There was an air of gravity as the president of Mexico prepared to board Avión Presidente Juárez, the Mexican version of Air Force One, bound for the northern border city that shared its name, the city on which he’d bet the success or failure of his presidency. The president, as well as the members of his security cabinet and his broader team, knew full well that the stakes for this visit were high and that Juárez remained restive and angry in the aftermath of unspeakable tragedy.
CHAPTER 25
The Visit
President Felipe Calderón was about to enter a maelstrom. Throughout Juárez, people prepared responses to the visitor from Los Pinos. At the high schools, students were going to mount protests against the violence. At Juárez’s universities, where nine faculty members and thirty-one students had been assassinated over the previous two years, students would protest for the victims of the violence. At Catholic churches, congregations would gather to pray rosaries for the Juárez dead. Civic groups were planning marches at the international bridges and at the “Mega Flag,” a city landmark in the heart of Chamizal Park. The president would be greeted by citywide expressions of protest and discontent.
José Reyes Ferriz told the press that the president would announce a plan that had been in the works for months, in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank. He called it the “Juárez Intervention Plan.” He said the municipal government had been working on it since April of 2009, and that it had been in negotiations with both the state and the federal governments. Carlos Chavira, the head of the influential business group Coparmex Juárez, announced that the city’s business leaders would tell the president that he had six months to show results, otherwise many of them planned to leave the city. Many already had.
The presidency announced that there would be one public event, at Juárez’s Cibeles Convention Center, during which the president would meet with representatives of various sectors of the city. For the first time, the president’s team referred to the new program that was to be unveiled as “Todos Somos Juárez: Reconstruyamos la Ciudad” (We Are All Juárez: Let Us Rebuild the City). Although it wasn’t announced formally, word was leaked that the president also planned to meet with the families that had lost their children at Villas de Salvárcar.
The president’s advance men arrived at the Juárez airport at the crack of dawn on Thursday, February 11, 2010, and by early morning there were five military helicopters hovering above the Cibeles Convention Center and the army and federal police had set up new checkpoints all around the city. The immediate vicinity around Cibeles was the object of especially intense security measures. The spokesperson for Operación Coordinada Chihuahua, Enrique Torres, said that approximately seven thousand army troops and three thousand federal police had been deployed to ensure security during the president’s visit.
In a surprise announcement, the president’s office said that not only would the president be arriving with his secretary of the interior, Gómez Mont, as had previously been anticipated, but he was also bringing much of his cabinet to Ciudad Juárez. In addition to Gómez Mont, the entourage was to include Secretary of Public Education Alonso Lujambio; Secretary of Social Development Heriberto Félix Guerra; Secretary of Health José Ángel Córdova; Secretary of the Economy Gerardo Ruiz Mateos; Secretary of Agriculture Abelardo Escobar Prieto; and Secretary of Public Security Genaro García Luna. It was a formidable gesture, intended to signal that the president was committed to putting the full resources of the federal government behind changing the realities on the ground in Juárez.
The funding that the federal government would be bringing to bear for the Todos Somos Juárez program was put at 3.3 billion pesos (approximately 260 million dollars).1 No Mexican government in the country’s history had ever invested anything close to that kind of money in a response to a local crisis, with the exception of mobilizations in response to massive natural disasters.
The monies that the federal government was putting into play activated considerable maneuvering by everyone from the state legislature to citizens groups. The governor again insisted that the funds be spread out across the state, which would give him leverage in terms of political favors and influence. The PRD insisted that the monies be overseen and managed only by citizen committees. Still others called for an integrated approach that would combine public and private sectors. With the exception of the governor, most recognized that Juárez was of necessity the focal point for the expenditures; it was the site of the tragedy, ground zero of the narco-war, and the prime location of the social and economic catastrophe.2 Saving Juárez would require that kind of a focused endeavor. Anything less, such as spreading the money across Mexico’s largest state, would erase the possibility of a meaningful impact.
José Reyes Ferriz told the press that the federal government was conditioning the funds on the consensus and agreement of Juárez’s civil society. By now it was obvious that although the mayor and the governor were both members of the PRI, they differed markedly in their views. Reyes Ferriz applauded and even championed the federal move, seeing it as a decisive step forward. The mayor said his only concern was that the funds not go “to erecting empty buildings,” rather that they be funneled toward projects that society itself requested, adopted, and of which it took ownership, as well as projects that could continue to develop and unfold rather than being onetime wonders.
In a bizarre move, the governor declared that he was temporarily moving the state government to Juárez in order “to support the people of Juárez.” The day before President Calderón’s arrival, the governor ensconced himself in the Camino Real (the same hotel, not coincidentally, where the federal people would be staying) along with most of the directors of the state’s agencies. The governor also met with the city council and the mayor forthwith, promising programs to upgrade the city’s image. (The governor had acted precipitously. The state legislature had yet to approve the quixotic move, which would have cost the state millions of dollars, and, in fact, it never did.)
The governor seemed to have reluctantly conceded that utilizing the funds elsewhere in the state was ill-advised or, at any rate, was not going to happen, although he continued to insist that federal funds should flow through the state coffers, meaning the governor would have greater control over them, given that all of the agency heads were his appointees. Curiously, just the day before, the Chihuahua state legislature, over which the governor exerted considerable influence (the PRI was the majority party), had refused to approve an initiative for Juárez that would have funneled extra state resources in the areas of health, education, work, social development, family development, and security. The state government continued to do virtually nothing to help address the crisis in Juárez, leaving Reyes Ferriz frustrated by the governor’s posturing and intransigence. Later, the mayor would tell me, “He did everything in his power to block Calderón.”
Contrary to the governor’s proposals, Reyes Ferriz announced that the government funds would be managed through federal agencies and programs, not those of the state. “We’re very excited about President Calderón’s visit,” he said. “We await his proposals for Ciudad Juárez.” Echoing what federal officials had been saying, the mayor emphasized that the specific ways in which the federal funds were to be used would depend on the local consensus in Juárez.
. . .
Calderón’s visit was not only a change in policy, it was a gamble driven forward by desperation. The toll of the dead, not only in Juárez but nationwide, was increasingly weighing on the country. His poll numbers had sunk. Once heralded in many quarters for his courage in taking on the cartels, his policies’ lack of success when it came to day-to-day crime and the seemingly inexorable wave of executions was increasingly impossible to ignore. Calderón was faced with a must-do situation in Juárez.
The new strategy represented a radical departure from the actions that the federal government had been undertaking since December of 2006, at the start of Calderón’s presidency. That earlier
strategy had netted many cartel capos, who were subjected to the classical Mexican perp walk, paraded in front of the media, with the emblems of the Mexican Army or federal police behind them, surrounded by heavily armed officers whose faces were typically covered by ski masks. Many of those capos had been prominent targets. There were also countless images in the national media of drug seizures by the ton, including dramatic footage of discovered tunnels connecting both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and narco-barges and narco-submarines that had been seized off Mexico’s Pacific Coast, their hulls bursting with Colombian “merchandise.” Tons of cocaine, tons of marijuana, and tons of methamphetamine, as well as other pharmaceutical drugs, had been seized. But on the ground, in terms of the violence, nothing changed; it only got worse. This was the paradox that Calderón faced: the government’s successes did nothing to ease the burden of violence that Mexicans were living daily.
But contrary to the idea that the Calderón government was throwing together a desperate plan at the eleventh hour, the intervention Calderón was bringing to Juárez had been a year in the making. It was modeled closely after the Colombian experience in Medellín, a city that had been similarly ravaged by cartel members and the FARC guerrillas. Calderón had visited Colombia in 2009, and he’d seen firsthand the efforts to rebuild some of Medellín’s roughest neighborhoods. A few months later, Mayor Reyes Ferriz and the governor had also visited Colombia. The Inter-American Development Bank had underwritten significant parts of the Medellín effort, and Reyes Ferriz had had numerous meetings with them addressing the Juárez situation. In fact, the Inter-American Development Bank had arranged the mayor’s appointments in Medellín to ensure that he visited the most instructive sites.
At Los Pinos, a team had been working on a Colombian-style plan, adapting it to the Juárez situation. This plan had been scheduled for implementation in Juárez in April of 2010. The massacre at Villas de Salvárcar and the national outrage it stirred quickened the pace of the planned intervention. In fact, even before Calderón’s return to Mexico City from Japan, he’d instructed that the plan be readied for immediate implementation.
The team developing the specific nuts and bolts of the new program, under the name “Juárez Intervention Plan,” started working around the clock. The president said he expected to see a proposal and a working document within days. Every federal agency that would have a hand in the intervention had a representative on the team, people with the power to make decisions. In the final days before the president’s departure for Juárez the team worked nonstop in a conference room at Los Pinos. A premium was placed on efficiency. Calderón’s style is to micromanage, and some of the participants later told me, “He’s a real detail person.” Not completing the proposal in time for the Juárez trip was not an option.
On the eve of the president’s visit, six people were executed in Juárez. The next day the local newspapers greeted the president with headlines like “Juárez needs profound solutions, Mr. President” and “A devastated city receives the president.” And, perhaps the most hopeful, “Calderón to the rescue.”
. . .
It had been decided that the president would meet with the families whose children had been murdered at Villas de Salvárcar. The massacre had become such a rallying point for the nation that a visit to Juárez that did not include direct engagement with the aggrieved families was not only unimaginable on human terms, but on political terms as well. The particulars of the president’s meeting with the families were kept secret. The meeting was not listed on the published presidential agenda and the press was not informed. The families had been told a few days earlier, during their meeting with Secretary of the Interior Gómez Mont, that such a meeting was likely, but no details had been given and no firm commitment made. Nonetheless, the families’ expectations were heightened the morning of the presidential arrival, when scores of army and federal police units arrived to secure the neighborhood.
The general assumption was that if the president were going to meet with the families, he would come to Villa del Portal Street. As had been the case with the governor’s ill-fated visit a few days prior, the neighborhood was already plastered with placards and graffiti protesting the violence, demanding justice and an end to corruption, and protesting the president’s visit. Residents for blocks around were milling about, anticipating that the president might arrive at any moment as the possibility of Calderón’s presence spread by word of mouth.
No doubt partly influenced by the screaming, taunting mob the governor had encountered on Villa del Portal Street, the president’s advance team decided to find an alternate location to meet with the bereaved families. Calderón’s people clearly hoped for a more controlled environment, where scores of angry residents would not be descending upon the presidential entourage in front of the national media.
The advance team decided on a place called Casa Amiga Crisis Center, a mustard-yellow building with red trim located just five minutes from the site of the massacre. The center had a reputation for providing exceptional service to the community. It was a nonprofit for women, founded by Esther Chávez Cano, a legendary and much-beloved Juárez social activist (she had received Mexico’s National Human Rights Prize in 2008). Although she died on Christmas Day in 2009, a little more than a month prior to the Villas de Salvárcar massacre, Casa Amiga was part of her legacy in the beleaguered border city. Two psychologists, two social workers, and two prevention specialists staffed the center, which offered a variety of programs, including child abuse prevention, art therapy for children, and support programs for women who worked in the city’s maquiladoras. There were also educational programs and workshops aimed at preventing domestic and sexual violence.
Mid-morning, the presidential team sent word to the Villas de Salvárcar families confirming the president’s visit and informing them that a van would be coming to retrieve them (the location of the meeting remained a secret). All but three of the families whose children had been killed boarded the van for Casa Amiga. Luz María Dávila, the mother who’d lost her only two children, was one of those who refused to meet with the president. “He can come here if he wants to talk to me,” she told reporters.
The families arrived at Casa Amiga in advance of the president, who came moments later, accompanied by the governor, the mayor, and a couple of cabinet members, including Abelardo Escobar, Calderón’s secretary of agriculture, who was a Juárez native. A surprise was the presence of the president’s wife, Margarita Zavala; none of the previsit lists of the officials arriving from Mexico City had included her name and her participation had been a closely guarded secret. Aside from the group accompanying the president, the Los Jaguares coach was the only non–family member at the meeting, which took place in a small auditorium whose walls were decorated, ironically enough, with various posters relating to the prevention of violence, especially domestic violence and violence against women. There were four rows of folding chairs, ten or so seats per row, and the president and the others sat in a line in front of them, also in folding chairs. It was a solemn and oddly intimate encounter, with no microphones and no speeches and no tables separating the presidential party from the families. Once again the president attempted to convey his sorrow for their loss and make amends for the remarks made in Japan that had insulted them.
Initially, the tenor of the meeting was one in which the families expressed their feelings and presented their grievances to the president. They rebuked him for his characterization of their children and for the failure of the city to respond in a timely manner to the crisis. Margarita Zavala took feverish notes, documenting the complaints and what needed to be done. Gradually, though, the meeting became more personal. The parents began to talk about their children’s lives, about who they were, about their friends. The meeting lasted nearly two hours, during which the president, his wife, and the aggrieved families talked, as the other officials mostly looked on in respectful silence. “The president expressed his condolences to each of us,” one
of the parents later told me, saying he now felt satisfied that the president and the nation knew that his children were good kids who’d been victims of an evil act. Calderón promised that they would be taken care of, that the children of the adults who’d died and the siblings of the adolescents who’d been killed would all receive college scholarships, along with other support, including psychological services. But the president also told them that he knew that no government intervention could restore their children or undo the profound loss they had suffered.
At the end of the gathering, as people began to filter out of the room and the president stood surrounded by some of the family members, a woman approached him carrying a framed photograph of her daughter. It was Brenda Escamilla’s mother, the same woman whose silent presence had so struck the mayor when he’d gone to give his condolences to the Villas de Salvárcar families a few days after the funerals. Standing in front of President Calderón, Brenda Escamilla’s mother raised the framed photograph so that the president could see it clearly. “This is my daughter,” she said, “and you implied that she was a gang member.” Silence fell across the room. “Look at her! Do you think she looks like a gang member? She was sweet, she was a good student!” Clearly touched, the president again offered his condolences. “For me, that was the hardest, the most moving moment,” the mayor would later recall.
Notes
1. The amount equaled the annual Juárez municipal budget.
2. Thirty-nine percent of the Chihuahua population lived in Juárez. The city was a vital economic center, generating 50 percent of the state’s economy and 10 percent of the national economy.
CHAPTER 26
Cibeles
At the conclusion of President Calderón’s meeting with the Villas de Salvárcar families, the official party left for what was scheduled to be a gathering at the Cibeles Convention Center of some three hundred citizens representing the city’s business, religious, academic, and civic organizations. At the Cibeles, demonstrators were out in force to protest the president’s visit. The protesters were an eclectic group that included students from the high schools and universities as well as members of various political factions, including the National Front Against Repression (FNCR).
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 31