Inside the Cibeles things were no less contentious. The mayor was the first to extend an official welcome to the president and his cabinet. When in his welcoming remarks José Reyes Ferriz summarized what the municipal government had attempted to do to contain the violence, there were boos among the attendees and someone shouted out “Liar!” The tone in the hall was raucous, verging on pandemonium.
Luz María Dávila’s sister, Patricia, had called to invite her to come to the Cibeles meeting. Patricia was politically active and she was going with some friends who were human rights activists. When it came time for the president to speak, the five women stood up at their seats and turned their backs to him in protest. No doubt it was unnerving, but Calderón proceeded with his prepared remarks. He told the audience that he had met with most of the Villas de Salvárcar families and reiterated his apologies “for the pain his words might have caused.” As the president spoke, several members of the Estado Mayor (the Mexican counterpart to the Secret Service) approached Luz María Dávila, urging her to sit down, but the aggrieved mother refused. The women did not sit down until the president concluded his remarks.
The event was like a town hall meeting, with various individuals taking to the microphones to air their concerns and grievances. Luz María Dávila made a number of attempts to enter an open area directly in front of where the presidential party was seated, but each time she had been intercepted by the Estado Mayor agents. However, she found her opportunity while the governor was speaking. The latter’s remarks had reached a crescendo when he declared that everything that took place in the state of Chihuahua was ultimately his responsibility. That statement elicited applause, although the tone was ironic, as if to say, “It’s about time you accepted responsibility for what’s been taking place.” That was the moment, with the Estado Mayor people perhaps distracted by the applause or losing focus after an hour and a half, that Luz María Dávila chose to make her move, slipping by the security and coming to a stop directly in front of the president and his wife, Margarita Zavala.
Belatedly, one of the Estado Mayor men rushed to intercept her, but just as they reached Luz María, the president motioned him to stand clear, before gesturing to her with open palms that she was welcome to speak. “Excuse me, Mr. President,” she said—she was clearly anxious and disarmingly sincere. She rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet and gestured, her hands making broad arcs in the air, as she continued, “I can’t say you are welcome, because in my opinion you are not welcome; no one is,” she said before a spellbound and church-silent crowd.
“It’s been more than two years that murders are being committed here, yes? And no one has done anything. I want justice not only for my two sons, but also for the rest of the youth. Mr. President, you say the same thing. Just like Ferriz on down have all said the same thing. Baeza—the same. But nothing happens, it just gets worse. That’s the truth,” she said, her voice repeatedly breaking.
“My boys are dead. They were not gang members. It cannot be, Mr. President. They were students. If someone were to kill a son of yours you would look under every stone for the assassin. But I don’t have resources. My boys have been laid to rest . . . I want justice. Put yourself in my place, what I’m feeling at this moment,” she said plaintively.
The president sat in front of her, hands clasped together, nodding. “Don’t just say ‘yes,’” Luz María excoriated him, “do something to make Juárez what it once was, not the bloody place it is now!” The crowd erupted, clapping their assent, as Luz María, full of grief and anger but now seemingly out of words, turned and walked to a couple of empty chairs at the end of the first line of seats and sat down, face in her hands, obviously distraught. A gaggle of reporters and well-wishers immediately surrounded her, some hugging her, others pressing their microphones and cameras toward her.
Margarita Zavala rose from the proscenium and walked toward Dávila. Momentarily, she seemed hesitant, unsure if approaching the grieving mother would only incite her further, but in the end she pressed through the crowd and wrapped her arms around Dávila, quietly speaking words of support and understanding in an attempt to console her. “I’m fine,” Luz María said to Mexico’s First Lady. “I’m calm. I expressed to the president what I was feeling.”
The sense of incipient disorder that had governed the entire affair finally broke down altogether. All decorum in the auditorium vanished. It was not restored again until Luz María Dávila, still tearful, made her exit from the auditorium amid the crowd’s emotional applause.
“At some point I just said to myself, ‘Why am I here if I’m not going to say something,’” Luz María told me when I interviewed her in her home a short time after the Cibeles event. In that moment, she’d almost felt possessed, she said: “I didn’t plan what I was going to say. I’m not a public person by nature.” On the contrary, she said, she was a hardworking woman whose focus centered on her family and her children. “I hardly even hung out with the women in the colonia,” she told me. The afternoon of the Cibeles meeting, her family had just completed the last day of the Novena prayers for the two boys. The gesture had been spontaneous, she recalled, but once on her feet she could not stop herself, something had taken hold of her. She was a disconsolate mother. Overwhelmed with grief and loss, she had seized the moment to demand justice for her two sons.
. . .
During the governor’s remarks at the Cibeles meeting, just prior to the Luz María Dávila incident, an agitated PRD state delegate had stood up and declared that the federal forces were mauling the students protesting out in the street. The president had dispatched Gómez Mont to see what was happening. Exiting the Cibeles, the secretary of the interior, escorted by a single Estado Mayor agent—in flagrant violation of the security protocols governing the protection of cabinet members—walked to the crowd of students and FNCR sympathizers. “I’m here to dialogue with you,” he told them amid shouts of “Assassin!” and “We demand justice!” Gómez Mont faced off with the demonstrators, attempting to stand his ground: “I don’t have blood on my hands,” he said. The two men had inadvertently waded deep into the sea of angry protesters; a circle closed in around the secretary and his increasingly anxious guard. As the Estado Mayor agent called for additional support via the microphone on his lapel, one of the protesters lunged at Gómez Mont from behind and hit him bare-fisted on the head. “So that’s your idea of dialogue!?!” the secretary barked as the guard attempted to pull him from the crowd and back within the safety of the Cibeles security perimeter. The foray was as harrowing as it was ill-conceived, but the secretary and his guard succeeded in extricating themselves from the situation. As for the confrontation between demonstrators and the federal police that had prompted the secretary’s intervention, there had been clashes, and some of the protesters had been bloodied. A score were arrested, most for laying down on the street in acts of civil disobedience in an effort to stop the movement of vehicles on the streets around the Cibeles.
Back inside the Cibeles, the president proceeded to detail his Todos Somos Juárez program. The federal government was prepared to invest approximately 260 million dollars into six areas that the president had outlined: security, health, education, economy, employment, and social development. The plan included building new schools in marginalized areas as well as paving streets, building childcare centers, programs for the unemployed, and prevention and treatment programs for addicts, among other projects. The president’s program was as ambitious as it was unprecedented in Mexico; it represented an enormous commitment of resources and personnel. Calderón vowed that the funds would be allocated in full consultation with Juárez’s civil society. He also promised to return to Juárez the following week, accompanied by his full cabinet. “We will stay the course until our work is done and Juárez is restored,” he promised.
Depleted and exhausted, the president and his wife, along with the bulk of his cabinet, boarded their respective official airplanes at Juárez’s Abraham González Inter
national Airport and headed back to Mexico City. The sentiment must have been grim; the challenge before them was daunting. Prior to the visit, Fernando Gómez Mont may have been the only one among them to truly grasp the depth of anger and frustration that had taken possession of the city, given that he’d met with the parents of the victims and listened to the desperate complaints and entreaties of the city’s residents during his marathon ten-hour meeting a few days earlier. But it would have been difficult to fully convey that experience to the president and the cabinet; they were operating in what for them was terra incognita. They were accustomed to highly orchestrated, orderly events where the respect for the presidency helped contain the more raw expressions of anger or opposition. But what they had experienced over the course of this day in Ciudad Juárez was something beyond containment. This city had endured too much for too long. Normal conventions no longer held.
. . .
The week between the president’s Cibeles meeting and his return to Juárez was frenetic. In Juárez, local working groups were formed under the rubric of the president’s six areas: security, health, education, economy, employment, and social development. Within these were smaller working groups, such as human rights, pubic spaces, the judiciary, and small business owners, among others. These groups met feverishly, with the aim of developing proposals for specific communities or sectors of the city. It was a Herculean task and it was carried out under the press of the president’s timeline, which called for the proposals to be presented to him at the forthcoming meeting.
The federal cabinet members returned to Juárez two days before the president. They convened their working groups at various hotels throughout the city. The atmosphere was intense, the efforts of the local participants earnest. Each of the working groups was meeting with the respective cabinet member under whose auspices that group’s activities were to be moved forward. For example, the secretary of health met with the Juárez working groups composed of physicians, psychologists, nurses, addictions specialists, and NGOs providing services, as well as academics whose research was relevant to health concerns. The meetings were substantive. Each was presided over by the cabinet member in question as well as a phalanx of aides, who did everything from distributing pads and pens to passing microphones around to documenting the proceedings and the topics and recommendations that they generated. The goal for each working group was to develop a set of up to ten specific recommendations or actionable items to be presented to the president at a plenary session two days hence.
I managed to gain entry into the working group focusing on the problems of small- and medium-sized businesses, over which the secretary of the economy, Gerardo Ruiz Mateos, presided. It was a window into the challenges faced by ordinary men and women who owned modest businesses such as restaurants, used car dealerships, appliance stores, and the like. Other than the violence, the most salient concern was that extortions were widespread throughout the city. Virtually every kind of business, large or small, was being victimized by gangs that were extorting them, some of them associated with the big cartel gangs, others not. “Our back is against the wall,” one business owner said. “We can pay our taxes or we can pay the cuota or we can pay our employees’ salaries, but we can’t pay all three. We desperately need protection from the pervasive extortions,” he said. The head of the Small Business Association chimed in, saying that twenty thousand of their members had received extortion demands. “Even the smallest businesses are having to pay five hundred to one thousand pesos a week in order to keep their doors open,” he said. The association received twelve to fifteen calls a day from members whose businesses had been held up by delinquents. The climate of insecurity and the inability to contain crime was hurting every business in the city.
It was evident that the economic cost of the U.S. recession, in combination with the city’s violence, was devastating the city. Juárez was the second-most-important maquiladora city in the country, and the maquiladora industry represented 50 percent of the city’s economy, but the maquilas were experiencing massive closures because of the American recession. The president of the Hotel Association cited occupancy rates that were at an all-time low. “People have stopped coming to Juárez because of the insecurity,” he pointed out. “Our society [in Juárez] is on the verge of collapse,” another man said, referring to the massive unemployment and businesses closures. “We’ve lost eighty thousand jobs in the last two years,” he said. The businessmen and businesswomen decried the government’s regulations that had made it cheaper for them to purchase goods across the border in El Paso than in Juárez. “We’re spending 450 million pesos [a little less than 45 million dollars] a year in El Paso that we could be spending here in Juárez,” he said. Given Mexico’s massive natural gas reserves, there was outrage at the fact that natural gas cost more in Juárez than it did in El Paso. The reason: a monopoly on natural gas in northern Mexico held by a prominent Juárez family. The head of the Used Car Dealers Association, comparing car imports from the United States for 2008 and 2009, noted that 2009 figures had dropped 80 percent.
But in addition to venting complaints and anxieties, the business owners also put forth specific proposals. One of the most persistent was that Juárez and the border be declared a free trade zone; the argument was that this would allow them to be more competitive with American companies. Among the other proposals was a six-month moratorium on federal taxes. The Hotel Association had numerous proposals for beefing up tourism, including developing the nearby Salamayuca Dunes for ecotourism and designating Juárez one of Mexico’s “cultural treasures.” The group also proposed that instead of having government conferences in the nation’s beach resorts, the government could schedule major conferences in Juárez. They called for a major PR campaign in Mexico, the United States, and Europe to restart the Juárez tourism industry.
However, in all of the forums that I attended, the clamor returned to the same fundamental reality: an awareness that the city’s massive crisis was not only the product of a lack of security but also of pervasive social problems whose origins went back decades. Approximately 25 percent of the population was between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two and, not coincidentally, the modal age of the sicarios was between seventeen and twenty-four. On the whole, the Juárez youth had no education, no jobs, and no prospects for the future. Given that stark reality, for the NiNis the temptation of two hundred dollars a week, with the bonus of a car and cell phone, was compelling indeed.
I attended several other forums and most had the same format, although the content varied as a function of the sector of the city that each was addressing. The surprise was the forum on the judiciary, at which several of the state supreme court justices were present. The judges defended the work of the Chihuahua judiciary. They seemed apathetic to the fact that the conviction rates were minimal in relation to the tens of thousands of arrests over the course of the last two years. They rationalized the fact that judges had set free some of the most notorious criminals on the basis of “human error.” In a state where the problems with the judicial system were obvious and almost universally recognized, the judges’ attitudes were entrenched and arrogant.
. . .
The launch of the Todos Somos Juárez intervention was set to culminate on February 17, when all of the working groups, toiling away feverishly, would present their proposals to the president and his cabinet at a plenary session.
On the day of the meeting, there was a glaring absence from the list of groups scheduled to present: the human rights working group was nowhere to be found on the agenda. According Gustavo de la Rosa, the original members of the working group had included several NGOs working on human rights issues, including Centro de Derechos Humanos Paso del Norte, Red de Mujeres, and Centro de Información y Solidaridad Obrera. Laura Carrera, of the National Commission for the Eradication of Violence against Women, within the Ministry of the Interior, had chaired the group. According to de la Rosa, the group had planned to present twenty cases of human
rights abuses committed by the military. “It was shut down by someone in the president’s office,” de la Rosa said. The day before the presentations the human rights group was deleted from the list. “It was shortsighted, an error on their parts that they couldn’t recognize the importance of including them,” de la Rosa complained. He argued that the federal government found the human rights issue inconvenient, an “obstacle to their operations.”1
Security was high that day at the Camino Real Hotel when Felipe Calderón arrived to preside over the forum. Each working group was to present proposals for how federal funds might be spent in Juárez. As had been the case during the president’s prior visit, several groups announced that they would mobilize large anti-Calderón protests.
I made my way to the Camino Real, arriving early because it had been predicted that the protests would make it difficult to reach the hotel. The national and international press convened in a parking lot next to the hotel, where they were being accredited for entry into the assembly. The atmosphere was testy. The large group was funneled into a narrow passageway where the first of three security checkpoints lay. We were packed in like fans trying to make their way into a sporting event due to start at any moment. In addition to the many army and federal police, there were also many Estado Mayor agents, all wearing suits and walking around officiously with communications plugs in their ears. In the distance, and at every intersection around the hotel, were teams of federal police dressed in ninja-type uniforms, including black ski masks and kneepads. The riot police were expecting the protesters to converge on the hotel at any moment, and they anticipated that the protests would be violent. Raymundo Ruiz’s newspaper had assigned him to cover the protests, so he was out there somewhere beyond the thick cordon of black-uniformed federal police agents. We text-messaged one another periodically to stay in touch.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 32