To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  El Diario’s editors first posed this question to the nation the day after a death squad killed Luis Carlos Santiago, a Diario photographer, and wounded a friend of his who was a photography intern at the newspaper. It was September 16, 2010, the bicentennial celebration of Mexico’s independence. The two young men were finishing up their lunch break and heading back down the street to the office at 2:35 in the afternoon when the death squad gunned Luis Carlos down in the Rio Grande Mall parking lot. The gunmen fled the scene, driving down one of the main avenues of a city occupied by thousands of federal police and army troops. No one pursued Luis’s killers.

  The two-year anniversary of Armando Rodríguez’s murder was approaching. Rodríguez was shot dead one morning in November 2008 while warming up his car; his 8-year-old daughter was in the passenger seat and witnessed his murder. No one has been arrested or put on trial. After Luis Santiago’s killing and two years of waiting for justice in Armando Rodríguez’s case, El Diario published an editorial with the headline, “Whom can we ask for justice?” Throughout the long September day that followed no one ventured an answer.

  Such answers are nearly impossible to find. The Chihuahua State Attorney General’s office has brought to trial less than 3 percent of the 7,341 homicide cases registered between 2008 and 2010. Most of the people detained in army and federal police operations were later released. A federal prosecutor actually posted bail for the prime suspects in the Villas de Salvárcar massacre, a case in which gunmen slaughtered fifteen people, most of them young students, and seriously wounded another ten at a house party in January 2010. The prosecutor was later found dead. You can imagine, in such a climate, why El Diario’s editors would not simply ask for justice, but ask to whom they could direct their demand.

  “The government is impervious to these calls for justice. They don’t hear them. They don’t react to such things,” said Pedro Torres Estrada, El Diario’s main news editor. After Luis Santiago’s murder, he said, “We thought, okay, how can we make them react?”

  The following Sunday, September 19, El Diario published a front-page editorial with the following headline, “What do you want from us?” The question was not addressed to the array of federal, state, and local officials ostensibly tasked with ensuring safety in the streets of Juárez, but to the members and directors of the death squads and assassination crews—whoever they may be—that have made Ciudad Juárez the most murderous city in the world for two years running.

  “Señores of the different organizations disputing the plaza of Ciudad Juárez,” the front-page editorial begins in a sober, gentlemanly tone, “the newspaper’s loss of two reporters in less than two years represents an irreparable damage to everyone who works here and especially to the victims’ families. We would like to bring to your attention that we are reporters, not fortune-tellers. Thus, as information workers we would like you to explain what it is that you want from us, what you would prefer that we publish or refrain from publishing, so that we know what to bear in mind. You are, at present, the de facto authorities in this city, due to the fact that the legally established rulers have not been able to do anything to keep our colleagues from falling, despite our repeated demands that they do so. And it is for this reason that, faced with this unquestionable reality, we address you to pose this question, because what we least want is for another of our colleagues to fall victim to your bullets.”

  After this opening appeal to the “de facto authorities,” the editorial proceeds for nearly four pages to state that the message is “not a surrender” but a truce of sorts, an attempt to understand what the rules are, for, the editors note, “even in war there are rules.” The editors eviscerate the federal and state governments for their blind military strategy and failure to respond to civilian cries for justice: “The State as the protector of citizens’ rights—and thus journalists’ rights as well—has been absent in these bellicose years, even when it has tried to appear present through diverse [military and police] operations that in practice have been sovereign failures.” The editors note that small business owners and doctors have been discussing potential tax resistance and labor strikes as drastic ways of trying to force the government to heed calls for justice, while, in contrast, “those with the highest obligation to protect citizens get lost in sterile disquisitions on whether Mexico is equal to or worse than Colombia twenty years ago, an affirmation that came from the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was taken up by such serious media as the Washington Post.” The editors reserve extra venom at the end for one state politician. “And if the atrocities, assassination attempts, and intimidations against the media were not enough, yesterday the State Secretary of Education and Culture, Guadalupe Chacón Monárrez, came to rub more salt in the wound by declaring that we are responsible for the psychological terrorism with which people live here in the city.”

  The following day, Monday, September 20, much of the world media turned to Pedro Torres. They called from Japan. They called from London and from Amsterdam. They called from Israel, from Chile. They called from all across Colombia, the United States, and, of course, Mexico. His three cell phones and two office lines all rang at the same time, nonstop. Colleagues at the paper received calls for him on their cell phones and came knocking on his door, phones in hand.

  “It was horrible, horrible, I mean . . . you can’t imagine,” Pedro Torres told me. “That day was frightening, profoundly. They started calling me at three in the morning that Monday and kept calling up until midnight; after twelve I didn’t answer anything.”

  But from those whom the editors had been addressing Torres did not take a single call. The “Señores” who dispute the plaza never sent word. The federal government attacked the editorial in a series of press releases and press conferences in Mexico City, but not one federal official called.

  “Those whom we had hoped would respond in a more positive way never did. We were really, at the end of the day, looking for a response from the government. But instead they came out very defensive,” Torres said. “That was when they said that Luis Carlos’s murder was not related to his profession but to some personal affair. We don’t know their basis for that statement. The reality is this: Do we feel like there was an investigation? No. There wasn’t. The same as in Armando’s case.”

  While the world media turned, for a moment, to El Diario to ask its directors why they had written the editorial and what they hoped to achieve, federal officials only mentioned the editorial to denounce it before the international media.

  “It made us angry,” he said. “They don’t react to reality, to events. They react to pressure in the media. This is very serious. I mean, if gunmen kill a thousand people here in a month, it won’t cause any reaction from the government. But if the New York Times or El País in Spain publishes a story about it then they shout, ‘Ah!’ For the government this is when something happens, not when it happens, but when it gets published. This is a gravely serious problem.”

  Torres said that in the past three years of a supposed war against drug trafficking, the state and federal governments have spent “all their efforts against a perception, not against a reality. They want to win over the media with campaigns in the media. So they take action against what gets published, not what happens. This is the main problem. The government’s interest is political, to win or lose sympathies amongst voters. This is a serious part of what is sustaining this mess.”

  Julio César Aguilar holds the record among the nota roja photographers in Ciudad Juárez; in one eight-hour workday he took photographs of seventeen bodies, an average of two corpses per hour in a city of 1.5 million souls. The first night that I went out riding with him in late October 2010, eight people had been executed when he started his shift at 4:00 p.m. When he picked me up after seven o’clock, he had already photographed two more. In two and a half hours we went to three more, thirteen total, an average day. After he dropped me off and finished his shift, in the predawn hours, gunmen opened fire on a bus
taking maquiladora workers home after their shift, killing four and wounding fifteen, an early start on the next grim day of murder. (October 2010 would become Ciudad Juárez’s most violent month on record up to that point, with 352 executions, 2,660 in the city so far that year, and some 30,000 across Mexico since Felipe Calderón first sent the army into the streets in December 2006.)

  Six days a week, from Tuesday to Sunday, Julio César Aguilar—a 32-year-old who wears thick horn-rimmed glasses and button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up to reveal tattooed forearms—drives through the most homicidal city on the planet guided by tips from colleagues and anonymous callers. He doesn’t scan the police radio frequencies anymore, he said. After a massacre of six federal cops all the frequencies have been jammed. When, while driving through town, he gets a call that a body has fallen, he puts on his hazards, floors it, and disregards all manner of traffic laws. Once while he was driving, I observed him answer a call on one of his cell phones: a body. The caller, however, wasn’t quite sure of the best directions out to the crime scene. Julio César reached out for a second cell phone to call another colleague and consult on the best way out to that part of the city. As he carried out both conversations simultaneously, driving thirty miles an hour through unlit Juárez back roads, he guided the steering wheel with his elbows.

  In the past few years of the drug war his job has evolved into a sort of urban death race. From four in the afternoon until midnight, Julio César and his colleagues in the press crisscross the city from one end to the other, responding to anonymous calls and reports from their respective media, constantly calling each other on the road to confirm and consult, zigzagging at top speed through traffic, cruising through stop signs and red lights in deserted parts of town, navigating to and within the most marginalized areas and ultimately dealing with families and police who are not always understanding about their profession. Arriving at the scene of an execution they receive news of another. En route they get word of a narcopinta, or narco graffiti, or a narcomanta. Once there, they hear of another execution. And so they twist and race through the city until their shift is up.

  Julio César has been doing photojournalism for six years, working the night shift for El Diario for four. He studied journalism at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, he said, because he did not want to get stuck behind a desk. “I went into journalism because I knew that I needed to study and I didn’t see myself sitting in an office,” he said while driving from one execution scene to another, “I wanted a profession that would liberate me from that.”

  Born in Hidalgo State in central Mexico, he came with his mother and six younger brothers and sisters to Ciudad Juárez in 1988 when he was ten years old. His mother began working in the maquiladoras and studying on the weekends. Now she is a nurse. Julio César, not yet a teenager, taught himself to play the guitar and would sing for tips on Juárez city buses. Now, in a way, he has returned to working in public transit, but as a driver for the eyes of a society at once terrorized by and obsessed with the symbols of this city’s daily binary lot of death and impunity: the corpses wrapped in tape, hanging from bridges, mutilated, decapitated, or posed on park benches and left in the very streets where thousands of masked federal police constantly patrol in convoys of three to five vehicles, their eyes and their machine guns ever at the ready.

  The first night I rode with Julio César he photographed the scenes of three executions—one of them half a block from an elementary school—and a car wreck. The second night, he crossed Juárez completely three times to photograph a narcopinta, the scene of a police attack in a shopping mall parking lot, and three execution scenes. The edges of the city on these two nights were desolate, but not entirely empty. A very small number of people still sat with their families on the porch of their home, played soccer in an outdoor field, or walked down the street with a handful of friends within blocks of or just around the corner from a dead body illuminated with the red and blue lights of police sirens.

  At one scene we apparently arrived only minutes after the killing of a very young man. Two men and a woman were there; one man was emotionally wrecked. Julio César and two other photographers riding with him approached the off-ramp of a highway through town where the young man’s body lay twisted in the middle of the asphalt, a pool of blood extending from the head. As the photographers approached, the distraught man charged at them, screaming at them not to take pictures. No one raised their camera. The federal police officers already there approached us in combat mode with their automatic rifles aimed. Julio César, accustomed to such dynamics, walked to the other side of the police truck parked in the road and took a couple of shots of the body from there. Another federal officer approached, drawing a notebook and pen from his bulletproof vest. He asked us for our names and media outlets. Julio César asked him why he would want that information. The commander then asked, “How did you get here so quickly? Who notified you?”

  Julio César—having received a call from a friend who heard the gunshots while driving—asked why the commander would ask such a question, saying that the cops never ask things like that. The commander, without raising his voice and maintaining a faint smile with every word, told us that we were part of a crime scene, not that we had arrived to a crime scene, but were part of one. “This is a crime scene,” he said, pointing at us.

  “Sure,” Julio César responded, unfazed, “what seems strange to me is that the police never ask us such questions.”

  “Well,” the commander said, “maybe you have never come across a commander like this,” and he pointed at his own chest.

  Julio César laughed and said, “Maybe you are the first one who does his job,” and then after a pause identified himself, “Julio Aguilar, from El Diario.”

  The commander took down the names of the other two photographers. Not eager to have my name scribbled in that notebook, I took out my cell phone, pretended to take a call, and walked off a few steps.

  The distraught man and his two companions watched us with open hostility, the kind of look that in Ciudad Juárez could immediately precede a blaze of gunfire. The photographers took a few quick shots and then we left. After crossing to the far eastern side of the city to photograph a narcopinta left by the Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez Cartel, known locally as La Línea, against El Chapo, we crossed to the far western edge to photograph an executed man left slouched on a park bench. Nearby, kids peered out of doorways; a few small groups ventured out and walked down the middle of the streets. Julio César received another call, a body on the street. On the drive he told me about the time he arrived at the scene of a reported execution and started taking pictures of a body splayed out in the street when the man raised his hand. Julio César froze in terror, and then realized that the man had fallen to the street not in a barrage of bullets but from booze. In Ciudad Juárez, encounters with discarded bodies of the executed have become more common than the sight of passed-out drunks.

  When we arrived out at the next scene—a body left in front of a house in what appeared to be a modest middle-class neighborhood—a group of women watching us approach openly chided, “You’re just now getting here? This one’s been dead for more than an hour.” After a few minutes of taking notes on the scene, I walked back up to the women to see if I could start up a conversation, not an easy thing to do given the circumstances. As I approached one of the women again asked in a mocking tone, “Why so late?” When I responded that, unfortunately, our delay was due to the travel time from another execution on the western edge of the city, the women changed their tone and urged us to be careful. I asked if this was the first time they had seen a dead body like this on their street and they all laughed. “No,” one woman said, “just half a block from here they killed one.” They told me that they had heard an argument, gunshots, and then the sound of the killers walking—not running—down the block, where a car was waiting for them.

  I went to the offices of El Diario at noon one Sunday. The parking lot in front was en
tirely empty; there was no one in reception, and the door was locked. A reporter came and opened the door for me, and while we walked toward the stairs through the empty desks and cubicles on the first floor, she casually pointed out the place where everyone hid the last time a gun battle broke out in front of the office.

  I went to talk with one of the reporters on the local news and crime beat, a woman who does not publish her name in a byline on most of her work. In honor of another Mexican writer who refused to keep quiet, I’ll call her Rosario. Ten out of El Diario’s fifteen reporters are women, and they work the heaviest beats: the police and crime beat, la nota roja, as well as local and state politics.

  Parts of Mexico are encased in silence. There are newsrooms where narcos call the shots, whether by bribe or by bullet. There are cities and entire states where publishing the name of a major drug trafficker carries an extrajudicial death sentence. Ciudad Juárez is—against all odds—no such place. Being a reporter here is a high-risk calling, and none know this better than the reporters and editors at El Diario, but even so, they have not bowed to silence. Rosario spoke to me in whispers at ninety miles an hour and with flawless precision.

  “Here we have published the names of all the narcos on both sides of the conflict,” Rosario told me from the start. “I want people to know that we haven’t quieted down, that there’s no silence here, that this isn’t Tamaulipas.”

  Tucked in her cubicle, huddled over her desk Rosario showed me a computer file with her hardest-hitting stories. “Not all of them have a byline,” she said, “but they were all published. Look, this is an article about the Aztecas. Many of the sources aren’t named, but the story of the gang is here.”

  Rosario used transcripts from a court case in El Paso and went to the prison in Juárez to interview the Aztecas’ leader. The Aztecas are a Juárez gang with members on both sides of the border, inside and outside of jails and prisons. The Aztecas are widely believed to move drugs across the border and carry out contract killings and other tasks for the Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez Cartel. The U.S. government suspects that members of the Aztecas killed three people linked to the U.S. Consulate in Juárez and were responsible for more than one thousand homicides in Juárez in 2009.