This Love Is Not for Cowards

by Robert Andrew Powell

  None of that qualifies as money laundering in the traditional sense. It’s more common, I’ve since learned, for money to be laundered through chain restaurants, or, even better, through pharmacies, fronts that can cloak the purchase of processing chemicals. I’ve read in a dozen places by now that drug money, if it’s not the backbone of the Mexican economy, is at least one of three legs—along with oil and tourism—that keep the country upright. The profits from drug sales touch everything in Juárez, and everyone. (And of course everything and everyone in El Paso, too. As Tony Payan, a professor at both UTEP and UACJ told me, those Juárez drugs don’t end up in Chicago without crossing through El Paso first.) Even someone as naive as me can figure that out. A person who wants to survive in this city—and, God forbid, if they want to actually thrive—will mingle with the drug underworld somehow, in some way, wittingly or unwittingly. If the news director at Channel 44 knows Chihuahua is a narco state, then the lucky contractors paid millions of dollars by the state know full well where their money is coming from. They’d have to be totally stupid not to know.

  And that, incredibly, turns out to be Francisco Ibarra’s best defense. I don’t like even calling it a defense, because that implies that Francisco is up to something nefarious, which not even the DEA has substantiated with hard data. Francisco doesn’t run the Grupo Yvasa construction business. He has brothers who run it, with their powerful father supervising everything. Francisco is the son in the family who likes soccer, likes it so much he worked with the team called Cobras instead of concentrating on construction, as his father wanted. Francisco likes radio, too, enough to build a popular AM station. Radio, really, is his career these days. The Indios are his toy. He bought the minor league team that became the Indios because the millions of dollars he needed to buy them had come his way, somehow.

  “Francisco Ibarra is a good man,” says the doctor who prescribed me Xanax. “Muy sincero. Decent.”

  Francisco sure isn’t stupid. I’ve used that word as a crude shorthand. Ignorant is a better adjective. Willfully ignorant. Kind of exactly the same way Marco Vidal remains stubbornly clueless about the violence surrounding him in Juárez. The violence that killed one of his club’s coaches. That inspired his wife and her family to flee the country for a while. He doesn’t think terribly hard about why his dream house came on the market at such an affordable price. He stays in his soccer bubble. Ask Marco about drug running or money laundering or cartel hierarchies and you might think he’s an airhead, or a child. What? Huh? The less he knows the better. Marco’s smart enough—and he’s very smart, super sharp—to be as dumb as possible.

  Just like Francisco. Agents of La Línea? I don’t know anything about La Línea. Or about cartels. Agents? Like sports agents?

  “My dad is the most honest person I’ve ever met,” Paco told me when I asked him about the laundering allegations. “I’d bet my life on it. If it ever turned out he wasn’t honest, my world would be turned upside down.”

  One can’t expect an objective take from Paco, of course. Is Paco aware that the house where he lives with his family, the brand-new house in El Paso’s upscale West Side, belongs to the owner of Peter Piper Pizza restaurants linked in a chain throughout Juárez? And that the owner lets the Ibarras stay in the house rent free? Who has a brand-new spare house to lend out? Why would Paco look into something like that? What’s in it for him? And yet, even if a blood relative can’t certify a man’s character, I think Paco’s telling the truth about his father. I think Francisco may very well be the most honest man he knows. Ramón Morales, who grumbles about Francisco’s business acumen, still describes him as sincere. Indios lawyer Mario Boisselier, when I last visited him at Teto’s campaign headquarters, told me Francisco is “incompetent, lazy, and distracted, but he’s not a bad guy.”

  One reporter who covers the Indios informed me that when Ibarra stepped forward with his plans to build that superstadium for his still-minor-league team—four hundred luxury skyboxes!—a red flag unfurled as tall and wide as the megabandera that flies over the valley. Some newspapers outside of Juárez ran with the story, asking the itchy questions. And then the project died. It was the falling economy and the rising violence that killed the stadium, Francisco told me, not the persistent questions about money laundering. I believe he’s probably right.

  “If we were laundering money, the Indios would be the best team in Mexico,” Paco argued with me, somewhat playfully, with a smile on his face. “We’d have the best players in the league, my father would have his new stadium, and every one of my film projects would be totally funded!”

  That, really, is credible. If the Indios were fundamentally corrupted, they wouldn’t be this bad. They wouldn’t have been kicked out of the Primera, they wouldn’t have laid off almost the entire staff, and they wouldn’t have launched their last doomed campaign with a motley crew of old men and castaways, otherwise unwanted players bonded by such a desperation to play soccer—to work—that they were willing to do it in the deadliest city on the planet. Marco doesn’t have to worry if he’s being paid by drug profits because, well, he hasn’t been paid in more than a month. If the Indios were a money-laundering front—and we’re talking specifically about the Indios here, only the soccer side of Grupo Yvasa—they’d be a much better team.

  THE FOURTH OF July. Capitalize that “F.” It’s also a Saturday, the day I try to run long. Instead of jogging up and down the river like I usually do, I cross into El Paso, it being an American holiday and me being an American and all. I get in eight miles at Ascarate Park, in the Central Valley. Even though I started out early to beat the heat, families already crowd the barbecue pits and picnic pavilions. A poodle chained to a tree snarls at me whenever I complete a lap of the park’s modest lake. A young girl snaps gunpowder pop-’ems on the sidewalk. Two workers on a golf cart carry the equipment for making snow cones over to a refreshment stand. Standard American stuff even if the park sits right smack on the border fence. The whole time I’m running, I can see directly into Juárez, a city celebrating, or perhaps enduring, a holiday of its own: Election Day, the return of Teto.

  He wins easily. His opponent claimed at every opportunity that Teto was the candidate of La Línea, but that argument, on the cartel’s home turf, swung few votes. Mario Boisselier tells me the victory party will start around six thirty P.M. When I arrive at campaign headquarters at almost seven, not much is going on, at least not yet. Only a few people stand around, none of them looking primed to party. I opt to stroll Juárez for a while. Almost everything is closed. Election Day is a federal holiday in Mexico. No lights flicker inside the Pronaf District clubs; all the bars shut down for the night, by law. At OXXO and Bip Bip convenience stores, black trash bags drape over locked beer coolers, alcohol sales having been prohibited since yesterday so the electorate could vote in sober confidence. I walk up to Chamizal Park, where Mexican families unfurl blankets to watch the fireworks, same as their American cousins unfolding lawn chairs in their Chamizal Park, right across the river. I head back into the city, past a polling place where I can see workers cleaning up. A huge sign over the door to the gymnasium where the voting took place announces that the gym was built, four years ago, by the administration of Teto Murguía, deft gamesmanship a politician in Chicago might admire.

  It’s dark by the time I make it back to campaign headquarters. The party has started. There is a band. There are some more people, and a few reporters on scene to cover the news. The first fireworks in El Paso launch into the sky. From the parking lot I can see the flares of red and blue and, at one point, red, white, and green, the colors of Mexico. Gunpowder smoke wafts over from Texas. Teto’s party is not nearly the wingding I’d expected. The band sounds as if it’s going through the motions. The crowd is relatively modest, and its mood approaches sedate. Muy tranquilo. But everyone knows their role, why they are here. Gaby, the main reporter from Channel 44, sets up a feed. When she goes live, a couple dozen boosters shout Teto’s name and wave Teto card
board cutouts, along with flags colored green and red. It makes for a nice visual. On TV it probably looks as though a lot of people are happy that Teto won, that it’s a good thing.

  Chapter 22

  The Last Straw

  A federale is murdered and dismembered, his body parts scattered—a leg here, an arm there—along my regular jogging route near the river. The officer’s head lands close to the stadium, right where I’d finished up a run that same afternoon. While watching the news that night, I calculate I must have missed the body-part dump by no more than five minutes. The next day, I return to run the same route.

  Marco and Dany registered at Liverpool, Mexico’s Macy’s. Ladrones invade the Liverpool at Las Misiones, the same outpost where I’d bought the newlyweds a set of towels and a wastebasket. “This was supposed to be a safe space,” a store clerk tells El Diario. Kids in day care at the mall’s Total Fitness gym, where Marco and Dany first met, hide in the women’s bathroom until police give the all-clear.

  Two more men are shot dead on my street. Again outside my apartment. I don’t witness their murders. I somehow don’t even hear the bullets, although I’m home at the time. I look up and blue federal police trucks clog the street. I step out to watch the technicians contaminate the crime scene. It struck me, the first time I saw those two dead bodies at the convenience store, how casual everyone had acted. Now, I’m mostly annoyed. I need to drive to the Laundromat to wash my clothes for the week, and my car is boxed in by all the trucks. I’m going to have to wait until the whole scene is cleaned up.

  My running partner Manuel, the Baptist pastor, talks about getting out. Is there a right time to leave? How much closer does the violence have to get? We jog our usual loop from his townhouse to the U.S. Consulate and back. We run slowly, sweating only because in the summer it’s hot even before dawn. He thinks it’ll take twenty years to get the violence under control. He’ll be in his seventies by then. Can he make it that long? What might finally prompt him to move? A kidnapping attempt? His wife being shot? Manuel worries that his church will drown if he leaves. He feels obligated to stay, as long as he possibly can. He reminds me I have other options.

  “What will it take?” he asks. “What will be the last straw?”

  “I’M PUMPED,” MARCO tells me. He’s excited to have signed on with Pachuca. Marco’s new team recently dethroned Atlante as CONCACAF club champions, which means Marco will be flying to Dubai for the FIFA Club World Cup, possibly to face Italian stars Inter Milan. He’s going to have to fight for playing time in Pachuca, he acknowledges. But he’s optimistic.

  “They wouldn’t have bought my contract if they didn’t think they have a use for me,” he says. Marco’s back in Juárez for one last week, training with his old team to shake off the rust from his honeymoon. He hasn’t exercised for a month, not once. That’s actually a good thing, a chance for his body to recover. He still feels guilty for letting himself go. The summer sun roasts at 107 degrees already, an hour before noon. Marco jogs a warm-up lap alongside faces that are mostly unfamiliar. Jair is missing. So are Edwin, Kong, Coco, and a starting lineup of other mainstays. I’m selfishly pleased to see captain Juan de la Barrera is still here, still an Indio. Maleno Frías remains, too.

  “At first I wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let me,” Maleno tells me after practice. “So maybe it’s for the best. I love Juárez. I’m going to defend my jersey with all my heart.”

  My follow-up question is a disaster. I ask Maleno if any progress has been made in the investigation of his brother’s murder. The question, as soon as it comes out of my mouth, sounds flip, like I might be making a joke at his expense. Of course no one has investigated the murder. I’m horrified at my gaffe, but Maleno cuts me some slack.

  “I just leave it to the law,” he tells me. “I put it behind me and I’ve moved on.”

  The Indios sell off their youth team. Ramón Morales quits, as expected, telling me he’ll be devoting his full attention to his Reiki practice. Federal agents arrest Jesús Armando Acosta Guerrero, alias “El 35,” identified as the operational leader of La Línea. A report on his arrest indicates that J. L. remains La Línea’s top man. I hear a radio story about Juárez focused only on “the young women targeted for sadistic killings.” Other news, other once-big events, fade from our consciousness. We moved on from the consulate murders long ago. We’ve forgotten about the boy shot by the Border Patrol. Our attention is currently trained on a dead woman, actually, a pretty sixteen-year-old girl who fits the classic profile. She wasn’t snatched off the street, though. She was murdered by her boyfriend. He led investigators to her dismembered body and he admitted his crime in open court. It was a very rare case of a killing making it as far as the courtroom. Yet right after he told the judge he was sorry, the judge—a woman, if it matters—dropped all charges, citing “a lack of evidence.” She released the murderer, free to go. The victim’s mother fell to the floor in tears.

  We are so moved by her pain, we give her a name: “Rubi’s Mother.” We follow her crusade. She marches all the way to Chihuahua city to meet the governor. He grants her an audience, but nothing else is done. She continues marching. In Chihuahua city. In Mexico City, too. I’ve driven slowly past her as she marches across Ciudad Juárez. A sandwich board around her neck demands punishment for her daughter’s killer. We admire her courage. And we will not be surprised, a few months later, when she’s shot dead, assassinated on a busy street, back in Chihuahua, right outside the governor’s office. She’d stepped off the line. No one will be charged with her murder, even though we all know exactly who is behind the bullet. Her tragic story will disappear, almost instantly. Her daughter’s murder, the also-tragic story Rubi’s Mother agitated to keep in the news, will fade away, too. That’s why they kill.

  I PARTY WITH Paco at his family’s mansion in Juárez. He crosses the river to host a relaxed little welcome-home-from-the-World-Cup get-together. A dining room table displays the booty: game tickets, signed jerseys, wood carvings, plastic vuvuzelas. The party moves outdoors to the poolside cabana. Cooks from Tacos El Campeón unpack warm tortillas and stir a tray of spiced ground beef. I’m happy to see Paco’s girlfriend, Karina, is here, along with her brother, Lorenzo; the three of us went out for my birthday, in June, when Paco was in Africa. Lorenzo tells me that I’m Juarense, that I qualify by now. Everybody in Juárez is from somewhere else, he says, and I’ve put in more than enough time. This makes me feel surprisingly happy. It took me more than ten years to define myself as a Miamian. Here in Juárez, I’m already in. And not just nominally in, but in, really in. I do feel like I belong here. That I am not only in Juárez but of it. I love this city, totally.

  “But if you stay here longer,” Lorenzo cautions, “you’re going to start to know the people who are killed. You’ll know them personally.” Another guy at the party tells me that when you grow numb, when the murders stop affecting you, that’s when you know you have a problem.

  I read this story on CNN.com:

  “The bodies of two men—both decapitated and showing signs of torture—were found early Sunday in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the state attorney general’s office said.

  “The victims were found in the Colony of Los Nogales neighborhood in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Their hands and feet had been bound with duct tape.”

  In El Paso one afternoon, I strike up a conversation with a soldier stationed at Fort Bliss. He’s just back from Iraq. He can’t believe I’m living in a city as dangerous as Juárez. Actually, he says, Juárez is just like Iraq. Same houses. The people look the same and they act the same, too. Only difference is, in Iraq you have to watch for bombs.

  THE FIRST BOMB explodes just after halftime. It explodes while I’m sitting in a sports bar on Avenida 16 de Septiembre, just east of El Centro. It explodes while I’m watching Marco’s new team, Pachuca, open a preseason tournament in Houston, against the Dynamo of Major League Soccer.

  The game airs only on cable, which I don’t have at my ap
artment. Not even the satellite dish at Applebee’s pulls in the channel, so that’s how I ended up trying this place for the first time. I’ve driven by here many times on my way to Olympic Stadium, but I’ve never been able to tell if it’s open for business or not. When I pulled up tonight, the lot sat empty, as usual. When I jiggled the bar’s front doors, they were locked. But then a waiter emerged to unlock the door, let me in, and then quickly lock the door behind me. I half expected to find cobwebs and dust, but a full staff stood ready to serve me: waitresses and waiters, a kitchen crew and a bartender governing a big central island of beer mugs and liquor bottles. As I look around now, two men sit at a table, talking. They may be customers. Or maybe that’s just the bar manager and his friend? I can’t tell. It’s not even seven P.M., so it’s early for a night out. Are the front doors locked because of security? That would make some sense. Locked doors make it harder for ladrones to storm the place. Is business down, in general, because of the violence? Or do the owners not really care if any customers visit? Is generating a profit the main objective of this place? The game flickers on all of the bar’s many TVs, just for me. I’m sitting by the windows, as I usually do to keep an eye on my car. A waitress brings me a fresh bottle of Tecate Light.

  Marco’s not on the field, which isn’t a surprise. He needs to learn a brand-new system, directed by different coaches. It usually takes him a while to work his way into any lineup. I study the faces and numbers of his new teammates. I want to learn their names, because with the Indios out, Pachuca is my new favorite team in the Primera. At halftime I order a plate of chicken wings. About ten minutes into the second half, Houston scores off a corner kick. Maybe two minutes after that comes the first concussive shock. Silverware clangs on the tables. A mug falls off the bar. The windows overlooking the parking lot vibrate almost out of their frames; they don’t shatter, though in the first microsecond it seems as if they might. Through the glass I watch the bar’s parquero dash over to the street. An ambulance and a police truck race past. More police trucks follow, one after the other after the other, shooting west, even though the avenue is normally a one-way running east.