The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  In the midst of the ambassador’s description of Juárez’s intractability, he was interrupted by a call on his cell phone. I asked if he wished for me to step out, but he indicated that there was no need. Standing up and walking to the bank of windows facing the street that ran along the back of the embassy, he had a brief, amiable conversation before returning to the couch. “That was Carlos Fuentes,” the ambassador said, adding, “He spends a great deal of time in London. He loves it here.”

  Without missing a beat, he picked up where he’d left off. “In Tijuana, which was an enormous problem just two years ago, far greater than Juárez at the time, we were able to retake the city from the criminal groups by disarticulating the Tijuana police that had been in the cartel’s hands. Juárez was different,” he said. “The problem with Juárez is the culture of local gangs, the power of gang identities, and their territorial disputes. They also seem to have a penchant for engaging in violence for violence’s sake,” he concluded.

  Mexican Army in Ciudad Juárez. Photo copyright © Ricardo Ainslie.

  . . .

  In Juárez, the government’s lack of success in quelling the violence was beginning to erode the initial enthusiasm for the federal forces. One afternoon I arrived at a crime scene where several men had been executed near the intersection of two streets in a ramshackle neighborhood. The yellow tape that marked the perimeter fluttered in the wind, and the usual players were presiding over the scene: municipal police “guides,” federal police, Mexican Army personnel, and forensics people, who had laid out black-numbered yellow markers next to each shell casing that they’d encountered. From my vantage across the way I could see at least thirty such markers, but there were many more: the execution had taken place inside a small auto repair shop so most of the crime scene was out of view. The yellow markers made their way from the street into the darkened space where I was told three men lay dead.

  The yellow crime scene tape ran across the street on all four sides of the intersection, creating an interior space, and most of the officials were standing in groups within that space. Federal police and army soldiers stood guard to keep onlookers at a distance. The entire neighborhood was out: children of every age, teenagers on bicycles, adults—all standing along or near the yellow tape, looking. Some were anxious and grim, others chatted as if at a carnival. The only other people inside the perimeter appeared to be relatives of the victims and a few neighbors whose homes were inside the taped-off area.

  “They were good people,” one of the neighbors said, standing next to me at the tapeline. “They were mechanics, and for a while now they’d been hitting them up for the cuota,” she said, referring to the extortion fee cartels and local gangs were charging merchants and shopkeepers. Another neighbor chimed in and explained his understanding of what had taken place. He told me that the man who owned the repair shop also employed his son and his two sons-in-law. The sicarios had entered the shop and started shooting. Only the man’s son had managed to get away, having jumped the wall at the rear of the building.

  The son was pointed out to me. He appeared to be in his midtwenties and was tall and thickly built; he was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt that still had what looked like garage grime on it. The survivor was standing inside the sealed-off area where two friends consoled him. The man appeared to be in shock; he was distraught, his face flush with tears.

  “They need to take him inside somewhere,” one of the neighbors said. “If they see him they’ll come back to get him.” The group of neighbors standing around me murmured their agreement. Just then, three soldiers walked past the man, and in that moment he lost control of himself and started shouting at the soldiers, insulting them. “You people are worthless,” he screamed in a mix of rage and tears. “You claim you are here to protect but you do nothing! You aren’t worth shit!” The son lunged toward the three soldiers, who stood their ground facing him, but before he could spring loose his two friends caught hold of him and restrained him. After a moment, the soldiers walked away and the man and his two companions made their way to the man’s house, which was on the same block. He was not present when the forensics people loaded up the three cadavers for their trip to the morgue.

  The scene was tense and hard to digest. The neighbors and other onlookers seemed to take on an angry mood, especially toward the soldiers and federal police. They’d seen too much of this. Whatever promise they may have felt, whatever hope there may have been when the federal forces first arrived in Ciudad Juárez, that optimism appeared to be dissipating rapidly, replaced by a sea of frustration. It was the first time I saw clearly that the federal forces were losing the battle for hearts and minds in Juárez. The city seemed to be losing faith in the possibility that things would get better. And civics lessons, it occurred to me, were as much about such hope and the belief that good and right would prevail, as they were about anything else that a society might offer.

  . . .

  “My aim is to have 3,000 new police elements by December,” José Reyes Ferriz told me one afternoon in his office at Juárez’s Presidencia Municipal in the summer of 2009, after the arrival of the new wave of federal forces. The paradigm had not changed: the army and federal police were buying him time—they were a stopgap measure, placeholders, until the city of Juárez could create a new, reliable force. “We need the army to help contain crime until the police can be cleaned up and begin working,” he added.

  With the arrival of the latest contingent of federal forces, March and April had seen a reduction in the number of executions in the city. In January and February executions had been running at about eight or nine per day, but in April and May they dipped to three or four per day. The cartels appeared to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the presence of ten thousand federal forces patrolling the city. But by the end of May the tally of the dead was back up and the problem with the federal strategy remained the same: the army was not trained to do police work, and even as it succeeded in arresting narcos and other criminals, the interface between the army and the civilian judiciary system was so deficient that for a variety of reasons most of the criminals simply walked once they were turned over to civilian authorities. An added complication was that their bread-and-butter tactic was bare-fisted engagements, and these were beginning to create a backlash of protest and accusations of human rights violations.

  . . .

  The mayor and the police chief, General Bretón, had set out to reach their goal of almost doubling the size of the police to three thousand. This time, they focused their recruitment efforts in Juárez. In order to induce men and women to sign up, the city launched campaigns that promised recruits higher pay, a $7,500 peso (about $700) bonus, scholarships for their children’s schooling, and credits that would help them purchase a house. By September of 2009, they had succeeded in bringing in the 2,250 or so recruits for what they were now officially calling the “New Police.” In addition to having passed the Confidence Tests, these recruits had been subjected to rigorous, boot camp–style training similar to what an earlier wave had received at a Mexican Army training camp in nearby Santa Gertrudis, but this time the recruits were trained in Juárez. They also received extensive instruction in the use of automatic weapons. In collaboration with the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, the city also developed a four-month-long law enforcement curriculum that was incorporated into the police academy instruction. Between the weeding out of the questionable officers, the creation of a new training scheme, and the recruitment and training of new officers, the yearlong process had represented a massive undertaking, but the New Police were now ready to be launched.

  Mayor José Reyes Ferriz inaugurated the New Police with great fanfare at an event in the auditorium at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez on September 14, 2009. The entire force was mustered, in their new, starched, silver-gray uniforms, specifically designed to be easily distinguishable from the uniforms used by the earlier incarnation of the discredited and infamous Juárez municipal po
lice. At the outset of the ceremony, the new officers stood at attention and saluted sharply. In his introduction, the mayor spoke about Juárez’s historic reputation as an industrious and progressive center, a reputation that was recognized worldwide, he said. The mayor acknowledged that over the course of the last decade the city had undergone a steady deterioration, increasingly becoming a place that was at the mercy of criminals. The city’s reputation was now on a par with that of some of the most violent places on the globe, the mayor continued. “We had to act,” he told the newly minted police officers. There was pride in the mayor’s voice as he summarized the accomplishments of the preceding year; it had taken an enormous effort to rebuild the police, a force that had been under the control of the Juárez cartel for at least a decade and that had then been decimated by the Sinaloa cartel’s efforts to take it over. In little more than a year, scores of officers had been assassinated, including three of the force’s top commanders. Two chiefs had resigned, ultimately eventuating in the army’s takeover of policing functions. For these reasons, in addition to a sense accomplishment, that September 14 ceremony brought enormous relief to the mayor, who dared once again to entertain the notion that the city could be saved, that it was on the cusp of a change, a change that would deliver it from the grips of the ungovernability it had endured for so long.

  Notes

  1. In Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, there are few restrictions for gun dealers selling assault weapons. As long as a purchaser has a valid driver’s license and does not have a criminal record, these dealers can sell an unlimited number of assault weapons without reporting the sales to the government.

  2. This figure has been a source of controversy. A sample of the total weapons seized was submitted to U.S. authorities, and 90 percent of these were found to have U.S. origins. On this basis, William Hoover, assistant director for ATF field operations, testified before the House of Representatives on February 7, 2008, that “there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over 90 percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in or interdicted in transport to Mexico originated from various sources within the United States.” More recently, in July 2011, an ATF report indicated that authorities in Mexico recovered 29,284 firearms in 2009 and 2010. Of these, 20,504 came from the United States (that is, approximately 70 percent).

  CHAPTER 19

  The Other War

  The Juárez mayor had another war to contend with: politics. The July 2010 elections, only a year away, were beginning to loom large. The city would be voting for a new mayor and the state for a new governor (by law, neither Reyes Ferriz nor Reyes Baeza could be reelected). There was already intense jockeying for these and other positions. Reyes Ferriz’s party, the PRI, was divided into two factions. One faction was derisively known as “The Dinosaurs.” Composed of remnants of the party that had ruled Mexico with an iron fist for over seventy years, it had a well-earned reputation for corruption and prepotency. The other faction within the party was made up of younger, college-educated, professional people with more of a democratic vision. Reyes Ferriz belonged to the latter faction.

  The stakes were high for the coming elections. One of the old guard who was jockeying for the PRI candidacy for governor was Héctor “Teto” Murguía. Murguía was Reyes Ferriz’s predecessor in the mayor’s job; he had imposed Saulo Reyes on the police department in January of 2007. The man that Murguía wanted in the Juárez mayor’s job was named Víctor Valencia. Valencia was Reyes Ferriz’s nemesis—a street fighter of a politician with a sketchy background. Reyes Baeza, Murguía, and Valencia formed the old-guard troika, a package deal wrapped in innuendo and rumor. Reyes Ferriz was convinced that this lineup would undermine his efforts to save Juárez from the current crisis; at stake was everything that he had been trying to achieve since becoming mayor of Juárez.

  . . .

  By chance, I had encountered Víctor Valencia one day at a standoff between police and residents in an upscale residential subdivision. In Ciudad Juárez the rich and the poor alike braced themselves every time they left their homes, no matter what time of day or night. Living in the most violent city in the Americas (perhaps in the world) was to live in a constant state of fear even for the city’s elite, who lived in the Campestre neighborhood. The older part of the Campestre was dotted with opulent mansions arrayed around the exclusive Club Campestre, with its emerald-green, well-manicured golf course and the usual country club amenities. The homes had expansive lawns; expensive, late-model cars and armored SUVs sat parked behind tall walls and elaborate wrought-iron gates. It was the fashion that a good number of these homes had private chapels. In addition to the ever-present bodyguards, elaborate security systems were in evidence.

  Not far from the heart of the Campestre was a more recent and comparatively more modest subdivision of the neighborhood. It was still upper middle class, home to assembly plant managers and successful professionals, but clearly a rung below the original Campestre, where the city’s mega-wealthy lived. If less luxurious, the homes here were still quite nice, ample with gated entryways and tall walls surrounding interior gardens. The newer neighborhood lacked the panache of the original Campestre; it had a nouveau riche feel rather than the air of established money. A long wall that ran several blocks separated the older Campestre from the new, further reinforcing the sense that the latter was not to be confused with the former. I had come to this upscale part of the city because I’d been told that the residents had taken to putting up impromptu obstructions in the streets in an effort to dissuade sicarios and kidnappers from coming through the neighborhood. It struck me as an indication that notwithstanding their bodyguards and armored vehicles, the rich were also affected by the climate of fear that permeated the city. In the older, wealthier Campestre, residents had trucked in enormous boulders to block the streets; in the newer subdivision, residents were using both boulders and sand from the desert to create berms.

  In an all-too-premature effort to bring an air of normality back to the streets, the city administration, in conjunction with the federal police, ordered the Department of Public Works to remove the berms and boulders so that traffic could flow freely. Under the watchful eyes of two dozen municipal1 and federal police officers, who lined the street to protect the city crew, a mustard-yellow Caterpillar backhoe loader was at work scooping up the sand from the berms and dumping it into the bed of a waiting truck. Black diesel smoke gushed from the backhoe’s exhaust as its operator maneuvered the heavy scoop, which scraped loudly as it moved across the pavement.

  The residents of the newer Campestre were out in the street and they were irate. A tense standoff had developed between them, the city crew, and the police officers. The residents had not been informed that the barriers they’d thrown up over a year ago in a desperate act of self-protection had been slated for removal. It was only the scraping sound of the backhoe and the sight of the dump truck and police that had alerted some to what was taking place, and as word spread in the neighborhood that their defenses were being dismantled, the number of angry onlookers grew. It was noon and some thirty or forty neighbors were out in the street demanding that the work stop, but so far their efforts were to no avail.

  The tension was growing with each scoop of sand that was removed and each boulder that was pushed on to the edge of the street. In desperation, one middle-aged man in a brown designer jogging suit jumped in front of the backhoe, daring the driver to run him over. The crowd screamed, imploring the Caterpillar operator to stop, which he did just as the thick steel bucket came within inches of the defiant man’s face. The jogger held his ground in this Juárez Tiananmen Square moment as the crowd erupted in applause and cheers and the Caterpillar operator looked on helplessly.

  When a federal police officer approached the jogger, the crowd drew close, shouting “Don’t touch him! We are all witnesses!” Several made it a point to show that they were filming the incident with their video cameras. The officer calmly explained that the orders were to clear th
e street, that this was no way to handle security issues, but his appeals drew a chorus of howls and derision. By this juncture, in solidarity with the Tiananmen man, some residents had laid themselves down under the enormous wheels of the backhoe. “Calm down,” the officer appealed, but to no avail.

  A municipal police officer named Lieutenant Villalobos now stepped forward to try to address the crowd. “I’m in charge, and I will ensure you are safe,” he told the men and women who’d left their nearby homes in what was already a sweltering-hot summer day. “That’s not true,” a woman shouted into the lieutenant’s face. “You’re a liar,” another shouted.

  “You tell me the time of danger and I’ll have a patrol car assigned to be here,” the officer said. “What time?”

  A middle-aged woman in a T-shirt and shorts, her hair braided down her back, spoke up: “They kidnapped me at four in the afternoon,” she said, her words breaking up with emotion. “They kidnapped my sister at ten o’clock at night, and they shot my father to death at eight in the morning!” She continued, angry and upset. “There is no safe time in this city!” Soon another neighbor replaced this woman, recounting his version of the city’s horror. “Please don’t use my name,” the first woman told me when I spoke to her later. “There could be reprisals.”

  The police pulled back, regrouping to the side as the stalemate continued. At that moment, a young man who had been standing in the wings stepped forward. He was no older than twenty-five, dressed in a purple striped dress shirt, black pants, and sunglasses. He was modest in stature and soft-spoken as he attempted to address the group, identifying himself as a city engineer here to monitor the job. He was apologetic and understanding of the residents’ concerns, but he also underscored that clearing the street was in keeping with a recent directive from the federal police. Such obstructions were not a good security strategy, he maintained. The city engineer was clearly a newbie, not long out of college and still wet behind the ears. He was perspiring in the summer heat and in the face of the responsibility he’d been given to oversee the order to clear the street. He was trying his best, but he was no match for the agitated crowd.