. . .
As José Reyes Ferriz left his office to cast his ballot, members of his security detail were posted at the door to his office and at every door along the way to the elevator. As the mayor approached, Roberto, the head of the security detail, punched in the code that opened the elevator door. Two other bodyguards in bulletproof vests, carrying AR-15 automatic rifles, flanked the mayor. Roberto had managed the Ferriz family’s security since the early 1980s, when Reyes Ferriz’s father had been mayor of Juárez. Roberto was like family; his balding gray hair and sad brown eyes gave him the look of a kindly grandfather, but with the demeanor of a man whose entire identity was bound up with the concept of security.
Throughout much of the country, the elections were fraught with fear, but this was especially so in the numerous states where the narco-traffickers held sway. The prior week, in the border state of Tamaulipas, the leading gubernatorial candidate, Rodolfo Torre Cantú from the PRI, had been executed along with most of his entourage at eleven in the morning as they made their way to a local airport during a final campaign swing. Calderón had described his assassination as “an assault against democratic institutions.”
In Juárez, for days now the cartels had been threatening to attack and kill people at voting precincts and to assassinate candidates. I’d spent an afternoon at the electoral center where workers were preparing ballot boxes to be delivered to the various precincts, and it was evident that people were nervous. No one knew what to expect. Under the circumstances, it took courage, not just a sense of civic duty, for these men and women to do their jobs. Just two days earlier the cartels had left signs all over the city threatening to behead Mayor Reyes Ferriz and execute his wife and children.
This very morning the mayor had awoken to the news that in Chihuahua City five men had been executed and left hanging from bridges. As in recent elections in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan, in parts of Mexico elections were being conducted under the threat of mass violence against citizens who showed up to vote. It was full-bore narco-terrorism: the intent of the cartels was to intimidate and frighten the populace and thereby shape electoral outcomes, in a context in which some experts were saying the number of narco-candidates was unprecedented. Such efforts would have their intended effect: in Juárez only about a third of the electorate would turn out to vote.
The mayor was in constant touch with the commander of the Juárez garrison, assessing the state of security. “Mi general,” Reyes Ferriz said, taking a call on his cell phone. “What else is going on?” A call from the representative of the federal forces informed him that there were renewed threats to burn polling places and shoot voters and candidates. “We’re on alert,” the mayor responded.
For José Reyes Ferriz and his team, there was tension in every move. Everyone knew that the threats were real. One could see it in the eyes of his security detail: they approached the mayor’s movements with the same deliberation that combat soldiers use when traversing open terrain in a war zone. The security challenges were daunting, but showing up at his precinct to vote was an obligation that came with the office of mayor. This was especially true given the circumstances; public figures all over the country would be out today performing their civic duty. There wasn’t even a discussion of the matter: the mayor had to appear in front of the cameras and vote.
Three of Ferriz’s security detail stepped into the elevator with him and descended to the first floor, which opened to a private garage where three Suburbans lay in wait. The mayor’s Suburban, with the highest armor rating, had the door to the back seat open, with a guard posted next to it. Once the mayor entered the vehicle the engine was fired up and the garage doors opened. The lead car exited the garage into the city hall parking structure, where a fourth Suburban was waiting for the convoy outside. This vehicle led the way through the garage and into the street, where it assumed a blocking position: the body of the vehicle was perpendicular to oncoming traffic. The mayor’s car roared into the street past the blocking car and onto Malecón Boulevard (near the spot where Enríquez and Redelfs had been assassinated a few months prior), en route to the mayor’s precinct. The other three Suburbans followed, one occupying the right lane so that no one could pull alongside the mayor’s vehicle (the favored sicario modus operandi for executions), and the other two trailing close behind. Each of these other vehicles was carrying four bodyguards, armed with an AR-15 and a pistol each. The rear seats of the two trailing Suburbans had been configured so that they faced backward, making it easier for the security team to monitor the rear of the convoy and detect approaching danger.
On the way, the mayor received a call from César Duarte. “Things look good,” he told Duarte. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm out there,” he said as the convoy happened to pass by the enormous home, replete with indoor swimming pool and tennis courts, that was built in the 1990s by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the notorious head of the Juárez cartel. The home was so close to the U.S.-Mexico border that man with a good arm could almost throw a baseball from the rooftop of the house to the Rio Grande. The mayor made no mention of the death threats or the hanging bodies in Chihuahua City, but he did interrupt the gubernatorial candidate: “Don’t say it,” he said to him at one point. “I’m on a cell phone.” It was the ever-present wariness that one comes to know so well in Juárez.
When the caravan arrived at the polling place, a public school, a half dozen of the mayor’s bodyguards exited their vehicles and secured the area. Some attempted to blend into the crowd, pistols bulging from beneath their untucked shirts. My impression from the communications was that the detail also had people in place at the site prior to the mayor’s arrival. When everyone was in position, the go-ahead was given for Reyes Ferriz to exit his vehicle. He was met by a crush of journalists who followed him to the school’s gate before he continued into the school, escorted by a single bodyguard, to cast his ballot. Roberto stayed at the entrance to the school, sizing up every person who entered.
While the mayor was voting, a man pulled up in a pickup truck and parked across the street. When he exited the truck, one of the mayor’s people thought he’d spotted a gun in the man’s belt under his shirt. The security team closed in on him and three of them stopped him before he could enter the schoolyard. They had him surrounded, hands on their own guns, as they engaged him in an agitated exchange. The man claimed to be a state ministerial police officer, which is why he was armed, he said, flashing his police badge. There was a flurry of communication among the people in charge of the mayor’s security, who were both in the various vehicles and deployed around the school. Finally, the mayor’s people escorted the man to his pickup truck, where he deposited his gun before returning to the school, presumably to cast his ballot. The incident left everyone on the mayor’s security team feeling unnerved.
Before long, a suspicious car that had been spotted earlier became the focus of concern. The car was parked under a tree across the street in an empty lot toward the end of the block, some thirty yards away. “They’ve been there for over an hour and a half, which makes us suspicious,” the mayor’s driver told me. There were three men in the vehicle—an aging, beat-up van—and nothing about them suggested that they had come to the school out of civic duty. “They’re halcones (hawks),” the driver said—the eyes and ears of the cartels. The hypothesis was that they were there monitoring the mayor’s activity. One of the mayor’s SUVs was moved and positioned between the entrance to the school and the suspicious van. “Our people are on them,” I was told.
Just then, word came that the mayor was exiting the polling place. The same group of reporters met him at the gate and the mayor stopped briefly to answer their questions, but he was pressed by Roberto and the bodyguard who’d been escorting him to board his vehicle, which had now moved up to the school’s entrance. The mayor’s team was jittery, given the presence of the presumed halcones and the armed man they’d intercepted. Nerves settled noticeably once the mayor was safely inside his armored Suburban, and so
did the communications chatter among his people.
Back at the Municipal Presidency, the mayor and I followed the elections on the fifty-two-inch flat-screen television that hung from a wall in his office. His assistant had brought us lunch (hamburgers from the Arby’s across the street and coffee from Starbucks). Duarte was no surprise for governor; he’d been ahead in the polls all along and cruised to an easy victory over his opponent. But even though Murguía had also been ahead, there had been a thread of hope that Jáuregui, his opponent, would pull ahead. That hope evaporated quickly once the exit polls began to come in: “Murguía’s got it,” the mayor told me, with obvious resignation. He hit the mute button on the remote as if he’d had enough, leaving silent images to bounce across the screen.
We sat in silence for several minutes. Not long after, as if others had arrived at the same conclusion, Reyes Ferriz received a call from someone at the Juárez Federal Police command center. “All of the top commanders are flying to Mexico City on Monday morning,” the mayor told me once he was off the phone. “They are going to deliberate about what comes next. They don’t want to work with this guy,” he said, in reference to Murguía.
But like it or not, Héctor Murguía was back. The word on the street was that people thought he might be able to broker a peace between the Juárez and the Sinaloa cartels. They were fed up with the violence; they wanted someone to tone things down. Three years of killing sprees, extortions, and rampant crime coupled with a year and a half of near–state of siege with army and federal police roadblocks all over the city had exhausted the populace. As July 4, 2010, drew to a close, the heat of the Chihuahuan desert was heavy on the city where Héctor Murguía had just been reelected mayor. José Reyes Ferriz’s term was set to expire three months hence. When I asked what he planned to do when he left office his response was vague, as if he were pondering that very question and had yet to come up with an answer.
. . .
The mayor of Juárez is a creature of habit. On the morning of Saturday, October 10, José Reyes Ferriz awoke at 5:30 a.m., as was his custom. After looking at the LCD screen on the nightstand to check the household cameras, he ambled down the stairs and unlocked the bank vault door. A metallic groan accompanied the opening of the fortification that separated the landing at the foot of the stairway from the living room and the entry to the house. Padding his way into the kitchen, the mayor poured himself a glass of orange juice before sitting down to his laptop at the dining room table and starting his morning ritual of scanning his favored news sites, which were preset to pop up when his computer came to life. For three years he’d considered this his daily homework: it was his job to know what was taking place in Juárez and elsewhere in Mexico and what people were saying about it. Always, the first site was the federal government’s daily news bulletin, announcing everything from new developments in federal law to the most recent presidential appointments. This was how Reyes Ferriz kept a finger on the pulse of what was going on in Mexico City. Next he read El Diario, the most important paper in Juárez, whose circulation was ten times that of its nearest competitor, El Norte. El Diario’s coverage of local and regional news was by far the most extensive and accurate, even if the paper’s views did not always align with the mayor’s. Reyes Ferriz eventually got up to make himself a cappuccino from the espresso machine in the kitchen before finishing off the round of news with the Chihuahua newspapers, then Excélsior, El Universal, and Reforma, the leading Mexican national newspapers. He saved the American press (USA Today, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the New York Times) for last. The lead story in El Diario that morning was the transfer of power to Héctor “Teto” Murguía; today was the last day that José Reyes Ferriz would be presiding over the city of Juárez.
José Reyes Ferriz delivers his final state of the city address, October 2010. Photo copyright © Ricardo Ainslie.
When the urge struck, Reyes Ferriz got up from the table and went to the kitchen to cook up some breakfast. His favorite was eggs with machaca, strips of dried beef that are a regional specialty. He called his wife and children in El Paso every morning at this time to check in on their day. By the time he finished his morning routine of reading, breakfast, showering, and dressing, it was eight o’clock.
Over the course of his three-year term the mayor had been extremely circumspect about his relationship with Governor Reyes Baeza. In the countless press conferences and hundreds of interviews that he conducted over that interval, Reyes Ferriz had taken pains to shape and parse his words so as not to have a direct, public confrontation with the governor. The reasons were multiple, but it came down to the fact that in Mexico governors are exceedingly powerful and control many essential resources within their states. Any mayor, even the mayor of an important city like Juárez, had to factor in the governor’s predilections in everything he or she did and said. To do otherwise was certain to make it almost impossible for a mayor to govern, a recipe for making a mayor’s life miserable in infinite ways. Reyes Ferriz needed the governor’s cooperation for funding the city’s operations and projects, but he also needed to work with the governor on the political front, given that they belonged to the same political party. These considerations had precluded open conflict with the governor. However, the previous day, José Reyes Ferriz had chosen to stop playing this game. Both men were leaving office, and it was time to end the charade. The mayor arranged a meeting with three local journalists during which he placed a significant part of the responsibility for the enduring chaos in the city at the governor’s feet, thereby publicly breaking with the governor. Reyes Ferriz accused the governor of blocking the mayor’s efforts in myriad ways, but most egregiously by refusing to help fund Juárez’s security needs and refusing to augment the presence of the state police in Juárez. Indeed, the mayor noted that the governor had repeatedly rebuffed him in his efforts to obtain state support for everything from law enforcement to public works.
Reyes Ferriz also accused the governor of protecting Patricia González, the state attorney general, whose ineptness or otherwise-motivated inefficiencies had resulted in judicial processes that were so defective that they had yielded successful convictions of only 2 or 3 percent of those arrested by municipal, state, and federal authorities. In a state with the highest crime levels in all of Mexico, González had presided over a legal system in which massive criminal impunity was the order of the day. Even by Mexican standards this was a travesty. There was no way to fight a war against the cartels when, no matter the evidence against them, most who were apprehended were back on the streets in a matter of days. As an institution for fighting crime, the Mexican legal system was as effective as trying to hold water in a sieve. It was an open secret of scandalous proportions, yet the Mexican Congress and the state legislatures continued to do little about the systemic failures of a dysfunctional judiciary. What should have mobilized local and national outrage was mostly set aside, the numbing aftereffects of a profound sense of helplessness: after nearly a decade of much-trumpeted judicial reform efforts in Mexico, sicarios and other drug cartel members, as well as kidnappers, extortionists, and ordinary criminals, were all but assured a free pass out of prison. And only a fraction of the criminals were even caught in the first place. Reyes Ferriz recounted to the journalists the many times he had privately complained to the governor about the state’s attorney general, complaints that had had no impact. The governor was shielding Patricia González, Reyes Ferriz asserted.
José Reyes Ferriz described his conflicts with the governor as having multiple sources, among them the fact that the governor had energetically backed the candidacy of Víctor Valencia to succeed Reyes Ferriz. The mayor viewed Valencia as disreputable, and he and key allies had succeeded in blocking his political aspirations, notwithstanding the governor’s support for Valencia. The story of the mayor’s conflicts with the governor and the state attorney general was on the front page of El Diario that morning. As Reyes Ferriz readied himself for his final day in office, he knew city hal
l would be abuzz with it.
One of the last things the mayor did every evening before signing off was to confirm the next morning’s departure time with his security team. Reyes Ferriz slept with a guard posted at the door to the house and a municipal police patrol car in front of the house. When the rest of his security detail arrived in the morning, the overnight crew joined the convoy, leaving the house with them. The morning exit was considered one of the riskiest moments of the day, given that the majority of kidnappings and assassinations took place when the target was leaving home: ambushes are more easily set along familiar routes. There were only two ways in or out of the mayor’s subdivision, and the several miles down the Juan Pablo Segundo thoroughfare also made vehicles easy prey. Many executions had taken place along this very roadway. So mornings were always the most tense for members of the security detail. The mayor could see the tension in his bodyguards’ faces and he felt it, too, as they took up their assigned positions and made their way out of the house and into the streets of Juárez.
The mayor’s convoy roared out of the gated community and headed for the Presidencia Municipal for what was anticipated to be a simple, straightforward event. Although the new mayor had already been sworn in, Reyes Ferriz was still officially responsible for the city until the end of the day. The entrega de poder, as the formal handing over of power is called, was to begin at 10 a.m. and consisted of the mayor’s team meeting with the city auditor and his people to review the inventory of equipment that the municipality had provided during Reyes Ferriz’s term. Everything from cell phones to computers, office furniture, and decorations had to be checked off the inventory lists. Reyes Ferriz had anticipated that the entire process would take at most a couple of hours, but over the course of the morning all of his staff, as well as city council members and others who had been part of his team, filtered into the spacious, dark-paneled office to say good-bye. Everything that the city had endured, the grim state of the war, the seemingly endless assassinations, and the reign of terror that the cartels had brought upon the city somehow swelled the atmosphere of this good-bye, giving it an especially somber cast. Many of the men and women who came to bid the mayor farewell had worked together for years, some even prior to Reyes Ferriz’s term. The camaraderie engendered by shared tribulation was clearly in evidence: the mayor’s people had endured a great deal over the course of the last three years, more than any of them could have imagined at the time they’d signed on. There was also evident relief: Héctor Murguía would now be responsible for addressing the city’s profound ills. The bureaucratic and tedious mechanics of checking serial numbers on everything in the office that was not the mayor’s personal property, the mundane elements of the ritual of passing the torch of power, had become the pretext for a bon voyage reception for Mayor José Reyes Ferriz.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 37