This Love Is Not for Cowards

by Robert Andrew Powell

  “But what a beautiful run, brother. What a beautiful run.”

  I don’t see Francisco in his regular seat. He’s here, I’ve been told, but it takes me a while to finally spot him up in the stadium’s one luxury box, walled behind glass and all alone. He waves for me to come up and join him. As soon as I step inside the box, a cool blast of air-conditioning washes over my skin, making me understand why Francisco has sequestered himself. At the same moment, just as I step into the box, the Indios score again, taking an incredible 3–0 lead.

  “Gracias a Dios!” Francisco cheers, pointing his fingers at the heavens. “Gracias a Dios!” he slaps his palms against the glass. He spins in a circle and then points his hands toward the sky one more time. “Please excuse my passion,” he asks me before returning his attention to the good news unfolding on the field. His team is rewarding his faith. He can see how it’s all going to play out. The Indios will return to the Primera, and quickly, within the year. The team’s redemptive journey, from disgrace back to glory, will inspire his hometown. The violence will fade away. He’ll be able to sleep in his mansion on this side of the river. Juárez will thrive once again, evolving into a new Monterrey or Guadalajara or Las Vegas only Mexican, so better. God wants his Indios to win, Francisco believes, mistakenly.

  The team will play solid ball in the first of the two annual seasons. Good enough soccer to reach the playoffs but not quite good enough to win a title. In the second short season, they’ll fall back big-time. They won’t make the playoffs. They’ll look like candidates to drop down yet another rung, to division three. The air will deflate from Francisco’s big dream as if it were a soccer ball ruptured by a bullet. He’ll sell the club, something he has been saying he’d never do. His health is suffering, he’ll announce at a press conference hosted at an Applebee’s restaurant. And he’s tired of the constant criticism. He’ll move more and more of his life over to El Paso. At the World Cup, his second son, Paco’s younger brother, rooted for the United States.

  The Indios’ new owners will appear to be the state of Chihuahua, though that’s not entirely clear. “It’s an absolute mystery,” the reporter from El Diario will write. The team’s new executive committee—Gil Cantú and Gabino will lose their jobs in the transition—will say only that, in addition to receiving substantial state funding, the team is owned by “entrepreneurs,” none of whom they care to identify. One of the first things this new and mysterious ownership group will do is entice the league’s most talented striker, the scoring champ from the previous season, to transfer to the border.

  If we were laundering money, we’d have the best players in the league.

  You have to remember that Chihuahua is a narco state. The government and the cartels are one in this city. The drug dealers give the money to the government, and the government gives the money back to the people.

  If the secretive new Indios owners return to the Primera, they will join the top league’s newest team, the Xolos of Tijuana. That club’s owner, a gambling magnate named Jorge Hank Rhon, served as Tijuana’s mayor at the same time Teto first ruled Juárez; they share a political party. In 1995, Hank was arrested at the airport in Mexico City and charged with smuggling. In 1988, two of his bodyguards were convicted of murdering a newspaper columnist who had criticized Hank in print. According to the Associated Press, a “1999 report by the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center singled Hank Rhon out as an associate of drug smugglers.” It was Hank’s father, also a prominent public official, who first said the famous line “A politician who is poor is a poor politician.” One month after the Xolos joined the Primera, Hank was arrested in a predawn raid of his Tijuana mansion. Army soldiers found a large cache of illegal weapons, including forty rifles, forty-eight handguns, 9,298 bullet cartridges, seventy ammunition clips, and a gas grenade. Two of the guns were linked to earlier murders. Hank spent ten days in jail before all charges were dropped, for lack of evidence.

  Before the car bombing, Marco and Dany rented out their Juárez dream house. After the bombing, they sold all the furniture inside it. They’re not coming back. A rutera driver working for Dany’s family will be murdered. “He was a very good man. A very extraordinary worker for us,” Dany’s mother will tell me. “And he was innocent. I don’t know why they killed him.”

  It won’t take long for Marco to crack Pachuca’s starting lineup. In a profile posted on an American soccer site, Herculez Gomez will rave that Marco “brings a calmness to the game.” But then Pachuca will switch head coaches and Marco, as always, will land back on the bench. Although he will fly to Dubai for the Club World Cup, he will not play in any games. He’ll ultimately end up in León, of all cities, of all teams, starting every game for the Esmeraldas and trying to play his way back into the big time.

  Mayor Teto will return the bullfights to La Frontera. He will also change the official name of his town to Heroic Ciudad Juárez. I will be told J. L. is dead. Definitely dead. Gunned down in Chihuahua city. Those who tell me this will admit that no super-fucking-fat dead body has yet turned up. Other people will tell me J. L. is still alive. Most people will tell me he’s dead. I’ll decide he’s dead. Once a week, as if visiting the Stations of the Cross, Arson’s mother will continue walking to the police station in Juárez to ask if they’ve made any progress in their investigation of Charlie’s murder.

  And I will leave. Before my original visit to the border, the plan had been—hopefully, if it could be done—to make Juárez my permanent home. Juárez is energizing. To live in a city where you can be killed at any moment, as Ramón Morales first put it, is to answer, every day, a fundamental question: How badly do you want to remain alive? Just answering that question, just saying that you want to live—very much so, please—is a kind of gift. It’s natural to take life for granted sometimes. It’s impossible to do it in Juárez. When I’m on La Frontera, I’m conscious that I’m alive, and that I want to stay that way.

  The city’s inspiring, too. At least the people are. The ultimate purpose of government, I’ve been taught, is to protect us from ourselves. In a state of nature, man is inherently wicked, all selfish id, out to kill and fuck and terrorize. Juárez challenges this lesson. The city is a failed state, obviously. The most wicked of all crimes, murder, is legal. Go ahead! Have at it! Yet almost nobody in this town is a murderer. So many people—almost everybody here—pursue remarkably normal lives. They go to work. They marry, they raise their kids, they follow soccer teams. It’s not lightly that I drop the name Anne Frank, but when I think about this city, she keeps popping into my mind. Juárez has made me believe that, deep down, people are fundamentally good. Juárez is where my neighbor tells me her mission in life is to help others and to love.

  And the food here is the best. I wanted to stay. But Manuel made it obvious the endgame could not be avoided. Over the phone, he shook my shoulders and slapped my face and pinched my skin to prove I’d gone numb. And when you go numb in Juárez, that’s when you have a problem.

  It won’t seem wise to start over somewhere else in Mexico, much as I’ve grown to love this country. Eight are killed at a bar in Cancún. Ships from Princess Cruises stop docking in Puerto Vallarta. My initially rosy take on Monterrey is proving way wrong, very naive. “Monterrey is becoming the new Ciudad Juárez,” reports the Associated Press. Extortions are up, as are carjackings. Fifty-two people are killed in a casino firebombing. Cartel assassinations fuel a murder rate that, while not yet on par with Juárez, is climbing rocket-ship fast. President Calderón sends in the federales, and we know how effective that’ll be.

  “The day-to-day reality is a violence that is out of control,” the AP concludes. Drug killings scar Guadalajara as well. Even in Pachuca, Marco and Dany’s home for a season, someone tosses seven dead bodies down a well.

  Juárez is the start of what will end up being a second Mexican revolution.

  I’ll again pack up my car with everything I own, adding a small Mexican dog to the pile. My landlady will say she’s com
ing over to retrieve my keys, but then she’ll call to report there’s been a shooting on her street and she can’t leave her house for a while.

  “I think it’s getting worse,” she will tell me.

  I’ll drive across the river, back into my country, heading ultimately back to Miami. An hour after I cross, maybe two hours this time, poof: Juárez will vanish, as if the city never existed. Except I can’t forget Ken-tokey, who’s unable to cross the border like I can. I can’t forget Lorenzo and Karina and their father who still drives every morning to the machine shop where he was kidnapped. I can’t forget Ramón and Adir and and my landlady and the Karteleros and my dog-walking neighbor and everyone else living life as best they can. The city really happened. Juárez does exist.

  “We are going back to the Primera!” Francisco shouts. He’s again pounding the window of his luxury box with both palms, making me recall the way the windows at the sports bar vibrated from the car bombs. Juárez has scored a fourth goal, the game a blowout. One of the Indios left from last season fired a low shot that slipped under the visiting goalkeeper’s arms. “This is good! This is good! We’re going right back up to the Primera, I assure you!”

  He turns to make sure I’m listening.

  “We’re going to stay as long as God permits,” he adds. “We will continue here as long as God gives us the strength!”

  A professional soccer team runs around one of the best-maintained fields in Mexico. I can hear the drums of El Kartel thumping even up in the luxury box. A hoppy tang hangs in the air from so many beers tossed aloft in this runaway win. As long as people continue to believe in the team, Francisco tells me, then the Indios are doing their job, which is to help people. The man who brought the Primera back to the border for a few beautiful years looks down upon his creation as if what he’s seeing—as if a soccer ball finding the back of the net—were the sweetest thing happening in his city.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to just about everyone on La Frontera. That includes anyone associated with UTEP, with the El Paso Public Library, with the Juárez Maquiladora Association, and with a hundred other border outfits including, while I’m at it, the many Whataburger restaurants I patronized on the El Paso side. Beyond the people already mentioned in the text, I want to recognize the contributions of Ben Adams, Kesse Buchanan, Ilean Di Raz, Steve Dudley, Pat and Carolina Flood, Victor Foia, Kyle Haas, Chris Higashi, Nate Knaebel, Tristram Korten, Chris Lopez, Janet Lopez, Kirk Nielsen, Will Palmer, Chris Parris-Lamb, Randall Patterson, Johnathan Rendon, Aurora Rivera, Linda Robertson, Aaron and Sarit Schneider, Kirk Semple, Jessica Sick, Janine Sieja, Jabari Smith, Tom Trahan, Alberto J. Treviño and Steven Yore.

  The New York Times commissioned my reporting on the dead women; a longer and unedited draft of the femicide chapter originally appeared as a Kindle Single. This book first took shape in the Scandiuzzi Writers’ Room at Seattle’s Central Library. Profound thanks as always to my family, especially this time to Nathan and Shea Bastian for their help in Dallas, and to Corin Jorns in Seattle for inviting me to his fourth birthday party, and for taking Benito on a good, long walk.

  A Note on the Author

  Robert Andrew Powell is the author of We Own This Game, a story of race, politics, and youth football. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Slate, Mother Jones, Inc., 5280, Runner’s World, and the Kansas City Star; on public radio’s This American Life and in The Best American Sports Writing anthology. He lives in Miami.

  By the Same Author

  We Own This Game

  Copyright © 2012 by Robert Andrew Powell

  Electronic edition published in March 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Powell, Robert Andrew.

  This love is not for cowards : salvation and soccer in Ciudad Juárez / Robert Andrew Powell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-60819-716-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Soccer—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. 2. Soccer teams—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez. 3. Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)—Social life and customs. I. Title.

  GV944.M6P69 2012

  796.33409721'6—dc23

  2011039004

  ISBN: 9781608197170