To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  When Rosario arrived at the interview, the leader had fourteen men standing guard around him; all of them, she emphasized, watching her. She told them, “I only come here as a reporter. I’m not going to get you all in any kind of a mess. What I would like to know is how the gang is doing after two years of war.” The leader said, “The thing is that the government declared war on us and many of our members have been disappeared, and we know that the soldiers took them out. They are covering for the other gang; they are protecting them.” The leader then made an unexpected suggestion, “Let the United States come in, because they’d maybe grab us and lock us up. But here no, here they’re grabbing us and they’re killing us. That is what is happening, it’s an extermination.”

  Rosario scrolled to the next article, pointing to a paragraph with all the names of mid- and high-level drug traffickers in Juárez. “For example,” she said, “these are openly, the ones who are . . . in control, you know?” Using government databases and press releases she sought out the various names and realized that all of them had at one time or another been stopped or arrested. “And they let them go,” she said. “Why? Who knows?” She pointed to one of the names and said, “This one for example is very dangerous. Very dangerous.” She then read from the article out loud, “Another presumed leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who was in custody and then released and is now free and committing homicides is,” and here she stopped reading and exclaimed, “Ay! How could I write that? I put ‘committing homicides’ . . . Did I write that?” The article goes on as follows: “Mexican army soldiers detained Gabino Salas Valenciano, alias ‘The Engineer,’ a 32-year-old from Durango, with drugs and guns in February 2008; the following August he was freed by the court.”

  “We have made a serious effort to understand the structures of the drug cartels,” she went on, “who they are and how they operate. And what explains a good deal of all this is state complicity. In fact, we feel more tension from the army.” She told me about an unfortunate experience she had had at an army press conference. She had brought a photograph of a civilian dressed all in black, wearing a black mask and hood, participating in a military operation in the city. She asked the general giving the press conference who the civilian in black was and who else accompanied the soldiers during their operations. The general responded, “No. The army goes out alone.”

  “I imagined,” she told me, “that the army was using paramilitaries to identify people to, . . .” she dropped from a whisper to near soundless speech on the word “execute.” “The army needed people from the other side; that was my reading.” And so later during an interview with various officials and other journalists she asked the question again, and the general said, in front of everyone, “You know? You are beginning to strike me as a bit suspicious.”

  “You son of a bitch,” she thought at the time. “It made me so angry that I couldn’t say anything to him right there in the moment, but afterward I walked up to him and grabbed his arm and said, ‘You know what, General? I think what you just said was totally unjust, because you know that I am only asking a question and asking questions is my job.” The general looked at her for a second and then said, “Hmm. You’re right.” Then he walked off.

  “That is the logic of the military—if you’re not with me then you are with them,” Rosario said. “That is dangerous and it is what the federal government is doing.”

  She showed me another article about the imbalance in arrests: almost all arrests involve accused members of the Juárez Cartel. At first this was only a suspicion, she said. Every time she went to a press conference where the federal police announced an arrest, the detainees stood accused of belonging to La Línea. Finally she asked a federal police commander during one of the press conferences, “It seems striking that during the last few months the federal police have only presented people from La Línea. How many have you arrested from the other group? There are two groups.” No answer. Another reporter from the Mexico City—based daily La Jornada repeated her question. The federal commissioner said, “No, no, I assure you that we are combating. . . .” Rosario interrupted him: “How many? Numbers.” He said, “Tomorrow I’ll give you the count.”

  “And he didn’t give it to us,” Rosario said. “So we had to do it ourselves.”

  She added up all the arrests in Juárez and shared the information with reporters from National Public Radio. NPR then conducted its own count nationally, using the Mexican federal attorney general’s press releases announcing arrests. Both studies showed that nearly 90 percent of those arrested were accused of belonging to the Sinaloa Cartel’s rival and enemy drug-trafficking organizations. (As we’ll see, the former Chihuahua State attorney general proceeded to release about 90 percent of those detained.)

  I asked Rosario how she made sense of all the murder. Was it really the result of a war between two Sinaloan families? Is the federal government carrying out an extermination campaign for El Chapo? Is it pure homicidal mayhem without reason?

  “It is a lot of extermination,” she said. “It is also a real war between two groups, and a lot of the murder stems from the impunity that allows anyone to just grab a gun. Part of the logic of this war is that people can collect on pending debts, or whatever, I’ve got a gun and I don’t like you.”

  Luz del Carmen Sosa, 41, covers la nota roja for El Diario and has worked that beat since 1992. If Rosario speaks at 90 miles per hour, Luz del Carmen does 120. I went to speak with her at the newspaper’s office one day in early November 2010 and asked her what her job was like.

  “A crime scene is usually the same,” she said, “the body, the ballistics. But each family’s pain is distinct. I can tell you that together with my photographer, we have seen a thousand different kinds of death. All of them have been painful, especially for the families. That is the hardest thing. When you arrive before the police sometimes, or the family asks you for help, or you have to run and catch a relative so they don’t faint and fall to the ground—those are hard moments. First, because that is not our purpose, our purpose is to provide information. But you are there, you are at the scene, and you can’t just turn your back. That is the most difficult thing: to see how the families get destroyed; to watch how a mother screams, desperate; or to see how a child cries because they killed her parents. Recently a child . . . I had to give a child a soda and hold him because he was wounded. The baby was about one-year-and-a-half old, and his body was covered in glass. He urinated. A fireman had taken him out and handed him to a woman who then handed him to me. The boy was covered in blood and then peed all over me. I had a soda and an apple and I gave the child the soda while we waited for the ambulance. These are the things that happen and you say, ‘Man, how long can this go on?’ This hurts, you know? Me, as a mother—I am a mother; I have two children—this has been what impacts me the most. In all this war, this is what sticks with me: not the dead victims, but the living victims who are destroyed and whose lives are thrown up in the air. But sadly, our government has not learned anything, because they have not created institutions to deal with these types of cases. Our society is ill; it is a wounded society, a scared society that is more and more distant from this pain. And this it what makes me look for other things, other angles for information.”

  And she has found many. She was the first reporter to cover the collapse of Juárez’s forensic medical services. She was the first reporter to write about the young female sheriff of Práxedis G. Guerrero, a story that then became a huge news boom across the world with headlines like “The Bravest Woman in the World.” She is the one who updates the daily death count in Juárez—the government either does not do it or does not share its figures—which she says is “the closest thing to the reality that there is.” And she keeps track of violence against women. October 2010, for example, was the worst month on record for violence against women in Juárez: forty-seven women were murdered. A total of 446 women were slain in Juárez in 2010, nearly the same number as during the entire ten-year span of 1993
–2003. And yet all the nongovernmental organizations that clamored for years to end feminicide in Juárez, she said, are nowhere to be found now.

  “Everyone talked and everyone stated their opinion,” she said. “But now we are seeing a very active women’s participation in criminal groups.” She mentioned the case of a Eunice Ramírez Contreras, a 19-year-old model who moonlighted with a gang of kidnappers. Eunice would help select and then seduce the gang’s victims. While I was interviewing reporters at El Diario that day, one of the reporters was flipping through Eunice’s Facebook page and discovered photographs of her posing with automatic rifles in a bedroom and posing with another woman in front of a federal police car. Antonio Montana, a man who identified himself on his own Facebook page as a federal police officer, commented on a photo of Eunice in a swimsuit lying by a hotel swimming pool, “How good you look, my love.” El Diario’s front-page headline the next day read: “Kidnapper model appears in Facebook armed and with federal police.”

  “You see how these young girls are getting lost in the narco-culture and you ask yourself, ‘Where in hell is that girl’s mother?!’ Juárez is a city where you can very easily get lost, and I think this is relevant, the fact that women are more active in organized crime and there is no longer the same respect. Now they see the women as equals, and so as equals they torture them, decapitate them, burn them. This is a fact. And another fact is that all the nongovernmental organizations that always fought for ‘not another murdered woman!’ [¡Ni una más!], they have all stepped aside because they know that in this context there can really be consequences.”

  I asked her about the common assumption that anyone found executed was somehow dirty, and she told this story:

  “They throw somebody out all wrapped in tape and it is an execution, no? But then later you learn that the person had been kidnapped, that the family was negotiating the ransom, and that they killed the person even though the family had already paid two ransoms. And that’s when they say, ‘We were wrong.’ That is, we judge without knowing the stories behind the events. Until it happens to us, that is when we want the benefit of the doubt. But we still haven’t understood that even if someone was a drug trafficker they still have a right to life. As long as the person wasn’t from your family, you like the nota roja and even want to see the blood and the decapitations. That is a fact. Until it happens to you, and that’s when you say, ‘But no, it wasn’t like that.’”

  At one point in our conversation Luz got a call on her cell—a report of a shoot-out and four dead bodies—and walks to another part of the office to take notes. I stared transfixed at the shelf in her cubicle against the wall, to the left of her desk. Broken and jagged pieces of seemingly random objects from crime scenes densely fill the space. A name-tag with dried blood on it. A stretch of yellow CAUTION tape. Red plastic pieces of a shattered taillight. Dozens of bullet casings, live ammunition, spent bullet casings, and bullet fragments. Wine corks and shotgun shells. A tiny Eiffel Tower and a plastic rose. Folded origami paper boats and small rocks. A bottle of spray paint and a tear gas canister.

  Luz came back, saw me looking at all the objects on the shelf and started to describe them. She picked up the tag and said, “This is from Salvárcar,” referring to the January 2010 massacre of fifteen students at the house party. The broken pieces of taillight came from the car where Luis Carlos Santiago was murdered. One of the bullet fragments was extracted from his friend who survived; before the friend went into surgery he pleaded with the doctor to save the bullet then lodged against his spine, so he could give it to Luz as a present for her collection. She picked up a rock and told me it came from the scene where army soldiers murdered a young boy. A sparkly purple elastic hair tie caught my eye, and I pointed to it. “That is from the first case of a woman decapitated,” she said.

  “This is part of the shoddy work that they do here,” she added. “All of this should be in a laboratory, not here. If something is here it is because they left it behind.”

  The debris of impunity. I asked her why she collects it.

  “So that you don’t forget,” she answered.

  THERE WERE 3,111 KNOWN MURDERS in Ciudad Juárez in 2010, while across the border in El Paso, there were only five. The killings in Juárez have left more than 10,000 children orphaned. Between 2007 and 2010, unemployment in Juárez rose from near zero to 20 percent, more than 10,000 businesses permanently shut their doors, and 120,000 jobs vanished. In the past two years at least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 230,000 residents have fled across the border, leaving their houses and apartments abandoned.

  And yet there is one sector of the Juárez economy that is humming along just great. Juárez’s sweatshops, or maquiladora plants—where Mexican workers earn $5 a day on factory floors assembling imported components into for-export products—are expanding, hiring, and drawing foreign investment, undaunted by the bloodshed. Bill Conroy reported on the Narconews website in August 2010 that in the previous three years of murder only one homicide had taken place in the city’s maquila industrial zones. Conroy called this the maquiladora exception: “There is often an exception to most rules, and in the case of Juárez, the rule of violence does not extend to its industrial zones, which are home to some 360 maquiladora factories that employ more than 190,000 people.”

  Tecma is an El Paso—based company that advertises “sheltering services” for foreign companies looking to outsource to Mexico. As the violence exploded in Juárez, Tecma signed new clients and made some $45 million in profit in 2009. Toby Spoon, the executive vice president of Tecma, told a reporter from the New York Times in December 2010 that “Juárez is open for business.” Spoon lives in El Paso. He shares his schedule with no one and takes different routes each time he visits factories in Juárez. He told the Times, “I have discovered maybe an unsavory part of human nature: If we can make money, and it’s not just too bad, then we are going to go for it.”

  Two things to note in Mr. Spoon’s statement: first, his hubris in elevating to the status of “human nature” his discovery of something “unsavory” about his own business practices, and second, that 7,341 executions over the course of three years in a single city and the forced exodus of more than 100,000 people from their homes is “not just too bad” for him and his colleagues to keep making money. Tecma has been in business for 25 years. Apparently the more than ten years of ritual rape and murder of female maquiladora workers in Juárez that preceded the current homicide epidemic was also “not just too bad.”

  It should not surprise that the Juárez-based maquiladora industry would surge unaffected by the murder and chaos all around it. Maquiladoras and illegal drug trafficking are two gears in one economy, and in Juárez those gears meet and turn together. More than 2,000 trucks and 34,000 cars cross from Juárez into El Paso every day. In 2009, more than $42 billion in legal trade crossed between Juárez and El Paso. An estimated $1.5 million to $10 million worth of illegal drugs moves over the border from Juárez to El Paso every single day. How do you think the drugs—bulky, heavy packages of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and crystal meth—get across? Where does the infrastructure and organizational capacity exist to transport so much merchandise? On the backs of mules led out through the desert? In the backpacks of pedestrians? In the trunks or spare tires of SUVs and sedans going through customs? Sure, there are the occasional sensational discoveries of underground tunnels. But what about the thousands of daily cargo trucks with their NAFTA fast passes? What about the maquiladora warehouses? Recall, when Forbes first listed El Chapo Guzmán on its list of billionaires, the magazine, with no moral qualms or qualifiers, credited the source of his fortune as “shipping.”

  Writer Charles Bowden called this place “the laboratory of our future” back in 1998 when he and a group of Juárez photographers published a book by that name chronicling the city’s impoverished sweatshop workforce, migrants, drug-related executions, and feminicide in the wake of NAFTA. “The book was strongly criticized by the government at
the time,” said Julián Cardona, one of the Juárez-based photographers who worked on the book. “But now the present is so much worse than what was shown and described in the book. In other words, we were right, but few paid attention.”

  Julián Cardona has worked as a photographer in Juárez since 1993. He shot for El Diario from 1993 to 2000. He has published several photography books with texts by Charles Bowden and has contributed photos for Bowden’s magazine articles and his recent book about Ciudad Juárez, Murder City.

  In March 2008, Julián Cardona set out to document every homicide that took place that month. There were 181. Of those, he said, seventy-seven were corner boys, small-time local dealers. “El Chapo ordering the murder of corner boys?” he asked, incredulous. This would be like Bill Gates ordering the firing of computer salespeople at Best Buys in Los Angeles. “It’s absurd,” he told me. “These were poor people, corner boys. Many were tortured. There were executions before, but this was something unprecedented.”

  Julián urged that one take a broader view than the gang war and cops-and-robbers explanation given by the government and repeated uncritically in the U.S. press. “It is important to emphasize the local factors that are kept out of public scrutiny: land speculation, the local oligarchy, and four decades of political manipulation of a global economic scheme. This has been an equation: land profits plus exploitation of cheap labor equals criminal machine. We can’t evade the fact that the city chose to be a maquila. And when I say the city I don’t mean the citizens, I mean the elite. If the problem could really be reduced to Chapo versus Vicente or good versus bad then the rest of society and the economy would be fine. What the citizens of Juárez are suffering is much worse than that. This is the manifestation of a failed state incapable of providing security, justice, or peace, where the role of the state has been taken on by a kind of parallel state where extortion and kidnapping are used instead of taxes. This is happening in other regions of Mexico. In Juárez, the state cannot guarantee the security of its citizens; it has lost the monopoly on violence.”