The Casa Aliviane killing was the third such attack on a drug treatment center in Juárez in recent months. It was also the biggest massacre on record for a city that had already witnessed more than its share of violence.
. . .
An operative of the Juárez cartel from the Amado Carrillo Fuentes days during the 1990s2 told me that at that time the culture within the cartel dictated that few of them used cocaine. People who violated that ethos were demoted and pushed to the margins, and if they persisted and their substance abuse interfered with their duties, they were executed. A decade later that ethos had all but disappeared. In fact, cocaine use had become extensive. In April 2010, state ministerial police intelligence video cameras caught a ninety-minute narco-takeover of Creel, Chihuahua, a small town on the edge of the Copper Canyon. The raid involved a dozen SUVs and a score of sicarios. At the beginning of the raid the sicarios, assault weapons in tow, are clearly visible coming up to a capo’s car—a man subsequently identified as Jesús Ernesto Chávez Castillo, an important Juárez cartel operative—and reaching through the car window into the bag of cocaine in Castillo’s hand before heading off to assassinate their targets. (In the course of the massacre fifteen people were killed, and yet, even as a state police agent in the Command and Control Center tracked the commando group’s actions, zooming in and out, there was no response by the state police. It clarified what everyone in Chihuahua already knew: the Juárez cartel ran the state ministerial police.)
. . .
Hernán was one of those who’d begun using the product he ran across the river. He had been a heavy drinker, but he had never been a cocaine user. Now, more and more cartel members were using coke and, as a consequence, some were becoming addicts themselves. Over the last year of Hernán and Elena’s relationship, his violence had intensified, very likely as a function of his cocaine abuse. For a long time Hernán denied it, but Elena felt she could always tell when he came home coked up. He was hyper and restless, his eyes constantly darting around. He could not sleep, he was agitated. She worried that he was losing it. He also became hyper-suspicious and increasingly vigilant, but Elena was never clear whether the paranoia was a function of something real or imagined, given that in his line of work there was the ever-present threat of being ripped off; cocaine loads could have “bunk” mixed in among the kilos. You had to worry about getting paid for loads you delivered and you had to worry about paying up the line in a timely fashion. You had to worry about rivals stealing money or product from you, or your people defecting to work for someone else. You had to worry about getting busted every time you or your people crossed the river. And you had to worry about the shifting politics and alliances within the cartel. Misreading any of these variables got people killed, and, with the changing terrain, as the Sinaloa cartel people started making inroads in Juárez, many of Hernán’s associates were turning up dead. The cocaine didn’t help Hernán manage these complexities, it just helped him forget about them in fits and spurts, even as it compromised his judgment.
Hernán became erratic. On one occasion he wrestled Elena to the floor in the kitchen and put a gun to her head in front of their boy. It was the one thing she would never forgive. She told him to go ahead and kill her. “You’d be doing me a favor,” she said. But she also fantasized killing him; she imagined poisoning his food. Things had reached bottom for them.
One incident captured her sense that things were unraveling for Hernán, that he was losing his footing. She had always made a habit of noting the numbers on the police patrol cars that were parked in front of her house. One day Hernán found the list and asked her what it was. She told him. His reaction suggested a problem. There was something in his tone, or in the glint in his eyes, that made her think that some of the patrol cars watching the house were not from his group. She had never liked having the police at her house, and now their presence made her feel anxious.
One morning she received a call from Hernán. He was tense and not himself. He gave her very clear, specific instructions: Take Pedro to your mother’s and stay there until you hear from me. Under no circumstances was she to go near the house. There was no mistaking his apprehension and sense of danger. Something big was taking place, although he refused to say anything more about it. Later that afternoon Hernán called again, only to repeat the instructions that she and the children were not to return to the house.
The next call Elena received was from one of Hernán’s brothers, telling her he was dead. He had been shot down in the street, ambushed by an unidentified narco-commando group. Killed like a dog, she said.
At Hernán’s funeral, Elena discovered that he had at least a dozen children, only four of which were with his wife. She had always assumed that he had other lovers, but discovering that her child was not the only one outside of his marriage surprised her. Elena consoled herself with the fact that she was the only one of his consorts for whom he’d purchased a home, and with the knowledge that he had participated in the boy’s baptism. She also consoled herself with the knowledge that she had had Hernán for eight years. “He defied the odds,” she told me. “Most of them don’t live more than five years.” Hernán’s execution was either a sad fact or earned justice, depending on how one looked at it.
Whatever purchase such reassurances gave Elena, it was short-lived. She returned to her house two days after Hernán’s execution to find it in shambles. It was obvious that the people involved believed that Hernán had hidden either drugs or money at the house. No drawer was left in a dresser or cabinet; no mattress was left unturned. Every piece of furniture had been moved, some of it broken. The closets and drawers had all been emptied onto the floor. In fact, no crevice had escaped the havoc of their thoroughness. Elena inferred from this that Hernán had betrayed someone. She also knew that had she been home she would have been assassinated or lifted and tortured to see if she knew something. That is why Hernán had been so insistent that she and Pedro leave the house. There was something else that Elena noticed: the ever-present police cars were gone. They never returned.
. . .
In the wake of the Casa Aliviane killings, officials weighed in on what they believed had transpired. Víctor Valencia had only remained as the governor’s personal representative in Ciudad Juárez for a short time, given the conflicts between Valencia and Reyes Ferriz. In another effort to further Valencia’s political prospects, the governor had appointed Valencia the Chihuahua state secretary for public safety, which meant that he was essentially the head of the state police. In that new capacity, Valencia’s response to the killings was to say that drug centers like Casa Aliviane were sometimes fronts for criminal gangs. Patricia González, the state attorney general, noted that such centers “had become hideouts from police or rival gang members.” Whether or not there were one or several gang members among the Casa Aliviane dead, there was also every indication that the dead included addicts who had sought to remedy their suffering in one of the city’s bona fide treatment programs, a fact that would probably have a chilling effect on other addicts similarly in need of help. A few days after the massacre at Casa Aliviane, mayor Reyes Ferriz announced that the army had arrested three of the people believed responsible for the killings.3
Notes
1. A 2008 Consejo Nacional de Adicciones report noted that Juárez had the highest number of addicts of any city in Mexico.
2. This individual requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, even though it had been over a decade since he had been actively involved with the cartel.
3. On March 19, 2011, eighteen months after the massacre, the state prosecutor in Chihuahua released the three men on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to convict them.
CHAPTER 21
Los NiNi
On a hot June day in 2009 I was at a crime scene in Norponiente. The federal police and the army had secured the area, which was a short block with an elementary school (its fence painted in bright primary colors) along one side, and modest homes along t
he other. Behind and above those houses were two layers of desert, like shelves, upon which other working class homes sat, constructed of rough, bleached-out cinderblock or red brick. The homes had barred windows and were surrounded by patches of scrubby, dusty vegetation.
It was a grim landscape even without the victim lying face-up on the pavement next to a recent-model, silver-gray Chevrolet sedan that he had been about to board. The driver’s door was still wide open. The man, dressed in jeans, white tennis shoes, and a clean white T-shirt, had fallen backward such that his head lay next to the vehicle’s rear tire. His legs splayed out in the opposite direction. I was mystified by the whiteness of his T-shirt; there was no trace of blood on it, at least not that I could see from my remove of twenty yards. The man had been shot in the face and, mercifully, someone had covered his head.
One of the federal police officers guarding the scene told me that the victim was twenty years old. The assassin had shot fifteen bullets—at least that was the highest number on the yellow markers that indicated the location of shell casings. Off to the side, standing along a chain-link fence, the victim’s mother wailed mournfully. She was flanked by two people who attempted to console her: a teenage boy in a light-blue T-shirt, who rubbed her shoulder as her right hand extended behind her and touched his face appreciatively; and a young woman in a white blouse looking on in silence, whose thick black hair was braided straight down the middle of her back. I surmised that these were her other children.
At one end of the street there was a pickup truck full of brooms that someone had been peddling at the time of the execution and an ice-cream vendor whose cart sat under a large faded umbrella. The entire neighborhood appeared to be standing at the yellow crime scene tape that enclosed the area where the dead man lay. As always, there were children and stray dogs. Some of the people had solemn looks; others were cutting up, having grown bored waiting for something to happen (the forensics people had to finish their work before the body was removed to the morgue). At both ends of the street people chatted intermittently or stared blankly in the direction of the victim. There was nothing to do but wait for the quotidian scene to play out so they could go on pretending their lives were normal.
Juárez execution. Photo copyright © Raymundo Ruiz.
Around the time of this execution, José Reyes Ferriz pointed out a curious fact: most of the victims being executed all over the city were young. Like the executed man I encountered that day, 60 percent of the dead were under twenty-five years of age. The mayor and the federal authorities attributed that fact to a transformation in the Juárez war. The victims now included more drug retailers and young gangbangers fighting for turf and fewer traditional cartel operatives (men who were executed in more orchestrated ambushes and selective, targeted assassinations). Juárez’s massive unemployment, especially among the ranks of young men, had created an explosive mix of youth, drugs, and a sense of hopelessness about the future. Therein lay the core of the problem for Juárez, or at least the part of the problem that didn’t have to do with the quantity of drugs Americans were consuming.
. . .
Boys and Girls First! was one of the programs run by Organización Popular Independiente, a small nonprofit in Altavista, a neighborhood where the dead appeared daily. The program was operated out of a rundown building and it targeted elementary school–aged kids and young adolescents. So did the gang members who ran the picadero across the street, one of many that supplied the addicts in the neighborhood. Inside the Organización Popular Independiente, the main room had tables where classes were taught and kids could work on projects after school and on weekends. The walls were mostly bare except for a poster of Christ (Laurencio Barraza, the NGO’s director, was a religious man who made the sign of the cross every morning before leaving his home; he knew his work in gang-infested neighborhoods was dangerous). A stack of donated food sat in the corner: fifty-pound sacks of El Globo wheat flower, beans, and rice, along with bags of corn masa for making tortillas, cooking oil, and boxes of “fine” cookies. The administrative offices were in an adjoining room and consisted of a series of workstations with a blackboard and a few old computers.
Barraza’s group described itself as an “independent organization for the people.” The day I visited, there were but two staff members present and no kids (I was there during school hours). Barraza and I sat at one of the computers reviewing photographs that the kids had taken for a photo contest they’d titled “Change in the Wind.” Forty kids from Altavista had participated. They were provided with ten weeks of instruction by a professional photographer covering light, composition, action, and mood, and then sent into their neighborhood to document their worlds with disposable cameras. Once the film was processed, each child had been permitted to submit three images to the contest.
Some of the images were whimsical. A photograph taken in the interior of a public bus was captioned The People’s Limousine. Another image was of two Mexican soldiers walking through shops that typically catered to Americans, with piñatas and colorful dresses hanging above and an assortment of Mexican curios all around. It was titled The New Tourists (a reference to the fact that the tourists from across the river had long since stopped coming). Most of the photographs spoke to the violence that had overtaken the city. One image was of a girl lying on the floor, ketchup on her neck to simulate blood, with a knife beside her. It was titled Man with a Knife. An exterior window with bars had a calavera (a Day of the Dead sugar skull), a small, brightly painted casket, and chrysanthemums (the ceremonial flower for the Day of the Dead). It was titled The Face of Juárez. A picture of two soldiers at nearby Altavista Park, their automatic weapons resting on sandbags, was titled The Surveillance. The most moving image was of a young girl standing with arms outstretched, reaching for the sky, a flash of sunlight caught between her fingers. It was titled Liberty. The photographer had added the following caption to this image: “I want to be able to go out in peace, I wish the afternoons were like they used to be, when I could go to the park.”
The images were hung in various locations throughout the city—at the Camino Real hotel, at the main city library, at the historic Presidencia Municipal—and the media had covered the events. The contest’s wining image, Liberty, had been exhibited in Mexico City.
Laurencio Barraza was a man with a calling. He was an energetic activist in his late forties, on the corpulent side, with a dark complexion and graying hair made starker by his thick, black-framed glasses. Barraza had been a child advocate most of his life. He and his organization were rabidly independent; he refused support from the usual government sources because, in his view, “there are too many strings attached.”
Barraza leaned back in his chair and described the world within which most of his charges lived: the poverty, the abandonment, the absence of schools and social services. He was extremely concerned about the impact of the violence on Juárez’s youth. “How can they process all of it?” he asked. “How do the daily images of violence affect their values? . . . You can’t imagine how saturated their lives are with fear,” Barraza continued. During Holy Week a year earlier rumors that the cartels were going to make the week the bloodiest ever had gone viral on the Internet, and everyone had been afraid to leave their homes.
In the Altavista neighborhood most parents either worked in the assembly plants or in the “informal” economy, which meant vendors in the streets. Barraza summarized the explosion of picaderos in the city. He told me that in 1997 there were seven hundred, but by 2005 there were almost 3,200. “It has to have happened with the consent of the authorities,” Barraza told me. (As he spoke I was reminded that the estimates I’d been given for the number of picaderos varied depending on the source; what didn’t change was the universal understanding that drugs had taken over the city, especially its poor and working-class neighborhoods.)
In 2000 there were six hundred elementary schools in Juárez, three hundred middle schools, and ten high schools. Norponiente, where 40 percent of t
he city lived, had but one public high school. “There’s been a systematic policy of exclusion for this population,” Barraza argued. “They push them toward the maquiladoras, at $70 pesos a day. They leave elementary school when they’re twelve or thirteen but by law they’re not permitted to work until they are fifteen. What do they do?” The question hung there. “There are few parks, no public institutions that address their needs, no tools. What these kids have is what the streets offer them—criminal activity.” He was describing what in Mexico had emerged as a new social phenomenon: “Los NiNi,”1 a term used to describe the growing number of youth who are neither in school nor working. Los NiNi had become synonymous with a lost generation, a generation whose lives were increasingly defined by gang affiliations and existence outside of the conventional social structures.
Barraza stood up and walked over to the blackboard. He sketched out a rough map of the city’s neighborhoods. The areas of dense poverty formed an arc, like a sliver of moon, curving from top-left (Norponiente) to a tip at the southeast corner of the city. “What you have in this corridor are the least amount of city resources: single mothers, no childcare centers, no infrastructure, no parks. And you’ve got a proliferation of gangs throughout this entire area,” he said.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 22