The Fight to Save Juárez

by Ricardo C. Ainslie

  Reyes Ferriz left the Presidencia Municipal for the last time hours behind schedule, knowing full well that it was unlikely that he would ever return. Certainly returning to Juárez anytime soon would be akin to signing his own death warrant. Everyone knew that. Still in his armored Suburban, the mayor and his convoy headed back to the house to pick up his personal belongings. There, all of the men who had comprised the mayor’s security detail congregated in the living room for a final good-bye. For Reyes Ferriz it was a moment filled with emotion. His life had been in the hands of these men for three years, and that meant that their own lives had been on the line as well, even more so: with the exception of the mayor’s driver and the man who rode shotgun next to him, the other members of the security team rode in unarmored Suburbans whose sides and windows could be easily pierced by even small-arms fire, much less the ever-present assault weapons preferred by the narcos. Every time they walked out the door, every time they entered a restaurant or even stopped at a stoplight, the team had been fully conscious of the real possibility that a sicario commando group might make an assassination attempt. The threats had been persistent and brutal: severed human heads in trash-strewn lots, severed dog’s heads with notes, and countless poster-board signs threatening to behead the mayor and kill his family. In a city where that kind of blood was seen on a daily basis, such threats were real; they spoke to declared intentions, not idle notions. Reyes Ferriz’s life and the lives of these men had become deeply entwined, producing that rare intimacy borne of sharing moments of great fear and anxiety, but also the profound intimacy borne by the passage of simple, ordinary time: riding in vehicles together day in and day out, chatting or overhearing phone conversations between the mayor and his wife and children, or the ever-present conversations with state and federal authorities, including the president himself. The bodyguards were posted at meetings, they took up strategic positions at restaurants, and they counted on each other as they watched the back of the man they knew to be at the top of the cartels’ target list. The only time the mayor was not with some subset of these men was when he crossed the river to attend a meeting or visit his family (at which times they met him at the bridge upon his return), or when he turned in for the night and made his way up the stairs, locking the bank vault door behind him. These men had safeguarded his life, and he was grateful to them. As a memento, in the living room of the house in Bosques de Aragón, the mayor gave each member of the security team a plaque acknowledging their service and thanking them for their courage and dedication.

  As of the end of the day, the mayor would no longer have the protection of the municipality. His security detail was disbanding. Some, like Roberto, who had been the head of security for the mayor’s father as well, were retiring. Others would be incorporated into the recently reorganized state police. Following the good-byes in the mayor’s living room, the convoy left the house, headed for the Lerdo-Stanton Express Bridge, traveling along the Juan Pablo Segundo throughway that ran parallel to the Rio Grande. The mayor was in his armored Suburban, while the other Suburbans trailed behind. One of his men followed in the mayor’s personal car, a red 2006 Volkswagen Passat. When they arrived at the bridge the convoy stopped one last time. The mayor exited the security of his armored vehicle and gave Roberto an abrazo before waving good-bye to the rest of the men who had been his trusted guardians for three long, hard years. He then stepped into his own car.

  Pressing down on the accelerator, José Reyes Ferriz moved slowly into the sparse traffic crossing the bridge into El Paso. Evening had set in, and the lights along the bridge were already aglow. Below, the trickle of water making its way toward the Gulf of Mexico some eight hundred miles to the east was all but inaudible. Reyes Ferriz was alone now, finally set free of the war and violence that had left nearly seven thousand dead in his city over the last three years. Behind him, the lights of Juárez were also aglow, bright against the desert evening, like so many diamonds cast into the night.

  Notes

  1. Like governors, mayors in Mexico cannot succeed themselves. They get one three-year term, so Reyes Ferriz was not in the running.

  Epilogue

  Not long after the July 4, 2010, elections, attacks on the federal police in Juárez increased. Numerous officers were killed while off duty or on their lunch breaks. Near Villas de Salvárcar, federal police were lured into an ambush by a report that several young women were being abducted. When a patrol arrived at the scene, sicarios opened fire on them from various perches, killing and wounding several officers.

  The most troubling incident was an Iraq War–style terrorist attack that took place on the evening of July 15, 2010. The previous day, the federal police had captured Jesús Armando Acosta Guerrero (aka El 35), the third–most important leader of the Juárez cartel and the head of La Línea. The following day, the federal police received a call to the Emergency Response Center reporting that there was a wounded police officer on the street at the intersection of Bolivia and 16 de Septiembre Streets. As a federal police convoy headed for the scene, they noticed that they were being followed and called for reinforcements. Arriving at the scene, they found a wounded man, bound and in a police uniform, lying beside a green Ford Focus, but as they approached, the car exploded. The blast was of sufficient force as to be heard for several kilometers around and windows in the immediate vicinity were shattered. Triggered by a cell phone after the federal forces had been drawn to the scene, the device was sophisticated, and the likes of it had never before been seen in Mexico. The toll was four killed: a federal police officer, a municipal police officer, one of the emergency responders, and a bystander, in addition to a score wounded, including six federal police. The car bomb was in retaliation for the arrest of Acosta Guerrero and it was the first time such tactics had been used in Juárez. A narco-message left near the Red Cross later that day, signed by La Línea, warned of more such attacks to come. A week later a car bomb with a much larger quantity of explosives was similarly set up, although this time the federal police succeeded in disarming the car bomb before it exploded.

  Months later, on the evening of January 24, 2011, Héctor Murguía, the recently reelected mayor of Juárez, was having dinner with the spokesperson for the Catholic diocese of Ciudad Juárez. Just down the block, two of his bodyguards were standing on the corner of Cuitláhuac and Tlaxcala Streets, waiting for the mayor to wrap up his visit. It was around eight thirty in the evening.

  Nearby, at the Hotel Santa Fe, which was serving as a bivouac for some of the federal police, a taxi driver pulled up to the agents standing guard and informed them that there were civilians armed with assault weapons two blocks away. A contingent of federal police left the hotel with the intent of checking out the suspicious men—the mayor’s bodyguards, unbeknownst to the police.

  Reports differ as to what happened next. The federal police say that when they approached the two men and asked them to identify themselves, one became belligerent and raised his weapon. The federal police shot him twice at close range as the other bodyguard threw himself to the ground.

  Héctor Murguía offered a very different account of what had taken place. According to him, the federal police had approached his bodyguards while he was still dining with the priest. The two men had identified themselves as municipal police officers assigned to the mayor’s security detail, but the federal police had shot the officer without provocation.

  Hearing the shots, the rest of the mayor’s security detail spirited him away in his armored Suburban, “following the security protocol for such situations.” However, not long thereafter, the mayor and seven of his bodyguards arrived at the Hotel Santa Fe, where they blocked the entryway, and, armed, exited their vehicles. Murguía addressed the federal police who were standing guard, demanding an explanation for the shooting and the arrest of the officer responsible for it. Murguía claims the federal officers cursed and mocked him, and when he identified himself as the mayor of Juárez, Murguía claims he was told, “You aren’t anybody
here, son of a bitch!”

  The standoff was tense and volatile, as an angry Murguía confronted the federal police and both sides trained their weapons on one another for an extended interval. It was only defused after a federal police commander and Murguía settled things down. Murguía subsequently called a press conference, where he asserted that the federal police had murdered his bodyguard “in cold blood.” “If this is what the federal authorities do to a bodyguard who identified himself, lowered his weapon, and raised his hands in a gesture of peace and they killed him . . . What must be happening to ordinary citizens?” Murguía remarked. “God only knows how I wasn’t killed,” he added. In the incident’s aftermath, two federal police officers were arrested and charged with homicide, abuse of authority, and improper behavior.

  Several months later, Mexican federal police fired on the convoy of the new Juárez chief of police, Julián Leyzaola, as he headed for the municipal jail following the execution of seventeen prisoners who were members of the Artistas Asesinos. Members of the rival gang Los Aztecas, armed with assault rifles and handguns, had assassinated them. These incidents, as well as another in which Murguía claimed that federal police had pointed their weapons at members of his security detail (Murguía was caught on tape berating the federal officers, jabbing his finger into their chests, telling them that he was in charge of Juárez, not them) made it more than obvious that enormous strains existed between the municipal authorities and the federal police.

  From the time of his campaign, Héctor Murguía had called for the withdrawal of the federal forces. By early summer of 2011, he seemed to be delivering on that campaign promise: he announced that there would be a “gradual withdrawal” of more than five thousand federal police from Juárez by the end of September 2011. In the year since the federal police had relieved the army and taken charge of the city, the tally of the dead had dropped noticeably (from an average of eight and a half executions per day to six), but killings remained at war-zone levels. A source within the federal police told me that an unspecified number of federal agents would remain in Juárez “to conduct operations relevant to federal offenses.” However, the Juárez municipal police would henceforth have responsibility for areas of the city’s security “which by law fall under their purview.” The decision was further evidence of a profound rift between the municipal and federal authorities, although neither publicly acknowledged it as such. What was undeniable was that the federal forces did not have anything that resembled an ally in Héctor Murguía. If their relations with José Reyes Ferriz had at times been strained, Calderón’s security cabinet no doubt now longed for the days when they felt a sense of collaboration with the mayor of Juárez.

  . . .

  In May of 2011, I met with a Mexican intelligence officer at the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, CISEN (he asked that he not be named). He outlined for me the reasons he believed that Mexico was winning the war against the drug cartels. At the time the Calderón administration came to power, in December 2006, there were five major cartels operating in Mexico: the Sinaloa cartel, the Juárez cartel, the Tijuana cartel, the Gulf cartel, and La Familia Michoacana. Those cartels were operating relatively free of interference from Mexican law enforcement or the Mexican Army. In some parts of the country they controlled significant territory and the institutions within that territory. His summary reminded me of Eduardo Medina-Mora’s statement, when I’d interviewed him in London, in which he’d emphasized that at the time that Felipe Calderón launched the war, Mexico had no choice as to what to do; the cartels were no longer simply organized crime groups conducting their business, they had become a threat to the Mexican state.

  The strategy of “disarticulating” the cartels has been largely successful, the CISEN officer told me. The command and control structure of the cartels has been decimated and the cartels severely fractured. Twenty-one of the thirty-seven individuals on Mexico’s Most Wanted list had either been apprehended or killed.1 Of the five original cartels, two of them, the Juárez cartel and the Tijuana cartel, were mere shadows of their former selves (the Juárez cartel continued to control the important border crossings in Chihuahua, and their war with the Sinaloa cartel continued in the state’s cities and rural areas, but the national scope of the Juárez cartel had been significantly reduced). The Gulf cartel had split into two warring factions, with Los Zetas, their armed wing, now fighting to take control of the Gulf cartel territory. La Familia Michoacana had atomized into small bands. The Sinaloa cartel, under the leadership of the mythic El Chapo Guzmán Loera, had always operated more as a federation of closely allied organizations, with Guzmán at the head. The Beltrán-Leyva organization had broken off from El Chapo in 2008 and had been at war with him ever since. Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, a powerful leader within the Sinaloa cartel, had been killed in 2010. And there was evidence of ruptures between groups in Durango, the heart of El Chapo’s territory. The cartels had been eviscerated by a combination of federal operations and internecine conflict, the intelligence officer summarized.

  The CISEN agent told me that one factor making it increasingly difficult for the cartels to operate was that they were being hunted by a variety of Mexican military and law enforcement agencies. The Mexican Army and Marines operated independently of one another, and Mexican federal police had quintupled in size to a force of 35,000 officers (and U.S. sources described their cooperation with American law enforcement as unprecedented). Each of these entities was pursuing the cartels, sometimes collaboratively, sometimes independently, and each had taken down important cartel capos. There were too many players tracking down the cartels and it was costly and difficult to pay all of them off. For example, even though the Beltrán-Leyva cartel had been paying the head of the organized crime unit in the Mexican attorney general’s office $450,000 dollars a month to provide information about investigations and operations, Mexican Army special forces had arrested Alfredo Beltrán Leyva in January 2008. His brother, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, was subsequently killed in December of 2009 by the Mexican Marines. The federal police had also taken down top Beltrán-Leyva operatives.

  A source who had served as a security advisor for President Calderón during the first two years of his administration suggested an additional variable making it more difficult and costly for cartels to ensure the control and protection to which they’d long been accustomed. Prior to 2000, in PRI-controlled, pre-democracy Mexico, what was decreed at the top levels of government was enforced all the way down to the poorest municipalities. That made corruption efficient. Well-placed bribes at the top controlled everything up and down the line. Today’s playing field was much more complex, given that there were so many actors. Mexico’s fledgling democratization had increased the cartels’ cost of doing business. Once a country where a single party controlled everything, today Mexico’s three most influential political parties controlled governorships and municipalities, making it more cumbersome and expensive for the cartels to control local and regional institutions. In response, the cartels had turned to raw intimidation, murdering mayors and attempting to influence electoral processes more directly.

  The Mexican government was perhaps right in its assessment that it was “winning the war,” if by winning they meant arrests of cartel operatives and the fragmentation of cartel operations. There had been unprecedented seizures of cash, weapons, and drugs over the course of the Calderón administration. The problem was that these successes had had no appreciable impact on the one index that mattered most to the Mexican public: the level of violence and the overall climate of lawlessness in some regions of the country. In fact, destabilizing the cartels had generated more violence and more crime, not less. Therein lay the paradox facing the government’s efforts, a paradox that was not easily explained to a Mexican public for whom, in many communities, ordinary life consisted of daily fear of what might happen to them or to their loved ones each time they left their homes.

  In addition to the bloody cartel-on-cartel warfare (the
Sinaloa cartel attempting to seize control of the Juárez plaza, the Zetas attempting to take over the Gulf cartel’s areas of operation, etc.), there were two additional factors behind the tidal wave of crime and violence in Mexico. One was the emergence of the Mexican retail drug markets that had begun slowly in the mid-1990s after the United States’ Operation Hold the Line started making it more costly for the cartels to move product across the border. By 2000, Mexico, which had been a transit point for drugs but not a major consumer of them, was experiencing a precipitous rise in addictions and drug-related crime problems. The majority of deaths across the nation were due to gang-on-gang disputes related to the local retail drug business. Thus, some of this violence was more akin to the Bloods and the Crips killing one another off in the streets of South Central Los Angeles than cartel-upon-cartel violence per se.