Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  The second story was offered by Rosalio himself. After three years, “I couldn’t keep on living with these people telling me what to do, who to kill, where to go, how to sleep, how to go about myself. I can’t live my whole life like that. I can’t live in fear of them saying people [will be] killing me. I had to stop it one way or another.” In the past, he had seen people get shot by rival gangs and then put out to pasture, allowed out of the life. So he said that in a moment of desperation, he decided, at the age of sixteen, to shoot himself.

  He pulled up his trouser leg and showed me the wound. It was large and angry. Some of the nerves were destroyed: he can’t feel much there. After pulling the trigger, he said, he shot himself with Novocain and cleaned the wound up, with the skills he had learned at the training camp. “I was missing a big old chunk of meat so I had somebody help me close it and I sewed it up the best I could. I cleaned it, took some antibiotics.” On the first day, he didn’t feel much. “But the second day—” He sucked his teeth.

  It didn’t work. “They made me sew my bullet wound up and nurse myself,” he said. Not long after, they sent him on another job, to the nightclub in Monterrey. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill anymore. He had had enough. “I was tired of that lifestyle,” he says. “I wanted to be left alone.” That, he says, is the reason they turned on him.

  He wouldn’t say how he got away from the throat cutters. Even after he was arrested, he doesn’t seem to have boasted about that. “Nobody knows what went on,” he said. “Nobody knows. I just—I had to fight for my life. I’m not going to let anybody kill me.”

  But what could he do then? He knew that in Mexico, the Zetas would find him, sooner or later, and they would do to him precisely what he had done to so many people over the preceding three years. So he called the American police in Laredo and said he had information for them. He was back in the United States within forty-eight hours.39 “I didn’t want to die, I didn’t want my family to die, for a mistake that was made when I was thirteen years old,” he says. “I didn’t get caught. I turned myself in . . . Ain’t nobody caught me, no cops went into arrest me. I turned myself in. I just wanted all this to stop . . . I don’t want to live that life anymore. I couldn’t keep on going like that.”

  He made the right call. Years later, as court evidence, Rosalio would see the pictures of what Treviño’s men did to his best friend Jesse not long after Rosalio fled. “Holes everywhere. He got stabbed all over the place. Neck, head, face, chest, arms, all over his neck, face, and he had a hole right here in his head.” Rosalio looked genuinely moved when he described the images, perhaps for the first time in our conversation.

  “He was still a human being,” he says. “He was still my brother.”

  Rosalio is now serving two consecutive life sentences in a prison camp in rural Texas for killings he carried out on that side of the border. He will be released when he is in his eighties, if he lives that long. It is unlikely. After I passed through the barbed wire and metal detectors to see him, the prison guard told me cheerfully that “it would be nothing for them [the Zetas] to be able to reach out and put a hit on him inside prison.”

  A year before I met him, two other prisoners seized Rosalio and stabbed him three times in the back and once in the head. He showed me the scars. His body, I realize now, has a complex topography, where each wound or mess of scar tissue marks a different part of his life. His ripped flesh is a history of the drug war all by itself. He believes they tried to kill him because one of his victims was a member of their prison gang, and so they are obliged to avenge him. Now, for his own safety, he lives in “administrative segregation.” The guard tells me it “is kinda like solitary, except we don’t call it solitary.” Rosalio explained: “You’re in a room twenty-four seven. Can’t go out anywhere. There’s nothing I can do . . . Just in a single cell. By yourself. I’ve been like that for a year already.” He can’t make phone calls or talk to anyone. “The way I’m treated right now—sometimes I think I shoulda let them kill me,” he said.

  He will probably live like this for the rest of his life, entombed from the rest of humanity. He is convinced the cartels could kill his family now. His family, and anyone who comes into contact with him.

  “What makes you think they’re not going to get you?” he said, peering at me. “You want to sit here and say [what] they can’t do—they can do anything they want. You don’t know the reach people got. You don’t know what kind of contacts they got. You don’t know who they got on their payroll. You haven’t lived that life. I have. I know what these people are capable of doing. I know how far they’ll go just to kill somebody. I lived that life. Not you.”

  He thinks obsessively about that day, when he was thirteen, and made that decision to pull that trigger. He will freely admit to and discuss almost everything he did for the Zetas, but he spends more than four hours trying to convince me, in a pleading, pained voice, that his account of that moment is true, and he was forced.

  I realize now I should have told him: It’s not that moment that sealed your fate. It’s the moment when the drug war was launched, long ago. I don’t know if he would have understood.

  Clearly, Rosalio was a disturbed adolescent, and would have been, whatever our drug policies. But it was the war for drugs40 that took his adolescent disturbance and gave him huge cash incentives to cultivate it, enlarge it, and live off it. It said: Murder, and we will shower you with money and cars and women. It gave him paramilitary training to carry out those murders as efficiently as possible. And it hollowed out the Mexican police force so he could continue those murders without fear of arrest.

  “Everybody around me is dead now,” Rosalio said to me, less, I think, in a tone of self-pity than of shock. “Everybody I used to hang around with—they’re all dead. There’s not even a handful of us that are alive.”

  A few months after I met Rosalio, when I was back in New York, it was reported in the international press that Miguel Treviño had risen, through slaughter, to become number one41 in the Zetas. And then, a few months after that, it was reported that Miguel Treviño had been captured by the Mexican police42 in Nuevo Laredo—almost certainly because they were paid by a rival drug gang to take him out.

  Nobody doubts that another gangster now controls the routes through Mexico into the United States, and nobody doubts he has a fresh batch of expendable child soldiers to defend him.

  Chapter 10

  Marisela’s Long March

  Rosalio’s story was so gruesome that I was sure it couldn’t possibly capture the day-to-day life of most Mexicans in the middle of the drug war. He was—as he says—a soldier. Soldiers take part in violence. I kept asking myself: What is life like for the noncombatants? What is normal life like? All these people I could see buying burgers in Wendy’s and flatscreen TVs in the mall in Juárez—clearly they weren’t working for the Zetas. I wanted to know how living in the middle of all this killing affected them.

  As I talked to people all over Juárez, I slowly began to glimpse the answer, but it really became clear to me only when I began to investigate a story of a girl who fell in love, and a mother who went looking for her. I learned it—as will become clear as the story progresses—by tracking down the people1 who knew them, and by reading through the records from the time.

  At first, this will seem like it is a story from a different book, because it focuses on people who have nothing to do with drugs or drug dealing. But in fact it is the closest I came—and the closest, I believe, that I can bring you—to understanding how the drug war has reshaped the psyche of Mexico, and the many other countries on the supply route.

  Rubi Fraire was on a vacation with her big Mexican family in Jalisco. They all stopped off in a diner where the roof was made of palm leaves and a sleepy river rolled past. She was eleven years old—a sarcastic, slightly plump little girl who was always quipping. Her mother, Marisela, was on a rare break from her endless whirl of work. She was a nurse in the local hospital, and when
she clocked off from that job, she sold necklaces and chains and rings. It was exhausting, but she believed in working hard for her family more than anything: she was saving up to buy a shop.

  Marisela counted her kids back into the car and—in a moment the family would later remember as like a scene in Home Alone—she must have counted somebody else’s kid by mistake. They all clambered in and drove off. All except Rubi.

  It was only two hours later that they realized she was not with them. “Where is she?” Marisela gasped. How could this happen? How could she forget her?

  They drove back in a panic to the last place they had seen her. They expected Rubi to be in tears—or gone.

  They pulled into the diner. Is she . . . ? Where is . . . ?

  And there was Rubi. She was laughing. She had made friends with another little girl and she was eating fish.

  Rubi’s older brother, Juan, asked her if she had been scared. No, she says: “I knew that my mom was coming back for me.”

  Rubi knew that Marisela would always come back for her, no matter what happened. She was right. What she didn’t know was quite how far Marisela would have to go to do that.

  A few years later, Rubi had a crush. A tall, skinny twenty-two-year-old with sticky-outy ears and an impressive line in hard-man talk turned up at her mother’s new carpentry store in Ciudad Juárez asking for a job.

  “Please help me out, I don’t have money to buy food for my little girl,” Sergio said. “I’ll do anything that needs to be done. Give me a job at least for a couple of days.”

  Marisela was feeling softhearted, so she made Sergio a carpentry assistant. Soon, her daughter was hanging around him all the time. She was fourteen, and impressed by his tall tales of being a DJ for a radio station, of being fired because he slept with the owner’s daughter, and of owning an AK-47. By now, Rubi had developed fast. She was curvy and precociously beautiful.

  We don’t know when they first become involved. He got a tattoo with Rubi’s name on it, and started telling her that her mother didn’t love her. Why is she on your back for not doing well at school, if she really cares about you?

  And one morning, Rubi was gone. The police refused to go get her. A few months later, Marisela found her, pregnant, and they became friends again—but Rubi ran back to Sergio each night.

  Just beyond the frame of this small domestic drama, their city was starting to look like the set of the Saw movies. Chopped-up bodies were being found all over the streets of Juárez. Decapitated corpses hung from the traffic overpasses with signs from the cartels declaring they were in charge now. But this had nothing to do with Marisela and her family. Like most people in Juárez, they looked away and tried to get on with their lives. What else could they do?

  One day, Rubi’s big brother, Juan, turned up to redecorate the flat where Rubi lived, and he was puzzled by what he found. The furniture was gone. The place was empty. There was only one thing: a note from Rubi. It said that she was having a lot of problems with Sergio because Marisela kept criticizing him, and they were going away to find a new life, free of her, far away.

  Rubi had run off before. She always came back.

  Christmas came. Rubi didn’t call.

  New Year’s Eve came, and still Rubi didn’t call.

  Marisela was puzzled. There had been no fight before she vanished, not this time. Where was she? She decided to visit Sergio’s mother to see if she knew. When she arrived, she saw something that startled her. It was Rubi’s baby. He was with Sergio. But there was no Rubi.

  Sergio said Rubi had abandoned them both. To Marisela, this was inconceivable. She could leave Sergio, yes, but her own baby? She looked again at Rubi’s letter, and she had a fear: What if she hadn’t written it? What if it was faked?

  When she returned shortly after to visit her grandson, she found Sergio had vanished and taken the baby with him. Marisela and her eldest son, Juan, decided to print up flyers of Sergio’s face and leaflet his neighborhood, Fronterisa Baja, asking people to come forward if they’d seen either of them.

  But nothing came of it.

  Then, after two weeks, there was a call. It was a teenager named Angel.

  “I need to talk to you—I’m going to tell you something real hard,” he said. “I don’t want to talk because I’m scared. [But] I have a family member [who] is missing also. I know how you are feeling. I know the feeling you have when you are looking for somebody and you can’t find them.”

  When Marisela met Angel, he was shaking. She had to drive him far out of the neighborhood before he was able to form the words he had to say.

  Months before, he had been hanging out in his ’hood when Sergio drove up to a group of them and said he needed help. He had to remove some furniture from his house, and there was some quick money in it if they’d help him, so a posse of them—Sergio’s brother Andy, Angel, and a ten-year-old boy—went back there. And when they did, they saw Rubi. Her head had been smashed in. She was dead. The kids didn’t want to get involved in this. Sergio became furious. If you don’t help me fix this, he announced, I’ll kill you all.

  So they rolled up Rubi’s body and put it in the truck. Sergio drove off with the ten-year-old boy. And Angel had had to live with what he’d seen ever since.

  Marisela and Juan didn’t know what to make of this. The kid seemed plausible. But they didn’t want to believe it. She begged Angel to come to the police with her. Finally, terrified, he agreed. The police wrote it up, but still nothing happened.

  She turned up at the police station every day now, demanding to know: “So what are we going to do today” to find Sergio? “What’s the next step?” She virtually moved into the police station as a one-woman pressure group. But even now, the police were shrugging. Sergio has vanished: What can we do?

  At this point, Marisela made a decision. If the police wouldn’t do their job, she would do it. She would become a detective. In the middle of the killing fields of Ciudad Juárez, she was going to become a freelance police force of one.

  She trawled the mountains around the city, looking hour after hour for Rubi’s corpse. Then she headed back to Sergio’s neighborhood to hand out flyers. Finally, one day, a woman told Marisela she knew where Sergio was. I can’t disclose the details of who this woman was, because it might get her killed. But she told Marisela that Sergio was in Fresnillo sixteen hours from Juárez, and gave Marisela his landline number. She took it to the police and . . . still nothing. They refused to act.

  Marisela had been feeling ill for a long time. She assumed it was because of Rubi’s disappearance, but her doctors told her she was wrong. She had breast cancer, and she needed a double mastectomy urgently.

  At this point, most of us would have given up. Marisela did not.

  A few days after the operation, she set off for Fresnillo. She had tubes attached to each breast to drain the fluid and serum that seeped from her into a container.

  And then, in Fresnillo, she found him. The local police finally seized Sergio, and he immediately confessed. Yes, he had smashed Rubi’s skull. He had set her on fire and tossed her body in the area on the outskirts of the city where the local abattoir dumps the bones and grease from the slaughtered pigs. The police started a search back in Juárez. They were only able to recover one third of her body: her arm, a few parts of her head—not even the skull. Just fragments. There were thirty-six bones in total. The investigators told Marisela that normally, when you are burned, your head explodes through your eyes and your ears, but because Rubi’s skull was broken, hers had exploded through the hole in her head.

  Marisela believed there must be more of Rubi left than that. She drove with her eldest son Juan to the abattoir dump. There were thousands and thousands of pig bones, and wheelbarrows dumping more all the time. They started to scramble through the bones and the grease, a pump still attached to each of Marisela’s breasts. “There were maggots and the smell of death and all these bones—we were going through the bones trying to find one piece of her. Trying to
find one piece of her,” Rubi’s brother, Juan, remembers. “Of course we didn’t find anything.”

  Angel testified at the trial. He described everything he saw, and he explained that Sergio had threatened to kill him if he ever spoke out about it.

  One day, Sergio turned to Marisela from the dock and said: “I know that I did a big harm that nobody will be able to repair. She already said that she will not forgive me, but I ask your forgiveness, Marisela, because I know that it was a great harm. And it is true what you said—‘Where was God at that moment?’ Unfortunately, I didn’t know God at that moment, but I had the good chance to find God in jail. I don’t have words2 . . . that’s all.”

  It was obvious he would be convicted—but then everything took a mysterious turn. The judges said they couldn’t accept Sergio’s confession, because the prosecutor has to be present for a confession to be valid. On these grounds alone, they said there was insufficient evidence, and he was acquitted.

  Marisela always believed in doing things the right way. Now, Juan says, “it was like she was betrayed by her own people, because she believed in the authorities.” She announced: “These judges have killed my daughter again.” Nobody understood why this had happened, but they knew it wasn’t unusual: the murder conviction rate in Juarez is just 2 percent.3

  Angel—the kid who had testified at the trial—was found dead along with his family, just as Sergio had promised.

  Marisela started to walk the streets of Juárez with signs demanding justice for Rubi, holding aloft her picture. She called on all the mothers who had missing daughters to leave their homes and join her. All over the country, people who protested were being murdered, but Marisela would not be stopped. And steadily, as they saw her standing up, other mothers began to come out into the streets to join her, holding aloft their own pictures of their own daughters. They walked all day, through the deadliest city in the world, refusing to accept that this is how things would always be. She said in a speech: “It is only a few4 of us that are gathered here, but there are plenty more waiting at home, crying . . . We ask you: How many more will it be? How many victims? . . . We stand alone in this struggle. Please join and support us.” Everywhere they went, people would shout “Keep on going!” and “We’re with you!”