Opinions were easily had in Juárez as to the fate of the officers who’d been lifted, and the motives that lay behind their disappearances. There were countless interweaved scenarios. Unless you were on the inside, however, there was only speculation, guesswork, and talk. The only thing that was known, concretely, indisputably, was that police had disappeared and a police badge had been found at the site of the narcofosas. One rumor had it that the badge had not belonged to one of the disappeared municipal police officers at all but rather that it had fallen off a cop as he was digging the graves. No information had been disclosed thus far as to the identity of the person who went with the badge, but one of the contacts within the forensics unit had suggested that the badge was found close to the surface rather than having been buried with the bodies. An alternate theory floating around was that the badge had been slipped in by the federal police to discredit the municipal police, specifically one of three municipal police agents who had been recently arrested and accused of handing people over to the Juárez cartel for execution.
No one really knew where reality lay in Juárez. It clustered around indisputable fragments and artifacts, like a police badge, a weapon, or a cadaver, from which the truth had to be constructed, but those constructions almost always contained as much fiction as they did fact. Life in Juárez was full of such fusions: fact and imagination dovetailed and interpenetrated such that one could not be teased out from the other. Conspiracy theories, big and small, abounded, even among the most sensible people. Every incident carried within itself endless possibilities for speculation and freewheeling conjecture. Hard evidence constantly toyed with perception and understanding. Not uncommonly, for example, when some cartel operation was interdicted (a car stopped on the street, a cocaine lab raided, a cartel safe house uncovered) uniforms belonging to one or another law enforcement agency or the army were found among the drugs, weapons, cell phones, and police scanners. The ready availability of official uniforms (they were easy to purchase, if not steal) often made it difficult to know actors’ identities. Criminals wearing law enforcement uniforms of one sort or another routinely abducted people or held up businesses. Then there were the actual abuses committed by the authorities. The circumstance lent itself to confusions and accusations that could never be resolved and that were fodder for endless spin. In Juárez, identities, like motives, were never certain. Over time this circumstance tended to erode people’s faith in the manifest. If things were never what they seemed to be, then nothing could be trusted, no matter how obvious.
Conspiracy theories quickly formed themselves in tightly woven clusters that then just as quickly dissipated into nothingness as if never before conceived or uttered. It was said that the governor of Chihuahua, José Reyes Baeza, was owned by the Juárez cartel, for example, and that he was paid two million dollars a year for the Juárez plaza. The state prosecutorial people came “bundled” with that, given that they were appointed by the governor and served at his pleasure, although the key people in those slots were being paid for their services separately (these “facts” could be readily found on narco websites, for example). Rumor had it that José Reyes Ferriz was on the outs with the governor, who’d sealed off the mayor’s designs on the state governorship (the mayor’s job was a historic stepping stone for the politically ambitious). That placed the mayor at odds with the Juárez cartel and was the purported reason behind the mayor’s recently announced decision to turn over the municipal police duties, wholesale, to the army. There were rumors that the top tiers of the federal government were in the pay of El Chapo Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. According to this line of speculation, the Sinaloa people were losing the fight against the Juárez cartel as they had earlier in Nuevo Laredo against the Gulf cartel. Buying the military, so this reasoning went, allowed Sinaloa to have the military serve as its proxy and wipe out the Juárez cartel, thereby clearing the way for them to take over the plaza. This conspiracy theory thus placed the mayor in the hands of the Sinaloa cartel.
It was impossible to know if any of these theories contained substance. There was no doubt that the cartels had many in their pay, from highly placed officials to cops on the street. That fact permitted the cartels to act with impunity and was reflected in both the police who were caught transporting drugs as well as the narco-messages directed at the police. But who was actually aligned with whom was much more difficult to discern. Everyone could conjure up wild scenarios and far-fetched motives, but really knowing was a near-impossible feat for anyone outside of the cartels. Most people were satisfied with that arrangement, because knowing too much in Juárez was a death sentence. Everyone in this town knew that as an axiom; it was one of those rules one learned early and lived faithfully. But rumor, gossip, and innuendo were another matter altogether.
The entire circumstance produced a pervasive cynicism. Faith in any government action was difficult to find or even justify. No act, no matter how apparently well intentioned or effective, could escape the stain of this cynicism, which had become a national disease. Thus, there was nothing of which one could take hold, no tether to serve as a guide through this social unraveling and confusion. Instead, people all too often turned inward, detaching themselves from the threads that give a neighborhood or city its vitality, its cohesion. The very essence of what makes civil society work was under threat of annihilation because of the evil in the streets and the cynicism that rendered every action suspect before it could hope to have any transformative effect. Most Juarenses had long ago stopped feeling that there was anything reliably good out there other than family and a few friends.
. . .
The morning of March 15, the ides of March, was crisp and sunny as wave upon wave of Mexican Army units entered Ciudad Juárez. It was an impressive sight: the columns of brand-new olive-green trucks, each numbered in sequence, approaching the city through the main highway to the south. “They’re at the Pancho Villa monument,” one of Raymundo Ruiz’s fellow journalists reported over the Nextel phone. We rushed down the Juárez side streets trying to guess where the Mexican forces would garrison, guided by the incoming communications. There had been no official statement except for a press announcement that the federal forces would be arriving sometime during the day.
Raymundo Ruiz was born in Ciudad Juárez and grew up in one of the hardscrabble neighborhoods now rife with sicarios and addicts and, all too often, dead bodies. But his attitude toward it all was strangely accepting, as if it were dictated by fate. “I was a cholo as a teenager,” he told me, using the Mexican slang for a gangbanger. The implication was that he could just as easily have been one of the victims he photographed as the one taking their images. He’d always been intrigued with photography, even though his family’s poverty was so severe that they spent years living in a shack made of wood pallets and other found materials. As an adolescent, he’d managed to scrape together enough money to buy a camera and eventually, through a mixture of good fortune and diligence, he became a videographer for birthdays, quinceañera parties, and weddings, before becoming a videographer for a news organization. But his true passion was the camera and documenting the tragedy that had befallen his city. His images now graced the pages of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines.
Swearing-in ceremony for Municipal Police Chief General Julián David Rivera Bretón (left), with Mayor José Reyes Ferriz (center), and Arturo Domínguez, city administrator (right). Photo copyright © Ricardo Ainslie.
Later that day I’d gone to the Police Academy, where José Reyes Ferriz was swearing in the new chief of police. The federal government, and, in particular, the army, had delivered on their promise to help the mayor find a replacement for Roberto Orduña. The new chief of police was another ex-military man who had come out of retirement to take the job. His name was General Julián David Rivera Bretón, and he was a veteran of military campaigns in Chiapas and Sinaloa. The mayor introduced General Rivera Bretón to the press and announced that all policing functions in the city would
be taken over by the army and the federal police. The municipal police was officially disbanded. Military officers would now head up the various areas of responsibility, including all six of the city’s police sectors.
The mayor underscored the fact that the city government remained in charge of public security, but it was clear that the army was now running the law enforcement show in Ciudad Juárez. A few municipal police officers were permitted to ride with the federal forces, mostly because the latter did not know their way around the city.
These extreme steps were unprecedented in modern Mexico. Some questioned the constitutionality of the government’s move, arguing that for all intents and purposes it amounted to the imposition of martial law. With the army convoys replacing police patrols and federal roadblocks all over the city, the only thing missing was a curfew. But the city’s residents were tired of living on the edge of anarchy, tired of feeling vulnerable and in constant fear. Most welcomed the drastic measures, hoping the federal intervention would finally restore some semblance of law and order to their city so that they could go about their lives.
José Reyes Ferriz was obviously one of those who welcomed the military presence. The problems within the police had been a constant threat to his administration; they’d absorbed the bulk of his attention, and the bulk of his city’s resources. The security situation had already placed an enormous strain on the city’s budget, a state of affairs that was about to worsen: the agreement that Reyes Ferriz had signed with the federal government stipulated that the city would underwrite the cost of housing and feeding the troops. This circumstance served to further inflame the tensions between the mayor and the governor, given that, despite repeated requests, more than a year into the violence the governor had yet to divert any state resources to help Juárez manage the crisis.
. . .
A week after the discovery of the narcofosas it was announced that none of the bodies found in the shallow graves at Villa de Alcalá were those of current or former police. The police badge remained a mystery. The one piece of evidence that should have been the easiest to track down (presumably the municipal police kept a registry of its officers and their respective badge numbers) proved to be the most elusive. A silence shrouded it. The official report was as terse as it was uninformative: “Under investigation.” Everyone in the city knew what that meant: nothing would ever be known beyond what was already known, which was very little. The frightening discovery would simply go down as yet another horrific crime in an endless sequence of unspeakable events that was the backdrop to the lives of the people of Juárez.
CHAPTER 18
Civics Lessons
A poll published in El Diario shortly after the army’s arrival that spring of 2009 found that 70 percent of the city was in support of the their presence, despite the accusations of abuse of force and human rights violations over the prior year. Historically, attitudes toward the army had varied in Mexico. In the aftermath of 1968, when the army had participated in the massacre of student demonstrators at Tlaltelolco in Mexico City and, later, in the ensuing anti-guerrilla campaigns of the 1970s, many viewed the Mexican Army as an abusive instrument of the state with no regard for human rights and a long record of committing atrocities against campesinos and poor, rural people as well as others who were in opposition to the government. Some of the military’s top brass had also been arrested for corruption and working in consort with drug lords. But there was a counter-narrative. Many also viewed the army as the most disciplined and least corrupt of the Mexican institutions, and some of the generals had earned the admiration of the nation for standing up to the cartels and fighting them hard while exposing corrupt police and politicians. Many Juarenses had high hopes that the army might solve the crisis of violence that was eviscerating their city.
Raymundo Ruiz wasn’t one of them. He was not sanguine about what the army could achieve or even about its intent. His natural skepticism worked against the view that the army could serve a useful purpose in Juárez. One afternoon after the army had taken over the city’s policing functions, Ruiz was stopped because his inspection sticker had expired. There was one municipal police officer in the patrol car (the “guide”), along with three soldiers. The police officer had been sent to deal with Ruiz. “Help me out, brother,” the photographer had pleaded with him. “I’m in the middle of my work shift.” But the cop wouldn’t budge. “I can’t,” he said, motioning back with his head toward the three soldiers standing grimly next to the patrol car. “These guys won’t let me.” The officer proceeded to take his pliers and detach Ruiz’s rear license plate—a means used to ensure that the transgressor will show up and pay the corresponding fine. “My tour’s over at twelve thirty,” the policeman said to Ruiz. “You can pick it up then after you’ve paid the infraction.”
If it was intended as a strike for a more responsible civic arrangement (taking your lumps and paying your fine down at the city offices rather than participating in the usual bribes), it had the opposite effect. I broached this idea with Ruiz but he smacked it right down. “No, it’s not about a more honest society,” he said. “These things are so entrenched that you can’t change them by issuing tickets. I can’t afford the time to go down there to take care of this; I’ll lose half of my day of work because of these idiots.”
Later that day we went to the city offices, where Ruiz dutifully paid his ticket. However, when he went to the window to retrieve his license plate, a dismissive clerk claimed it wasn’t there. “It’s there!” Ruiz fumed, noting that the police officer’s tour had been over hours ago. Turning to me and still within earshot of the clerk, Ruiz said, “He just wants a bribe.” Eventually, Ruiz’s plate was returned, but only after he’d found a district attorney walking down the hall whom he’d known from a couple of stories. The DA had gone straight into the room with the license plates and returned ten minutes later with Ruiz’s rear plate. “See? What did I tell you?” Ruiz said. The civics lesson was over.
In Mexico, corruption is a creature of many faces and permutations; it can come into play for a few pesos when stopped by a cop on a city street or for millions of pesos in fancy restaurants and richly decorated boardrooms. It is a civics lesson with which an entire nation is wrestling, and it is a circumstance into which narco-corruption readily enters when the opportunity or need arises. An entire way of life, a deeply ingrained cultural stance, is at work. Changing such realities will be a long, slow process in a country where the flush of narco-dollars works a system and attitudes are so deeply ingrained that they are simply accepted as a normal and ordinary way of life.
. . .
“We had no choice,” Eduardo Medina-Mora would later recollect in reference to the intensification and militarization of the Mexican government’s tactics against the drug cartels. Medina-Mora was a veteran of Mexico’s campaign against the cartels. During his time as federal attorney general, he’d had to fire his subordinate, the former drug czar Noe Ramírez Mandrujano, who had purportedly accepted $450,000 a month from the Beltrán-Leyva faction of the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for information about police operations. After leaving his post, Medina-Mora was appointed Mexico’s ambassador to Great Britain by Felipe Calderón. In 2010, I visited the ambassador’s private office in the embassy in London’s fashionable West End, which was spacious and decorated with an eclectic eye that included modern sculptures and handsome wood-inlaid antique chests. A large painting of a seascape hung over a couch, and an assortment of large-format books (Haciendas of Mexico, Beauty and Poetry in Mexican Popular Art, and The Soul of Mexico, this latter book by Carlos Fuentes) lay on a coffee table.
Prior to 2004, the cartels had been a problem and a national presence, but they lacked the firepower and infrastructure to deploy systematically, even though by then they had already made enormous inroads into Mexico’s police forces as well as the judiciary. The violence had begun to increase precipitously in 2004, Medina-Mora explained. He was unambiguous in his assessment of one of the root causes for t
hat increase: “That’s when the Americans allowed the Assault Weapons Ban to lapse,” he said. Almost immediately, the cartels had begun their buildup, buying large quantities of assault weapons, thereby dramatically increasing their firepower. Very soon the cartels all over Mexico were much better armed than municipal and state police forces, which tended to carry 38-caliber pistols and the occasional antiquated rifle. That’s when the cartel violence shifted in intensity and reached a new level. “They started becoming a real threat to the sovereignty of the Mexican state,” Medina-Mora said, adding, “That’s why the president had to move in the way he did.”
The ambassador had been reluctant to criticize American domestic policies, but it was evident that he viewed the procurement of assault weapons as a critical problem. “I see no contradiction between some regulation of these weapons and their Second Amendment,” he noted, referencing the U.S. Constitution. “They don’t even keep a database; there is no record of who is buying these weapons in the United States.”1
To underscore his point, the ambassador handed me a document labeled “Not for public release: Mexico/UK—SENSITIVE.” The document included the following statistic: “About 90% of all the weapons seized in Mexico come from the United States.”2 The document also noted that between December 1, 2006, and July 2010 the Mexican government had seized more than 85,551 weapons. Almost 60 percent of these were high-caliber automatic weapons. Indeed, according to an August 2008 article in the Los Angeles Times that cited the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, there are 6,700 licensed gun dealers between Brownsville, Texas, and San Diego, California, all within a short drive of the two thousand–mile U.S.-Mexico border. As violence reached an intense pitch all over Mexico, ready access to automatic weapons was playing a key role. Genaro García Luna described these weapons as the gas that was fueling the engine of violence.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 19