The students’ caskets were rolled through the school for the last time. Their teammates, in uniform, formed two lines at the entrance, receiving the victims’ friends and family members. The football coach gave a tender soliloquy, after which he announced that the two players’ jerseys, numbers 12 and 62, were being retired. The coach gave the corresponding jersey and a football to each of the families, as the parents stared vacantly at the caskets containing their beloved children. There was a minute of applause, as is customary in Mexico, a ritual meant to honor the lives that had been extinguished in the senselessness that had taken place at Villas de Salvárcar; the applause was intense and full of emotion. It was followed by a minute of silence, after which the students and families again broke into porras (school cheers).
In the afternoon, a silent funeral cortege, guarded by army and police units, left the rain-drenched city and headed out of town. The long trail of cars moved at a slow, mournful pace, traveling the thirty kilometers along the Pan-American Highway until reaching the San Rafael cemetery. There, eight of the student victims were to be buried alongside one another. A bitter wind blew over the flat, wide-open desert terrain, and, as it had all day, the rain fell in a steady downpour, leaving the assembled mourners drenched and cold. The names of the dead were read, then the classmates of the fallen chanted school cheers, followed by applause and, again, a moment of silence in which the only sound was the cruel, gripping wind sweeping across the cemetery. The gravesites were festooned with white balloons. Jesús Armando Segovia, a fifteen-year-old junior high school student, was the first to be lowered into the ground, followed by the rest. The families had pitched in to hire a conjunto norteño, which sang sorrowful songs like “You’re Leaving, My Angel” and “Eternal Love.” In the end there was nothing left to do but to trudge back through the puddles and thick mud to parked cars for the long ride home and the lonely silence that would forever wrap itself around the mourners’ lives as they continued to endure the day-to-day horror that defined life in Juárez.
. . .
A cloud of bewilderment hung over the city in the ensuing days. Why? Why had these children been massacred? They were good kids: they were in school; they were athletes. And the party across the street had been clean. A few of the kids were from other colonias, but most of them (they ranged between fifteen and twenty years of age) were from the neighborhood, if not Villa del Portal Street itself. All around the neighborhood families had waited for their children to walk back home after the party that night. The tragic irony was that many of these parents did not allow their children to go into town to the nightclubs for fear of violence.
Immediately, a variety of hypotheses emerged. One parent told El Diario that he thought one of the kids attending the party was a cocaine user, spurring the theory that the sicarios had come after him. Various witnesses told reporters that on two occasions they had heard one of the sicarios say, “We’ve been looking for you.” Another theory was that Brenda Escamilla had witnessed the assassination of four high school students in November and the sicarios had tracked her down to prevent her from testifying against them. But these explanations seemed untenable. It was unlikely that one of the cartels would mount a multi-vehicle operation involving two dozen sicarios to kill a witness or a supposed drug user. People were executed with much greater efficiency in the streets of Juárez every day. Those kinds of hits hardly required more than one or two sicarios to effect.
. . .
Two days after the Villas de Salvárcar murders, José Dolores Arroyo and Adrián Rodríguez (who went by the nickname “El Rama”) were driving down Popocatepetl Street in a grey 2002 Grand Am that had been stolen in El Paso some months prior. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Rodríguez was the head of one of the Juárez cartel’s sicario cells, and the two were on the trail of a man named Daniel Elías Vicencio, who was traveling with his girlfriend in a Ford Explorer just ahead of them. Vicencio was a member of a gang affiliated with the Sinaloa cartel, and Rodríguez and Arroyo were about to execute him. Vicencio had been a member of Los Aztecas until his release from the Juárez city prison, at which time he’d jumped ship and joined the Artistas Asesinos, or the Double A’s, as they were sometimes called.
Just as the two vehicles reached the intersection of Popocatepetl and Manuel J. Clouthier streets, the Grand Am pulled up alongside the Explorer and Rodríguez began firing his pistol into the Explorer. Fortunately for Vicencio and his girlfriend, the two vehicles encountered a military convoy at almost the same moment. The soldiers attempted to intervene, and a brief but intense firefight broke out lasting several minutes. When Rodríguez tried to flee on foot he was shot in the back, perishing at the scene. Next to Rodríguez’s body the soldiers found a Nextel phone, a cell phone, and an FN Five-Seven “cop killer” pistol (so named because its bullets can pierce bulletproof vests). Arroyo was apprehended, along with Vicencio and his girlfriend, both of whom were wounded.
A black Nokia cell phone was also found in the Grand Am, and it turned out that it had belonged to one of the kids who had been shot at Villas de Salvárcar. It was the first break in the case for the Mexican authorities, and it made José Dolores Arroyo the subject of intense “questioning” to ferret out what he knew about the massacre.
It turned out he knew quite a bit. Arroyo soon gave army intelligence and officers of the federal attorney general’s office an account of what had transpired on the night of the Villas de Salvárcar murders. It had begun, he said, when José Antonio Acosta Hernández, a former state ministerial police officer who ran the Juárez plaza on behalf of the Juárez cartel, had received a phone tip from one of his chavos who lived in Villas de Salvárcar alerting him that there was going to be an Artistas Asesinos party on Villa del Portal Street. Because of their alliance with the Sinaloa cartel, the Artistas Asesinos gang was the nemesis of the Juárez cartel and their gang affiliate, Los Aztecas. Los Aztecas and the Artistas Asesinos had now been at war in the streets of Juárez for two full years. El Diego, as Antonio Acosta Hernández was nicknamed (he also went by El 1022), put in a call to El 51, the man who coordinated the cartel’s sicario cells, ordering him to gather a cell to wipe out the “AAs” or the “Double A’s” (all nicknames for the Artistas Asesinos) at the party.
El Diego also called José Dolores Arroyo on the night of January 30 and instructed him to go to a shoeshine shop located outside the Plaza Juárez mall to await further instructions. When Arroyo arrived, he found his boss, El Rama, and ten other sicarios. They were told that they were going to go “do” some Double A’s that were attending a party in Villas de Salvárcar. Arroyo was sent to drive through the neighborhood and “comb” it: do preliminary reconnaissance to verify the party’s location and make sure it was taking place. Upon Arroyo’s return to the rendezvous location, El Rama called El 51 to bring a second team to bolster the force. According to Arroyo, the convoy that set out for Villas de Salvárcar consisted of two sicario cells riding in four vehicles, each with six sicarios aboard. Their instructions were to kill everyone at the party. Arroyo claimed that his role within the cell run by El Rama was as a “hawk,” or lookout, and that he was posted at the Little Wings restaurant in the nearby Plaza Las Torres, not far from the rendezvous point, to alert the team in the event that army or other law enforcement neared the operativo. Following the massacre, the group had dispersed, he said.
According to Arroyo, he’d had no further word until two days later, when El Rama had contacted him on Monday to participate in the execution of Vicencio. Arroyo told the authorities that he received two thousand pesos a week (less than two hundred dollars) for his services within the sicario cell. He was also given a cell phone and the stolen 2002 Grand Am he’d been driving prior to the shootout with the soldiers on Popocatepetl Street.
Perhaps the neighborhood gangbanger who was affiliated with El Diego, the one who tipped him off that the Artistas Asesinos were having a party on Villa del Portal, had simply misunderstood. Or perhaps he was angry at not h
aving been invited to the party. We may never know. El Diego’s Villas de Salvárcar chavo has never been identified.3 And, given the heat that he created for the Juárez cartel, he may no longer be alive. But what is clear is that the Double A’s who gathered at the Villa del Portal party were members of a high school football team, not a Juárez drug gang. They played in the city’s AA league. José Dolores Arroyo’s stunning revelations appeared to point to a grotesque and tragic misapprehension, one that had left the street at Villas de Salvárcar stained with the blood of the innocent. And left the howls of agony and mourning permanently seared into the memory of a nation.
. . .
As if to say that the frenzy of violence had momentarily rendered them exhausted and inert, on Wednesday, February 3, there were no executions in Juárez. Spent by their own savagery and the steady, relentless flow of blood with which they’d stained the lives of everyone who lived in that desert city, the demons took a day to catch their breath.
Notes
1. Valencia’s resignation in the midst of such a crisis drew national opprobrium, further hobbling his political aspirations.
2. Cartel members and their gang affiliates often used numbers to identify themselves. This made it more difficult for law enforcement to know who they were and thus helped protect their operations in the event of arrests.
3. El Diego, on the other hand, was arrested by the federal police in Chihuahua City on July 29, 2011, along with his bodyguard.
CHAPTER 24
All the President’s Men
The evil that had taken place at Villas de Salvárcar shook a city that had grown increasingly numb to the varieties of death and cruelty to which the cartels routinely subjected it. The teenagers had been slaughtered attending a private party in their own neighborhood while their parents waited nearby for their children to return home.
President Felipe Calderón had just left the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and arrived in Japan for a state visit when the news broke about the massacre. Ironically, he’d spent the day promoting Mexico’s maquiladora industry, trying to sell Japanese manufacturers on the notion that it was cheaper for them to build appliances bound for U.S. markets in a Mexican border city than it was to build them in China and ship them across the Pacific Ocean.
At an impromptu press conference, the Mexican president deplored the murders in Juárez and suggested that “the most probable hypothesis” was that the executions were related to an inter-gang rivalry, adding that some of the victims may have had “links” to the cartels’ gangs. Calderón further decried the enduring “grave problem of insecurity” in Juárez, saying that it was a function of the deterioration of institutions and the presence of organized crime, which had expanded “under the protection of many years of impunity and corruption.”
At the same press conference, Calderón also announced what he said was a policy change: his administration was poised to launch a new security strategy in Juárez, because the problems the city faced were beyond what police actions alone could address. “It is a complex problem,” the president said in relation to the violence. “And it isn’t solely a criminal problem, it’s a social problem requiring a broader and more integrated strategy. In the next few days my government will provide ample details of that strategy, which I believe must be deployed to support the authorities.” The president concluded his remarks by expressing his condolences to the families of the victims and wishing a speedy recovery to those who were still hospitalized, in addition to reiterating the readiness of his government to support state and local authorities in the investigation and clarification of what had taken place at Villas de Salvárcar.
Felipe Calderón was not alone in assuming a possible linkage between the massacre and the cartel gangs. The killing of “civilians” was relatively rare in cartel violence, the majority of which was score-settling between criminal groups. Most innocent victims tended to be people who, say, happened to be at a bar when sicarios arrived to take out a target and were killed in the cross fire. A number of innocent people (no one could say with certainty how many) had been executed for not paying the cuota when extorted by the gangs. But even the killings at the rehabilitation centers had turned out to be gang-related, though there were plenty of innocents among the victims. And the teenagers who’d been killed at Villas de Salvárcar fit the profile (adolescents and young adults from poor, working-class neighborhoods) of many of the drug war–related executions. At first glance it was easy to assume that at least some of the victims had links to the cartels and their gangs. To assume otherwise was to venture outside of the paradigm that had become all too familiar, almost axiomatic.
Many of the first pronouncements shared the president’s initial formulations. For example, the governor, Reyes Baeza, volunteered that “practically” all of the students were clean kids, leaving room for the possibility of gang involvement. The governor also told the press that the lines of investigation were indicating that “the sicarios were after specific people” who were at the scene where, unfortunately, “there also were good students and athletes.”
But it was Patricia González, the state attorney general, who several days after the massacre offered the most extensive description at the time of what was believed to have taken place at Villas de Salvárcar, and her explanation, too, emphasized inter-gang conflicts. González noted that the authorities had a man in custody (José Dolores Arroyo) who was providing key information. She indicated that “a criminal group” was attempting to penetrate the Villas de Salvárcar neighborhood and that one of the gangs had attacked because it believed that there were members of the Double A’s gang in the house where the party was taking place. Those individuals, she went on, were actually next door, and they were executed that night as well, she said. In other words, the state attorney general underscored the notion that the violence was directly linked to the gangs. González noted that often the sicarios were drug-addled when they conducted their operations, which might have contributed to the tragic confusion that night, especially if one of the Double A’s gang members had sought refuge in the party house, as they believed to be the case. González concluded by noting that the gang problems in the city’s colonias had increased tremendously due to the dispute between “the organized crime groups.” For some reason she was still reluctant to identify either the Sinaloa or the Juárez cartels by name, even though everyone knew that she was referencing them. Nor did she mention Los Aztecas, the gang running the Juárez cartel’s retail drug operations, though it was obvious that they had been the gang hunting down the Double A’s.
Similarly, the Chihuahua State Ministerial Police told the media that one of their primary lines of investigation was that the massacre was gang-related, given that “on two occasions the killers, in different houses, had said ‘We’ve been looking for you,’” leading them to conclude that two people were the actual targets of the sicarios that night. The second line of investigation revolved around the November 2009 execution of four young men (the execution that Brenda Escamilla, one of the Villas de Salvárcar victims, had witnessed), two of whom lived in the Villas de Salvárcar neighborhood. The state police said that they were investigating the relationship between the two neighborhood kids who’d been executed in November and the current victims of the massacre in order to “clarify the activities of all involved.”
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre it was easy to impugn, even if obliquely (“practically all of them were good kids”), the teenagers who had been at the party. It not only seemed plausible, it was easy, almost reflexive. But all indications were that such inferences were wrong; everything pointed to the idea that in Juárez there were still good, innocent kids, probably more than the steady drone of raw, brutalizing crime stories would permit most to entertain.
While a number of people, including the governor of Chihuahua and the state attorney general, had already floated similar ideas in their public comments, the president’s statement seemed to galvanize the fami
lies of the victims, who immediately protested the defamation of their children. In a city with some of the highest dropout rates in the country, the Villas de Salvárcar parents reminded anyone who would listen that their children had been in school. Alonso Encina took out the Governor’s Excellence List award that his son Adrián had won for two consecutive years, and the coach of Los Jaguares praised the players who’d been assassinated as spirited and disciplined athletes. Luz María Dávila talked about the fact that her eldest son, Marcos, was enrolled at the university while also working at the maquiladora where she and her husband were employed. They wanted the world to know that theirs were good, hardworking kids, not a bunch of neighborhood cholos bent on intimidating others when not otherwise occupied committing crime.
José Reyes Ferriz attempted to defend or at least justify Calderón’s remarks. He noted that the president had only suggested that the possible links between a cartel gang or gangs and the massacred adolescents was “a line of investigation.” The mayor added that one of the victim’s cell phones had contained an image of himself with an assault weapon, ammunition, and chargers. “Of the fifteen victims it’s possible that one of them had ties [to a narco-gang],” the mayor said, noting that such a finding would not negate the fact that “the rest of the people attending the party were good, innocent kids.” It was evident that the mayor was working hard to defuse the criticism of the president. “The world is aware of the fact that in Juárez there were powerful gangs like Los Aztecas, Los Mexicles, and Los Artistas Asesinos that are at war with one another,” Reyes Ferriz continued. This was the reality to which the president was referring, the mayor said.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 28