The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  When I asked the mayor his opinion regarding the allegations that García Luna was in league with El Chapo Guzmán and the Sinaloa cartel, he remarked that his gut instincts were that it was not so, with the caveat that in Mexico anything was possible. As for corruption within the federal police, his response was, “Look, there’s corruption everywhere. That’s just a fact.” Mexico was engaged in a slow process of trying to change the mindset that fostered and lived within the culture of corruption, he noted. Sometimes it was also difficult to know with certainty what constituted corruption. He mentioned the famous security cameras that had been installed in Juárez. In his view, the price paid per camera had been excessive. Was that an artifact of corruption? “It’s impossible to know,” he said. The same was true for the upgrade of the municipal police’s communications equipment from analog to digital. The police had Motorola equipment, which could have been upgraded by buying inserts and new keyboards—everything else required to go digital, including the towers, was already in place. Reyes Ferriz said that the federal police had insisted instead on French equipment that was more expensive. Perhaps there had been an insider deal there, or technological issues that justified the decision; there was no way of knowing, the mayor said. Was García Luna aware of this? Was it underlings? Were there other pressures to go that route? “Who knows,” Reyes Ferriz said. “In Mexico it’s still impossible to make deals without some of that. It’s just inherent in the system. It’s the way it all works,” he concluded. But Reyes Ferriz distinguished this kind of business culture or this kind of corruption, if indeed it played a role, from being owned by one or another of the cartels. Reyes Ferriz told me that he trusted García Luna. Though he described him as ambitious, in his view those ambitions were in line with the good of the country and the effort to change the world of Mexican law enforcement from top to bottom. “I think he’s a good policeman, a policeman with a vision,” he concluded.

  . . .

  It took me a year and a half to secure an interview with Genaro García Luna. We met at the SSP (Secretariat for Public Security, SSP by its Spanish initials) headquarters—a recently refurbished and smartly designed compound in Mexico City that had once housed the Secretariat for Social Development. The SSP consisted of three administrative areas: the federal police, the federal prison system, and a unit responsible for providing security to federal buildings and administrative units such as the Mexican executive, legislative, and judicial branches. García Luna was one of the most influential players in Calderón’s security cabinet; his ideas had held sway from the beginning of the administration and he’d survived a great deal of criticism as it became clear that the war against the drug cartels was not reducing the violence across the nation.

  His office was an ample corner space with commanding views of the compound’s well-maintained lawns, which were dotted with tall trees and crisscrossed by crisp paths. The walls in the office had a blond, beechwood veneer and the overall design of the room was quite modern, with clean lines throughout. His desk was large and orderly, with the telltale red phones via which he could reach the president at a moment’s notice. I sat at a conference table, accompanied by his director of communications, Lizeth Parra, and her assistant.

  García Luna strode into the room after I was seated. A man of medium stature with a sturdy frame, he sported a burr haircut and wore a navy blue suit, white shirt, and a fashionable electric-green tie. He was amiable and straightforward, talking at a quick pace with a modest speech impediment that the Mexican media has widely caricatured. In the interview, García Luna described his law enforcement philosophy, as well as his analysis as to why the situation in Juárez had proven to be so intractable. He talked law enforcement theory—the relationship between law and order and the state, civil society, and democracy, for example. He also described the evolution of the drug cartels in Mexico, referencing how the closing of the Caribbean by U.S. law enforcement had transformed Mexico into the primary funnel for Colombian cocaine headed to U.S. markets.

  García Luna was especially animated when talking about the central role the federal police were playing in the war against the cartels country-wide, as it increasingly took the place of the army, and his plans to export the model of the federal police to state and municipal police forces. “It’s obvious that you can’t have a democracy if you don’t have functioning police forces,” he said, noting that the process of transforming the culture of the police and, especially, the public’s perceptions of the police, was proving slow and difficult.

  As for Juárez, García Luna spoke about how the enormous migration to the city of people seeking jobs at the maquiladoras in the 1980s had transformed the city. “You had countless families where the fathers were away working in the United States and the mothers were working in the maquiladoras,” he noted, invoking Los NiNi without calling them such. He described Juárez as a city with the economy of a small country but one lacking in infrastructure, where streets had no lights, communities had no schools. He also described how the logistics of moving merchandise across the border (whether legal or not) were part of the city’s identity, which is what had made it so indispensable to the cartels. Finally, he talked about the fact that the cartels had killed twenty-three federal police officers in the nine months preceding the interview, in what he described as a clear change in cartel tactics.

  The head of the Secretariat for Public Security was very enthusiastic about the still-new Plataforma México, a national law enforcement database for tracking criminals with their police records, fingerprints, and other information; data about municipal, state, and federal police officers was also kept on Plataforma México, as were Interpol alerts and other information such as car registrations and license plates.

  As the interview wound down, I told García Luna I had one last question. We both knew, I said, that there were allegations accusing him of links to the Sinaloa cartel. What did he have to say in relation to those? There was a pause and I braced myself for an angry response. Instead, he was surprisingly non-defensive. “Look,” he said. “That goes with this territory. It is impossible to be in this position and not have these kinds of accusations. And it is all but impossible to defend yourself against them,” he said. He cited the fact that his people had arrested many of El Chapo’s men, including top capos, and he rattled off the quantity of drugs seized from the Sinaloa cartel. “I arrested El Chapo’s brother,” García Luna added.5

  After a moment he continued, telling me that recently Reforma, the respected and politically moderate Mexico City newspaper, had printed an allegation that he lived in a two-million-dollar house (clearly beyond what was commensurate with his salary). The article further implied that there was no bill of sale for his prior home (suggesting, in other words, that the funds for the new house must have come from elsewhere) and that another home he owned in Juitepec, Morelos, was worth in excess of a million dollars. García Luna cited this to illustrate that he had been the object of “systematic calumny and defamation” because of his position, in addition to sustaining death threats against him and his family. “Any journalist could have tracked down the facts by searching public documents,” he told me. García Luna had written a rebuttal to the allegations, noting his annual salary over the prior three years (for the most recent, 2009, his salary had been the equivalent of $327,000 U.S. dollars), as well as bonuses and a severance package from the PGR over the same interval. I was subsequently shown purchase documents, and a copy of his mortgage on his home. The purchase price for the home, including renovations, came to $808,000 (less than half the value alleged in the Reforma piece). A portion of that had been paid for by the sale of his prior home, which he’d sold for a modest profit (there was a copy of the bill of sale documenting the transaction). An outstanding mortgage covered the difference. Reforma had subsequently published García Luna’s response to the piece. I later found several references in other media accounts to the original allegations that García Luna lived in a two-million-dollar home, wi
th no reference to his rebuttal and without supporting documentation.

  As with everything in Mexico, it was impossible to know with certainty what was factual and true beyond doubt. Not being an accountant, not having been privy to the transactions, and having no way of evaluating the validity of documents I’d been shown, I had no way of certifying what I was told by García Luna and his people. What was undeniable, however, was that Mexico’s war against the cartels turned as much on what people believed to be true as it did on what was actually taking place. Another way of framing the problem, however, was just as true: if people had been living relatively free of fear in their communities, rumors such as those that impugned Genaro García Luna would have found much less traction.

  Notes

  1. In Juárez, federal authorities had arrested 262 people affiliated with the Juárez cartel and only sixty affiliated with the Sinaloa cartel.

  2. Alarcón and the three lieutenants were subsequently charged and sent to federal prison.

  3. This meeting took place a month prior to the February 24 Washington Post story disclosing just this kind of collaboration.

  4. WikiLeaks suggested that part of the U.S. government’s rationale was that the federal police were better positioned to interface with Mexico’s judicial institutions and thus were the logical ones to be in the forefront of the cartel war—which, in any event, had been the strategy from the beginning.

  5. Arturo Guzmán Loera, whose nickname was “The Chicken,” had been arrested in 2001. During the seven years that El Chapo was in the Puente Grande prison, until his escape in 2001, Arturo Guzmán played a key role in managing the Sinaloa cartel for his brother. Arturo Guzmán was assassinated at the La Palma maximum-security federal prison in 2004.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Election

  José Reyes Ferriz walked out of his oak-paneled office, through an ample foyer and a conference room, to his personal elevator. It was the fourth of July 2010, a day of national elections in Mexico, elections that most pundits viewed as a referendum on Calderón’s drug war policies. Reyes Ferriz was on his way to vote. In a number of states, including Chihuahua, governorships were up for grabs, in addition to congressional seats and mayorships.1

  The PRI slate for the Chihuahua elections had been set the night of March 9 at the Westin Soberano hotel in Ciudad Juárez, when the representative of the party’s National Executive Committee, Adela Cereso, had arrived from Mexico City to meet with the contenders. Typically, the exiting governor had great influence over the selection of candidates, and José Reyes Baeza had his lineup: Héctor Murguía would replace him in the governor’s slot and Víctor Valencia would be the party’s candidate to be the mayor of Juárez. But Reyes Baeza had not counted on César Duarte, who had recently completed his second term as a federal deputy in congress, where his skill at working with other political parties had earned him the influential position of president of the Chamber of Deputies. Duarte, who had the support of Mayor Reyes Ferriz, was well liked within the party at a national level. Much to the governor’s dismay, Cereso told him that César Duarte, not Hector Murguía, would be the PRI’s gubernatorial candidate. Duarte had succeeded in outflanking the governor’s plans.

  Cereso then convened the six aspirants for the Juárez mayor’s job, one of whom was Víctor Valencia, who’d arrived at the meeting under the impression that he had the position sewn up. Cereso announced to the group that Héctor Murguía would be the party’s “unity” candidate to be mayor of Juárez. Furious, Víctor Valencia stormed out of the meeting in protest. Duarte strenuously opposed Murguía’s candidacy, but was given no choice: it was a bone thrown to Reyes Baeza, who’d been preempted in terms of the gubernatorial succession.

  Foiled in his campaign to secure his party’s nomination for the governor’s slot, Murguía had accepted the consolation prize: he hoped to land his second stint as mayor of Ciudad Juárez, where he’d been mayor between 2004 and 2007, the term immediately preceding that of Reyes Ferriz. The animosity between the mayor and Murguía was such that Reyes Ferriz decided to back the PAN candidate for mayor, a man named César Jáuregui, rather than Murguía.

  Everything about César Jáuregui communicated that he came from a modest background. Early in the campaign, Jáuregui had appeared on El Malilla (The Bad Boy), a local TV show popular among the maquiladora workers and working-class Juarenses. El Malilla, the host, was fast-talking and quick-witted in a streetwise sort of way, sparring with his guests in his customary short sleeves, jeans, and skullcap. El Malilla’s language was chock-full of street slang, his manner Mexican urban hip-hop; he exuded working-class sensibilities. All of this would have seemed to stand in contrast to Jáuregui, dressed in a pressed baby-blue dress shirt and slacks, but Jáuregui came across as a guy who was more comfortable with a beer in hand at a backyard barbecue than at an upper-class cocktail reception. He was chubby, with short-cropped hair and the look of the sharp-witted elementary-school kid who had found his place in the peer group despite an absence of cool.

  Jáuregui invoked his class origins by telling El Malilla that his background was “of the people.” He wanted to help people in their communities, in their barrios, he said. He told El Malilla that the reason improving public transportation was a priority for him was that he had grown up taking the bus back and forth to school. By the end of the show, Jáuregui had apparently passed the test; he received El Malilla’s on-camera endorsement.

  But the heart and soul of Jáuregui’s campaign was less about public transport (a major concern for working class Juarenses) than the more pressing issue, the more obvious issue: the violence that had eviscerated Ciudad Juárez over the last three years. His pitch was consistent: a vote for Murguía was a vote for the dark narco-forces that were destroying the nation, not just the city. His campaign spots were thinly veiled accusations that Murguía was under the control of the Juárez cartel, if not an outright “Godfather.”

  “It’s a horrible feeling, going through our city that has accumulated so much pain,” Jáuregui said in one of his commercials. “With more than six thousand families in mourning because they’ve lost a loved one in a war that few can make sense of, we need a municipal president a quien no le den línea (who won’t toe the line).” In the spot, the words “the line” echoed in reverberated accentuation, bringing home an obvious reference to La Línea, the Juárez cartel’s feared shock troops. That reference was not lost on anyone in Juárez. But Jáuregui also took on the Sinaloa cartel, saying that the city also did not need someone who would “sell it short.” The specific phrase he used, however, was a play on words, because achaparrar means to shorten or to make short, and everyone knew that El Chapo’s nickname meant “shorty.” The message that Jáuregui wanted the voters to take home was that he would not deliver the city to either La Línea, that is, to the Juárez cartel, or to El Chapo Guzmán. In one of the campaign’s face-to-face televised debates, Jáuregui directly accused Murguía of being a Juárez cartel operative, citing a report that had appeared in El Universal, a respected Mexico City newspaper, claiming that Murguía had purchased eleven million pesos worth of property on behalf of the Juárez cartel. He also cited a purported DEA report linking Murguía to La Línea (neither of these reports has ever been confirmed). A visibly furious Murguía threatened to sue Jáuregui over the allegations.

  Though Héctor “Teto” Murguía presented himself as a populist, his background was upper class. He had started out running family businesses over thirty years ago, and at the time of the campaign he was president and general manager of twelve different companies, in addition to serving on the board of directors of several banks. But his public persona was that of a guayabera-wearing ordinary man who talked norteño slang and felt a kinship with the working class.

  The Juárez mayoral campaign was a referendum on the local narco-war and the violence it had spawned. Jáuregui’s views on Murguía were widely shared in Juárez. This was the same Murguía whom El Diario had accused of making Saulo R
eyes rich with insider deals and who had imposed Reyes on the municipal police, making him its director of operations. Jáuregui insisted that electing Héctor Murguía was tantamount to delivering Juárez back into the hands of the Juárez cartel.

  In the days prior to the election, Murguía’s numbers were up and it was looking like the old guard was going to be back in the driver’s seat in Juárez. That eventuality created a great deal of uncertainty as to the future of Calderón’s project in the city. In his campaign spots, Murguía had attacked the federal police and the army, accusing them of committing rampant human rights abuses and of wreaking havoc upon the city. The federal forces were making things worse, not better, Murguía argued, calling for them to leave Juárez. On one radio show he’d mocked the “chilangos,” a term of derision for people from Mexico City (most of the federal police were from the Federal District), making fun of their Mexico City accents and describing them as useless. José Reyes Ferriz made no effort to mask his dislike of Murguía. “He’s absolutely nefarious,” Reyes Ferriz told me.

  One might have thought that such antics would alarm the citizens of Juárez, but throughout the city there was an emerging nostalgia for the ancien régime. The old days might have been laced with corruption, but the violence had been mostly “private” and limited to the narcos themselves; it had rarely spilled over into the public sphere, much less into every nook and cranny of the city, as it had over the last three years. The idea that a vote for Murguía was a vote for the Juárez cartel, whether or not it was true, had lost its toxicity. Like the national elections, the municipal elections were, in effect, a referendum on the city’s stomach for continuing the fight.