So the man beheaded and positioned outside the seminary? That’s obviously a cartel hit. The two men shot near the Santa Fe Bridge? Probably a drug hit, too. Two men in a Jeep just sounds suspicious, and extortion victims aren’t often killed in moving vehicles. Those other two men executed at a cell-phone store? That’s trickier. The first impulse is to say extortionists—Pedro Picasso had been shot at his uncle’s cell-phone shop after a shakedown attempt. But today’s victims were both told to kneel first. That might indicate a drug payback; just because someone’s working a straight job doesn’t mean they’re out of the game. When three young and well-educated men—they’d attended the same elite prep school as Paco—were gunned down at an upscale bar close to Marco Vidal’s house, I figured it was bad luck, that the victims had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A friend of mine set me straight. The three were killed because they were dealing.
“You start selling because it’s so easy,” says my friend, who also attended the prep school. He now works a professional job in El Paso, but for three years he was hooked on cocaine, which he, too, used to sell. He knew the victims. “It’s such easy money. It’s almost impossible to turn down the money. Then they kill you.”
At the other end of the social spectrum from those three dead bodies is my friend Mario, a parquero at the Rio Grande Mall. Parqueros patrol every parking space in the city, watching over your car as you shop and helping you back up into the crowded lot when you return. For this service they hold out their hands for any one-, two-, five-, or ten-peso coins you might spare. Mario has the lithe physique of someone no older than forty, and the deeply weathered skin of a man in his seventies. He’s missing a few teeth. We struck up a friendship when he first saw my Colorado plates. He used to live in Denver. And also in Seattle, Vancouver, Nebraska, Kansas, and Minneapolis, where his wife and two grown kids remain. He’s been stuck in Juárez since he was deported, after serving jail time for entering the United States without permission. Or at least that’s what he first told me.
Mario works six to seven days a week, all day long in the winter snow and in the spring sandstorms and in the sun that’s growing increasingly intense as the summer approaches. He gets depressed on the job, he’s told me; he knows it will never get better, that this is his life. After work, in the dark, he rides a bus for forty-five minutes back to the room he rents for sixty dollars a month. He reheats the beans congealing on his electric grill, he eats, he washes his face, and he sleeps on a bare mattress until it’s time to wake up for another identical day. On the one or two nights a month when he won’t work the next morning, he likes to change into a hand-washed tank top, pull on a red baseball cap, and head to this dive in El Centro where all the bartenders are women and where a thirty-two-ounce bottle of Carta Blanca costs not much more than two dollars. I join him at the bar when I get a chance. We’ll sit on stools wrapped in duct tape and he’ll show me the pictures of his family that he keeps in his wallet, protected by folds of waxed paper. He’ll buy a Nirvana song on the jukebox to remind him of the States, and we’ll pour our beers over ice seasoned with salt and flavored with lime. When I pay for a round, he cautions me to ration my money because any of the bartenders I might want to spend time with are available for a price, and a man needs a woman no matter what. One Saturday night, after we were well into our Carta Blanca and after we’d stepped out for burritos and then relocated to a bar by the railroad tracks called the Bermuda Triangle, he let slip that the prison where he’d been incarcerated was Leavenworth. He wasn’t merely an illegal immigrant. He’d been caught trafficking cocaine in Nebraska and also in Minnesota.
“I was making five hundred dollars a day, which was more than I made in a week as a roofer,” he admitted. “I thought if I told you the truth, you wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore.”
I’ve stayed friends with Mario. If I’m in my car around the time he gets off work, I’ll swing by and give him a ride home. I figure if he is still connected to the drug trade, he wouldn’t be standing in a parking lot every day, all day long. But I can’t help but feel a bit paranoid now whenever we’re together. It’s pretty clear, just from reading the newspapers, that everyone who plays the game eventually gets shot. If I had Mario’s life, how tempted would I be to get back on the playing field, to purchase a few days of sweetness before the bullet comes?
IN A VIDEO posted on YouTube, a five-year-old Juárez boy fondles a nine-millimeter pistol and announces he’s a sicario. The gun is almost as big as he is. A young admirer posts a follow-up video in which she calls herself La Niña Sicaria, the girl assassin.
A DOCTOR PRESCRIBES me Xanax. I’ve been having trouble falling asleep. I visit the doctor at his storefront clinic, connected to the Rio Grande Mall. He keeps a guitar in the corner of his office to help him relax. “Many people in this town have anxiety,” he tells me. “Almost half my patients are on this stuff.” I take the drug for only two days. It dries out my mouth and makes me feel unusually lonely. I return to the doctor’s office on an afternoon when the dust has kicked up, tinting the sky yellow. He gives me a prescription for sleeping pills. He tells me I should look into seeing a shrink.
“What’s happening in Juárez is about to happen in other cities,” he says. “It’s capitalism. Any system, at the extremes, is horrible. Extreme socialism is horrible. Extreme capitalism is, too.” He thinks Juárez is the start of what will end up being a second Mexican revolution. El Diario reports that the violence has prompted hundreds of psychiatrists in Juárez to cross to El Paso for their own psychological counseling.
MY NEIGHBOR, ANOTHER man in the apartment complex, knocks a gnarly ding in the side of my car. I know which neighbor did it. The gash in my blue car is rimmed with white paint. The truck parked next to my car is white, and the geometry indicates that if I were to open the truck’s passenger door too fast, too far, and way too fucking carelessly, it would swing right to the exact spot of the hellacious ding. This infuriates me, in part because I’m so powerless. I can’t confront the guy. You can’t confront anyone in this town. I have to just suck it up and live with it.
“I could kill him!” I grumble to myself, stopping cold because, when I think about it, I can kill him. Easily. No one is supposed to have guns here, but getting my hands on a pistol or a shotgun is no harder than buying a hunk of Chihuahua cheese at the S-Mart up the street. I can shoot my neighbor, let’s say, oh, thirty times for every one ding to my car, and there’s virtually no chance I would be caught. They never catch killers in this town, certainly not the killers of lone men, an execution everyone would presume he’d brought upon himself by trafficking in drugs. I don’t have the power to confront an inconsiderate neighbor, but I do have the power to kill him. The knowledge is unsettling. It tastes acidic. It feels disgusting.
MORE THAN 130,000 stray dogs roam the streets of Juárez. I’ve decided to take one in. My new dog is a tiny blond mix between a terrier and a Chihuahua and maybe, judging from his bushy mane of fur, also a lion. I’ve been watching him pick through garbage on my block for almost a month. I went and sat outside with him for a while, and he struck me as a good guy down on his luck. So I brought him inside. I cleaned him up and after a couple days took him to a vet for shots and a haircut and for the surgery he doesn’t like to talk about. When it became clear he wasn’t going to hold his castration against me, I named him Benito Juárez and declared him my new best friend. Every morning and every night now, we walk around a small park one block north of my apartment.
Very late one night, on our regular walk, I’m counting up the vacant homes when somebody sets off a book of firecrackers, maybe one street over. Benito freaks out. All dogs hate fireworks, ha-ha. But it’s almost one-thirty in the morning. And it’s a Thursday night. The explosions shared the arrhythmic staccato of firecrackers, but they were much louder, much sharper. Benito and I run the rest of the way back to the apartment, the dog wriggling out of his collar and sprinting upstairs ahead of me. Before I can even unlock the
door, we hear the sirens wail. They’re coming closer. Coming to where the bullets were fired. To where, no doubt, a man lies dead.
I’M SHOPPING IN the Superette grocery store near my apartment. It’s a smaller store than S-Mart, but it’s easier for me to walk to, and they have a pretty good selection of the basics. I turn down the tortilla aisle to find a woman crying. I recognize the woman as one of my neighbors; she lives in a house not far from my building. Two men I also recognize as neighbors hold the woman in a hug. Both of the men look at me like Hey, give her some space, okay? I don’t know what’s happened, only that something has.
There is a toxic energy in Juárez. It flows underground, vibrating to the surface in scenes like this, scenes I witness in some form almost every day. Living here is like living in that Shirley Jackson short story. We accept that a few of us will be chosen for the daily killing ritual, that the likelihood of being chosen is very small, and that the killing is a cost of residency. We try to wipe the violence from our minds, to “go about living as best we can.” But it takes a toll, this game of chance. It flavors every aspect of our lives. A poison leaches into everything.
TWO AMERICANS—A pregnant U.S. Consulate worker and her husband, a guard at the El Paso County jail—are executed in Juárez, in broad daylight, yards from the river. They are murdered soon after leaving a children’s birthday party near the consulate. Another man who’d attended the same party with his children, and who was driving a similar white car, is also shot to death. We think the second guy might have been killed by mistake, but we don’t know. Nor do we know why the young couple has been targeted. She worked at the consulate, so is it a statement against the U.S. government? Is it because the husband got mixed up in something nasty at the El Paso jail? We don’t know, because not one of the ten thousand police and soldiers supposedly patrolling Juárez sees a thing.
The young couple’s car is followed from the new consulate to El Centro, a distance of maybe six miles. The high-speed chase—from Juárez’s emerging city center to its historic downtown—doesn’t attract the attention of any police. The couple apparently wants to cross the Santa Fe Bridge, but they lose control of their car and crash into a light post within sight of the bridge and directly in front of Juárez City Hall. A picture window in Mayor Reyes Ferriz’s office overlooks the crash scene. Anyone in his office can watch the assassins exit the trailing car, walk up to the young couple, and shoot them both dead. They can also watch the sicarios drive off without being stopped by a single soldier. No cops pursue the killers. And nobody at City Hall admits to seeing a thing. The only confirmed witness is unable to speak. The couple’s seven-month-old baby, suddenly orphaned, cries in the car’s backseat.
Chapter 13
Amor
There’s a small school near my apartment where Juarenses can study English. The school has only one teacher: the owner, Francisco Gomez, a man who lost a leg in a car accident a few years ago and who, since the accident, has worked at his school every single day of the year. Christmas, Easter, New Year’s Eve. It doesn’t matter if there are no students that day. There aren’t that many students anyway, holiday or not.
“I get calls where they say they’ll come back after the violence,” he tells me, rolling his eyes because the killing isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
When I first saw the school, I thought it was serendipity that I’d taken an apartment so close by. If Gomez can teach Mexicans how to speak English, I figured he must be able to upgrade my Spanish. I signed on for one-on-one classes. We scheduled to drill four nights a week, but it was obvious from the get-go I wasn’t going to learn very much. He’d run through flash cards of the absolute basics: water, meat, milk, ball, woman. I have those down already, gracias. Then he’d usually segue into English and a discussion of the National Football League. “Are you aware, Robert, that New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez comes from a Mexican family?”
When it became clear that fútbol Americano was pretty much all we were going to talk about, I couldn’t justify taking more classes. I still visit the school every now and then. I’ll bring Gomez a beer and we’ll watch an NFL playoff game or maybe just talk for a while about football, or about his son who is studying English literature at UTEP or about how teaching has kept Gomez from sinking into a depression since he lost his leg. He still has a few students, and if there’s a class in session he’ll ask me to dazzle them with some English sentences. One night Gomez handed over a newspaper article he wanted me to read. An expert in “metaphysics” had been profiled on the front page of Norte, the second-best newspaper in town. The expert said the problem with Juárez is negative thinking. Everyone is afraid. Their fear is causing them to elect leaders they don’t like. And those bad politicians make everything worse.
I really bristled at that. The problem with Juárez is that people are being shot on the street. And at the mall, at the gas station, and while sitting on park benches at the corner of Almendras and Tlalpalpan. Fear exists because bad things are happening, no? “No,” Gomez insisted. He told me that if la gente would adopt better attitudes, the violence would disappear. You can’t cower in your room. You have to move forward. You have to get out there.
“If you’re not positive, you’re not growing,” he argued. “You’re already dead, and the bullet hasn’t even found you yet.”
That’s a solid point. I think most people in Juárez agree with it, actually. While fear may have cost Gomez some students, the majority of Juarenses are optimistic. Take the Indios. There’s probably no team on the planet better at shedding negative energy or experiences. Yes, the mood at the first practice after the Tigres loss was darker than I’d ever seen it. I helped a trainer carry orange tubs of Gatorade to the practice field, and when I asked him how he was doing he replied, “Muy mal,” the first time anyone in Mexico has ever answered me with something less than “Bien.” I didn’t think the black cloud could possibly lift. But by the next day, Tuesday, the players and coaches weren’t as down. By Wednesday hopefulness had somehow returned, as always. “Can’t be thinking about the Tigres game, dawg,” Marco told me. The Indios aren’t dead yet. They believe they can beat a team called Estudiantes down in Guadalajara on Friday night. They believe they can still pull off a miracle.
The Indios lose to Estudiantes, 4–1. The winless streak climbs to twenty-seven. Not long afterwards, bullets find Francisco Gomez’s language school. A man runs in from the street, bursting through the school’s front door as if he is being followed, which he is. Gomez drops under his desk, his aluminum crutches clanging on the tile floor. He can hear thirty or more bullets fired by an automatic rifle. Then Gomez can hear tires screeching as the assailants speed off in their car.
“It was all over in two minutes,” he’ll tell me later. “I was not fired on, thank God. Because of my faith in the Almighty I am still here.”
FOCUS ON THE positive. Stay upbeat. That is what so many in Juárez try to do. Me included.
I run long the day after the consulate shooting. Ten miles, my big workout for the week. I trot right past City Hall, right past a crime scene already cleaned up, all evidence erased except for the still-dented streetlight the car crashed into. It’s a Sunday, warm but not yet summer-hot, a nice day to be outside. The riverbank transforms into a public esplanade, Juárez’s dusty version of Havana’s Malecón. Families walk over from Chamizal Park to pose on the canal’s aluminum guardrail. Kids play soccer down in the dry canal. Teenagers climb the north bank right up to the first fence on the American side, and the Border Patrol lets it slide because they know it’s only sightseeing. Just one day after the consulate employees were shot, a girl in the park flies a pink kite. Another rides a pony. I fall in with a fellow jogger, a complete stranger, and we help each other stay on pace for almost four miles, until it’s time for me to head back and fetch my wheels. In the Olympic Stadium parking lot, a man teaches his teenage daughter how to drive the family car.
“Sounds like it’s getting worse down there,�
�� writes my sister. “I’m worried about you.”
“I bet you’re more vigilant now,” texts a friend in Miami.
“It’s like you’re living in Iraq or Afghanistan but without U.S. protection,” says my father in a voice mail.
I go through my messages at a McDonald’s, where I stop on my way home. I’m not trying to undermine my workout with fatty food; I mostly want the Wi-Fi. I buy a soda and sit in a booth for a while, reading text messages and e-mails out of sync with what’s unfolding around me. “Are you still alive?” asks my friend Glenn in Los Angeles. Alive? I’m watching a team of Little League Pirates enjoy a postgame training table of hamburgers and french fries. A girl in a Snow White costume waddles by. A birthday party screams with contentment over at the indoor playground. The killings might be big news in the United States, but El Diario gave them only a small write-up on page 5B of the local section, and then only because the baby found in the car lent herself to a heartbreaking photo. We’re not thinking about the consulate murders anymore. We’ve shaken them off. We’re enjoying a nice day.
AMOR POR JUÁREZ. It’s a sticker I see everywhere I drive. On car windows, on truck windows, on the windows of school buses and glued onto the rear windows of junker fronterizas like Marco’s. The stickers were originally distributed by the city government, handed out for free at Indios games. It’s a slogan, a take on I♥NY, used in Juárez the way the word “Believe” has been plastered around Baltimore to boost the morale of that also-violent city. Love for Juárez. I see it everywhere.
This Love Is Not for Cowards Page 18