The fracturing of the cartels had also resulted in a proliferation of criminal bands engaging in ordinary street crime, including the lucrative kidnapping and extortion rackets. In Juárez, I spoke to shopkeepers and small business owners who were deeply afraid of the extortionists. People who did not pay the cuota were executed or had their relatives or employees kidnapped, or their businesses burned to the ground (both as a consequence for not paying and as a way of terrorizing others who were being extorted). These crimes were taking an enormous toll on citizens, which is why Calderón’s popularity was sagging, notwithstanding his government’s success in dismantling the cartels.
Though the dividing lines were anything but clear given who the players were, Mexico was now actually fighting two different, if interrelated, wars: the war against the cartels (which was under the purview of federal authorities), and an explosion of ordinary street crime (much of which was under the purview of state and local police forces). The Mexican government had had a significant impact on cartel operations, but organized crime groups had proven to have a tremendous capacity to adapt and to reinvent themselves. Meanwhile, local crime had become an enormous challenge. And even as the federal government succeeded in strengthening the federal police and the military as tools for fighting organized crime, the institutions for fighting ordinary crime, the state and municipal police forces, were still highly problematic: many remained infected by cartel influence and the traditional corruption that had been their mainstay for decades. As “ordinary” (though no less violent) crime exploded, the institutions charged with meeting that challenge were at best inadequate, at worst still participating and colluding with it.
The biggest failure of all remained the Mexican judicial system, a system so flawed and byzantine that it ensured criminals’ impunity in all but a small percentage of cases. The fact was so apparent and so grotesquely obvious that no one could fail to see it, yet the Mexican Congress was either unwilling or unable to implement meaningful reform. Admittedly, the challenge was complex, involving both reforms to Mexican law enforcement (how crimes were investigated, how police were trained to handle evidence, questions of human rights, etc.) as well as judicial reform (how attorneys were trained and how judges and the courts worked to establish truth and culpability or innocence). But the Mexican Congress had dallied with these questions for more than a decade, and the outcome of those years of debate were far short of what the Mexican nation needed if it was going to be saved from the narco-disease by which it was being devoured from within. Instead, the absence of judicial reform in Mexico bordered on legislative malfeasance; it was unconscionable, but politics and personal agendas consistently trumped the greater good in these deliberations. No progress was possible without substantive reform. It was a matter of will, but it was also a matter of the Mexican public pressuring, insisting that legislators do the necessary work.
In late August of 2011, four vehicles pulled up to the entrance to the Casino Royale in Monterrey, Nuevo León, where they set fire to the establishment, trapping and killing fifty-two people inside. The act of narco-terrorism resulted in the greatest number of civilian deaths on record in Mexico. President Calderón declared three days of national mourning, vowing to track down the killers. The federal attorney general’s office offered a nearly three-million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the culprits. In an unusual move, Calderón delivered a fifteen-minute speech to the Mexican nation. Especially noteworthy were the last four minutes of the speech, in which he directly and pointedly addressed the American people, the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. government. Calderón thanked the United States for its cooperation and for the information and intelligence that had helped Mexico “to capture dozens of organized crime leaders and hit their criminal structures.” Calderón asked Americans to “reflect upon the tragedy that we are living in Mexico.” It was partly a plea, partly a demand. “Part of the tragedy that we are living as Mexicans,” Calderón said, “comes from the fact that we live next door to the greatest consumer of drugs in the world.” (It was a play, perhaps, on the oft-repeated phrase apocryphally attributed to Porfirio Díaz following the Mexican-American War: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!”) Calderón called on Americans to reduce their “insatiable” drug consumption or institute “mechanisms” that would deprive the cartels of the profits derived from drug trafficking (a thinly disguised appeal for legalization strategies). Finally, Calderón addressed the fact that the cartels were armed with weapons that had been purchased in the United States. “There is no reason that hundreds of thousands of weapons are being sold to criminals,” he argued. He urged the United States to close the “criminal” sale of high-powered arms and assault weapons. These weapons were going into the hands of criminals operating in Mexico and everyone knew it. The problem had a solution, Calderón argued. The United States “has done it in the recent past. Stop the indiscriminate and uncontrolled sale of assault weapons!” Calderón demanded.
Perhaps it was the onslaught of Hurricane Irene, which was preparing to hit the Eastern Seaboard the day of Calderón’s speech, but in the United States Calderón’s words, like much of what was taking place in Mexico, received scant attention. By the fall of 2011 the national tally of the dead since the beginning of the narco-wars was nearing fifty thousand, though no one could know the true number with any certainty.2 In Juárez, the grim tally had exceeded nine thousand souls, and the counting appeared far from over.
. . .
One afternoon I visited a cemetery in the heart of one of Juárez’s bloodiest neighborhoods. I’d been told that the violence was so transforming the city’s culture that it was even altering the rituals around death. The man who oversaw the cemetery told me that funeral directors like himself no longer stood too close to the victims’ families for fear that sicarios might come to the graveside and assassinate the deceased’s relatives along with anyone who happened to be standing near them. It went against the grain of his job of providing comfort, he said, but people in his line of work saw no alternative. Recently, a van full of men wearing sunglasses had pulled into the cemetery just as a funeral was getting underway. The funeral director and his crew had panicked. “They looked like sicarios,” he told me. It turned out they were only a mariachi band contracted to play at the graveside. But the panic was testimony to the edginess that had come to reign over everything. Implicit in the funeral director’s lamentation was the connotation that civilization itself seemed to be unraveling. I left the cemetery feeling disquieted.
Less than fifty yards from the cemetery entrance, I happened upon a group of six young men. In Juárez, in this neighborhood, the reflexive assumption was to assume that they were cholos or NiNis. All of them were under twenty, some sporting tattoos. But they were holding musical instruments, not assault rifles. The musicians (three trumpet players, two percussionists, and a bass player) were playing tropical cumbia music outdoors, in the driveway of a house. They told me that they were called Banda La Palmera. “We’re playing at a party tonight!” they added, almost in a chorus. There was an innocence in their excitement that I found refreshing. That day I had been to two executions prior to visiting the cemetery, and I’d been feeling the press of the city’s violence. The cumbia group dissolved those emotions. These young men were full of life. It was a serendipitous gift, I thought. In this forlorn neighborhood, surrounded by so much death, the musicians were evidence of the resilience of the human spirit.
Two years later, there was a glimmer of light. As October 2012 drew to a close, the tally of the dead for the year was running slightly more than 700, the lowest murder rate since the drug war had begun in 2008. Local tax revenues were up (a sign that people were going out to restaurants and making purchases in stores), as were building permits and real estate sales. Some credited the purported victory of the Sinaloa over the Juárez cartel, others the success of Mexican law enforcement, still others the rebounding maquiladora industry enjoying the fruits o
f a post-recession American economy. There had also been unprecedented investment in the city’s social fabric. Whatever the reasons, the turn made it possible for some to begin to hope that Mexico’s most brutalized city had perhaps seen the worst of it.
Notes
1. At the top of Mexico’s Most Wanted list was Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán Loera. Following the 2011 execution of Osama Bin Laden, INTERPOL listed El Chapo as the most wanted man in the world.
2. People who had been lifted and disappeared were not in the tally, for example, and every month or so a mass grave was discovered in some part of the country containing victims who had been dead from weeks to years. Given the absence of adequate investigations, it was often a matter of conjecture whether any given murder was a cartel- or gang-related execution.
Interviews
Juárez Interviews
Anonymous (“Elena,” mistress to mid-level Juárez cartel operative)
Anonymous (former Juárez cartel operative during Amado Carrillo Fuentes era)
Anonymous (former Juárez municipal police captain)
Jorge Luis Aguirre, Editor of La Polaka, Juárez/El Paso
María Teresa Almada, Centro de Asesoría y Promoción Juvenil
Laurencio Barraza, Organización Popular Independiente
Nohemí Barraza, El Diario
Sergio Belmonte Almeida, Director of Communications, City of Juárez
Alejandro Bringas, Juárez photojournalist
Mariana Chew, social justice and environmental activist, Juárez/El Paso
Julián Contreras, Juárez community activist
Beatriz Corral, El Norte
Luz María Dávila, mother of two Villas de Salvárcar victims
Rosario Gabriela Díaz Mena, Principal, Escuela Primaria Federal Justo Sierra Mendez, Juárez
Alonso Encina, father of Villas de Salvárcar victim
Isidro López, Juárez evangelist, Punto de Encuentro de Asociaciones Civiles
Verónica Lozano, Director of Community Centers
Father Martín Magallanes, Catholic priest, prison activist
Father Mario Manríquez, Catholic priest, neighborhood activist
Isidro Morales Villanueva, President, Parents’ Association, Escuela Primaria Federal Justo Sierra Méndez, Juárez
Father Kevin Mullins, Catholic priest, Anapra, Chihuahua
Juan Muro, independent Juárez videojournalist
Alfredo Quijano Hernández, Editor, El Norte
José Reyes Ferriz, Mayor of Juárez, 2007–2010
Edgar Román, Canal 44 (television), Juárez
Gustavo de la Rosa, State of Chihuahua Human Rights Commission, Juárez Representative
Raymundo Ruiz, Juárez photojournalist
Mario Héctor Silva, El Universal correspondent in Juárez
Jaime Torres, Office of Communications, City of Juárez
Interviews with Mexican Academics and Government Officials
Anonymous (officer, Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional [CISEN])
Sigrid Arzt, Commissioner of the Mexican Federal Institution of Public Access to Information (IFAI), former Security Advisor to President Felipe Calderón
Luis Astorga, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Manuel Balcazar Villareal, Coordinator of Special Projects, Presidencia
Enrique Betancourt Gaona, Secretaría de Desarrollo Social
Juan Buenrostro, Communications, Secretaría de Seguridad Pública
María Josefina Linda Carreón Chairez, Presidencia
Fernando Castillo, Director of Communications, Procuraduría General de la República
Jorge Chabat, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Carlos Cristóbal Flores, Inspector, Federal Police, Juárez
Genaro García Luna, Director, Secretaría de Seguridad Pública
Agustín Marciel, Mexican Consulate, El Paso, Texas
Eduardo Medina-Mora, Mexican Ambassador to the United Kingdom, former Federal Attorney General
Adriana Obregón Andría Vásquez, Advisor on Social Policy, Presidencia
Lic. Lizeth Parra, Director of Communications, Secretaría de Seguridad Pública
Alejandro Poiré, National Security Spokesman (Mexico), Secretary of National Security Council (Mexico)
Facundo Rosas, Director of the Federal Police, Secretaría de Seguridad Pública
Juan Ramón Salinas, Communications, Secretaría de Seguridad Pública
Guillermo Valdés, Director, Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISEN)
United States Interviews
Fred Burton, Stratfor Global Intelligence
Howard Campbell, Ph.D., Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso
Michael Lauderdale, Ph.D., Department of Social Work, University of Texas at Austin
Tony Payan, Ph.D., Department of Political Science, University of Texas at El Paso
Interviews with U.S. Government and Law Enforcement Officials
Diana Apodaca, Special Agent, Public Information Officer, Drug Enforcement Administration, El Paso Field Division
Joseph Arabit, Special Agent in Charge, El Paso Division, Drug Enforcement Agency
Robert Lindemann, Homeland Security Agency
Sergeant Joel “Purple” Peña, El Paso Police Department
Greg Thrash, Resident Agent in Charge, Drug Enforcement Administration, Austin, Texas
Index
Acosta Hernández, José Antonio, 194–195
“After Ten Home Is Best,” 165–166
Agencia Estatal de Investigaciones, 30, 75
Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI), 33, 77
Aguascalientes, 204, 207
Aguilar, José, 190
Aguilar, Rafael, 39, 89, 90–92
Alarcón Olvera, Salomón, 246, 250
Alfaro Siqueiros, David, 181
Altavista, 156–157
Amnesty International, 172, 175
AMOR (Municipal Accord of Order and Respect), 10
Aragón, Hortensia, 208–209
Aristegui, Carmen, 126
Armando Acosta Guerrero, Jesús, 265
Armando Segovia, Jesús, 189, 192
Armendáriz, José Luis, 177
Arrellano, Ortiz, 230, 240
Arroyo, José Dolores, 193, 197
Artistas Asesinos: connection to neighborhood gangs, 27; execution in prison, 266; war with Los Aztecas, 193–195, 197, 199
Asiaín, Guillermo, 227
Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez. See Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez
Aztecas, Los: assassinate rival prisoners, 11, 266; connection to Barrio Azteca, 237; connection to neighborhood gangs, 27; role in Juárez drug market, 54–55, 150; Rosales Rosales mistaken for member, 169; war with Artistas Asesinos, 193–195, 197, 199
Badiraguato, 173
Baja California, 12
Barquito de Papel, 234, 237
Barraza, Laurencio, 156–158, 164, 167
Barrio Azteca, 237–238
Barrios Terrazas, Francisco, 40
Belmonte, Sergio, 1, 126
Beltrán-Leyva, Alfredo, 268
Beltrán-Leyva, Arturo, 268
Beltrán-Leyva organization, 268
Blanco, René, 192
Booth, William, 229
Boys and Girls First!, 156, 163
Bridge of the Americas, 16
Cadena, Rodrigo, 192
Calderón, Felipe: collaboration with U.S., 234; criticism of drug war strategy, 199, 208–209, 233–234; criticism from the left, 92, 173, 177, 201, 204; decision to use Army, 35, 79, 171; deployment of troops, 6, 241; election of, 3; focus on federal police, 33–35; managerial style, 215; on “new strategy” for Juárez, 204–207, 209; protests against, 225; public opinion of, 127, 214; reaction to U.S. Consulate murders, 239–240; response to Casino Royale massacre, 271; response to execution of Torre Cantú, 255; response to Villas de Salvárcar, 196–198; on Todos Somos Juárez, 227; visits Juárez, 216–222; v
isits with Villas de Salvárcar families, 216–218; on “war” against cartels, 4
Camarena, Enrique “Kiki,” 233
Camargo, 38
Camino Real Hotel, 127, 157, 214, 225, 227
Campestre, 141–142, 199
Carrera, Laura, 225
Carrillo Fuentes, Amado, 45, 151, 256
Carrillo Fuentes, Rodolfo, 13
Carrillo Fuentes, Vicente, 13
Carrillo Moreno, Laura, 176
Casa Aliviane, 149–151
Casa Amiga Crisis Center, 216–218
Casino Royale, 270
Castillo Tapia, Fernando, 4
CBTIS-128 High School, 183, 192, 211
Central de Abastos, 200
Centro de Derechos Humanos Paso del Norte, 225
Centro de Información y Solidaridad Obrera, 225
Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISEN), 32–33, 247, 267
Centro de Rehabilitación Social (CERESO), 11, 54
Cereso, Adela, 252
CERI. See Emergency Response Center
Cerro del Águila, 169
Cháirez, Julián, 29, 41
Cháirez, Leonel, 30, 41
Chamizal High School, El, 39
Chávez Cano, Esther, 216
Chávez Castillo, Jesús Ernesto, 151
Chavira, Carlos, 211
Chiapas, 174
Chihuahua, 5, 35, 201, 236
Chihuahua City: ambush of Reyes Baeza, 124; assault on Ciudad Madera, 90; election day executions, 255; home of Reyes Ferriz, 38; meetings in, 19, 23; shootout in, 24
Chihuahua Human Rights Commission, 168, 170, 176
Cibeles, 48, 212, 219
Cima, La, 53, 55
CIPOL, 25, 144–145
CISEN. See Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional
Citizen’s Watch, 200
Clinton, Hillary, 239
CNN, 126, 128, 237
Coahuila, 5, 236
cocaine: Colombian trafficking of, 62–64; confiscation by army, 80; confiscation by federal government, 244; confiscations by Juárez police, 57; domestic consumption, 48, 53–54, 208; price, 85; trafficking by Juárez cartel, 85; use by Juárez cartel, 151
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 39