. . .
The fact that their nation’s president had implied that their children had links to the drug cartels filled the Villas de Salvárcar families with rage. That indignation quickly spread beyond the boundary of the little working-class neighborhood surrounded by maquiladoras and into the city. Soon that same indignation was reverberating loudly throughout the country. In addition to being a deeply tragic incident, the execution of so many innocent became a collective metaphor for a national experience. It was emblematic of the many good, hardworking citizens whose lives were being eviscerated by the ongoing violence, and it highlighted the inability of the government to protect its citizens, who felt vulnerable and exposed, whether they lived in poor colonias like Villas de Salvárcar, in middle-class enclaves, or in upscale neighborhoods like Campestre. Many Mexicans felt that there was nowhere to hide and nowhere to turn; such was the brutal reality of life in significant parts of modern Mexico. The massacre on Villa del Portal Street captured that reality all too thoroughly and it struck a nerve. People had had enough.
The massacre became an instant symbol for all that had gone awry in Mexico’s drug war. A pent-up cry of fury and rage erupted all over the nation. It was called the drop that brought on the flood, the tipping point. Everywhere, the rage was deep, the frustration profound, and the helplessness pervasive. The deployment of the federal police and the Mexican Army over the course of the last two years had proven useless in containing or inhibiting the violence of the cartels and their gangs. Nothing seemed to turn the tide against the horror that had become daily fare all over Mexico, even in the many communities where violence was not elevated. The steady, unrelenting coverage documenting the violence, often accented by acts of unspeakable cruelty, was pouring into the living rooms of homes all over the country, and there was an inevitable feeling of gloom and futility in the face of it that drained the spirit.
For these reasons, the president’s gaffe mobilized an avalanche of criticism, and almost immediately that criticism went beyond the specific tragedy of Villas de Salvárcar. Critics roundly challenged Calderón’s vision in the war against the cartels. By the time of the massacre, nearly thirty thousand Mexicans had died in cartel-related violence since Calderón had taken office. While Calderón’s strategy had succeeded in disrupting the cartels’ ability to operate, it had also left corpses all over the county. Many executions were taking place in the streets and often in broad daylight—in shopping malls and grocery stores, in front of schools, at movie theaters. In other words, all too often the violence was knitted into the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens. Drug war or no, the most important metric for the Mexican nation was the security of their families, and by this measure the government’s policies had fallen far short of their mark.
All over the country, the president was taken to task in the aftermath of Villas de Salvárcar. Joaquín López Dóriga, a respected and well-known television news anchor, labeled the war the president’s “failed diagnosis.” “They took a gamble and we’re the ones who lost,” he editorialized, referring to the federal government’s strategy in Juárez. In particular, the anchorman derided the president’s decision to make Juárez “the benchmark” for the fight against organized crime. Of the resources mobilized by the Mexican government, almost a quarter of the total troops and federal police had been deployed to Juárez, yet the violence continued unabated. There was little to show for the massive effort, he said. Calderón had failed to grasp the depth and dimensions of the problem, López Dóriga argued. Similarly, the influential Mexico City newspaper El Universal said that the Villas de Salvárcar massacre made clear that Calderón’s war was “an utter failure.” The criticism of President Calderón and his strategy against the cartels was as severe as it was widespread. Some were calling Calderón’s move against the cartels Mexico’s Vietnam, alluding to the quagmire that cost tens of thousands of American lives and depleted the national treasury, but ended in failure and inconclusiveness.
A group of civic and business leaders took it upon themselves to travel to Mexico City to bring attention to the reality that Juárez’s citizens were living. They hosted a press conference at the tony Hotel Nikko in Polanco, where María Soledad Maynez, the president of the Juárez Maquiladora Association, demanded that the president address the crisis in Juárez. “With respect to repairing the social fabric, it’s going to take us a generation because we’ve got approximately ten thousand children who’ve been either victims or victimizers; we have more than ten thousand children who have been abandoned or orphaned because of the number of deaths,” she said. The president of the board of directors of the Central de Abastos, the city-run wholesale food market, charged that “the [local, state, and federal] governments have not lived up to their obligations.” Eduardo Güereque, the Citizens Watch representative in Juárez, told the national and international press that sixty thousand families had abandoned the city because of the violence. He also chastised the president, saying he’d only been in Juárez on two occasions since becoming the nation’s chief executive, and that during those visits he’d only met with the city’s business leaders for a total of ninety minutes. The group called for President Calderón to come to Juárez immediately to address the crisis in person.
The pervasive violence conjured images of a lawless wasteland and invoked the one notion that the Mexican government found most irksome: the idea that Mexico, or portions of it, was, in essence, a failed state. Juárez’s El Diario editorialized: “[The violence] is the reason for the debate over ‘failed state’ in the pages of the nation’s newspapers and on the internet,” it read, citing the absence of safety as the most telling evidence of such state failure. “If we don’t have a failed state, then show us; guarantee what Mexicans minimally need: our lives,” El Diario said.
Even members of Calderón’s own party had grown restive. Given the extent to which local, state, and federal governments were overwhelmed by the violence, the state president of the PAN, Cruz Pérez Cuéllar, declared that Chihuahua was a “failed state” and appealed for foreign intervention because of the inability of Operación Conjunto Chihuahua and its most recent iteration, Operación Coordinada Chihuahua, to quell the violence. A coalition of civic, business, and academic groups also called for the United Nations to intervene in Juárez. Such calls, in a country long known for having a strong nationalist tradition, reflected the measure of desperation that many felt. “Juárez is a city without life,” Cuéllar said. “People live in terror.” He called for the “blue helmets,” as United Nations forces were referred to in Mexico, to be brought in to establish peace.
The political opposition parties attempted to shift the terms of the debate, arguing that it was the federal government, rather than the cartels, that was the source of the violence. Federal deputies of the PRI demanded that the president remove federal forces from Juárez given the “obvious failures” of his strategy. The left accused the president of fomenting the violence rather than fighting it. Víctor Quintana, a federal deputy from Juárez for the PRD, called for the withdrawal of all federal forces from the state of Chihuahua.
While the president was the focal point of much of the national criticism, he was not the only target. El Financiero of Mexico City singled out the governor of Chihuahua for special criticism, describing him as “a man without shame” for allowing Juárez to unravel as it had and accusing him of doing virtually nothing to help the city in the face of its profound crisis. The article cited the fact that ten thousand businesses had closed in a city where nearly 30 percent of the nation’s executions had taken place, provoking the exodus of tens of thousands of persons. “He’s blamed the federal government,” the article said. “But he’s done nothing to plug the dike to slow the growth of the gangs associated with the cartels.” Reyes Baeza was accused of standing by blithely as the most important city in his state became the most beleaguered city in the nation.
Local and national media took everyone responsible for the safety of the nati
on’s citizens to task, and in some quarters there were calls for President Calderón to resign, along with Governor Reyes Baeza and Mayor Reyes Ferriz. The dimensions of the anger within Juárez were reflected in cold numbers in a survey conducted by El Diario: 80 percent of the people surveyed were unhappy about the president’s remarks and 90 percent blamed all three levels of government (municipal, state, and federal) for the crisis of insecurity. An overwhelming number, almost 85 percent, stated that the violence had had a significant impact on their lives. The findings spoke to the depth of despair that had come to pervade a once-proud city known for its grit.
. . .
One of those calling for the president to resign was Julián Contreras, the resident of Villas de Salvárcar who’d captured the spontaneous, traumatized comments in the neighborhood following the massacre. Contreras wrote a letter to the editor of El Norte several days after the massacre in which he introduced himself as living two blocks from the site where “a death squad” had massacred “almost twenty adolescents.” (The death toll from the massacre had come to fifteen, five of whom were adults.) In addition to Calderón, Contreras also demanded the resignations of Governor Reyes Baeza and of Mayor Reyes Ferriz. “As long as these fascists continue being in charge of the government [perpetuating] the lie of its ‘war against the narco-traffickers,’ the lives of all Juarenses will continue to be in danger,” he said. “It’s not the narco-empresarios or the corrupt politicians who die, the only ones who die here are the poor,” Contreras wrote. The next day, in Juárez’s El Mexicano, Contreras was even more pointed in his accusations. Describing himself as the Juárez representative of a group calling itself the National Front Against Repression (or, by its Spanish acronym, FNCR), Contreras placed responsibility for the massacre not on the cartels and their narco-gangs but rather on what he described as a “paramilitary commando.” “The massacres in Ciudad Juárez are actions undertaken by death squads that are operating in the city,” Contreras alleged. Contreras said that the death squads were related to Calderón’s militarization of the country and that their aim was to intimidate the population and restrict people’s rights; he likened the work of the death squads to what had taken place in places like El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. He singled out the Zetas as an example. Rather than portraying them as renegade defectors from the military who’d been recruited to work as the armed wing of the Gulf cartel (the conventional understanding of the group’s origins), he claimed that the Zetas were actually a group still operating within the military, working simultaneously within and outside of it in collusion with local and federal police. Contreras argued that the death squads in Juárez were operating under the protection of the military.
A coalition of leftist trade union groups, human rights groups, and intellectuals, the FNCR had been active during the Mexican government’s Dirty War against leftist guerrillas in the 1970s but had dissolved after a decade of activism until October 2007, when the war against the cartels and the violence breaking out around the country had bred new life into the group. It now claimed a membership of over one hundred organizations. The FNCR accused the government of fascism and was especially critical of the military, accusing it of widespread human rights abuses, including torture and disappearances. The group mocked Calderón’s assertion that the cartels and their violence and corruption were a “cancer” plaguing the nation, arguing instead that Mexico’s problem was that under Calderón’s rule the country was drifting toward a militarized fascism; indeed, they argued that the country was facing a “new phase of the Dirty War.” In this analysis, the violence was not cartel-driven at all; rather, it was an instrument of the government, a device to intimidate and control the population. Along similar lines, a sister group calling itself the Juárez Citizen’s Assembly, which Contreras also represented, argued that what Juárez was living had nothing to do with a fight between drug cartels or rival drug gangs. Juárez was living “state terrorism,” and the federal government was covering up paramilitary groups and sending death squads to the border city.
The far-left seemed unable to engage the violence outside of the rubrics that were left over from the 1960s and 1970s. There was no place within those frameworks for understanding a relatively new, third force, one that was neither the government nor a guerrilla/worker resistance movement but rather a force fueled by the requirements of narco-capitalism, which, even if driven by similar commercial instincts, was nonetheless an altogether different creature. Narco-capitalism was not run by the traditional Mexican elites (despite its influence and control over individuals both within and outside of local, state, and federal government). If in the 1980s the cartels had had to answer to state and federal law enforcement, there had now been an inversion of the power structure: today the cartels called the shots in many of the areas they controlled. But there was a populist patina to the narco-world given the humble origins of all of the important cartel players and given the emergence of a narco-culture that romanticized their exploits and celebrated them in the ever-present narcocorridos and telenovelas. That populism shifted the terrain for a political left long accustomed to an adversary defined as the nation’s elites and long accustomed to viewing itself as a movement that defended the downtrodden. The cartel leadership and its cadres were mostly uneducated individuals from poor communities. And the cartels and their gangs were terrorizing poor communities through their violence and extortions. This was an awkward fact for the left when it came to framing adversaries. NAFTA and globalization were easy to fold into the traditional analysis given obvious facts, such as poor wages and an absence of even basic services in countless neglected communities. But the war against the cartels was not a new edition of Mexico’s infamous Dirty War, notwithstanding the abuses of the military and other law enforcement agencies. It was a monster the likes of which Mexico had never known.
. . .
The pressure on Felipe Calderón was enormous given the national reaction following the tragedy at Villas de Salvárcar. There was a clamor for a change, for a pause that might usher in fresh deliberation. The circumstance demanded something beyond apologies delivered from Mexico City, no matter how sincere and heartfelt. The national debate was pushing the administration, forcing federal officials to break with their habits of mind. Even the PAN’s state leader, Cruz Pérez Cuéllar, called in an open letter to the president for Calderón to concede that his policies had failed in Juárez. Reeling off statistics on the number of dead, he advised that the president come to Juárez “in humility.” If he did so, Cuéllar assured, the president could count on the support of the good people of the city.
Immediately upon his return from Japan and at every subsequent opportunity, Felipe Calderón began signaling a change in course in relation to his government’s Juárez strategy. From the state of Aguascalientes, where he was inaugurating a new technical institute, he announced that his government would take the necessary steps to restore peace and tranquility to the city. He again expressed his deep condolences to the families whose children had been massacred and underscored as often as he could that it had become clear that they were good, decent kids. Calderón expressed his “solidarity” with the parents, siblings, and family members of the fallen. This tragedy, he said, had “not only wounded and hurt the nation, it had also aroused its indignation.” Calderón indicated that an announcement was imminent regarding “a new strategy” for Juárez that would involve its citizens. “We are all required to renew our commitment to Juárez,” the president declared. The new strategy would encompass new educational opportunities and areas such as employment, recreation, and community life, as well as prevention and treatment of addictions. In other words, it promised to be a broad, sweeping proposal.
The notion of a new strategy did little to change the tenor of what was taking place on the ground in Juárez and the rest of the nation. Historically, successive Mexican governments had often presented grand schemes that amounted to very little. In Chihuahua, the initial federal government inter
vention had been called Operación Conjunto Chihuahua. It had then been given a new name, Operación Coordinada Chihuahua, but for Juarenses living the day to day, the distinction meant nothing at all. So the promise of a new strategy to rescue Juárez, although it was given extensive coverage in local and national media, was received without credulity, much less enthusiasm.
Given the national clamor, President Felipe Calderón and his security cabinet, meeting at Los Pinos (the Mexican White House), soon came to the conclusion that nothing short of a full-on response could contain or absorb the powerful emotions that had been unleashed by the slaughter of the innocent in Juárez. The president’s office announced that Calderón would be visiting Juárez on Thursday, February 11, 2010. The communiqué said that the president was undertaking the trip in order to personally address the concerns of the citizenry and to present a new strategy for taking back the city. The secretary of the interior, Fernando Gómez Mont, would lead an advance team that would lay the groundwork for the president’s visit to the most violent and aggrieved city in all of Mexico.
. . .
“I waited until several days after the funerals before visiting the Villas de Salvárcar families,” Mayor Reyes Ferriz told me. The visit was private, in a house across the street from the scene of the shootings. “I expected a great deal of anger against the government,” he said, “but the overwhelming tone was more one of resignation and loss.” The families had just buried their children days before, and the gravity of it still hung in the air. “There was lots of pain,” the mayor continued. He recalled two primary complaints. The first was about the delay in the response by the Red Cross and the police. The second was against the president for his remarks in Japan. One of the things that the mayor remembered from that difficult encounter was a mother of a young girl. She had stood at the back of the living room, which was cramped and full of people. In her hands was a framed photograph of her daughter in a quinceañera dress. The woman never spoke, but her silent, mournful presence stayed with the mayor.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 29