The Line Becomes a River

by Francisco Cantú

  Now, as night settled over the valley, I struggled to discern the exact location of the border as it flowed through an illuminated expanse. I thought about the places I had seen in Juárez: the turnstiles and taco stands, the storefronts and snack vendors, the blinking stoplights and the intersections teeming with cars and people—people I had seen extend, without hesitation, the most basic kindness toward one another, people who lived and breathed in the city as if it were entirely ordinary, as if it were a place worth coming to, worth living in, worth remaining. I held Juárez in my mind and I felt a pull to go there, to walk confidently through its parks, its sidewalks, its market halls. I felt the city’s pull even as I knew, with sinking certainty, that I would not go, that something I had chosen now kept me from crossing over.

  —

  In Ringside Seat to a Revolution, author David Dorado Romo examines how the Mexican Revolution “was photographed, filmed, and commodified” from the twin cities on the banks of the Rio Grande, which together served as the “intellectual crucible” of the insurgency. A carnival atmosphere prevailed in El Paso during the buildup to the Battle of Juárez, and both cities were awash with international journalists, photographers, and filmmakers, as well as all manner of mercenaries, thrill seekers, adventurers, and spectators. Tourists from El Paso crossed the Rio Grande to pose with insurgents and their horses in the encampments on the river’s southern bank, feigning steely resolve with rifles clutched in their hands and bandoliers slung across their chests.

  When large-scale fighting finally erupted in May of 1911 between federal soldiers loyal to President Porfirio Díaz and the renegade armies of Francisco Madero commanded by Colonel Pancho Villa and General Pascual Orozco, El Pasoans “scurried to the tops of trains and buildings” to witness the bloodshed. Twenty-five cents could buy you a viewing spot from the rooftops of the Mills Building, the Sheldon Hotel, the Union Depot tower, or the El Paso Laundry building, and if fighting did not materialize you could ask for your money back. Newspapers in El Paso ran advertisements suggesting, “It is foolish to expose yourself to any danger in connection with the troubles in our sister republic. You can see everything, even to the smallest details, if you get a good pair of field glasses.” The urge to witness the mayhem was so strong that “people were willing to risk their lives to be spectators,” and during the battle “five El Pasoans were killed and [eighteen] wounded on the American side of the line.”

  The newspapers reported that Juárez looked “as if a hurricane had struck it.” Buildings were blown apart and left to burn through the night. Daylight revealed streets “littered with splinters of wood, plaster, broken window glass and adobe debris.” To some, the ruin of Juárez was a thing of wonder. Joseph Sweeney, a former mayor of El Paso, remarked that “it was a beautiful sight to see the shrapnel bursting up in the air and scattering its death-dealing missiles on the hills and in the valleys surrounding.” In the aftermath of the fighting, sightseeing cars ran advertisements for trips to the ruins of the “battle scarred city.”

  Only a year before, the residents of both cities had been brought to their rooftops to witness a very different event—the passage of Halley’s Comet across the night sky, visible to the naked eye for more than a month. Seven hundred miles away in Nuevo León, in the city of Monterrey, my unborn grandfather swelled in the belly of his mother. I imagine how his family might have gathered together at some high point in the cool air of an early-summer night, my great-grandparents holding their children close as they gazed awestruck at the cosmos. I imagine tiny Frances, my great-aunt, beholding the comet as an incomprehensible streak of light.

  —

  Beto invited me to go with him and his friends to a nightclub in downtown El Paso. We made our way through hot crowds of scantily clad women and sweating men, taking turns buying rounds. I watched a woman in a red dress dancing with a man in the roped-off VIP section at the center of the dance floor. Beto leaned toward me and shouted in my ear. I wouldn’t look at her if I were you. What? I asked. She’s with a narco, he said, lowering his voice. Beto gestured at the man and I watched as he grabbed the woman’s hips, his bleary eyes rolling back in his head.

  For much of the night I danced with a thin, dark-haired woman. She led me by the hand to an outdoor terrace and I stood in the cold with her as she leaned against the brick wall of the nightclub, smoking a cigarette. I don’t like it here, she told me. What do you mean? I asked. Earlier, she said, when I went to use the bathroom, a couple came up to me. They were older, in their forties maybe, they looked like they had money—they were good-looking, you know, dressed in expensive clothes. They spoke Spanish like they were from Spain and they tried to convince me to go somewhere with them, to their house or the house of someone they knew, I’m not sure. There was just something about it, she said, I didn’t like it. She hurriedly smoked her cigarette and tugged down at the hem of her dress, then crossed her arms in front of her chest.

  Inside the woman drifted away from me and disappeared into the throng. At the end of the night, as the bars closed and young people flooded into the streets and parking lots, I searched for her outside the nightclub, craning my neck to look over the crowds.

  —

  Beginning in the mid-1990s, femicide—the killing of women—became the hallmark of Ciudad Juárez, an emblem of the danger and chaos unfurling along the border. Mexico City journalist Sergio González Rodríguez was one of the first reporters from outside the state of Chihuahua to cover the murders for a national audience. In The Femicide Machine, González describes the archetypal crime of the era: “The victims were abducted from the streets of Ciudad Juárez and taken by force into safe houses where they were raped, tortured, and murdered at stag parties or orgies. The victims’ bodies were dumped into the desert like garbage, tossed onto streets, on corners and vacant lots in the city’s urban and suburban zones, and in the outskirts of the city.” By dumping their victims in empty lots and trash heaps, González asserts, the perpetrators of these crimes negated the essential humanity of their victims: “To leave a raped, abused, half-naked woman’s body in a garbage dump is to resignify the body with indifference and abjection. The act suppresses the distance between objects and humans, and calls out for savage disorder . . . Through it, the victim is reminded of her restricted status in domestic and industrial spheres . . . Her identity is predestined not to exist.”

  Even as international attention began to focus on the city’s femicide, the identities of its victims were obscured by sensational narratives. Women were represented as young and powerless, engaged in exploitative employment in U.S.-owned manufacturing facilities known as maquiladoras, and preyed upon as they bused home from work or reveled in the city’s nightclubs. In an interview with The Texas Observer, Molly Molloy describes how these narratives served to fetishize victims, representing their bodies as a “kind of sacrificial host” or a “symbol for suffering.” She conveys how the sexualized rhetoric surrounding femicide eroticized its targets, making the women, many of whom “do the work and are the only breadwinner,” appear more helpless and powerless than they actually were.

  At first, the women murdered in Juárez were assumed to be victims of a serial killer. After the suspected killer was caught, subsequent crimes were blamed on alleged copycat murderers or sex-obsessed misogynist gangs. It was implied by local and state officials that many of the women shared the blame for their victimization because of their penchant for frequenting bars and nightclubs. The city was presented as a battleground, an active crime scene. In such places, where the threat of death is incessant, there is little space for grieving. In Juárez, this paved the way for an almost ritual negation of individual loss by both those who sought to bring attention to the crimes and those who sought to dismiss them.

  Law enforcement exhibited no inclination to seriously investigate the murders. In 2003, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women visited Juárez to evaluate g
ender-based discrimination and violence in the city. Its subsequent report found that “thus far, in the cases involving sex crimes, the murderers have acted with full impunity. Nearly all sources, including statements and comments made to the experts by Federal Government officials, the heads of federal agencies and several senators, have made it clear that the local authorities, both state and municipal, are assumed to have a years-long history of complicity and fabrication of cases against the alleged perpetrators.”

  Sandra Rodríguez Nieto, a longtime investigative reporter for the newspaper El Diario de Juárez, writes about interviewing victims of Juárez violence in La fábrica del crimen (translated into English as The Story of Vicente, Who Murdered His Mother, His Father, and His Sister): “Nearly everybody I’ve met who has come in contact with the Chihuahua criminal system over the femicide cases has described it as the worst experience of their lives: the victims don’t get justice, the defendants lack basic guarantees of safety or legal proofs against them—which makes it highly probable that the actual killers remain at large.”

  In 2004, the internationally regarded Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team—a nongovernmental human rights organization of forensic scientists established in 1984 to investigate the thousands of unsolved disappearances during Argentina’s “Dirty War”—began its own investigation of the Juárez femicide cases. In later reports, the team documented a willfully inept justice system with investigatory bodies prone to “grave methodological and diagnostic irregularities” in identifying female remains. In investigating the more than thirty unidentified bodies taken from mass graves, the team found that state authorities had often failed to label the remains, leading, in some cases, to the mixing together of the recovered body parts of distinct persons, a literal amalgamation of individual victims into an undifferentiated mass.

  The unsolved murders in many ways provided a blueprint for the structural underpinnings of the large-scale violence that would soon come to eclipse them. By 2008, little more than a year after Calderón declared war on the cartels, Ciudad Juárez had become ground zero for the conflict. As cartel violence exploded south of the border, Juárez underwent a grim transformation. It was no longer the city where women died, it was the city where everyone died. At the height of violence in 2010, according to El Diario de Juárez, more than three thousand murders were reported—an average of eight per day—earning Juárez the nickname Murder City and the dubious title of “murder capital of the world.” During these same years, El Paso was named the safest city in the United States.

  The indiscriminate killing in Juárez and all across Mexico was so rampant that in 2012, when New York Times foreign correspondent Damien Cave reported on a new wave of killings and disappearances among the women of Juárez, even larger than those of the 1990s and early 2000s, attention could not be roused. “People haven’t reacted with the same force as before,” a human rights investigator for the state of Chihuahua told Cave. “They think it’s natural.”

  —

  Manuel asked Beto and me if we would help him move into his new house over the weekend. Beto and I drove together to his home on a Saturday morning and joined his family in unloading a massive moving truck parked in his driveway. His wife directed us as we carried furniture into the rooms and up the stairs. As we lumbered through the living room with boxes, Manuel’s two girls ran in circles around our legs. When the truck was finally empty, we sat on stools around the kitchen counter and ate pizza with his family. Manuel introduced us to his mother and father. Este es mi otro hijo, he told them, gesturing at me. I chuckled and reached out to shake their hands. Mucho gusto, I told them. Manuel’s father smiled. You speak good Spanish, he told me, are you Mexican? I thought about how to answer. Partly, I said, yes. My grandfather’s family came from Monterrey. Ah, Manuel’s father said. Soy de Delicias, estado de Chihuahua. But I’ve been to Monterrey, he told me proudly, I used to drive big rigs all along the border. He sat tall in his stool. Fui trocadero, he said. Conozco todos partes.

  Manuel’s mother and father began to tell me about the towns of West Texas and the nearby villages of northern Chihuahua and Coahuila. We used to cross the border like it was nothing, his mother said. Manuel’s father shook his head. When I retired from truck driving, we took the children and drove all along the border, all the way to the Gulf. Manuel’s mother sighed. What a nice trip, she said. She looked fondly at her husband and then at Manuel. Manuelito, she asked, do you remember those little villages in Big Bend? Manuel shrugged. No me acuerdo, ma. Manuel’s father held out his hand to interject. Well, he said, I remember it like it was yesterday. People would cross back and forth all day long, like the border wasn’t even there. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Men would even ride their horses across the river, como en las películas del viejo oeste. Manuel’s mother smiled. Es cierto, she said, it was just like the movies. She shook her head and looked down at her granddaughters eating their pizza. There weren’t so many problems back then, she said. We even used to take our kids to Juárez. We would go for long weekends with the whole family down to the lakes and mountains south of the city. The children loved it there—they fished and played in the water for days. She looked at Manuel. Do you remember, mijo? Manuel handed another slice of pizza down to his daughter. Yes ma, claro. His mother sighed. We don’t go there anymore, she said.

  —

  On the way back from Manuel’s house, Beto and I talked for the first time about our lives before the patrol. He told me how he’d always wanted to be a cop, how he’d gone to school for criminal justice, always knew he wanted to carry a badge and a gun. Growing up outside El Paso, he said, it seemed like the only ones doing well were either getting paid by the cartels or getting paid to take them down. I asked him about school, if he ever thought he’d go back. He shook his head. For me, he said, this is my life now. I’ve been doing it for almost ten years. I asked him if he’d ever considered leaving the patrol. He stared out over the steering wheel. He had a mortgage, he said, he was still making payments on his car. He couldn’t walk away from the money he made unless it was for something just as good. I chuckled. It’s hard for me to relate, I said. What do you mean? I live in your fucking backyard, I said. I could walk away from that whenever I want.

  Beto explained to me that to move forward, he would need to become a supervisor or transfer to another agency. Where would you go? I asked. He thought for a moment. Did you know the State Department has its own security force? he asked me. The Diplomatic Security Service. They get to fly all over the world. Beto smiled. Now that would be nice. I looked out the window at the concrete city south of the interstate. I’ve thought about the State Department too, I told him, but not law enforcement. He laughed. You want to be an ambassador, güey? I shrugged. I used to think about the foreign service, I confessed, but that was before the patrol. They’ve got these scholarship programs though. You can apply to do research in any country you want. Beto stared ahead at the advancing freeway. Qué chingón, he finally said.

  We sat for a few minutes. Then Beto looked over at me. So you’re looking for a way out? he asked. I shrugged. I’m not even four years in yet. So what? That doesn’t mean you don’t want to do something else, pendejo. True enough, I said. I looked out the window again. I always imagined I’d go back to school, I told him. I used to think that I’d go for law, political science, something like that. But now I don’t know. When I was in school, I spent all this time studying international relations, immigration, border security. I was always reading about policy and economics, looking at complex academic ways of addressing this big unsolvable problem. When I made the decision to apply for this job, I had the idea that I’d see things in the patrol that would somehow unlock the border for me, you know? I thought I’d come up with all sorts of answers. And then working here, you see so much, you have all these experiences. But I don’t know how to put it into context, I don’t know where I fit in it all. I have more questions now than ever before.
Beto sat glancing at me with short turns of his head. Damn, he finally said, that shit runs deep.

  After we exited the freeway Beto began to talk to me about his family. He had grown up on both sides of the river and still had cousins in Juárez. We used to have these big family reunions on the south side, he told me, but now I only see my cousins when they come to El Paso to party. As we neared the house, I asked Beto if he ever went south of the line to see his family. Never, he said. Not since I’ve been in the patrol. He stopped for a traffic light at the base of a hill and looked down an empty side street. Even before things got really bad, he told me, I still wouldn’t go. I knew it would probably be fine, but there’s something about being an agent. It just never felt smart. I nodded. I haven’t gone either, I told him.

  The signal turned green and Beto accelerated up the hill as I wondered to myself what it was, the thing that kept us from crossing to the other side.

  —

  In Antígona González, Sara Uribe writes:

  Count them all.

  Name them so as to say: this body could be mine.

  The body of one of my own.

  So as not to forget that all the bodies without names are our lost bodies.