The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  The forty-five-year-old stepfather of one of the kids who lived directly across the street from the party had exited his house in order to pull his car into his carport just as the sicarios arrived. Rosales had run into the party house trying to save the kids. “When I entered the house his body was on top of the group of dead kids,” Alonso said. “It was as if he had been trying to protect them all with his body.” Although at the onset of the holocaust the sicarios had yelled for all of the girls to leave, a seventeen-year-old named Brenda Escamilla had refused, clutching her boyfriend, in all likelihood knowing what lay in store. They’d shot her, too, and she was in the same pile.

  All of the people in that mound of bodies appeared to be dead. Throughout the house there were spent shell casings. Alonso wailed. He shouted the names of his two other boys into the moans of the wounded and the screams of the neighbors and parents who were entering the house, crossing the lagoon of blood in search of their children or intent on lending assistance. The dead and wounded were strewn throughout the house. There was blood splattered on every wall and there was fear and nausea, an overwhelming scene that would never be digested or absorbed by those who witnessed it.

  Alonso’s youngest son, Oscar, emerged from a back room that was off of the hallway into which the bulk of the dead had been herded and shot. He’d taken refuge in a large closet with a sliding door along with two other kids. The closet had been strafed, and others in the room had been wounded, but, miraculously, the three in the closet emerged unscathed. Alonso’s eldest son, his namesake, was nowhere to be found. Alonso allowed himself to entertain the idea that perhaps he’d been spared, but the thought was also present that perhaps he’d just missed him among the contorted bodies, some of whose features the bullets had torn beyond recognition. Then again, maybe the sicarios had taken him for some reason. In Alonso’s desperation his mind was a jumble of thoughts and fears.

  Down on the next block, Luz María Dávila heard the noise coming from the party. She would later tell me that she took the reports to be firecrackers. In a city where so many people had died, people’s natural defenses still kicked in: firecrackers. Please, firecrackers, not bullets, she thought to herself. Luz María stepped out onto the street and immediately knew that something terribly wrong was taking place. The sicario convoy had already rounded the corner near her house on its way out of the neighborhood. What Luz María saw as she looked up the street was people running to the house where the party had taken place. The night was full of the shouts and screams of parents and their wounded children. She panicked; both of her sons had attended the party.

  As she ran up the street, someone shouted, “Here they come again!” and she and her husband threw themselves under a parked car. Running up the street again after the false call she encountered the dead in front of the little store and the cruel sight of wounded teenagers, wailing in pain. One girl had the front part of her foot shot off and was screaming in agony. Inside the house she found both of her sons. The older son, nineteen-year-old Marcos, was in the tangle of bodies in the hallway. He was dead. A little farther on she found José Luis, her sixteen-year-old. “He was still breathing,” she recalled. He was critically wounded, having taken a shot to the head.

  By now it was after midnight and despite repeated, frantic phone calls, neither ambulances nor police had responded to the appeals for help. “There were police two minutes away at the Seguro Social [hospital], but no one came,” Alonso said. “Not even the Red Cross.” Many of the families soon concluded that they would have to ferry the wounded to the hospital themselves, otherwise their children would surely bleed to death. Luz María Dávila and her husband went home for the family car, into which they loaded their wounded son along with two of the other wounded before rushing them to the Seguro Social Hospital, only five hundred yards away.

  Alonso tried to help the others out. He heard a neighbor shouting, “Help! Help! He’s still alive!” Alonso went to lend assistance, but it was soon evident that the boy was already dead. Alonso’s impression was that he’d been dead all along; the shouting had been a parent’s desperate wish that his child still had life. Meanwhile, Alonso Jr. was still nowhere to be found.

  In the aftermath, it was difficult to piece a coherent narrative together about what had taken place. There were conflicting reports about how many vehicles were in the sicario caravan, for example. Alonso remembered hearing the sicarios say, when they’d first arrived and erupted into the house, “This isn’t them! It’s a bunch of kids!” But another voice shouted back from among the SUVs, “Fuck it! We’re here!” Once the killing had begun, some of the kids had managed to run out the front door. Seeing how young they were, one of the sicarios guarding the vehicles was heard to say, “Let them go!” There was confusion and perplexity. No one could make sense of it. Why had this happened to their children?

  By the time the ambulances arrived along with the army and municipal and federal police, it had been forty minutes since the guns had gone silent. The authorities were received by a wave of outrage. The entire neighborhood was aroused, furious and incensed. They shouted obscenities and told them they were worthless. They demanded to know why there had been no ambulances to ferry the wounded to hospitals; why they had let their children bleed to death. They asked how it was possible that a convoy of multiple vehicles full of heavily armed sicarios could have made it to Villas de Salvárcar undetected when there were police and army checkpoints on the main boulevards all over the city. They asked every question and they challenged every soldier and policeman, and all the while the collective wailing of bereaved parents and siblings and neighbors formed a mournful backdrop to the angry interrogatories. “We said to them, ‘We hope something like this never happens to you, that they never kill one of your children because you have no idea what that’s like, the impotence you feel, the pain, the rage that we feel,’” El Diario quoted one of the parents saying to the officers who’d arrived to secure the area.

  Mayor José Reyes Ferriz was at home when the first calls came in about what was taking place at Villas de Salvárcar. “It was around midnight and there was a great deal of confusion and misinformation,” he recalled. He was initially told that it was a quinceañera party. Over the course of the early morning hours he received at least a dozen calls from his police chief and other city officials keeping him apprised of the emerging picture of what had taken place. He issued instructions for the hospitals to receive the wounded (the Seguro Social Hospital, for example, was only supposed to treat patients covered under their auspices) and sent the administrator in charge of city purchases and expenditures to authorize coverage of all medical services for the victims. “The city’s response was terribly inadequate,” Reyes Ferriz later told me. Despite repeated, desperate calls to the city’s emergency response number, no help had come during the critical period in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, a time frame that might have made a difference. It was unconscionable. “It is possible that lives could have been saved,” Reyes Ferriz said of the failure of the city’s emergency response services.

  By Sunday morning the gun smoke had been swept away by the winter winds that continued to blow steady and cold, and the harsh odor of gunpowder had all but evaporated. Only the stench of death and blood remained inside the house at 1310 Villa del Portal Street. There was blood on the sidewalk and in the street; by now hundreds of footsteps had tracked the victims’ blood everywhere—the desperate coming and going of parents, family, and neighbors as they rushed in and out of the house looking for their loved ones, attempting to render aid. That had been followed by the arrival of local and state police, as well as the federal police and the army, and finally the media, who were allowed into the house to document the grotesque scene. All had tracked the victims’ blood through the house and into the street.

  A young man named Julián Contreras, who lived two blocks away and knew many of the Villa del Portal families, walked through the neighborhood that Sunday morning and wrote down the thin
gs he heard. They were fragmentary, some from neighbors, others from parents, still others from the kids who’d been inside the house at 1310: “They didn’t shoot to kill the girls, they shot at their arms and legs. The guys they shot in the head and chest and the bigger guys they shot repeatedly in the head until they were disfigured”; “One hid behind the television”; “We were awakened by the sound of gunfire”; “This was the happiest street in the neighborhood”; “They won’t do anything, it’s always the same. They’d already killed my nephew and nothing is ever investigated”; “They killed almost all of my friends”; “Did they kill one of yours, too?” Contreras had documented the voices of a traumatized community.

  . . .

  A strange, haunting silence fell over Villa del Portal, where a heavy military and law enforcement presence sealed the street. For hours after the massacre there was no official comment about what had taken place; local, state, and federal authorities were mute. Those whose loved ones had been taken to local hospitals and clinics, some fourteen in all, kept a lonely vigil, praying that their children would not succumb to their wounds. On Villa del Portal the municipal and state police, as well as the federal police and the army units sent to secure the area, were accused of being cold and indifferent to the families whose lives had been destroyed by the tragedy, treating them as just so many more victims of the city’s violence. The meaning of the massacre had yet to fully take shape, but already it was becoming clear that what had taken place at Villas de Salvárcar rested on a different plane of experience, something so outrageous that it would soon shake the conscience of the entire nation, stirring indignation even in the most hardened of hearts.

  When the mayor’s team arrived at Villas de Salvárcar and at the hospitals where the wounded had been taken, they reported back to Reyes Ferriz that they’d met the families of the victims and their impression was that most of the dead, if not all, were innocent victims. For this reason, Reyes Ferriz was one of the only public officials who resisted raising the specter that at least some of the kids were gang members. The next day the mayor went to the Emergency Response Center to find out what had gone wrong, and he ran into Patricia González, the state attorney general. The two had an exchange in which González warned the mayor against saying that the victims were good kids because, she said, the state police had proof that they had weapons “and other things” that suggested otherwise.

  González called a press conference in Juárez that afternoon. Mayor Reyes Ferriz and the new head of the state police (notwithstanding the massacre, Victor Valencia had resigned his post that same morning, announcing his candidacy for mayor of Juárez1) joined her. The head of the federal police in Juárez was also there, along with the representative of the PGR (the federal attorney general’s office), and a representative of the army. The fact that all of the principals with some responsibility for bringing law and order to the city had been mustered was itself telling. González told the press that, at present, the information was that fourteen people had died on Villa del Portal Street; the wounded, she said, were recovering at various hospitals and clinics, all of which were under the protection of federal forces. González assured the media that the culprits would be tracked down, and that they were already pursuing several lines of investigation regarding what had taken place and why, although the only motive that she mentioned was that perhaps one of the murdered adults had been the target of the sicarios. When questioned by the press as to how the convoy had made it to and from the scene of the massacre undetected, the commander of federal forces in Juárez grew defensive, arguing that the sicarios no doubt had lookouts that were shadowing the federal forces in the area, including identifying the locations of the federal roadblocks.

  Mayor Reyes Ferriz announced a million-peso reward for information leading to the arrest of the authors of the massacre at Villas de Salvárcar. He announced that the city’s new Crime Stoppers program was taking anonymous tips, and he also said that the city and state governments would cover the funeral costs for the Villas de Salvárcar victims.

  The final toll at Villas de Salvárcar would come to fifteen dead (eleven students and four adults), and as many seriously wounded. Ten died that night on Villa del Portal Street, and five others died at the hospital or in transit in the impromptu caravans of vehicles that had ferried the wounded. Luz María Dávila and her husband lost two sons in the massacre, their only children. Alonso Encina was more fortunate. In addition to Oscar, who’d managed to hide in the closet, his oldest son, Alonso Jr., had also survived, having left the party to walk his girlfriend home just moments before the commando unit arrived.

  . . .

  In Mexico it is common for families to bring the dead home to mourn them at a wake the night before they are interred. In Villas de Salvárcar, families readied their homes to receive the coffins of their loved ones on Tuesday morning, but it wasn’t until early evening that vehicles from several funeral homes arrived bearing the six coffins of the students from that block who had been killed in the massacre. It had been raining all day, the steady drizzle reflecting the mood of the city. In addition to Adrián Encina and Marcos and José Luis Piña Dávila, the other boys were Jesús Armando Segovia, José Aguilar, and Horacio Alberto Soto. All had grown up together on this modest street and all had been friends.

  Not long after the coffins had been set up in the modest living rooms, surrounded by candles, flowers, and framed pictures of the deceased, Governor Reyes Baeza arrived to pay his condolences to the families. The strain between the governor and the mayor was such that by now the governor was not even giving the mayor the customary courtesy of letting him know when he was in the city. The governor arrived in a white armored Suburban, protected by a half-dozen heavily armed bodyguards, who secured each of the victim’s homes before the governor entered. He was accompanied by Mara Galindo, in charge of victim’s services for the state of Chihuahua, a woman whose reputation had been marred by her mismanagement of her responsibilities during Juárez’s infamous femicides in the 1990s.

  The governor and his entourage started at the home of Adrián Encina before making their way down the street to the three homes on the same block where family and friends were mourning the other young men. His reception was tepid at best; the families greeted him politely, enduring the intrusion into their bereavement and allowing him to offer his condolences before he moved on, leaving them once again to their sorrow. But in the street there was obvious anger. The collective rage over the massacre had yet to dissipate, and there were many people out, given that all of the homes had visitors. The charged atmosphere was amplified because of the governor’s presence and the fact that every time he entered a home, his bodyguards seized control of the entryways and did not allow anyone to enter or leave until the governor exited and made his way to the next house.

  The last stop for the governor on Villa del Portal Street was the home of Luz María Dávila, a half-block away. It was still raining; the street and sidewalk were full of puddles. Whether for that reason or for reasons of security, the governor chose to get back into his Suburban and drive rather than walk the thirty or so yards to the Dávila house. The gesture elicited derisive taunts from the people assembled on the street. “Why don’t you get your shoes dirty, governor!” some shouted with obvious contempt.

  When Reyes Baeza exited his Suburban at the Dávila house he was met with a chorus of similar taunts: “Get out of the car and give us answers, don’t be cowards!” and “What we want is justice! You have no shame!” At the entry to the small house there were at least ten placards on poster board expressing outrage and demanding security, answers, and solutions, although by now the rain-smudged ink had rendered some illegible.

  Inside, Luz María Dávila and her husband were standing in the living room next to the coffins in which their sons, Marcos and José Luis, lay. The boys’ school friends and family surrounded them in the cramped, almost unadorned living room, and for the governor it proved to be another tense encounter. Luz Mar
ía openly chastised him for what she termed the authorities’ incapacity and disinterest in solving the crime. She threatened that if progress was not made on the case, she would seek the intervention of American law enforcement, as if this were the ultimate embarrassment for the Mexican authorities. “Because of all that is happening here, I no longer have my children. It may be best for me to seek the assistance of the United States to help us because here I see nothing at all,” she said. She was tearful, but she was clear and unequivocal. In a country where power at the top is absolute, it takes unimaginable courage for a working-class citizen to speak so unflinchingly to that power. In her suffering and loss, Luz María had found a powerful voice, a voice that would soon touch the soul of a nation. The governor had no choice but to listen quietly as he was dressed down by this bereaved mother, against the backdrop of shouts emanating from the street as neighbors and visitors who’d been barred entry by the governor’s bodyguards loudly voiced their indignation and demanded that the state deliver justice. Unlike the ink on the poster boards, their voices were not the least bit dimmed by the rain.

  Blessing a Villas de Salvárcar victim. Photo copyright © Raymundo Ruiz.

  The governor finally exited the Dávila home and boarded his snow-white Suburban, leaving the families to themselves in their living rooms, where votive candles were lit by the score and rosaries chanted throughout the night. The rain continued to fall upon the poor neighborhood of Villas de Salvárcar, as if the gods themselves were acknowledging the sorrow of what had taken place there.

  The next day, there were funeral masses at different churches. Most of the families went to the Iglesia Jesucristo, Sol de Justicia, where Juárez’s Catholic vicar, René Blanco, gave a mass assisted by fifteen of his fellow priests. The entire city was in mourning. Later, at the CBTIS-128 high school, full honors were given to Juan Carlos Medrano and Rodrigo Cadena, who had been star players on Los Jaguares, the school’s American football team. Brenda Escamilla, the seventeen-year-old ecology student who’d refused to leave Rodrigo Cadena’s side when the sicarios had ordered the women to leave the house, was also honored. All three had come to the party from other parts of the city, and this was to have been their last semester before graduating from high school.