The city was caught in a vise grip, he told me. There were seven hundred gangs, according to one study conducted by a local university. “That’s why 90 percent of the people are in favor of the military being here,” Barraza said, adding that he wasn’t particularly taken with them. “They’re from the south; they are burning up in this heat yet they don’t bathe.” But the real critique was what he perceived as inaction: “There haven’t been that many skirmishes between the army and the narcos. It’s more the narcos killing each other off,” he told me, adding that the gangs were extorting everyone: pharmacies, hardware stores, stationary stores. “They’re all hit with the ‘mochate o te va ir mal’ [pay up or it’s going to go poorly for you].”
Barraza added that the army had lost its moment of opportunity as far as public opinion was concerned. “The first time the army entered the city en masse there was a sense of hope and possibility, even a sense of respect,” Barraza recalled. But those hopes had been dashed with time: “The ever-present road blocks have produced very little other than being a major hassle for us.”
. . .
Growing up, Elena never had the benefit of Boys and Girls First! or any other such program. She was a NiNi who’d been fortunate enough to have the looks to hook up with a narco. But in the aftermath of Hernán’s execution, Elena was left alone. For all the conflict between them, her life had revolved around Hernán. Now he was gone. There was both relief and sadness in it. She felt that Hernán’s executioners had done her a favor; she felt unburdened even as she felt deeply mournful. Life is always so full of contradiction, she thought. She missed him and she knew Pedro missed him. Her cell phone was all but mute, as his insistent, stalking calls had ceased. The enormity of his emotional baggage was no longer upon her. Hernán, the father of her son, was dead.
But that absence had consequences. He had purchased the house outright, so she owned it free and clear, but suddenly she was broke. He had always been clear with her: “I don’t want you to have money because I want the guy who has you after I’m dead to have to work for you like I’ve worked for you.” At the time it seemed like something theoretical, a “what if” scenario. But the “what if” was now a reality. She had no money and an elementary school–aged son. In fact, Pedro was in a private school. For the last eight years Hernán had typically arrived at the house with a wad of cash in his pocket that she tapped to pay the bills, shop for groceries, or go to the mall. That was gone.
“I was alone and had nowhere to turn,” Elena told me at one of our meetings. Her family was impoverished; her brothers had their own families to feed, clothe, and otherwise support, and all of them lived hand-to-mouth lives as it was. Elena’s first strategy was to sell her things. The house had nice furnishings, artwork, three computers, several televisions, and appliances and knickknacks. Elena organized a series of garage sales and started selling off what she had. A close friend, another narco-widow whose man had also been executed and who was now prostituting herself at an expensive brothel to pay her bills, offered a proposition: “Don’t sell your stuff, come work with me. I’ll set you up,” she told Elena. But Elena couldn’t bring herself to do it. “My pride got in the way,” she told me. Over the first few months she sold everything she had in the house except for worn-out modular couches, the beds, and one of the televisions. She pulled her son out of private school and put him in the neighborhood public school.
For a year, Elena cobbled together a month-to-month subsistence, borrowing what she could from family members and selling everything she could. In the end she could not stay afloat. A year later, broke and in debt, Elena swallowed her pride, called her narco-widow friend, and asked her what she needed to do. Her friend’s response was not heartening: “You should have called me a year ago; you wouldn’t have had to sell all your shit.” Elena started prostituting herself.
It was not an easy transition. Elena had been fast and loose for years, but always in control. Sex had been her terrain and a source of power. This was different. She was forced to relinquish that sense of agency. She had to make herself desired rather than dictating the terms of engagement. She had to acquiesce to other’s desires and play a game she had never wanted or needed to play. The very essence, the thing that made prostitution what it was, ran counter to the way in which Elena had used sex. She felt defeated and depressed.
The man who ran the shop stopped her one night and told her to cut out the moping. “This is just a job,” he told her. “What you do here is not your identity, it’s just what you do to earn money. When you leave here and go home, leave this behind; separate yourself out from it.” It was simple advice, proffered with a mix of sympathy and this-is-the-school-of-hard-knocks straightforwardness. It was advice she tried to take to heart. Somehow it relieved her. She stopped feeling sorry for herself and worked.
The bordello where Elena worked catered to Juárez’s professional class: dentists, veterinarians, accountants, lawyers, and plant managers. She says she made six hundred to seven hundred pesos (roughly fifty to sixty dollars) an hour, although that didn’t include the house “cut.” Still, it was far more than she could make in a week at any of the local assembly plants. Her only costs were wardrobe—buying the outfits that made her alluring and desirable to the clientele. Between her family and friends she tried to find people to take care of Pedro, but he also spent nights alone sometimes.
After a year of turning tricks Elena talked the owner into letting her be part of the management team. She started recruiting girls for the brothel. “I just returned from a recruitment trip to Parral,” she told me once. She had discovered that she had a talent for talking girls into prostitution. She would enter a bar, scan the place, and target girls that she intuited were vulnerable or amenable to her pitch. She offered them base salaries that were far and above what they made in regular jobs, and she brought them to Juárez and trained them. Most had to be taught how to dress for this clientele, how to act, how to make themselves interesting to the men of Juárez’s professional class. They were unsophisticated; most had never traveled anywhere beyond Chihuahua. Elena claimed she was straight with them about the job and what it entailed. They came willingly, she said, and she described herself as a kind of sponsor or protector who made sure the owners lived up to their promises. Of course, I had no way of confirming her representations of this world or her role within it.
One evening Elena and I met at a Chinese restaurant for an interview. The place was dimly lit, with ersatz Chinese decorations of gold tassels and gold, red, and black trim. At the buffet line the warmers appeared to have kept the same food hot since the lunch rush. The Chinese are more plentiful in Juárez than many would expect. They’d come in the nineteenth century after the California Gold Rush; some opened opium dens that became the nucleus of the local drug world. Eventually, the other netherworld types like La Nacha, the infamous drug queen who ran La Cima for many years beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, decided to wipe out the Chinese, and they did it in a most brutal way. In the 1930s there was a massacre of Chinese involved in the drug business that has not been forgotten. The descendants of these immigrants went on to do what immigrants do: some became university professors, others doctors, others ranchers, and still others policemen. More than a few opened restaurants like this one, although there were also upscale Chinese restaurants with excellent food.
We sat at a corner table, our backs to the rest of the restaurant in an instinctive attempt at discretion. Elena placed her cell phone on the table, as she had been receiving a steady flow of calls from the girls working or scheduled to work at the brothel that night. The calls covered a range of pressing needs; two of the girls called for a wardrobe consultation (“I think the striped blouse looks good on you!”; “No, that’s not sexy enough”). Elena was like a mother hen to them. One of the girls called to ask whether there would be sufficient clients that night to make it worthwhile to show up for work (it was a Tuesday, typically a slow night). Elena responded like a harsh schoolmarm. “Y
ou’re damn right you have to show up,” she told her. “And if you don’t show, you know I’ll have someone behind you who really wants the work.”
She gave the girls no quarter. She told me these conversations were frustrating because she’d made it clear over and over: the schedule is the schedule. You don’t always get the prime-time nights; you have to take your turn on the slow nights, just like everyone else, and so on. No matter how many times she reiterated the message, she still got the calls, often just before someone was expected to report for work. She had to threaten them with firing or else she’d have anarchy on her hands, she said. Elena also was convinced that if she took a more lenient, soft approach, if she placated or indulged the girls, they would take advantage of her. Elena’s greatest fear was that one of them would “jump” her, as she put it, meaning try to take over her job. Being a manager was far preferable to having to turn tricks.
In the midst of these reflections Elena surprised me with an insight about herself. She’d been describing her knack for recruiting girls, for going into bars and knowing, intuitively, which girls might be amenable to this work and just how to sweet talk them into signing up. “I really learned this from him,” she offered at one point, referring to Hernán. It was then that she described Hernán as a narco-pimp because of his skill at seducing and recruiting young women to be his mules. He ran those women like a pimp runs his whores, she observed, aware that this was exactly how she now recruited and ran her girls at the brothel.
Within the chaos, Elena had somehow found the turns her life had taken to be oddly empowering. She dreamed of starting her own brothel. Maybe she’d send Pedro off to the nuns and turn the house into a members-only, exclusive “club.” She could pilfer the membership list from her current workplace and bribe the cops from her precinct so that she wouldn’t have any problems. She was convinced that the girls would come with her rather than stay with the current brothel owner. “He’s got his head up his ass,” she said. “And he’s always trying to renege on the base pay he promised them.” She was brainstorming ideas. For the first time in her life, she told me, she felt she had a skill, she knew she could run a business, manage employees, keep track of money. She was already doing it at the brothel, where as time went on she had less and less respect for the owner and where she increasingly felt that he needed her to run a successful business, given that he relied on her for everything. It gave her a measure of control over him. The only thing that intruded upon and ruptured this feeling of agency was the ever-present anxiety of being “jumped.” She feared that if she pushed too hard, one of the other girls would take her place and the owner would drop her.
. . .
The cuota (extortion fee) was said to have begun as a strategy for replacing lost income, given the increased effectiveness of American efforts to seal the border. That effort was making it more difficult to cross product, which, in turn, meant lower profits. Extortion of businesses had become epidemic. That, in turn, had encouraged other gangs and neighborhood punks to emulate the lucrative strategy. It was impossible to know for sure, but it was assumed that the cartels were extorting higher-end businesses and perhaps professional people, while lesser gangs were extorting neighborhood shops, bus drivers, and street vendors.
Elena’s shop had cameras through which they could monitor the entrance to the brothel, which had an outer door, then a hallway to the interior, and then a second door that led into the brothel itself. One night a man opened the outer door and walked calmly toward the second door. Elena watched him enter. He looked like one of their typical clients. He was well dressed, in his thirties. “Not bad looking,” had been Elena’s initial assessment. There was a panic button that Elena could press when something suspicious happened, and she could have some muscle at the desk in a matter of seconds, but this man did not raise her concerns until he was through the second door and walking up to the desk, where Elena sat with another woman. It was his face, which was tight and severe, and especially his eyes, which made her feel instinctively that he was malevolent.
The two women froze. Just as he reached the desk the man’s hand went into his coat pocket and he said, “Your time has come.” Elena and her companion feared they were going to be executed. Instead he pulled out a slip of paper, which he put on the desk. “Have the owner call this number in the morning,” he said, before turning around and exiting the building. The next morning the boss called the number and was told that he was to begin paying a cuota of one thousand dollars a week. Someone would be picking up the payments every Monday night. Failure to pay up would lead to dire consequences: the owner or a member of his family might be killed, the establishment might be burned to the ground, or the girls would be murdered one by one. He’d know soon enough which outcome it might be.
Like most of the other businesses in Juárez, the brothel owner started making his weekly cuota payments. He assumed it was one of the cartels, but of course they never identified themselves and at the end of the day he had no way of knowing. It was part of the Juárez terror. Even the brothels were being hit up by organized crime. Later, when I ventured the thesis that perhaps the brothel was owned by someone with links to the Juárez cartel, Elena assured me that if the owner was hooked up with them, he would not be paying the cuota.
. . .
Across town from the Altavista neighborhood where Laurencio Barraza ran the Boys and Girls First! program, Father Mario Manríquez, a forty-one-year-old priest at the Santa Teresa de Jesús church, tended to his sprawling, impoverished parish. The church was in another hardscrabble colonia called Oasis Revolución. Father Manríquez was tall and lanky, with jet-black hair that matched his vestments. He was an activist whose ideological views I found to be an odd mix of liberation theology and hardcore, old-school Catholicism. His office at the church was cluttered with religious artifacts—statues of saints, busts of Jesus, rosaries. One of his parishioners had given the priest a globe of the world and it sat on his desk; each of the continents had been cut out, painted by hand, and pasted onto it.
The priest had grown up in Parral, Chihuahua, a small town of less than 100,000 famous for the fact that Pancho Villa was assassinated there. Mario Manríquez was the eleventh of twelve children in a close, religious family of modest means. One of his older brothers was severely impaired, having suffered acute oxygen deprivation at birth. That tragedy was part of the day-to-day culture of the Manríquez family, and Father Manríquez described it as formative for him.
The family moved to Juárez after his father lost his job when Mario was very young. Not long thereafter, when Manríquez was fourteen years old, a gang assaulted his cousin as he was leaving a party with his girlfriend, crushing the boy’s skull with stones. Manríquez had grown up with this cousin; they’d attended elementary school together in Parral and were quite close. His murder affected the young Mario profoundly. Four years later, when Mario Manríquez was eighteen, he went to seminary, joining the Order of the Sacred Hearts. Initially he studied philosophy in Mexico City, before going to Mérida and Guadalajara to study theology. At the completion of his seminary studies he returned to Juárez.
Father Manríquez was to be ordained on February 17, 1996. His father was quite ill and he told Mario that he feared he would be unable to make his ordination. Indeed, Mario awoke to the news that his father had died on the morning of the sixteenth. Mario was given his father’s Bible on the day of his ordination and discovered that a priest who was very close to the family had written the following inscription: “May God grant you the opportunity to see your son ordained as a priest.”
Thirteen years later, as we sat in his parish office at the Santa Teresa de Jesús church, Father Manríquez reflected on what was happening to Juárez. “What we’re living is the end of a political, social, and economic epoch,” the priest told me. He believed that the violence in Juárez and Mexico was a symptom of an unraveling society. “We’ve had laws since 1917 [when the Constitution of Mexico was signed, signaling the end of the Mexica
n Revolution] that were made just to be broken time and again,” he averred. For decades the government had distributed resources with an eye toward enriching members of the ruling party and with little regard for the needs of the broader citizenry, he continued. Laws and institutions weren’t transparent. “The corruption starts at the top,” he said. “When you construct an edifice with so many incoherencies, it’s going to collapse.” That was his diagnosis for what was taking place not only in Juárez, but also, in myriad forms, throughout the country.
Like Laurencio Barraza at Organización Popular Independiente, Father Manríquez viewed Los NiNi both as the root of the problem and as victims of a dysfunctional society. “We’ve lived in a crisis for decades now,” he continued. He put out some confirmatory evidence: for every ten families, four fall apart within the first five years, and there is no support for the children, he told me. Fathers frequently abandoned families and mothers were forced to work to support their children. “The typical shift at the maquiladora starts at five thirty and ends at three thirty,” he noted, “but children enter school at eight o’clock and finish at one in the afternoon. The kids are home alone; there’s a high incidence of child abuse in our homes,” he said.
Father Manríquez decried the fact that the country’s educational level had been on a steady decline for decades. Moral values had all but evaporated, the priest argued, rattling off a litany of evidence: “When you tie into the electric grid to circumvent having to pay for electricity; when you pay transit cops a bribe; when the group that oversees reconciliation and mediation of disputes between workers and companies is bribed by the companies so there is no justice for workers; when you open businesses without licenses or security and safety measures because you bribe officials; when students pay teachers for grades; when judges sell themselves; when the Mexican soccer selection uses false birth certificates for its team who are over-age and they are disqualified by FIFA; when Mexican banks charge some of the highest interest rates in the world; when corruption in the legislature is at a high level; and when you have a company like TelMex, owned by Mexico’s richest man, charging some of the highest service fees in the world because of government concessions . . . that’s corruption!” the priest exclaimed. “The list is interminable,” he concluded after a moment’s pause. “Mexico isn’t free. It’s a slave to corruption,” he said. “What we’re living in Mexico is the death of a system that was started in 1917.”
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 23