This Love Is Not for Cowards

by Robert Andrew Powell

  I think of a line by the author Charles Bowden, an American who’s covered Juárez for nearly two decades. Before I moved down, I read his border big three: Juárez: Laboratory of Our Future, Murder City, and Down by the River. And then I put the books aside. I don’t want to re-plow land he’s already harvested, which is something many journalists who visit Juárez end up doing. I’ve even tried to dodge him physically, though, perhaps inevitably, I did run into him one Saturday afternoon at the El Paso Museum of Art. While I’ve kept my distance, lines he’s written flash in my brain all the time. “The governments of Mexico and the United States are not waging a war on drugs, they’re waging a war for drugs.” Forty years in, illegal drugs in the United States are cheaper, more available, and of better quality. Proceeds from the sale of these drugs—perhaps fifty billion dollars a year—prop up the Mexican economy. NAFTA, Bowden argues convincingly, has been a social disaster, a prime reason why so many Mexicans are compelled to illegally cross into the States. (And, by the way, border fences aren’t going to stop a desperate man or woman from crossing. Fences clearly aren’t in any way stopping the flow of drugs). My favorite of his many sharp insights: People in Juárez are murdered twice. First they are killed. Then their reputation is assassinated. There are exceptions for victims like Pedro Picasso or those massacred students, but for the most part, if you’re gunned down, it’s assumed you did something to bring on the bullet. Why else would you be killed?

  I recommend Bowden’s books. Yet as I sit in the pizza parlor, I find myself dwelling on a line of his I’ve always disagreed with. “In Juárez you cannot sustain hope,” he wrote in Laboratory of Our Future. No hope? Hope is all that Juarenses have. They overflow with hope. Hope is the ultimate coping mechanism. It is hope that drew so many to the border in the first place, eager to cross to the United States or, barring that, to land a factory job after the earthquake took everything or the drought evaporated their crops or NAFTA destroyed the only way to make money their family had ever known. The hope that maybe the maquiladora will work out, that the impossibly low wages—just do the math—will magically provide for the family they must leave every day. The hope that, after making the sensible and pragmatic decision to slip into the drug trade, they will be the one exception, the only man—or woman—to make it out alive: rich, honorable, loved, old. It won’t happen. None of it will happen. But they can hope. There is nothing else. It is hope that repels the odor, that toxic stench as the shit they are drowning in bubbles ever higher.

  Now I’m getting angry, like Gabino after the game. Bowden may be right after all. It’s disappointing, the loss. It’s truly too bad the Indios are going down. The team’s failure feels like an argument against hope itself.

  Chapter 16

  The Dead Women

  I arrive back in Juárez in a good mood somehow. I can’t be that upset about the Indios; I knew they were going to lose, same as everybody else. I’ve enjoyed one last day at the beach. And now I get to again see my supercool new dog, who was being watched by a friend. I get to sleep in my own bed, too. “It’s funny how you miss this place when you’ve been gone,” the bass player of an El Paso rock band said one night when I was clubbing with Paco Ibarra; the band had just returned from a California swing. The sentiment’s the same on the Juárez side. Even after five days in Cancún, I’m jazzed to be back on my home turf, in such high spirits that I walk with my luggage from the Free Bridge all the way back to my apartment, maybe two miles. A choking dust floats in the air. I pass abandoned buildings and junker cars and I walk on roads bruised with potholes. None of this bothers me. When I step into my neighborhood, I hear little kids playing in their front yards. They look like animals caged behind iron bars, yes, but they are still little kids, and they are still playing. Buds green on trees lining my street. There’s my apartment up ahead, and I melt a little when I see it. Home remains sweet, even in Juárez. It’s funny how much I missed this place.

  “Hey man, did you see that guy that got killed?” a neighbor asks me. “They killed him right over there, right at the dip in the road. I guess he was slowing his car because of the dip and they shot him. They shot up his car with a thousand bullets. It was in the news. It was right over there. He was the son of a woman who owns one of the houses over there. She was all crying. The police weren’t even around.”

  My neighbor is excited to be breaking the news to me. He ducks inside his apartment to fetch a copy of PM published the day after the shooting. He saved the paper because our building appears in it, like we’re famous. Yep, there’s my usual parking space. That is indeed my apartment right there in the photograph. The man was executed maybe a hundred yards from my front door. “Liquefied by bullets” is how the newspaper put it. And if my neighbor hadn’t told me about the shooting and saved the paper, I wouldn’t have known a thing. All the evidence has been swept up, like it never happened.

  THE VERY FIRST time Marco and I went to lunch, he gave me a somewhat surreal driving tour of the city. There’s the new consulate flying the American flag. There’s the mall, and there’s the bowling alley, the only place we feel safe going out at night. Here’s where I was carjacked. Oh, and you’ve heard about the dead women, right? That cotton field over there is where a bunch of them were found.

  I’d heard about the dead women. Until it evolved into the killing capital of the world, Juárez was best known for one thing: the murder of women. The basic storyline has been disseminated in newspapers, via television and radio reports, even in the arts. There’s Oskar’s favorite book, 2666. (“It concerns what may be the most horrifying real-life mass-murder spree of all time: as many as 400 women killed in the vicinity of Juárez, Mexico,” wrote Stephen King in a review published in Entertainment Weekly.) There have been separate movies starring Jennifer Lopez, Jimmy Smits, and Minnie Driver. TruTV.com posted “Ciudad Juárez: The Serial Killer’s Playground.” Ms. magazine published “The Maquiladora Murders,” linking the dead women of Juárez to free trade policies. Tori Amos wrote a song. Jane Fonda and Sally Field marched over from El Paso to read The Vagina Monologues. Juárez: It’s where women are murdered just because they’re women, and where authorities care so little about women they refuse to resolve the crimes.

  I still see the religious iconography around town. Painted pink crosses, a little faded by now, cling to telephone poles along Avenida Colegio Militar, in view of the border and Texas beyond. A large wooden cross framed in pink and studded with the kind of spikes that crucified Jesus Christ guards the Santa Fe Bridge, the last thing a tourist sees before walking back to El Paso. With tourists no longer visiting, the spikes have been repurposed as hooks for plastic trash bags and as shelving for newspapers sold to Mexicans lined up to escape. Deeper inland, a pink cross welded from metal rebar protects the justice center. And there are still eight small pink wooden crosses huddled in that cotton field Marco pointed out to me, the site where the decaying bodies of eight young women were found.

  Femicide, as the mysterious killings have come to be called, first received attention in Juárez close to twenty years ago. That attention has not abated, at least internationally, even as the city has undergone its dramatic upswing in overall violence. In the past few months, I’ve seen femicide stories in the Christian Science Monitor, in the Los Angeles Times, and on several news broadcasts. The dead women were a plot point on the television show NCIS. Drexel University in Philadelphia, in conjunction with Amnesty International, sponsored an “ArtMarch” to call attention to those being murdered in Juárez “simply because they’re women.” On International Women’s Day (March 8), a group called Sydney Action for Juárez gathered in the center of their Australian city wearing pink-and-black clothes and carrying pink crosses.

  “Most of the Juárez femicides have been young maquiladora workers,” the group’s coordinator told the Sydney Morning Herald. “The women seem to be targeted just because they are women.”

  Most significantly, just before I moved down, the Inter-American Court o
f Human Rights ruled that a pattern of gender-based violence in Juárez had been well established by the time the women’s bodies were discovered in the cotton field, in 2001. The Mexican government was ordered, among other things, to continue investigating the cotton-field murders and to give $800,000 in compensation to the victims’ families and their lawyers.

  “This ruling is a landmark,” Amnesty International’s Mexico researcher, Rupert Knox, told me via e-mail. “It confirms that femicide has occurred and that the State’s failure to prevent and punish the crimes is a violation of the State’s responsibilities. This is important.”

  When Knox sent me that e-mail he was an ocean away, in London, where he lives and works. The court that ruled that a femicide has occurred in Juárez adjourned in Costa Rica, several countries south of Mexico. In my time on the border, I’ve noticed that when the topic of femicide comes up, the words locals use to describe the dead women often differ dramatically from those disseminated by Amnesty International over in Europe or by the court down in Central America. When I’m in Juárez I hear words like “myth.” And “black legend.” And “a great lie.” When I showed a young Juarense a photograph I’d taken of a pink cross, she scrunched her face into a frown.

  “Ugh,” she said. “That’s super cliché.”

  “FEMICIDE IS LIKE a religion,” Molly Molloy told me the first time I met her. “I used to be a true believer. Then when I started looking at the real numbers, I changed my opinion. Now I’m a heretic. Now I’m like someone who has escaped from a cult and feels compelled to attack the cult.”

  Although she’s not even five feet tall, Molloy has become one of the most visible people studying La Frontera. A librarian at New Mexico State University, in Las Cruces, she’s spent almost two decades collecting and disseminating information about the border. She reads every newspaper published in Juárez, every morning, in an attempt to track every death in the city. Three, five, nine times a day, she updates her Frontera listserv with stories of fresh kills and with articles about Juárez published in the Washington Post, the London Guardian, and anywhere she finds them. When I went to visit her at the NMSU library, I found an Onion headline taped to her office door: KITTEN THINKS OF NOTHING BUT MURDER ALL DAY.

  The Frontera listserv has given Molloy a platform she has not hesitated to use. In frequent e-mails, she slaps down any reporter who dares romanticize the border, perhaps by lamenting the sharp drop-off in business at the Kentucky Club. “I have a hard time balancing more than 28,000 dead in Mexico and nearly 6,500 dead in Juárez with the hard times of a few bars,” she wrote after the airing of an NPR story.

  Her biggest criticisms, the ones she marshals the most energy to launch, come when any journalist, academic, or filmmaker dares focus solely on Juárez’s dead women. Her 2,600-word essay “A Perspective on the Murders of Human Beings (Women, Men & Children of Both Genders) in Ciudad Juárez” arrived in electronic mailboxes packed with stats and supporting a main point Molloy is increasingly comfortable espousing: What is happening in Juárez is much more than a femicide. It’s a human-rights disaster.

  “Those in the press and academia who have written extensively about the murders of women, those who coined the term ‘femicide’ to define the killing of women as a product of their gender, seldom acknowledge the actual numbers of victims of violence in Juárez and the fact that the killings of women are a small percentage of the total,” she wrote. “And that this gender ratio in murder statistics is not uncommon, not in Mexico, not elsewhere.”

  In 2001, the year the eight bodies were found in the Juárez cotton field, 12 percent of all murder victims in Juárez were women. That’s not a high percentage for any city in North America, and 2001 wasn’t an anomaly. The rates have held steady since 1993. Since 2008, when the overall murder rate in Juárez accelerated, the percentage of women murdered has fallen below 7 percent. By comparison, close to a quarter of all murder victims in the United States are women.

  Some of Molloy’s other findings:

  It is not true that hundreds of the murders of women that occurred in Juárez between 1993 and 2007 are unsolved. The majority of the cases have been shown—by Mexican officials as well as by independent researchers—to be domestic violence cases: The killers are known, and they were known to the victims.

  Across Mexico, the number of women killed per capita between 1995 and 2005 has been highest in cities in the center of the country, not in Juárez or anywhere else along the border.

  And then there’s impunity. It’s a core contention among femicide proponents that machismo has kept Mexican authorities from prosecuting crimes against women. The Inter-American Court for Human Rights specifically ruled that “gender bias” undermined the government’s investigation of the cotton-field murders. Molloy counters, with sources, that 99 percent of all reported crimes in Mexico go unpunished, male victim or female victim. And only one in one hundred crimes are reported in the first place.

  “I don’t want to be misunderstood,” Molloy later insisted to me via e-mail. “There’s nothing wrong with people mobilizing, organizing and challenging the government in Juárez and Chihuahua to solve these murders. There’s nothing wrong with these women [from the cotton field] getting a judgment against the State for not solving these cases. These cases deserve attention. The wrong thing is not what the Mexican activists have done. It’s what the idiotic American and international activist and feminist theorizers and these Hollywood people have done in turning it into this mysterious untrue thing, this myth.”

  THE MYSTERY, EVERYONE agrees, began back in 1993. Amado Carrillo Fuentes took control of the Juárez Cartel. The murder rate in the city subsequently took off. The number of men killed doubled from the year before, from fifty to one hundred. The number of women murdered shot up from six deaths in 1992 to twenty-three, almost a quadrupling. A retired accountant named Esther Chávez Cano focused on the spike in female murders in a column she’d launched at El Diario.

  Chávez became an exceptional advocate. She was never afraid to call up a journalist or a politician or anyone else she felt could prod the government into action. She criticized officials up to the state governor for, at least initially, blaming the victims for staying out late at night or for dressing provocatively. When her activism prompted reforms, Chávez insisted that the reforms never went far enough. Not one more murdered woman was her goal—Ni una más, to this day the rallying cry of the femicide movement. Chávez went on to found Casa Amiga, the border’s first rape crisis shelter. She won the Mexican government’s National Human Rights Award, specifically for her work on behalf of “the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez.” She died of cancer on Christmas Day 2009.

  “She literally changed the world for women in Juárez, bringing the struggle of the raped, the disappeared, the discarded women and girls to global attention,” wrote Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, who performed her play in Ciudad Juárez in 2004, along with the actresses Sally Field, Jane Fonda, and Christine Lahti.

  Hollywood actresses marching across the Santa Fe Bridge marked the high point of the femicide movement in Juárez itself, says Kathleen Staudt, a UTEP anthropologist. After that, at least locally, energy began to drop off. I stopped by Staudt’s office one morning during a break between classes. An insect frozen in amber held down papers on her desk. A poster from Amnesty International hung on a wall behind her chair. The poster featured a green road sign embossed with the words WELCOME TO CIUDAD JUÁREZ. The overall population of the city was listed on the road sign, as well as the total number of men who live in the city. There was no corresponding number for women, only an arrow pointing to a graveyard.

  “Away from the border, some would surely wonder how many border women were still alive,” Staudt told me with a chuckle. “I don’t know if they did that for fundraising purposes or what.”

  In her 2008 book Activism on the Border, Staudt credited Chávez with introducing femicide to a wider audience. Juárez proved conveniently malleable, a blank slate upo
n which anyone or any group could sell whatever agenda they pleased. With none of the crimes ever prosecuted, any theory behind the murders remained, technically, viable.

  There are a lot of theories. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, the author of the dead-women-of-Juárez murder mystery Desert Blood and a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UCLA, connected the killings to the North American Free Trade Act. In addition to criticizing NAFTA in her novel—the plot revolves around a lesbian who adopts a child carried by a maquiladora worker—Gaspar de Alba also organized a conference at UCLA called “The Maquiladora Murders, or Who Is Killing the Women of Juárez?” More than a thousand people at the conference pondered the “disposability” of women on the border, in factories and in life generally. Amnesty International lobbied to sell pink scarves at the conference, Gaspar de Alba told me. “I think they were looking at femicide as a fundraising opportunity.” The dead women as a global economic metaphor has been a powerful symbol, Staudt concluded in her book, but only after noting that just a small fraction of the women killed in Juárez had ever actually worked in a maquiladora.

  If free trade isn’t killing women, how about a snuff-film/pornography ring based in El Paso and run by Border Patrol agents? (That’s a key plot point in Gaspar de Alba’s novel.) Or how about serial killers? Prominent El Paso journalist Diana Washington Valdez claims that “two or more” of these serial killers currently haunt Juárez. “Most of the victims, practically all of them, are young women, teenagers often,” Washington Valdez told Al Jazeera in 2009. Yet when Staudt actually examined the murders, she found much diversity. There were young victims and old victims, poor and not so poor, their killers known more often than they were unknown. Rather than victims of snuff filmmakers or serial killers, the list of the dead features “the sort of routine sexualized torture associated with female homicide found in many cities and countries.”