The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  Inside the enormous auditorium, each of the committees gathered to present its proposals to the president, a process that took over two hours. There were two unanticipated highlights. One came close to the end, when the head of the culture group rose from the sea of attendees and looked straight at the president. He stood erect and spoke with a clear, if impassioned, voice. “Mr. President,” he said, “the city is to the point of paralysis due to fear. Artists are more than about theater; they are about a vision, about a capacity to see. I can tell you that the criminals are not going to stop killing because we build swimming pools. The sicarios will not stop killing. An exceptional situation requires exceptional actions, Mr. President. I was anticipating proposals that would help us attack this problem because Juárez is something magical and it deserves to be saved. The different workshop groups have met and presented you with their proposals and ideas. In order to change what is taking place we must reconstruct the social fabric. But we’re being pusillanimous, not brave. If we’re going to believe, to have faith, well, believing is the most serious game in this city. Many of us are so afraid of the killers that we are finding it easier to react against the military rather than against the assassins, it’s safer that way.”

  Felipe Calderón at the Camino Real Hotel, February 2010. Photo copyright © Ricardo Ainslie.

  There were no points, lists of proposals, or “actionable steps” in the culture representative’s words, only the truth of the extent to which fear was warping perception, shifting orders of importance. He articulated the fury that lives in the absence of faith, when citizens cease to believe in the greater social project of the city, of the nation. Most of all he spoke to the profound human toll such an absence creates. True to his calling, the artist had broken with the forms and conventions of the plenary session to give expression to what was most important about their having convened. His presentation was dramatic; the president and everyone else in the auditorium were spellbound.

  Finally there was the student. A young man named Guillermo Asiaín stood and asked for the president’s indulgence, given that he was not on the program. Indeed, he said, that was a problem with the arrangement: while different working groups had presented their ideas on how to save the youth of Juárez, he pointed out that nowhere were the youth of Juárez represented in the working groups. Those assembled in the hall grew silent. “You need to recognize the youth of this city, and the programs aimed at intervening with the youth should have input from us,” the young man said. There was a powerful response in the hall to Asiaín’s comments. He received a thunderous ovation that was as spontaneous as his remarks had been.

  At the end, the president himself addressed the assembly, assuring those present that he had listened closely and that his team would get to work on the proposals immediately. “I believe in Juárez and in the nation,” Calderón said. “And I believe that Mexicans will find a solution to the myriad problems that our country is facing at the moment.” Calderón emphasized that Ciudad Juárez occupied a special place in his deliberations about the crisis. He set a one hundred–day target for the implementation of the proposals. The three-month timeline seemed unrealistically ambitious given that most government projects involved more than three months of permits and paperwork before breaking ground. The president was promising bullet-train speed on all fronts. Whether Calderón could deliver on these promises, or whether the country was any closer to solving the conundrum of the national violence, remained to be seen.

  . . .

  The president’s people structured a team that would coordinate and monitor the implementation of the federal government’s intervention. Antonio Vivanco, one of the president’s closest aides, led the team, and its members included a representative from each of the federal agencies that had been involved in Todos Somos Juárez. Beginning the next week, the twenty people on that team boarded the six a.m. Aeromexico flight every Monday out of Mexico City bound for Juárez, where they stayed all week until returning Thursday evening. “We had people who were in a position to make commitments on behalf of their respective agencies,” Adriana Obregón would later tell me. Obregón was one of the key players at Presidencia for the Todos Somos Juárez project, and she had been on those weekly flights.

  The team stayed at the Camino Real Hotel, and there was a standing Monday morning meeting at ten o’clock that they called the “weigh-in.” “How’s it going?” “Why is the school not getting finished?” “What are the obstacles?” I was told by one of the participants that the ethos of the team was “can do” and “must do.” If someone on the team from one of the federal agencies wasn’t up to the task, that person was replaced. “Send me someone who can push,” was the guiding qualification. Vivanco, who cut a tall, imposing figure, chaired the process with a firm hand. The aim was to complete the adopted proposals by the president’s one hundred–day target, which meant an enormous undertaking and considerable pressure. The effort to translate the Colombian experience in Medellín into something that would work in Juárez represented a vast expenditure of personnel and resources.

  It was a complex challenge; the cities were different, the cultures were different. And yet, conceptually and strategically, public recognition that the solution to the violence in Juárez lay not only in quasi-military police actions but also in social programs addressing the realities in the long-neglected colonias that hung around the city’s neck like a dead weight represented a vital step forward. For too long the city had deferred a reckoning with those realities, so long, in fact, that parts of the city were near the point of no return.

  In all there were 160 formal commitments that became the focus of the one hundred–day target. The federal government created a website for Todos Somos Juárez where the status of each of the commitments could be tracked. Mexico had never seen such a massive mobilization of government resources, a mobilization so closely tethered to the perspectives and demands of the local working groups who knew their city’s needs. As one editorial put it: “Todos Somos Juárez is something that we cannot allow to dissipate, it’s an exercise in democracy.”

  For once, the federal government had come to Juárez, breaking with the historical modus operandi in which NGOs and local and state agencies were forced to travel to Mexico City to gain audiences with government officials. For a city long-accustomed to indifference from Mexico City, the intervention represented a profound change. However, the payoff of the enormous undertaking would take a long time to assess. It was unlikely that the violence would drop immediately. A long-term rather than short-term vision had been put into play. It was an indispensable shift in strategy: in order to turn the city of Juárez around, the long-frayed social fabric had to be repaired. Such repair was the cornerstone to the future of a great city. Indeed, to the future of the country.

  Note

  1. Two months later, in a compromise, Gustavo de la Rosa was named to head an office that would receive complaints of human rights abuses in the city and oversee human rights issues in relation to police operations.

  CHAPTER 27

  No Accidents

  In an article that appeared in the Washington Post on February 24, 2010, just a week after president Felipe Calderón’s second visit to Juárez in the aftermath of the Villas de Salvárcar killings, William Booth reported that for the first time American intelligence agents would be embedding with Mexican law enforcement in an effort to help pursue drug cartel leaders and their hit men operating in Ciudad Juárez. The agents, the article continued, would be operating out of a Mexican command center, where they would share drug intelligence gathered from informants and intercepted communications.

  Just a month earlier I had visited the Intelligence Center, which was on the second floor of the Emergency Response Center (known as the CERI), when José Reyes Ferriz had invited me along to attend a security meeting. The building is a solid, squat structure made of native stone with a sky-blue glass façade. Heavily armed soldiers and federal police guarded the entrance. The bo
ttom floor of the CERI is a large space enclosed by thick glass walls, where army and federal police monitored information coming in on the city’s anonymous tip line and from emergency calls. Each workstation had three computer monitors, where pairs of agents were supposed to work the calls, identify their locations, and track the location of nearby law enforcement patrol units (this was the system that had presumably failed to respond to the calls coming from Villa del Portal Street).

  The security meeting was held on the second floor, in a large operations room at the front of which was a long oval table covered by a forest-green tablecloth; a bottle of water had been placed in front of each seat. The mayor chaired the meeting, sitting at the head of the table. Seated to his right was the city district attorney; to her right was her immediate predecessor, an army colonel who was transitioning out. A federal police inspector who had been overseeing the placement of three hundred security cameras throughout the city sat at the other end of the table, across from the mayor. Next to him was José Luis Lara, an engineer who was in from Mexico City as the chief consultant on the security camera project. To his right was Gerardo Ortiz Arellano, the head of the municipal prison.1 Finally, there was Julián David Rivera Bretón, the former army general who was now heading up the Juárez municipal police following Roberto Orduña’s resignation almost a year earlier.

  Each of the principals had brought their personal aides to the meeting, who, standing, were arrayed around the table, periodically responding to various requests from their respective bosses. The federal police appeared to be hosting the meeting—their uniformed staff attended to the needs of the participants, offering them coffee and sodas or opening up the bottled waters and pouring them into glasses. The discussion around the table that day centered on how to track convicts once they were released from the municipal prison. The mayor asked if prison personnel were routinely obtaining addresses and if someone was checking in on the ex-cons after their releases. Ortiz Arellano, the director of the prison, noted that social workers were already doing that, but the mayor was insistent that the procedures in place were not adequate—as often as not former prisoners disappeared from the addresses they’d given upon release. The mayor later summarized his frustration, noting that the municipal police arrested approximately three thousand people a year. “The majority,” he told me, “are let out within a day or two.” Of those three thousand, only 150 or so were ever actually sentenced. “Your chance of getting off for anything from murder to car theft to rape to assault in Juárez is 95 percent” the mayor told me. “Those odds look good to most criminals.”

  The mayor and the others reviewed the newly implemented Crime Stoppers program. A complication was that it only took calls related to local crime, that is, crime that was under the auspices of municipal police. The federal police were triaging calls to the corresponding authority depending on whether they fell under the federal, state, or municipal purview, but there was considerable confusion in the public’s mind about what law enforcement entity was responsible for what kind of crime.

  At the conclusion of this meeting, the federal police inspector approached the mayor and asked if he cared to see the progress they had made with the security camera program. The cameras had gone up all over the city and were being used to monitor criminal activity from this site as well as from the federal police command center in Mexico City. The inspector led the way to a workstation, where two federal police officers sat in front of a large computer screen. “We’re going to show you an execution that we caught on the cameras last week,” one of the officers said as he began rolling video. On one corner of the footage was the date and time code, which whirred as a function of the speed with which the officer ran the footage. The first image was of a city street with a fair amount of traffic at an intersection with a traffic light. The main boulevard was two lanes running in either direction while the other street, perpendicular to it, had a single lane in each direction. As the agent fast-forwarded the video, cars zipped across the screen and beyond in the blink of an eye. “Watch this maroon SUV,” the officer said. “It’s the car carrying the hit team.” The car in question drove up to the stoplight and then made a U-turn, going off-camera. “They’re scouting the hit,” the agent narrated. “This car,” he said, pointing the cursor at a white Mercury, “is also involved. And so is this one,” he said, drawing our attention to a pickup truck. Over the course of several minutes, those three vehicles made a series of passes through the target area.

  It was evident that the video had been closely studied. “These hits all have the same basic profile,” the agent said. The vehicles involved in the execution had first moved through the busy intersection prior to the hit. To the untrained eye, they were easily lost in the ordinary flow of traffic. The officer explained that the team actually carrying out the hit typically traveled aboard one or two vehicles. There were also several scout cars, as well as a car that would block others from pursuing the hit team once it completed its work. “Finally, there’s always a car that remains behind to ensure that the targets are all dead before it leaves the crime scene,” he added. Each of these players had been identified. The time code at the top of the screen made it clear that the video spanned a little more than ten minutes.

  For the execution, the federal police officer rolled the tape in real time. The maroon SUV came into view from the opposite direction it had taken during the first two passes. The lookout cars were positioned on both sides of the street. The escort car then made its way through the intersection. At that point, the maroon SUV pulled up and the sicarios could be seen jumping from the vehicle, weapons in hand. A group of six men ran off camera, where they took down their target before scampering back into the SUV, almost leaving one of them behind. The maroon SUV then headed down the cross street to the right, where two getaway cars had already been positioned. The so-called “verification” car was also in position just past the intersection. Just then, the pickup truck that we had seen make several practice runs through the intersection rounded the corner and blocked the street down which the sicarios had just made their getaway. To my surprise, at that moment two municipal police cars arrived at the scene of the execution. Rather than giving chase, they jumped out of their patrol cars and ran to the victim. The pickup truck continued to block the getaway route and the police paid it no mind. I found it hard not to draw the inference that the police were either afraid of a confrontation or were in collusion with the sicarios. The final image was of the white Mercury, the verification vehicle. Once the blocking vehicle left the crime scene following the getaway path, the verification vehicle proceeded slowly down the street, eerily merging into the afternoon traffic as if nothing had happened. The federal police officer froze the frame at that point, with the Mercury at the top of the screen.

  Those of us standing around the workstation fell silent. Even in this city of so many executions, so many deaths, it was rare to actually see one live. Typically, one saw photographs or video taken in the aftermath, or one managed to arrive soon after, but it was unusual to see images of an execution as it was taking place. But the silence also pressed an obvious question. Why had the municipal police done nothing? It seemed to me that perhaps the federal police officers had left the white Mercury floating at the top of the screen as if posing a question.

  The mayor broke the silence. “Who is the victim?” he asked. He was told the victim’s name, but there was no information as to why this man had been executed. The mayor asked if the vehicles’ license plates could be brought into focus. He was told they were working on that. What was perfectly evident, however, was the sophistication and planning that had gone into pulling off this execution. The operation had involved six different vehicles; the federal police agent estimated that the entire team consisted of fifteen to eighteen men. They had carried out a precise, highly choreographed hit wherein every actor knew his exact role. They had rehearsed the hit in every detail, making practice runs before executing their target. Each person had don
e his job to perfection; the execution was carried out flawlessly.

  The Mexican federal agent swiveled in his chair, turning from his computer screen to look at the mayor. “Here’s another hit by the same team,” he said. We were now looking at a Soriana shopping center. According to the date on the video, this hit had taken place several days later. The maroon SUV, the white Mercury, and the pickup from the prior execution were again playing key roles. The other vehicles were different. This time, two men in a beige pickup truck were sandwiched in between two sicario cars at the exit to the shopping center. A hit-team van then closed off the adjacent lane, sealing the unsuspecting vehicle off from any possibility of egress. As before, the sicario team’s vehicles had made several dry runs through the target area some fifteen minutes prior to the execution. The white Mercury, parked across the street, was again the verification car. Another vehicle pulled up alongside the target, and the smoke from the blazing gun barrels firing at the occupants in the beige pickup truck was plainly evident on-screen. When the shooting stopped, the targeted vehicle coasted out into the boulevard on its own accord, as if piloted by an invisible ghost. The pickup continued rolling slowly through four lanes of traffic until it hit a curb across the street. One of the sicario cars had pulled into the intersection, blocking traffic as the other vehicles slipped off down the street and disappeared from view. As before, once they’d verified that the two men in the pickup truck showed no signs of life, the white Mercury exited from the scene, merging into traffic as horrified drivers attempted to maneuver around the bullet-ridden beige pickup, aware, now, that within it lay one or more additions to Juárez’s tally of the dead.