This Love Is Not for Cowards

by Robert Andrew Powell

  “Don’t do it,” an Indio warns me at the next practice. Keep your nose down. Stay on the line. “Do not move in there. Even if you think of these guys as your friends, you don’t know who they might be messed up with.”

  It is with some reluctance that I tell Mike thanks, but no thanks. I’m going to persevere in the Last Frontier. If I’d accepted his offer, I almost certainly would have been there, in the office, when the gunmen broke in.

  MIKE IS HOME alone, sketching out a new El Kartel T-shirt. The executive committee sells the shirts outside Olympic Stadium before every home game. A new design every two weeks. Some in El Kartel grumble that their barra brava seems to be devolving into an arts-and-crafts club. I’ve heard whispers that the capos, Mike and Don Roberto, are channeling their energies away from team support and into mining as many pesos as possible off the membership. The grumbling is pretty low-level. The shirts remain popular. I’ve bought a few myself, and have requested that they reprint an old design I’ve seen: the words EL KARTEL DE JUÁREZ ringing a silkscreened image of a man wearing a black ski mask over his head, like the sicarios do. I think the shirt looks badass. Mike’s working on his current design at the computer in the living room. Suddenly, four men burst through the front door. Maybe there’s as many as six of them. All the men are armed with automatic rifles. That they are concealing their identities behind ski masks is an ironic detail Mike doesn’t have time to contemplate. One of the men grabs El Kartel’s captain by the hair and drags him into the street, out where we eat our hamburgers.

  “Where are the drugs?!”

  More forcefully: “Where are the drugs! Who’s selling the drugs?” A gun barrel pokes Mike’s stomach. Other gun barrels circle his face.

  “Pinche puta!” Where the fuck are the drugs, faggot? Mike is sure—Mike knows without a doubt—he is about to die. “We know someone in El Kartel is moving cocaine. Who is it? Where is he? Where are the drugs?”

  Mike sells insurance. He makes pretty good money for Juárez, or at least for a member of El Kartel. He’s thirty-one, though the puffy skin around his eyes makes him look at least ten years older, perhaps even on the cusp of fifty. He’s the father of two young daughters, both living in El Paso with their mother, a woman who left Mike some years ago. Soccer split them apart. Even before Francisco Ibarra started up the Indios, Mike followed Juárez’s semi-pro and amateur teams. The Astros. Los Soles. When the Indios arrived, he fell hard, immediately. He hasn’t been able to explain to me the sudden and intense love he felt for La Frontera’s new team. “It was a diversion,” he offers. “It was fun.” He began attending all the games. With Roberto he formed El Kartel so he could think about the Indios all week long. His wife eventually laid down an ultimatum: me or that stupid soccer team. Indios it was. Indios it remains. She took the kids and moved to Texas. Mike stayed in Juárez with El Kartel.

  Don Roberto handles the social side, recruiting new members. Who knows how many Karteleros there actually are? Members of the 915s, the El Paso subgroup, get angry when they pull up to Chico’s Tacos to find an unfamiliar car with the El Kartel logo displayed in its rear window. A splinter group of kids living in Juárez near the new U.S. consulate calls itself Los Fabulosos Muertos, with muertos basically meaning “dead bodies.” The stickers these guys display in the windows of their trucks feature three menacing skulls. Another subgroup calls itself Los Sicarios. El Kartel’s Internet chat room keeps all these subgroups in the loop. Dues are voluntary. There’s no secret swearing-in ceremony. To become a member in full, all you really need to do, I’ve discovered, is survive a road trip to Monterrey.

  Mike certainly doesn’t monitor membership. He handles logistics. He books the road-trip buses and the hotel rooms. He signed the lease on the El Kartel office. He does not know where the drugs are. He does not know who is selling the drugs. Lying on the pavement, his eyes clenched shut in expectation, Mike thinks of his mother, who died recently. They were very close. He’ll miss his daughters, but he’ll see them again someday. While he waits for them, he and his mother will be together again, together forever.

  It’s taking too long. He’s still breathing. When Mike opens his eyes, he sees the gunmen running off. He does not know why. He’s still on the street, on his back. He clutches his ribs, which are bruised from boot kicks. He does not think to call the police. There’s a very good chance those were the police. He knows only one thing for sure: The El Kartel name, which was una broma, a joke, a spin on the border’s negative image, is no longer funny.

  “YOU’VE GOT TO come to the meeting,” Ken-tokey shouts when he reaches me on my Mexican cell phone. Everyone is gathering at Liverpool Bar. “They’re changing the name of El Kartel!”

  By the time I arrive, the meeting is already under way. Mike stands on a platform where young rock en Español bands sometimes play. He lays out his case, speaking with passion and force. His words carry the weight of his acknowledged leadership. Still, no one wants to change the name except him. “We’re a different type of cartel!” counters Ken-tokey. Someone points out that when Francisco Ibarra once offered to pay their traveling expenses for a season if they’d rename themselves after the indigenous Tarahumara Indians, El Kartel turned the owner down. To placate the malcontents, Mike offers a compromise that carries the day. From now on the barra brava will be known only as EK.

  Everyone breaks for beers. Big Weecho the luchador finds some blue electrical tape, which he uses to cover the “l” and “artel” on the T-shirt hugging his mammoth frame. Mike will surrender the lease on the office. He’ll cross the bridge to El Paso, an application for permanent residency in his hands. Immigration rules bar most people seeking residency from returning to Mexico for at least six months. Mike, the man whose love for the Indios is so strong it broke up his marriage, can’t attend the team’s games. He can’t set foot anywhere in Juárez. As if that’s even something he might want to do anymore.

  I start walking back to my dark apartment well before the emergency meeting breaks up. I need to pack for an extended road trip I’ll be taking with Marco and the team. On the way home, I buy an El Diario. I flip the newspaper open to see that Francisco Ibarra has bought a full-page ad. The tear gas fired after the loss to Morelia shouldn’t sour anyone on the Indios or the team’s noble mission, he writes. Yes, the play on the field has been poor. Yes, it will take a true miracle to avoid relegation to the minor leagues. But whatever happens, the Indios aren’t going anywhere. The club will not fold. His commitment to “this social experiment” is strong and in his heart. It can be difficult to stand with a team as it struggles, Ibarra admits. Be patient. Be brave.

  The owner concludes with a line cribbed from Mike, of all people. The El Kartel captain has printed the phrase on those T-shirts he sells outside the stadium before every home game: ESTE AMOR NO ES PARA COBARDES. The line is El Kartel’s rallying cry, a testament to the strength of their bond with the Indios. It’s Francisco Ibarra’s rallying cry now, too, a statement that clearly speaks to a struggle that has nothing to do with soccer, and to a commitment to more than just a sports team.

  Chapter 6

  Faith

  When you are at your highest, when you are rich and successful and you have everything, you don’t need God.

  —JOE GRAJEDA, INDIOS TEAM PRIEST

  First, whisky unfolds the tapestry, affixing it to a concrete wall. It’s a bolt of silk two feet wide and three feet high, held at the corners with strips of white athletic tape. La Virgen de Guadalupe hovers in the clouds, the sun and the moon at her feet. Her head bows to the left, eyes drowsy but still open, hands raised and clasped in prayer. She is the symbol of all Catholic Mexicans. Gold robes cover her dark skin. Gold stars pretty her indigo shawl. Light radiates from her body, signaling holiness with blond rays as sharp and spiky as the spines of the maguey agave. She has faded after years of locker room consecration. Her colors are muted now, her fibers thin.

  Whisky, the Indios’ equipment manager, drags an orange plastic Gat
orade tub beneath her. He places two candles atop the tub’s white lid. One candle is a wide, round wheel of red wax, bent from previous burns. The other candle sits inside a tall glass jar embossed with a second image of the Virgin, the sort of thing S-Mart sells for about a dollar. Whisky lights the candles. Alain N’Kong, back in tonight’s starting lineup at striker, hits Play on a boom box. Def Leppard opens the set.

  Players snake their way to lockers set up with tonight’s uniforms of long-sleeved white jerseys, white shorts, and white socks. One of the corner lockers, prime real estate, is commandeered by starting goalkeeper Christian Martínez, probably the Indios’ best player. He tears off two strips of athletic tape, overlapping them to form a cross on his locker’s back wall, “JHS 16” markered onto the crown. He dangles two rosaries from the handle of a toiletry cabinet. On top of his yellow padded bench, Christian opens a Bible, saving his page with a small and silver third rosary. Four tiny pictures of Jesus Christ flank the Bible. A candle embossed with Jesus’s face won’t be lit until just before kickoff, so that it can burn throughout the game. Also on the bench: a pair of padded white goalie gloves.

  New music, still cheesy. The Black Eyed Peas ricochet off the walls, popping up to a concrete ceiling that slopes like the bleachers the locker room hides beneath. Fluorescent bulbs glow the X-ray aura of a basement bomb shelter. Trainers unfold two padded tables in an anteroom between the lockers and the urinals. An official from the Mexican Football Federation steps forward. Yes, the Indios are dressing in all white, as mandated. Good. He pulls aside Gabino, the traveling secretary. The two men synchronize watches to ensure Juárez will take the field at the proper time for warm-ups, and then for the game itself. Tonight’s going to be a good night.

  Warm-ups. Those already dressed jog out to the field for stretching and light wind sprints. Waves of yellow and blue plastic seats wait for fans to arrive, about an hour from now. Billboards advertise Banorte bank, Mexicana airlines, and Voit soccer balls, a brand I didn’t know still existed. When an Indios defenseman from Mexico City emerges onto the field, he pauses at the goal line to pick up a tuft of grass, cross himself, and then point his index fingers skyward. He’s left his own small shrine back in the locker room. There’s a photo of his beautiful wife taken at a street carnival and another photo of his wife with their three kids. In front of the pictures, atop an open Bible, the defensemen has placed two small crucifixes, his personal picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and a list of the three Bible verses he studied in his hotel room before the game.

  It’s a Saturday-night away game in San Luis Potosí. The Gladiators are a bad team, which is good news for the Indios. Every game is a must-win at this point, but this game especially so. This whole week is crucial. On Wednesday the Indios will play their third game in eight days, against Atlas in Guadalajara. Rather than fly back from San Luis on Sunday just to fly south again on Tuesday, the team will spend two nights at a mountain resort in the state of Jalisco. A nice break, actually. A fun trip, though also a business trip. The realistic, attainable—and very necessary—goal is two wins, six points in the standings.

  After a short practice on Friday morning, back in Juárez, players dressed in identical black business suits with Indios soccer-ball logos sewn onto the breast pockets. The team looked like a professional outfit, which I sometimes forget they are. A quick meal in the clubhouse commissary, then a shuttle to Aeropuerto Internacional Abraham González. It floors me that Ciudad Juárez has its own airport. Not that it’s too small to justify one; it’s just that El Paso’s own international airfield receives and dispatches planes only fifteen miles away. Such duplication is common along La Frontera. There are two city halls with two different mayors (though both mayors actually live in El Paso), different local news channels covering the same stories, and different state universities employing, in several cases, the same professors. The reasons for the duplication are sometimes less than obvious. When Amado Carrillo ruled the Juárez Cartel in the 1990s, his jumbo jets of Colombian cocaine unloaded at the Juárez airport without incident, something he probably couldn’t have gotten away with in El Paso.

  It was a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Mexico City, an hour layover, and then a thirty-minute hop to this mountain mining town. The players sat in coach, three to a row. Headphones delivered music. Suit jackets dangled off the backs of seats. When the plane’s wheels lifted off the ground, every player crossed himself. Every one of them.

  JUÁREZ, LIKE MOST of Mexico, is Catholic. Seeds of faith planted by Spanish missionaries still bloom, full and lush. CIUDAD JUÁREZ: THE BIBLE IS REAL. READ IT was painted without permission onto a mountain face visible everywhere in the valley. Juárez officials have let the message stay up for years, claiming no one really disagrees with it. The Juárez Cathedral defines El Centro. A second big church, San Lorenzo’s, is an Indios landmark. Two years ago, prior to the team’s huge championship game against León, fans placed Indios jerseys and candles at San Lorenzo’s door. It’s the same church that hosted the victory party after the win over León elevated the Indios into the big leagues.

  It’s a coincidence the Indios name can be parsed to “In dios,” with Dios being the Spanish word for “God.” In God. In God we trust. Back when he bought the minor league Pachuca Juniors and relocated them to Ciudad Juárez, Francisco Ibarra held a rename-the-team contest. “Indios” won in a landslide, as expected. Every team in Ciudad Juárez is named the Indios. A professional baseball team that plays to only a few dozen fans calls itself the Indios. The volleyball, basketball, and track teams at the university are the Indios. That’s just what teams are called in Juárez. While the name is a mandate from the people, the link to God pleases Ibarra immensely. He’s set up a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe in the foyer of his El Paso house. A painting of the Virgin has been baked onto tile and set into a wall of the Indios’ home locker room. Olympic Stadium billboards advise fans to GO WITH GOD TODAY. On the rare occasions when the Indios score a goal—I’ve only see it happen in the preseason—Ibarra rises from his padded club seat, points to the sky, and offers up gracias a Dios. In a promotional video assembled by Ibarra’s radio station employees, the “In Dios” connotation is spelled out plain as day, flashed repeatedly on the screen: IN then DIOS, IN then DIOS. His club is on a crusade.

  “God bless you, my brother,” Gil Cantú tells me every time we shake hands. An assistant coach wears one of those WHAT WOULD JESUS DO wristbands. Whenever Marco Vidal steps onto the pitch, even for practice, he does that same pulling-up-a-tuft-of-grass thing, crossing himself and then pointing two index fingers to the heavens. Riding around Juárez with Marco in his beat-up Mercury, I’ve noticed him make the sign of the cross when we pass a church. He does this even though he doesn’t sit for mass nearly as often as his wife would like, and when I once asked if he ever attends Easter services, he replied that he attends only when Easter happens to fall on a Sunday.

  “God has a plan for this city,” Gil has told me. “God has a plan for the Indios, too.”

  GAME DAYS INVOLVE as little activity as possible. Players do almost nothing besides eat and rest. In the room they always share on the road, Marco and Maleno Frías watch Primera games on television. Like everyone else on the team, they allot plenty of time for shut-eye.

  “I’m a champion napper,” Marco has boasted. “I really like to sleep.”

  The team hotel—a generic Courtyard by Marriott—sits on the strip-mall fringe of San Luis. While the players rested up, I hailed a cab into the Colonia city center, which is a much nicer area. The Mexican Revolution started in San Luis, in 1910. One million Mexicans subsequently lost their lives (out of a population of only fifteen million). Two million more Mexicans fled to the United States, setting up migration trails that remain to this day. The city twice served as the national capital. On the short connecting flight from the current capital, head coach Pepe Treviño told me that in addition to the Revolution and also the silver mines advertised on the city seal, San Luis is mo
st famous for its tuna. Tuna? I thought he might have been pulling my leg, or testing the limits of my Spanish. San Luis is landlocked. While walking around the city’s many plazas, I didn’t see any fishmongers. But what I did find were slices of sweet cactus fruit grown on San Luis’s semiarid hills. Gringos would call this cactus the prickly pear. For centuries, Potosinos have enjoyed such desserts as tuna honey and queso de tuna, or cactus cheese. The soccer team’s nickname, before it was switched to the more manly Gladiators, was the Tuneros, or cactus growers.

  Plaza de Armas is the main square in San Luis. I sat for a while on one of the square’s green park benches, taking in everything. A married couple amused a toddler. A very attractive woman in a white sweater kissed her novio—boyfriend—between shared spoons of soft ice cream. A young girl carried a silver balloon shaped like a crescent moon. Her sister carried a balloon of a monkey wearing boxer shorts, both girls’ father trailing with a camera stuck to his face. Tap, tap, tap—a drummer tested his snare in advance of a free rock concert scheduled to start in half an hour. The scene fascinated me. It kind of overwhelmed me. So many people outside, recreating, living. Away from the border, Mexico seems like a pretty sweet country.

  The plaza fronts an enormous orange cathedral with twin spires and baroque flourishes paid for with mining money. Shops fan out along tight streets tiled with limestone and open only to pedestrians. I walked the streets, inhaling vapors of tamales and of roasted corn slathered in mayonnaise and dusted with chile pepper. I stumbled onto the Calzada de Guadalupe, a long pedestrian path lined with green trees. Stepping off the path at one point, I explored the old penitentiary where imprisoned politician Francisco Madero drafted his plan for revolution. Seven barracks inside the jail have been retrofitted into loft-like schools for different artistic disciplines. I watched ballerinas stretch in the dance wing. In the music hall, a woman flipped through a composition fanned across her desk. I could hear a full opera company belting out Italian lyrics. Space in the complex serves sculptors and painters and photographers. There’s also a literature wing with quiet writing rooms, which got me to daydreaming. As in Monterrey, I again felt a powerful attraction. I could live here, happily.