Both of them picked out the photographer. They stumbled onto his shop one afternoon, liked a picture he’d taken of a pregnant woman, and told the photographer to start thinking about sand and sunsets. Dany’s vision included portraits on the dunes, even though she’s never been out here before. The photographer hasn’t been here, either. He’s clearly excited by the creative possibilities of this shape-shifting landscape. As the sun sets, the dunes change colors almost instantaneously. One moment they glow with a yellow tint. Not ten seconds later the sand seems to burn a bright pink.
“Okay, Marco, it’s time for the sunglasses to go,” he says. Marco hands me his Armani frames. “Okay, now guys, lean in for a kiss. Dany, kick up your heel. You know what I mean, right? That’s it!”
Dany and Marco are compliant models. They relocate, on command, to a tuft of scrub brush. Marco positions himself behind his wife, both of them facing the light as if looking into their future. Sand stretches out as far as they can see. Those guys in their dune buggies take up only a small patch of a granular ocean, miles and miles of breathtaking dunes. Juárez isn’t far away, yet the psychic pressures of the city have lifted. I have to prod myself to remember all that stuff about killing and murder and mayhem. I’m outside of the city. And when I’m out of Juárez, as always, Juárez seems to disappear.
“WHEN I’M NOT in Juárez it feels like a dream,” says Manuel Estebane. He’s the pastor of a Baptist church located due south of Juárez’s Central Park. I first saw his church a few months ago, when Felipe Calderón gave a speech in the park. The church is a big yellow shoebox. With its flat roof and right angles, it looks more like an industrial warehouse than a traditional house of worship. Curiosity—what’s a Baptist church doing in Juárez?—compelled me to stop in and introduce myself. Turns out that Manuel’s a recreational runner, like me. We’ve started meeting up now and again for early-morning jogs from the townhouse where he lives with his wife over to the new U.S. Consulate and back.
Manuel is fifty-three years old, a bit full in the face and soft in the midsection. He started jogging only when his doctor, “one of those running freaks,” told him to sweat his triglycerides down to a safer elevation. On the mornings we meet up, we start out just before sunrise and jog slowly along a circuit of sidewalks that ring his subdivision, which is located close to Las Misiones and the consulate in the emerging city center. I was shocked the first time we approached the consulate to see maybe three hundred people already lined up for visas. Bodyguards loitered in the parking garage of an adjacent hospital. Manuel is a Chihuahua native, born in that tiny apple town where the Indios keep their minor league team. He’s worked in the United States for most of his pastoral career, primarily at a church outside Kansas City. He returned to Mexico three years ago because Juárez seemed like it could use some help, and he felt up to the task. Now he feels like he’s in over his head. People have been kidnapped off the very sidewalks we run together, at the same hour when we run together. Extortionists have phoned in threats to kill Manuel if he doesn’t tithe them a certain percentage of the church’s income. Manuel insists he doesn’t have any money to pay out, which I believe is true. I’ve attended a couple of his all-day-long Sunday services. His flock is passionate and committed, but small. If there are enough worshippers for the church to break even, then they’re doing so by the slimmest of margins.
Manuel and I never run terribly fast. Sometimes we’ll quit early and walk a few laps instead, labeling our laziness a therapeutic “cooldown.” We talk about how unsettling Juárez can feel. He tells me about how the hair rises on his neck when his wife announces she’s going to dash over to the S-Mart for some groceries. Will she come back? Are extortionists tracking their cars? Juárez has him so frazzled that his home church in Missouri has ordered him to spend at least one week every three months away from the city. Just for his mental health.
“Did that ever happen?” he asks himself when he’s out of town. “I can’t believe I ever actually lived in Juárez.” I catch the past tense. He lives here now. He has a house, a car, a small congregation to attend to, and an occasional running partner. It’s a tense slip I identify with. I often slip myself. When I leave the city I forget about it, too. Like, I can’t believe I ever actually lived there.
“Juárez doesn’t exist,” Paco Ibarra once told me. Now that he lives in Texas, and especially now that his trips into Juárez have become rare and surgical, he feels more than merely disconnected from his hometown. “When I see it from El Paso, it’s a different reality, a different place. Now when I drive past it, it feels like it has a dark side.”
Juárez may be only a concept, or a rumor. It’s an island unto itself. When I was in San Luis Potosí and Guadalajara with the Indios, the people I talked to regarded Juárez (and its problems) much the way El Paso does: as belonging to someone else. It’s in Mexico, yes, technically, but it’s not really in Mexico. The newspaper in San Luis overflowed with stories of mayoral reports and public works, tourism data and sports scores. The big news in Juárez at the time—the Student Massacre—was reduced to a little bullet item buried on the National page. News, but nothing someone in central Mexico need really worry about. In my Guadalajara hotel room, I was startled when Juárez flashed on the TV screen. Univision had sent a reporter to the border to film handguns shattering under the heavy steel roller of a street paver. The police are cracking down on illegal weapons, the reporter said. The “secretary of state for security” or something like that came on-screen to assure viewers that Juárez is under control, that all is well. No need for me or anyone in Guadalajara to engage. I flipped up to a higher channel and a Hollywood movie dubbed in Spanish.
“Juárez doesn’t exist,” one of the Indios assistant coaches told me before he lost his job in the purge of Pepe Treviño. He was talking about the tribulations of coaching a losing team. The worst part, he said, is when your family reads the negative stories in the papers. I knew that this coach was from Mexico City and that his family had not moved to Juárez with him. Was he saying his wife gets online to read the Juárez papers?
“No, no, no, man. Those guys don’t matter,” he replied, referring to the reporters at El Diario, El Norte, and El Mexicano. “I meant the Mexico City papers. In Juárez they could write that I’ve grown a third arm and nobody would ever read it. To the rest of the country, what goes on up here doesn’t even happen.”
The sheer number of dead bodies makes it hard for anyone outside Juárez to really comprehend the violence. It’s almost cartoonish, the amount of blood, like it can’t possibly be real. Even the desert climate is a separating factor. In that story I watched while in Guadalajara, armed federales shivered in winter coats and face masks while, outside my hotel room, a soft wind rattled a stand of palm trees. It would be hard for anyone in Jalisco to feel connected to the border. How much worse is the separation in Cancún or Acapulco? That phrase President Calderón rolled out, “We Are All Juárez,” is a great slogan, I think, a necessary reminder that Juárez is Mexico, too. That Juárez isn’t just the national ghost town, its haunted house.
When I’m in Juárez, I feel like myself. I’m living an essentially normal life, going about my business as I would if I were living anywhere else. And when I leave Juárez, I think of a popular American television show winding down to its final episode on the day Marco and Dany and I trek out to the dunes. On the show, survivors of an airplane crash are stranded on a tropical island. Will this ragtag collective make it back to the mainland? Can they learn to work together, to surmount cultural differences and stereotypes? These were the questions when the show first aired, when it seemed as if we were going to get a simple character study. The show soon proved much darker than that. The island has a personality, a life of its own. It moves around in the ocean, and disappears sometimes. It draws the characters back in. An actor might escape, only to be compelled to return to its shores. People get killed on the island all the time. Is it even real? The characters on the island, are they dreaming
it all up?
I think of the show when I’m riding around El Paso at night. I might have just gone for Shiner Bocks at the UTEP bar Liquor Dicks. I’ll have met up with Weecho and even Arson Loskush and we’ll have stayed until last call and then the mandatory run for the bacon Whataburger with cheese Saul Luna demands as payback for his chauffeur service. We’ll be in Saul’s car, shooting east on I-10. Maybe it’s a night when Orbita radio—Rock Sin Fronteras—matches the mood just right by pumping out a hypnotic bass line and Jim Morrison breaking on through. Or maybe it’s a night when Orbita makes me smack my forehead by being the last station anywhere to spin “Beth” by Kiss. I’ll look outside my passenger-seat window at yellow lights, so close, a dot paper grid rising and gently falling. It won’t occur to me that I’m about to march over the Free Bridge, that I’m about to pass Border Patrol agents and then Mexican soldiers sipping coffee while bemoaning their assignment to the graveyard shift. I won’t remember my new dog, and how he’s waiting for me to give him a walk. Instead, the news of the day will be in my head. Eighteen killed, or perhaps as many as twenty-five killed. What a crazy fucking city. That’s it, right, over there? That’s Juárez? I can’t believe I ever lived there. I’ve actually thought this, momentarily overlooking that I still live there, and that I’ll be sleeping there that night.
THE SUN HAS set on the Chihuahuan Desert. As it sank lower and lower, the sun flared in ever more intense shades of orange, until at the end it seemed as if Marco and Dany were roasting in a toaster oven. I hand the future groom back his flip-flops and Gatorade. I’m about to give the future bride back her shoes when the photographer sees one more possible shot.
The wedding will be held on the first day of May. That’s very revealing. May first is the opening day of the Primera playoffs. For all Marco’s talk about “a mathematical chance” and “we’re not yet eliminated” and there still being the possibility the Indios will pull off “the miracle of miracles,” he and Dany have already booked a church. They don’t really think the Indios can pull it off, and haven’t for a while. The entire Indios’ front office will be invited: Gabino, Francisco and Paco Ibarra, and Gil Cantú, of course, along with every player on the team and all the coaches and support staff down to Whiskey the equipment manager. Marco’s clan in Dallas will be invited, naturally. Some of Dany’s extended family live in Texas, too. One of Dany’s aunts has lived in El Paso for twenty-two years. Her mother’s second sister has lived in El Paso for the past decade. When Dany first told these maternal aunts the wedding and reception would be held in Juárez, the women balked. They haven’t crossed the river in three years, not even to visit Dany’s grandmother. They’re not about to cross over with the violence growing worse, not even for their niece’s wedding.
The photographer perches Dany and Marco atop a minor dune, the fading light at their backs. In the distance, the jagged Juárez Mountains have been reduced to a silhouette. From this angle, Dany and Marco are silhouettes, too. They’re two all-black and human-shaped outlines against a lava-like orange swirl of sky. We’ll drive back to the city after this. Soldiers will stop us on our way in, rifle through our things, ask us what we were doing and where we’re going and what we’ll do when we get there. “All these soldiers and police, and yet they never catch anyone,” Marco will say. It will be the first time I’ll hear a comment like that from him, a hint that the wider world is seeping inside his soccer bubble. We’ll go back to Juárez. Back into the thick of it, into a city where bullets are dividing families. The photographer clicks his shutter a few last times.
“Nice shot,” I say. Marco and Dany smile in the gloaming, out here in the desert. It’s a really pretty picture.
Chapter 15
Exodus
What you’re seeing is an exodus, like in biblical terms. Mexico is collapsing. And any sane person is going to get out, and they are.
—CHARLES BOWDEN
The mexican government finds the killer, the sicario who shot the pregnant woman from the U.S. Consulate. He’s a member of the Azteca street gang. In the papers, the Aztecas are usually described as the enforcement arm of La Línea, itself once merely the enforcement arm of the Juárez Cartel. The killer’s name is Ricardo Valles de la Rosa, also known as El Chino and as El 29. Police extract from him a full confession. He was going after the prison-guard husband, he says. There had been a dustup in the El Paso jail, and the guard had rubbed someone the wrong way. So, nice work, Mexican police! If only the confession can be believed. “We still maintain that we have no information to indicate that any of the [victims] were specifically targeted,” says Andrea Simmons, an FBI spokeswoman. El Paso Country sheriff Richard Wiles, who is emerging as my most trusted law enforcement official, seconds the skepticism.
The Aztecas are easy to finger. There’s no doubt they are a force in border crime. I’ve seen pictures of Aztecas incarcerated in the Juárez jail, their arms, necks, and backs covered with elaborate art. Portraits of masked warriors with feathered headdresses and swords. Battle scenes in black ink. Aztecas are mean-looking dudes, tough and muscular hombres exactly like the guy standing next to me on the bus. I’m in Cancún, riding the shuttle that serves the tourist corridor. I’m here in advance of the Indios’ next game, against the team called Atlante. Aztec designs darken the upper torso of my fellow commuter, the ink more than peeking out of his wifebeater. A friend riding with him sports the “C” logo of the Chicago Bears on the inside of his left arm. On the friend’s right forearm, descending to his fingers, is the word “sin.” He’s not necessarily Azteca, the friend. The first guy, though: classic. The ink, the shaved head: definitely. I’m surprisingly unthreatened to be straphanging next to him. We’re all on spring break here. Our collective energies have been sapped bobbing in beautifully warm turquoise waves. Maybe these two have just finished a drinking session at Señor Frog’s, downing tequila shots to forget for a while the game we all left back in Juárez. Even Aztecas need some R & R.
I’ve come to Cancún earlier than I needed to, three full days in advance of the game. I figured if I’m going to pay for a plane ticket clear across the country, then I should get as much out of this trip as possible. And hotel rooms are cheap right now, hardly an expense. Tourism in Cancún—tourism all across Mexico—is way down. Visits to Acapulco are off 45 percent, according to the latest figures I’ve seen. Cancún tourism is down by 30 percent. Texas police are warning spring breakers not to visit Mexican border towns. (Which is, like, duh.) The State Department has warned Americans about the dangers of traveling anywhere in Mexico. Several American universities have shut down their Mexican study-abroad partnerships. A story in the Orange County Register: “Spring Break May Be Broken for Mexico Resorts.”
I’ve checked into a hotel off the beach. It’s just a motel, really, though they modernized it into a retro-hip kind of place. It’s centrally located, there’s a pool, they charge next to nothing, and the hotel is still maybe only half occupied. “It’s very hot here,” says an American down from Los Angeles. It is hot, and more humid than Miami, which I didn’t think was possible. I picked the motel because I wanted to stay away from the American tourist ghetto. Why go to a foreign country only to spend time with Americans? Yet almost every guest here is an American. And the reason they are here is traditional, and immediately obvious: They’ve flown down for the sun and the possibility of sex and, above all, to legally drink.
“Bro, I got a job offer today. In this recession!” A kid from Brown accepts fist bumps from his Ivy League hermanos. He twirls a sugar packet into a tall glass of spiked iced tea and asks if there are any zip lines to ride around here. Spring break may be crippled, but it is not dead. From what I can tell, just from listening to the guests in my hotel, sophomore year sucked, but this year has been great so far, and senior year looks like it’ll be amazing. Young men not yet twenty-one down clear bottles of Sol and smoke Cuban cigars and top off their pre-party with shots of vanilla-smooth tequila. “We need some Spanish pickup lines, bro.”
A sign in the lobby advertises morning jitneys to “the most sexiest beach club,” a daylight dance party I can’t see myself committing to. I’ve been wandering around Cancún rather aimlessly, a solo explorer.
I’ve never been here before. I’ve never wanted to visit here before. So I never knew the beaches in Cancún are spectacular. It’s the warmest seawater I’ve ever enjoyed, water so clear I stay in it for hours at a time, pulling myself out only to drip dry before repeating the wash cycle again and then once more after that. The beaches counterbalance the disappointing resorts lining the waterfront. They’re nothing special to look at, and the guests staying there bore me. I walk up from the sand to check out one resort, passing a pack of students touching each other in a game of fútbol Americano. In the shallow end of a giant swimming pool, a kid in an orange Illini hat—he’s age nineteen at most—sips from a can of Modelo, shouting out to every girl his age that walks by. There’s not much action for him, I’m afraid. It’s mostly middle-aged Middle America bulging through the plastic straps of beach chairs, basting in their own beers and reading paperback thrillers.
Fish tacos near the beach cost five times more than they do in the city. Everyone eating is an American tourist, some of the younger ones reporting (with a somewhat forced enthusiasm) that last night’s foam party was wild, and tonight promises to be wilder still. It doesn’t feel at all like the Mexico I’ve come to know, but I only have to look up at the megabandera—the exact same giant tricolor flag that flies in Juárez—to be reminded that this is indeed the same country. And that the issues that face Juárez affect Cancún, too. Border violence is crippling tourism all the way down here. A pedestrian mall near the waterfront hotels has been abandoned. It’s an artificial esplanade designed to look like an Old Mexico village. All the businesses have closed up. Rusting steel gates shield empty storefronts. Graffiti tags the stucco walls. As I walk through the mall, I can’t help but think of El Centro in Juárez, which, in the end, makes this ersatz Mexican village more authentic than the developers could have ever envisioned.
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