. . .
The secretary of the interior arrived in Juárez on Monday, February 8, three days before the president was due to arrive. The mayor had recommended to the president’s liaison that Gómez Mont meet with the Villas de Salvárcar families and had provided a brief on his own meeting with the families a few days earlier, conveying that the tone had been somber and the complaints appropriate given what the families had just endured. “They [the advance team] were cautious about not creating problems for the government,” the mayor observed. This was especially crucial in light of the governor’s recent reception on Villa del Portal Street. Governor Reyes Baeza and Mayor Reyes Ferriz met Gómez Mont at the airport, where the officials conferred and agreed that together they would visit the families of the victims at Villas de Salvárcar. It appeared that the secretary of the interior hoped to defuse the families’ anger following the debacle of the president’s comments in Japan. They left the airport and their entourage headed directly for the beleaguered colonia where, days after the funerals, the entire neighborhood continued to mourn.
The three men met with the families privately at one of the Villa del Portal homes, across the street from the scene of the massacre. In addition to Luz María Dávila and Alonso Encina, the families of the other adolescents who’d been killed that night were represented. Gómez Mont told them that the president had sent him in order to express his deep sorrow for their loss and to give them his personal condolences. During the two-hour meeting the families pleaded for security. They told Gómez Mont that they feared for their lives. Gómez Mont did what he could to reassure them that they would be protected. He promised that representatives of the federal government would continue discussions with them and that their needs would be addressed. The families would get help, he said. The families had prepared a list of actions, including demands that the authorities allow “foreign law enforcement” to investigate the case; that federal, state, and local police as well as the military stop wearing ski masks to cover their faces when on duty; and that they stop pointing weapons at civilians during their operativos. Gómez Mont did not respond to those specific petitions.
Luz María Dávila had already shown that she was not one to buckle in the face of the powerful. She took advantage of the meeting with two of the most powerful men in the state of Chihuahua and the president’s personal emissary, dressing down the secretary of the interior just as she had the governor days earlier. She told Gómez Mont that there was no trust, even though he’d promised a full and vigorous investigation.
Following the two-hour meeting, Luz María told El Diario that she remained angry; she felt there were no solutions to what was taking place in Juárez. She also struck out at the minister and at the president: “[Gómez Mont] said that when the president made his declarations he had erroneous information and that now he knows that it wasn’t so, but I do not accept that as an apology.” Her sons were good boys, she said, and she demanded that the president publicly retract the comments he’d made at the press conference in Japan. She also pressed for justice: “Mr. President, until the culprits are apprehended I hold you responsible for the murder of these children!”
The secretary of the interior left the gathering in a five-vehicle convoy and headed for what would be a marathon ten-hour meeting with representatives from a variety of groups, including business leaders, human rights activists, and civic organizations. At a subsequent press conference with the governor and the mayor, Gómez Mont sought to sketch out the outlines of the president’s new strategy, a strategy, he said, that would rest on support from four pillars: the federal, state, and municipal governments, as well as civil society. The one thing he specified about the president’s forthcoming visit was that the president would meet with the families of the victims of the Villas de Salvárcar massacre, whose tragedy, the secretary of the interior insisted, had “moved the president deeply.” “The president knows that the dead were innocent victims and they were part of a youth that is involved in sports and their studies, that they represented the way out of the violence in Juárez, and any hypothesis regarding a confrontation between rival gangs has been discarded,” Gómez Mont affirmed. It was clearly a continuation of the full-court effort to defuse the public relations gaffe that had brought strenuous criticism against the president both locally and nationally.
The press conference was testy for another reason; the significant tensions between the governor and the federal government were evident. Earlier, the governor had publicly chastised the president for not coming to Juárez sooner. With national elections just five months off, he now said that it was “imperative” that whatever help Juárez was to receive not become part of the forthcoming electoral contest—in other words, that the money from the federal government not be used to further the PAN’s political leverage in the city.
Following that meeting, in separate remarks to the press, Governor Reyes Baeza called the federal government to task for “creating victims.” This amounted to a public rebuke of President Calderón and the federal government’s policies in the war against the cartels. Reyes Baeza said that the dead were not victims of a natural disaster but “of the war [against the cartels] which the president convened two years ago.” Referring to Calderón’s statements in Aguascalientes and elsewhere since his return from Japan, in which he had expressed condolences and solidarity with the victims and their families, the governor scoffed at “expressions of solidarity” as insufficient. What people needed, he said, was “deeds.” Nowhere in the coverage of the governor’s remarks was there mention of the fact that over the course of those two years the governor had himself sent virtually no support to Juárez. There had been no additional funding from state coffers to help defer the spiraling security costs (in fact, those expenditures had been reduced), and neither had the governor enhanced the presence of the state ministerial police in the city despite the rampant violence that had enveloped it and despite the mayor’s repeated requests for assistance. In his own way, the governor was using the Villas de Salvárcar tragedy to political ends.
Beyond the governor’s cynical comments, the massacre became fodder for political positioning both locally and nationally (municipal, state, and federal elections were slated for July 4, 2010). Víctor Quintana, the federal deputy representing Juárez from the PRD, the party that Calderón had defeated by the slimmest of margins in the 2006 presidential election, coined the phrase “youth-icides,” playing off of the so-called femicides, as the killings of young maquiladora women in the late 1990s had been termed. He noted that 80 percent of the Juárez deaths since the start of the drug war were young people, and 30 percent were under nineteen years of age. “We’re living a youth-icide,” Quintana told Mexico City’s Proceso magazine. “The youth of Juárez and the nation, whether execution victims or executioners, are victims. And Gómez Mont and Calderón are trying to blame them and make them delinquents.” He pointed out that Chihuahua had the highest incidence of youth between the ages of twelve and eighteen who were neither in school nor working (the infamous NiNis). The state had the highest incidence of middle-school and high-school dropouts. It was three times harder for youth between fifteen and twenty-four to find jobs, he argued, and the youth of Chihuahua, and, especially, of Juárez, faced limited alternatives other than forced migration, joining a gang, participating in drug trafficking, or suicide. “All of them,” Quintana insisted, “the executioners and the executed alike, are victims.”
Similarly, David Penchyna, a PRI congressional deputy, declared that Calderón’s security policy and his so-called war against the drug cartels were merely a ruse to “legitimize” a presidency “that was not legitimately won at the ballot box.” “Don’t be confused, comrades,” the legislator said, “this is Mexico’s cancer” (thus mocking Calderón’s oft-invoked metaphor that the drug cartels were a cancer upon the nation). It was as if the cartels, their gangs, and the orgy of violence to which they had subjected the country were a figment of the administration’s im
agination, invented merely to justify themselves.
Javier Corral Jurado, a federal senator from Juárez affiliated with the president’s party, the PAN, in turn blasted Penchyna and the PRI. “That’s how the PRI reduces the problem of insecurity,” he said. He noted that the PRI held practically every political position of consequence in the state of Chihuahua, yet 31 percent of the victims who had already died in the violence across the nation had been killed in the state (Juárez alone accounted for almost a quarter of the national drug war fatalities). He further noted that the state had a 50 percent higher rate of marijuana use than the national average, and twice the number of people consuming cocaine (4.8 percent in Chihuahua as opposed to 2.4 percent nationally). “Those are hard numbers,” the senator noted. “And yet in Chihuahua judicial investigation is almost non-existent, hundreds of dossiers lay unattended.”
From the floor of the Mexican Congress, Javier Corral also implied that Governor Reyes Baeza had ties to the narco-traffickers, suggesting that therein lay the reason for his “negligence” in fighting the cartels and, specifically, the unbounded violence that had overtaken Juárez. He accused Reyes Baeza of accommodating the narco-traffickers, arguing that the governor had blocked attempts to clean up the state police apparatus that was known to have close ties to organized crime. “The government of Reyes Baeza is a spectator before the dispute between the narco capos,” he said, implying that the inaction was due to the governor being compromised.
The PRD party’s state secretary, Hortensia Aragón, declared that Chihuahua was presently “ungovernable” because of the federal forces and announced that the party would propose legislation to force the departure of federal forces from the state. She argued that fifty crimes were committed every day in Chihuahua, a fact that “required” the withdrawal of federal forces. Aragón’s pronouncements lacked coherence. As an antidote to the lawlessness, the PRD proposed that neighborhood groups patrol their own streets. It was, at best, a naive strategy, one that ignored the raw brutality of the cartels and their well-armed gangs and the extent to which they were already terrorizing communities. If the government forces had been ineffective, the viable alternative was hardly to create a vacuum that would give the cartels unfettered control of the city and its neighborhoods. The Villas de Salvárcar families, for example, were clamoring for more protection, not less.
In the days after the announcement that the president would soon be arriving in Juárez, the head of the PRD in Chihuahua, Víctor Quintana, accused him of delaying so long that the situation in the city had become “rancid” and “putrid.” “He had to wait until we had more than four thousand executions in the state before coming to Chihuahua,” Quintana said. Quintana reiterated his call for the removal of all federal forces not only from the city’s streets but also from the entire state. Quintana warned that whatever the president imagined his reception would be, the people of Chihuahua would demand an accounting of his actions, of his presidency. “He’s not coming as ‘The Savior’! The times do not call for the appearance of a ‘Messiah!’” Quintana pronounced. But, in truth, the embattled Juárez needed nothing short of that.
. . .
As the president’s team prepared for his visit to Juárez, they appeared to send mixed messages regarding what the city’s citizens might expect. For example, they sought to minimize expectations, initially saying that only the president and the secretary of the interior would be coming and implying that the visit would be brief. Most took this to mean a cameo appearance by the president, something akin to what he’d done on two prior occasions when he’d come into Juárez, given a brief talk to business groups, shaken hands, and dispensed a few abrazos before departing for another destination. At the same time, at several press conferences, the president and Gómez Mont indicated that the new program would touch all spheres of the city’s life, including education, the economy, unemployment, and public spaces—signaling, in other words, an ambitious plan. The latter suggested the possibility of a significant infusion of federal funds.
The governor of Chihuahua apparently felt he was being cut out of the deal. The day that Los Pinos announced the president’s trip to Juárez, the governor contacted the state media to convey his displeasure. As the media carried stories about the president’s arrival, headlines all over the state simultaneously described the governor as “mad” and “excluded” and “thundering” in his anger. “By excluding local authorities, the president’s new plan has started on the left foot,” the governor protested. Journalists described the governor as “visibly upset” at having been excluded from the planning for the new strategy. “I wasn’t invited,” he complained to the media. He went further: “This plan is not going to work without the participation of the state government.” However, according to José Reyes Ferriz, each of Gómez Mont’s visits, as well as the subsequent president’s visits, were preceded by numerous meetings with the president’s advance team that included the mayor of Juárez and the governor of Chihuahua. The mayor dismissed the governor’s statements as misrepresentations. In fact, he described an atmosphere of contentiousness: “They argued about everything, down to the forks and silverware!” the mayor recalled. “It was all conflict with the state government.” The mayor attributed this to Reyes Baeza’s electoral worries.
The governor’s protestations continued for days. Three days after the announcement of the president’s visit, the governor complained that “I still have not received a call [from the president].” The governor thrashed the president and his team. “I don’t know how they intend to create new strategies,” he said, “when all they do is that some come, others leave, and they just have meetings at Los Pinos, but the governor has not been called to participate.” He told the media that, with respect to law enforcement, he had made “unprecedented” efforts, “perhaps even beyond what was constitutionally permissible” (by allowing state police to investigate crimes that fell under the federal purview). His government had invested fiscally to professionalize and clean up the police, the governor maintained. The governor also argued that whatever resources the federal government was sending should be spread across the state and not be limited to the border.
But the fact was that the governor had done relatively little to support the city of Juárez. And even though he declared that it was “strange” that he had not been included, the most likely explanation was that there was significant mistrust of the governor, who had long been hounded by allegations of alignment with the Juárez cartel. The governor accused the federal government of playing election tactics, implying that they were throwing federal funds around in Juárez in order to buy the 2010 election that was just months away. No doubt somewhere political calculations formed part of the Los Pinos thinking; it was only natural. But, unlike the governor, Mayor José Reyes Ferriz, who was also a member of the PRI, appeared to be fully in the loop with the federal people. And in terms of election positioning, it was of far greater utility to the PAN, the president’s party, to be able to show a measure of progress and success in Juárez than to have a successful election in Chihuahua per se. The entire nation was looking over Calderón’s shoulder, demanding results. From that perspective, perhaps it was more useful to the president’s opponents that his policies fail.
. . .
The Juárez visit by the secretary of the interior had not gone far in calming either the nerves or the rage in the city. A little more than a week after the massacre, the day after Gómez Mont had visited Juárez, Governor Reyes Baeza and Mayor Reyes Ferriz attended a prearranged convocation at the gymnasium at the CBTIS-128, where students from Juárez’s four technical schools had come together for a series of crime prevention presentations focusing on avoiding gangs and criminal organizations and preventing drug addictions. The mayor and the governor faced a near-riot at the school. There was a chorus of loud boos when they entered the auditorium and again when they were introduced. The students shouted demands and called for action; they wanted the political leadership to t
ake action not only to solve this case but also to bring peace and security to their communities. Ten students were evicted from the event as they shouted, “We demand justice!” There was pandemonium. Eventually, the students settled. “The students of Ciudad Juárez are not delinquents,” Reyes Ferriz assured them in his comments. “They are good people, they are kids who study, they are kids who are going to work for their city and they are the ones who will move Ciudad Juárez forward.” For the mayor and governor it was a harrowing experience. The students’ wrath was undiluted, pure, and it reflected the sentiments of the entire city.
. . .
The massacre at Villas de Salvárcar had become a focal point of discussion throughout Mexico. Every newspaper, from the most important and widely read papers in Mexico City to small newspapers in provincial towns, carried the story and reflected on its meaning. Every television newscast in the country had broadcast the gory images from the house on Villa del Portal, and now television stations and radio programs were mustering their best and most respected pundits to analyze what had taken place. Villas de Salvárcar broke down the national denial that previously had accommodated the horror and found ways of avoiding it; it became the stark fact that forced the nation to engage with the brutal realities it was living.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 30