finally, with a knowing look, the news director added this detail: “And then there’s the problem of the police,” he said quietly, fearing that someone in an adjacent office might be listening.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 18