To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  The next day the army sent out a press release that read, “On the 26th of the current month an incident took place near the community of Santiago de los Caballeros, municipality of Badiraguato, Sinaloa, in which two soldiers and four civilians lost their lives and two soldiers and one civilian were injured; one civilian was detained and turned over to an agent of the Federal Public Prosecutor.” The army lied. The press release conflated two separate incidents that took place in different places and at different times to make it look as if the massacred family had been involved in a shoot-out and had killed two soldiers. As Javier Valdez reported in Ríodoce on March 31, 2008, two soldiers were indeed killed and one wounded, but on the other side of Badiraguato municipality, near San José del Llano.

  By May 2008, during the first year and a half of Felipe Calderón’s drug war, the Mexican National Human Rights Commission received 634 complaints against the army for abuses ranging from murder to torture to robbery. (One year later the number of complaints would rise to more than two thousand.) The human rights activists at the Sinaloa Civic Front faced the escalation of army abuses and thought, what would happen if soldiers could be tried in civilian courts for crimes against civilians? They worked with the Mexico City-based Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Organization to take the cases of army massacres of civilians to the Supreme Court as justification to revoke special military jurisdiction for crimes soldiers commit against civilians.

  On July 27, 2009, Ríodoce published a front-page article about the Supreme Court case. A full-color photograph of soldiers, armed and standing at attention, appeared under a headline that read, “Army on the sidelines: Court to review military jurisdiction for Santiago de los Caballeros massacre.” One month later, at 6:00 a.m., Salomón Monárrez looked past the barrel of a 9mm pistol and watched a man in sunglasses shoot him to the ground.

  Salomón Monárrez was not the first member of the Sinaloa Civic Front to receive a bullet. On September 6, 2007, Ricardo Murillo Monge, who cofounded the organization together with his sister Mercedes and Monárrez, was found in his car, parked near a gas station and a major shopping mall in Culiacán, shot through the head. The day before, a few men had come by the office looking for him. They saw him from a distance and left. At the time Ricardo Murillo, 66, was selling his car; it had a FOR SALE sign in the window. The next day the men came back and asked Ricardo Murillo to show them the car. He left with them, leaving the light and air-conditioning on at his office. He was next seen dead. The gas station near where he was left has a closed-circuit video camera mounted on a wall. The camera clearly captured the killers walking away from the parked car. One of the killers even turned back and faced the camera, apparently unaware he was being videotaped. The camera stills, clearly identifying the killers, are in Ricardo Murillo’s case file. Police never identified or detained these men, nor have they made an arrest in the case. At the time of his death, Ricardo Murillo was investigating the massacre of Adán Esparza’s family near La Joya de los Martínez four months prior. A week before his murder he had held a press conference about the case. The day before his murder Ricardo Murillo decried the impunity of the army massacre of Adán Esparza’s family on a radio show.

  Mercedes Murillo, Ricardo’s sister and the 74-year-old current president of the Sinaloa Civic Front, joined us in the office. Again I introduced myself as a journalist, and Murillo, also known as Meché, said, “Okay,” took a seat, and proceeded to unleash the following appraisal of the situation.

  “The only thing organized, well-organized, in Mexico is organized crime,” she fired off. “Everything else is unorganized. How is it possible that in Mexico the government jumps off to a war where all the generals are divided? The PGR can’t stand the SIEDO [the Assistant Attorney General for Specialized Investigations and Organized Crime], and neither of those two can stand the AFI [Federal Investigative Agency]. The army doesn’t like the AFI, the SIEDO, or the PGR. And all these federal agencies can’t stand the state agencies. So, what is happening in this war? Twenty-eight thousand people are dead.

  “People have lost all faith in the authorities, the only thing in this war that we can believe in is the dead. So far in this six-year term [of Felipe Calderón’s administration that began in December 2006] 3,000 people have been slain in Sinaloa. Today we read in the newspaper that 300 more federal police are coming to Sinaloa. And the question is: why? If thousands of soldiers came and the executions continued, and the violence continued. . . . Today we are worse off than before.

  “So the Sinaloan Civic Front together with the Miguel Agustin Pro, went to the Supreme Court to ask that when a soldier commits a crime of civil jurisdiction, the soldier be tried by civilian courts. Because the way things are now the military killed these four people [in Santiago de los Caballeros] and we do not know where the trial stands because they are trying them with military prosecutors and before military judges. So we do not know what is happening. Along with the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez we took this complaint to the Supreme Court and the truth is they sent us packing; they said no. They told us that soldiers can kill civilians the military will judge them. They will not be judged by civilians.

  “Today in the midst of such hopelessness they start to talk about legalizing marijuana. If they legalize it or if they don’t legalize it, the marijuana is everywhere. And it is the least harmful. He works in construction,” she said pointing to Monárrez who owns a small contracting business, “and he’ll tell you that he knows construction workers who have smoked marijuana for years and it’s no big deal. But Sinaloa became a place for the transit of other drugs, not marijuana, but synthetic drugs including cocaine and this is now a transit place en route to the United States. And so what we most lament in Sinaloa are our dead. What we most lament in Sinaloa is that the government should launch a war without prior investigation, launch a war with everyone divided, launch a war where we don’t know who is responsible for all our dead.”

  I asked both Murillo and Monárrez about the investigation into Monárrez’s attempted murder. What is happening in the case?

  “We don’t know,” Meché answered in a tired voice. “Who are you going to demand justice from? The governor? The President of the Republic? The state police? The federal police? The army? Just look at all these I’m naming. The SIEDO? The AFI? The PGR? Who? Who? Who is responsible for all that is happening in Mexico? That is a question that you journalists have to ask. Who is owning up to all this? Because it’s not just that they are killing; the widows are left with nothing. There are thousands of orphans. It is not just a murder attempt, but also all the consequences that come after: work, family, the disintegration of everything you have. Disintegration everywhere you look—economic, political, social. That is the situation with drug trafficking, and no one is responsible, and they say it is a war, but we don’t know what it is.”

  And her brother’s case?

  “The photos are in the case file, but nobody is looking for those men. That’s why it’s called impunity,” she said. “There are 28,000 murders so far in this war that started when Calderón took office and only 5 percent have been investigated. And thus the people of Mexico are contributing the dead and Calderón is contributing the politics.”

  FROYLÁN ENCISO, A BRILLIANT YOUNG SINALOAN historian of the drug trade, told me that if I wanted to report on the drug war in Sinaloa I’d have to get drunk. “At their offices people will treat you a bit coldly,” he said. “They’ll talk around the matter at hand and leave only hints and clues in code, and if you don’t know the codes you’ll be lost. People here talk straight when they drink. If you want to really find out what’s going on you’ll have to leave your notebook behind and get drunk.” He told me this after about eight bottles of Tecate Light, the local favorite.

  Unplanned, I had a chance to test Froylán’s theory. A friend and his wife sent me a message that they were going to the Guayabo cantina one Saturday night and invited me along.

  The Guayabo is a simple place wi
th a jubilant atmosphere—“the only cantina in Culiacán untouched by narco,” according to Javier Valdez, a habitué of the place for many years. Patrons whistle, throw peanut shells and dirty beer-soaked napkins, treat each other to drinks, and greet and taunt in a nonstop nonlinear dynamic that drips of camaraderie without any undertones of hostility or danger.

  Vendors sell peanuts, chewing gum, cigarettes, fried pork skin, pirated DVDs and CDs, including the latest narco-corridos, and offer electric shocks for $5 a hit. (The money is apparently not justified by the sensation itself but by the deep belly laughs afforded to the congenial crowd witnessing a first timer’s reaction to a significant electrical shock.)

  A high-angled thatched roof, ceiling fans whirling to diminish the heat, waitresses with name tags. Zurdo, the headwaiter, wears a white waiter’s coat, left over from some twenty years of donning an all-white uniform from shirt to shoes he first put on one day when warned that an impending state health inspection required such attire. Said inspectors never arrived, but Zurdo (Lefty) kept the all-white dress until just a few years ago, when he allowed himself black shoes and pants.

  Many cantinas in Mexico still do not allow women inside. But not the Guayabo. Women are welcome there, and it shows, though the crowd is still mostly men in their 40s and 50s.

  At one point a young man lingered in the doorway, watching, scanning the crowd. A Culiacán native with his back to the door made subtle gestures with his eyes to keep a watch on the guy. The man, in his early twenties, tall and thin, with close-cropped hair, and a slow, purposeful gaze that did not correspond to looking for a friend on a Saturday night among the older crowd of a cantina, watched, observed, and then stepped away. This is a city where armed convoys shoot people dead on major avenues and no one ever seems to be pursued or caught. This is a street where, only an hour or so before, someone walking along the sidewalk could glance by chance into an auto repair shop just in time to see a man lift an automatic rifle from a table.

  My friend and his wife noticed a high-level Sinaloa state government security official and invited him over for my benefit, saying maybe he’d give me an interview. He joined us and was soon drumming on the table to the 1950s Spanish rock tunes played by a virtuoso band of 60- and 70-year-old musicians. The conversation turned to the subject of reforming the police, recently in the headlines due to Calderón’s “National Security Dialogue” in Mexico City. “What good will a sweeping police reform do if the public investigators [ministerios públicos] are not also reformed?” the security official asked.

  He then looked to me and, apparently for the benefit of an outsider not familiar with local customs, added, “Not that it really matters; no one here investigates anything.”

  I asked him if anyone had been executed that day in Sinaloa. “Oh sure, I think about seven people,” he said. “The daily average is seven or eight.”

  A lawyer by trade with many years’ experience in state government, I asked him what solutions he saw, what possible ways out of the current situation of violence. He did not hesitate a second. “None,” he said. “There’s no way out. It will go on and it will get worse.”

  The conversation at the table turned for a moment to Cuba. The security official had traveled there and commented on how beautiful it was and how safe he felt there, though, at the same time, how intensely socially controlled it seemed. “In order to have a foreign visitor in your house you have to have a permit,” he said. “No sooner will a foreigner arrive for lunch than someone will knock on your door and ask to see your permit for having a foreign visitor in your house.”

  The state security official paused and then said, “I’d rather have Cuba’s problems than the violence here. I’d rather my son live in Cuba with all the deprivation they have there, than live here and fear for his life every day.”

  I asked the official if I could interview him in the coming days in his office. “Of course,” he said, “on Monday,” and gave me his mobile phone number. I called on Monday and a secretary answered and took my message. I tried calling back later in the afternoon. The official said that he’d had “many problems to deal with,” and asked if I could come by his office at 11:00 a.m. the next day. I said sure.

  Although a total of fourteen people were executed in Sinaloa that day, the main problem was the discovery of five dead bodies inside the state prison in Culiacán. Four were found in a trash dump, inside the prison grounds, with their throats slit. The fifth was found dead, apparently of an overdose, in his bed. The discovery brought the total number of homicides committed inside Sinaloa state prisons during the first eight months of 2010 to sixty: twenty-three in Culiacán and thirty-seven in Mazatlán. That is as many people as had been killed in Sinaloa state prisons during the five previous years, 2005–2009. Of the four men found with their throats slit, three had been arrested only days before after a shoot-out with the army. Soldiers confiscated nine SUVs that had been reported stolen, assault rifles, grenades and grenade launchers, more than one thousand clips, and a Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle. The soldiers arrested the three men on illegal weapons charges on Friday; by Monday morning they were dead. The fourth man found dead with them had been in jail since December 2009 on sexual assault charges.

  I went to the Sinaloa Department of Public Safety the next day at 11:00 a.m. After I waited nearly one hour and was interviewed myself by the Department’s public relations staff, the official came in, greeted me warmly, and invited the PR director and me into his office. He asked how he could be of help. I said that I would like to interview him about the general state of public safety in Sinaloa. He asked if I could write down my questions so that they could work on them and get back to me. I replied that I would prefer to talk and would be willing to come back at any time more convenient for them. The official repeated his request that I leave written questions. I said, of course. “And don’t think I’m taking you for a ride,” he said as we stood up. “We are committed to speaking with you and will stick to that commitment, because we will.” I said thank you and went back into the PR director’s office to leave my questions, which I knew would never be answered, and they weren’t. Froylán Enciso was right. The sober official had no interest in talking.

  While leaving my questions however, I thought I would try my luck: “Would it be possible to interview someone inside the prison?”

  The PR director called one of her staff into her office. “What do you think about taking him to the prison tomorrow to see Beni?”

  “Tomorrow’s perfect,” the staffer responded. “They’ll be doing the burning of the past.”

  They then explained to me that there is a drug rehabilitation program inside the prison called ¡Tu Puedes! (You Can Do It!). It is run by a prisoner—Beni—and the inmates in the program volunteer to be locked in a room together for a month and taken twice a day into a sauna in the same small building as the dormitory. Absolutely no drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes are allowed in the room. Anyone caught with any kind of intoxicant is immediately expelled. The manner in which the PR staff stressed and re-stressed that really no drugs are able to get in that room revealed a certain tacit official recognition that drugs are easily available everywhere else in the prison except that room. The “burning of the past,” they said, is a ceremony in which participants throw an article of their clothing into a fire before they step into the dorm room for the month-long detoxification, leaving their past behind them.

  I knew I was walking into a PR trap, a rigorously controlled room in a completely lawless prison where four dead bodies had just been dumped in the trash, but I thought I would surely see something interesting.

  The next day on the drive out to the prison, I asked the PR staff what the prison population was. About 2,600. “But there are prisoners who are still here years after their sentences have been completed,” the state employee told me. “They don’t check their case files; their lawyers don’t check their case files. And you can’t expect us to be checking 2,600 case files.”

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bsp; My custodian accompanied me through security—I was asked to leave my identification and was cursorily frisked—and took me to meet the warden. The PR guy introduced me, “a reporter from California,” and said I was there to learn about the rehab program You Can Do It!

  The warden, Carlos Suárez Martínez, is the man who, in theory, would need to explain how four prisoners ended up dead in the trash dump. He would need to explain how the killers got the weapons they used to slit four men’s throats. He would need, in theory, to explain how the killers got access to their victims, killed them, and then carried their bodies out to the trash without any guards noticing and without any of the camera surveillance equipment recording them. On the morning of August 19, 2010, Carlos Suárez Martínez was a man with a lot of explaining to do, and thus a man who was probably not looking forward to being introduced inside the prison to a foreign reporter.

  The PR guy stressed several times that I was there for the “burning of the past” and You Can Do It! Carlos Suárez Martínez looked me up and down and before I could say a word said “You Can Do It! Let’s go meet Beni!” He then charged ahead followed by two large guards armed with machine guns.

  On the walk through the prison courtyards over to the rehab area the warden stopped several times to point out fruit trees to me: papaya, banana, and avocado growing on small patches of thick mud amidst the sprawl of concrete. The warden plunged onward and stopped again around the corner to point out a mango tree. “This year we had a shitload of mangos,” he said with a big smile, “a whole shitload!”