The drive out from Juárez was eerie. Blond vistas. Tumbleweeds. A town with the strange name of Truth or Consequences. The landscape oddly meshed with the operatic and arrhythmic guitar solos of the Mars Volta, a progressive rock supergroup I’m afraid to tell Paco I’d never heard of before I moved to the border. Our ride back is in the dark. There’s nothing to see out the window except the headlights and taillights of other cars on the road. Paco and I fall in and out of easy conversations. He came back from Orlando to find Juárez had changed. He’d been noticing the changes, little by little, when he’d return from film school on short breaks. By the time he came back for good, a year ago, his city was unrecognizable … Legalization of drugs won’t solve Mexico’s problems, he doesn’t think. It’ll just force the cartels to ramp up their kidnappings and other nefarious moneymaking activities … He had this “Macedonian fuck buddy” in Orlando who was insatiable … He thinks the planet earth is trying to kill us humans off, to save itself. We just talk, about a lot of stuff.
I find Paco’s life story pretty interesting, even if he’s young. His grandfather is passionately Mexican, yet we’re speaking English in the car, a language Paco says he learned from watching television; his parents don’t speak it. He’s a Mexican, yet he’s also an American, more and more so. He’s a young man in both cultures in the Fussion sense, but he’s also an unwitting pioneer. The rich and connected of Juárez are all setting up shop in El Paso these days. Even Paco’s high school, the most elite prep school in Mexico, is opening its first American branch in El Paso.
“I want to build crazy-ass jails,” Paco says, slipping back to our talk of drugs and cartels and crime. “Like awesome super-jails where we could lock people up for the rest of their lives. If their crimes are related to drugs, then they get a lifetime sentence. It would be like getting rid of them. I don’t believe the system rehabilitates them. Not at all. I think that most of us are criminals if we are allowed to be. So if they did something once, they’ll do it again. I say we have to deny them the chance.”
Okay. A conservative, hardcore-on-crime position. Not really how I feel about these things, but that’s all right. Paco continues:
“I have this daydream where I’m literally able to do whatever the fuck I want to do. I have, like, powers. Have you seen the X-Men movies? If I somehow could, my mind would be able to know whoever in Juárez is involved in drugs or corruption. I would announce their names on TV, on the radio and other media. I would interrupt the news in Juárez to say that all these people I’ve named have a week to either get themselves to jail or be punished. They wouldn’t report to jail, of course—obviously they’d laugh at my order—but mentally they’d be really afraid. And at the end of the week, late at night, I’d take every criminal who didn’t report to jail out to the Rotary Bridge, the one that’s rusting. In the morning, the rest of the city would wake up to see all the bodies, and all their severed heads piled up there along with all the drugs they had sold and all the money they stole. There would be a file for every single one of them with proof of their crimes and an explanation of who he was and what he had been doing wrong.”
I let that sit for a while. We’ve been driving back for about three hours so far. There’s an hour or maybe two before we’ll reenter Texas. It’s mostly black out, mostly just white lines shooting underneath the Jeep as we motor south. I think I can see the faint glow of El Paso up in the distance, or perhaps that’s just Las Cruces. We drive for some time in a silence that’s not awkward, but I can’t say it’s exactly comfortable. Eventually I shift in my seat, clear my throat.
“That’s an awfully violent dream, bro.”
“I know,” he admits. “I’m fucked up that way. I just hate to see what they’ve done to my city. Before I went to Orlando, Juárez was a place of freedom. It was one of the best places to be on the planet. People loved it here, just because of the vibe. I could shoot a short film in Juárez, maybe driving real fast on the Camino Real [Highway, which his family won a lucrative city contract to build], actually speeding while also operating a film crane that a friend of mine owns. And we wouldn’t need a permit. That’s how free it was. You could really live. It wasn’t lawless; people had common sense. But even if you were pulled over, the cops would say just to be careful. Stuff like that was amazing. Juárez was positioned to become a new Guadalajara or Monterrey. It could have been better than both of those cities, just from its geographic location.
“At the beginning of the violence, I felt it was people from Juárez actually fucking it up. When I came back from Orlando, a saltarón, a mugger, stole my mom’s car at gunpoint. I was disappointed in Juárez. I began to wish I could turn my back on it. At one point I told my dad, ‘Please, just leave everything, sell the team.’ But I still feel so attached to the town. Because, really, it’s not fair what’s happening in Juárez. I have these dreams because I care about the city. I’m still very, very attached.”
GIL CANTÚ, ACTING on Francisco Ibarra’s orders, fires Pepe Treviño. No surprise there. Gabino Amparán, the traveling secretary who offered me a chocolate chip cookie on the bus ride to Guadalajara, is promoted to head coach on an interim basis. I’m pretty sure he saw the promotion coming. On the flight back from the Atlas game, as the rest of us blocked out the disaster with music and video games, he was reading a book about the mental tricks a coach can use to motivate a team. (My advice: Don’t show any more Mark Wahlberg movie clips.) Other changes in the organization are afoot, most of them cost-cutting. When I stop by the front office after the Toluca loss, I learn that the head of promotions, a guy who’s kept a desk in the media office with Ramón and Adir, has been laid off. I often sat next to the guy when checking my e-mail before or after practice. Ramón jokes that if I want to continue using the office, from now on I’ll have to pay rent.
The Indios lose their next game, at home to Tigres of Monterrey, Marco’s old outfit and the second-lousiest team in the league, the only other club still with a statistical chance to descend to the minors instead of Juárez. Almost impossibly, the game sets a new low point in the Indios’ miserable season. After the Atlas disaster, everyone knew this team on La Frontera was bad, the worst team to ever play in the Primera. Nobody could have imagined the Indios might be this bad.
The game kicks off on a bright, sunny afternoon, a beautiful day. Cottony clouds float over the border from El Paso. The pregame soundtrack of Bill Haley and the Everly Brothers transports Olympic Stadium back to the 1950s, a brighter time in the city’s history. New coach Gabino claps his hands on the sidelines as his players take the field wearing unusually bold colors. Gil Cantú petitioned the league to change from the Indios’ normal home whites to the all-red uniforms they sometimes wear on the road, a sartorial switch that Gil tells me signals change and hope and the vitality of oxygenated red blood.
“We’re going to win today,” he insists as I take a seat next to him. “Gabino’s going to coach the team the way we always wanted Pepe to do it. Everything’s different now. We’ll win. I can feel it. I know it.”
I’m willing to believe him, but right from the kickoff, the best things to happen to the Indios are mistakes by the other team. A Tigres player attempts a dangerous tackle, gouging his cleats into the calf of one of our forwards. That earns a red card, giving the Indios a man advantage for the rest of the game. The refs—those nefarious villains supposedly throwing games so they don’t have to travel to Juárez anymore—proceed to issue a second red card on Tigres, a call that gives the Indios a rare two-man advantage. It is almost impossible for Juárez to lose this game. So when they do, 1–0, the fans turn merciless.
First the Tigres goal: a simple header off a corner kick. Very basic, but a blow to the Indios’ fragile collective psyche. Juárez’s attempts to equalize prove pointless. Shot after shot misses the net entirely, earning boos and whistles. Edwin completely screws up a free kick, which would normally be a good chance to score. The crowd rewards him with sarcastic chants of “Tigres!” By the end,
the team from Monterrey plays keep-away. Tigres—missing two players!—kick the ball among themselves, the Indios unable to intercept, the crowd crying “Olé!” after every pass. The inflatable tunnels to the locker room fill with air. The clock ticks closer to the sad and frankly unbelievable end. Francisco Ibarra stands up to leave a little early, as his security detail demands. The crowd turns on him. I hear the word pendejo, “asshole.” Someone else calls him una mierda, “a shit.” It is his fault, to a large degree. It’s his team. He makes the final call on all coaching and personnel decisions. Paco trails behind his father, hands raised in a sheepish shrug. I can tell he’s embarrassed, and also angry.
When the game finally ends, I slip away from Gil to join Dany outside the Juárez locker room, where she’s waiting for Marco. She’s angry, too. The booing of her husband. The cheers for Tigres. She’s also worried about the future. The Indios are obviously going down. A return to the minors will stain Marco forever, just like he warned me before the season started. He might be allowed to languish down there for only a year or two before washing out of soccer altogether. “They were calling Ibarra a shit!” Dany cries, twisting the spiked heel of her left shoe into the dirt. She has always been a big booster of her hometown. “It’s the greatest city in Mexico,” she once told me. “My whole family is here. I want to live here the rest of my life.” Now, as we wait outside the stadium, she throws the evil eye to every passing fan in a red Indios shirt.
“I hope he gets traded to another team,” she says.
Paco doesn’t even wait until he gets home to update his Facebook status. In the armored SUV with his father, as their bodyguard maneuvers toward the bridge back to El Paso, Paco whips out his iPhone. He thumbs out a long screed against the “ungrateful” and “ugly” citizens of the town where he grew up, where his father has planted his flower and where his grandfather made the family fortune. As far as he is concerned, Paco writes, Juárez can “sink in its own shit.”
Chapter 12
The Lottery
The tigres loss seriously depresses El Kartel. At a postgame drinking session inside Liverpool Bar, Kinkin the hooligan tells me he cried real tears when the final whistle blew. His girlfriend, Briana, cried so hard that mascara smeared down her face. A guy I’ll call Oskar and I take our minds off the defeat by discussing his favorite highbrow books. “Roberto Bolaño is my idol,” he tells me. The late Bolaño, a Chilean, is best known for writing The Savage Detectives and 2666, the latter novel structured around the infamous and mysterious murders of women in Ciudad Juárez. “I think the man is a genius.”
Oskar is studying English literature at UACJ. He’s not a fan of the school’s program. Too much criticism and appreciation but no actual writing practice. He moved to Juárez from a small town six hours from the border. “I’ve seen a lot of shit,” he once shared. “I could tell you some stories.” In addition to taking classes at the university, he also works at a call center, helping the bilingual residents of Florida collect rebates for trading in their old refrigerators for newer, more energy-efficient models. A Bob Marley song comes on the stereo, which makes him perk up a bit; he’s such a fan he used to wear his hair in long dreadlocks.
“Robert, I’m going to take a piss,” he says. “When I come back, I expect these three beers to still be here, okay? Got it?”
I’ve been told by at least ten other Karteleros that Oskar subsidizes his call-center income by killing people. For money. I’ve never believed it. How can I believe something like that? If we know he kills people, why don’t we turn him in to the police? “That’s what my girlfriend asks me,” says Saul Luna, my Kartel friend in El Paso. “I tell her that Oskar doesn’t kill people in Juárez. He only kills people in other towns. Selling a car is what he calls it. If Oskar tells you he’s going to sell a car in Veracruz, what he really means is that he’s going there to shoot someone. I tell my girl that he doesn’t bring his work around us. To us he’s never been anything but a nice guy.”
He’s always been a nice guy to me, too. He invited me to a birthday party at his house. I went and I enjoyed myself. Most of the guests were literature students or, if they were older, professionals—engineers and maquiladora managers. It was a nice change of pace; El Kartel isn’t exactly a book club. Oskar smiled the whole night, topping off drinks and making sure everybody was having a good time. I’ll acknowledge there’s an intensity about him, a physical presence that makes him seem coiled. But a sicario? A guy with the options Oskar has? I haven’t seen anything to indicate he has a dark side.
There’s a commotion over by the nightclub’s big picture windows. I leave Oskar’s three beers on the bar and run over to check out what’s up. I stand on my toes to look over the crowd. I can see Oskar down on the street, for some reason. He’s got a thirty-two-ounce glass beer bottle in his hand. I watch him raise the bottle over his head, then swing it onto the skull of a man wearing a Tigres jersey. The jersey is torn and stretched at the neck and arms.
“Three Tigres fans tried to come in,” says a girl standing next to me at the window. “They started yapping their mouths stupidly.” Oskar charged at them, defending El Kartel’s turf. The beer bottle disintegrates into a liquid firework of cerveza and tiny shards of brown glass. Blood sprays out of the Monterrey man’s scalp as if from a lawn sprinkler. He crumples to the sidewalk, curling into the fetal position, his hands and arms protecting his head. Oskar continues to kick him in the chest, stomach, and face. Blood pools on the sidewalk, an incredible amount of blood. The Kartelero named Sugar runs outside and grabs at Oskar’s arm in an attempt to save the Tigres fan’s life, but Oskar continues his assault. He keeps kicking until, finally, some municipal cops arrive. The reflexive cynicism I’ve developed—Great, it’s the police—gives way to honest relief. Step in, officers. Please! Oskar darts back inside, running up the stairs to rejoin us on the second floor. I return to my seat at the bar. He reclaims his stool next to mine and takes a deep swig from one of his three beer bottles, as if nothing just happened. He’s amped, though, totally torqued. His face is deep red and he’s breathing heavily. Drops of blood stain his jeans.
“I’m a natural-born killer!” he shouts. He is not being sarcastic or ironic, nor is he trying in any way to be funny. That’s the way he views himself, as someone hardwired to kill. Two police officers enter the club, looking for Oskar. They leave after other Karteleros convince them he isn’t here, that he never came back inside. I wasn’t going to be the one to give Oskar up—no way I want this guy mad at me. But I feel uncomfortable sitting next to him. I surrender my seat and step back a bit. I need some space.
“What you just saw there was the violence in this city everyone sort of hides inside themselves,” says Briana.
I TELL MYSELF Juárez is okay, that it is, for the most part, a normal city. That the violence is overplayed by the press. That people do all the normal things here that everyone else does everywhere in the world. I tell myself this all the time. But it’s becoming clear that there’s a psychic cost to be paid for all the killing, for all the blood we pretend not to see pooling in the streets.
A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD KID sits in his car at a red light. A car pulls up alongside him, on the driver’s side. A passenger in the car points an AK-47 straight at him. Then the gunman shakes his head. The car pulls up one more space. Affirmative. That’s him. The car in front of the boy is sprayed with bullets. The gunmen speed off. The kid doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t want to also speed off, lest someone think he was responsible. Nor does he want to stay. He idles for a few frozen moments, then shifts into gear. Slowly he pulls around the bullet-riddled car and drives home.
THE STATE DEPARTMENT sends me an e-mail: “This Warden Message is being issued to warn American citizens that levels of violence and criminal activity continue to increase in the State of Chihuahua and that drug traffickers are targeting individuals who previously were not at particular risk.”
THE MORNING PAPER. One absolutely typical day:
&
nbsp; A small shop that installs security alarms is raided by men carrying automatic weapons. A fifteen-year-old boy is killed, a seventeen-year old boy is killed, and a twenty-one-year-old man is killed. A fourth person, a customer, is injured.
Two men are shot dead in El Centro, steps from the Santa Fe Bridge. The men were driving in a black Jeep Grand Cherokee with Texas license plates. The car rolled to a stop in front of a barbecue restaurant.
A man driving a white Oldsmobile is shot dead at the intersection of Talamás Camandari and Libramiento Independencia. After the first bullets hit him, the driver loses control of his car, which swerves over a median and crashes into a tractor trailer. The victim is not identified.
Armed men enter a cell-phone shop located at Montes Urales and Blvd. Oscar Flores. César Ponce and César Saucedo, both thirty-two years of age, are ordered to kneel facing a wall. Both are shot dead.
The body of a man missing his head is found on a sidewalk in front of the Catholic Seminary of Ciudad Juárez. “The body was strategically positioned so it could be seen from the windows of nearby houses,” reports El Diario. The headless man is clothed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt, but no shoes. His hands are bound behind his back. Police remove a message left on the torso. They do not reveal the message’s contents. The body is taken to the medical examiner’s office for the difficult task of identification.
A man named Ricardo Gonzalez is shot multiple times as he sits on a park bench at the corner of Almendras and Tlalpalpan.
An almost identical list of crimes will appear in the paper tomorrow. And the day after that. And then the day after that. The newspaper stories are remarkable for what they don’t say. Published details rarely include more than what is plainly visible in the accompanying pictures. It’s not in the paper’s interest to point out patterns; solving crimes would almost certainly get its reporters killed. Not two years ago, El Diario’s crime reporter was killed. Connecting the dots is a job left to the readers.
This Love Is Not for Cowards Page 17