Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

by Charles Bowden

  Often, down below on the dry soil of the river, there is a crazy man. He shouts in English, “Welcome! Hello America!” And he holds a cup in his hand for catching tossed coins.

  When I cross back, often late in the night, he is on the other side of the bridge, but now he begs in Spanish.

  Behind the loony, a bunch of crosses were painted on a wall to symbolize the dead girls of Juárez. The simple message in Spanish says they were actually killed by capitalism incubating in the American-owned maquiladoras, the border factories of such renown in the parlors where wine is sipped to toast the global economy.

  Every day in Juárez, at least two hundred thousand people get out of bed to pull a shift in the maquilas. The number varies—right now probably twenty thousand jobs have vanished in Juárez as a chill sweeps through the global economy. Within a year, eighty to one hundred thousand jobs will vanish. Just after the millennium, about one hundred thousand maquila jobs left the city for mainland China, because as Forbes magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four times the wages of the Chinese. A fair point. The greedy Mexicans were taking home sixty, maybe seventy dollars a week from the plants in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the United States. Turnover in these plants runs from 100 to 200 percent a year. The managers say this is because of the abundant opportunities of the city. Labor is still a bargain here—but so is death. Four years ago, the Chihuahua State Police were doing contract murders. They supplied their own guns and bullets with the full knowledge of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

  But we must not talk about such matters. Juárez officially has almost no unemployment. The factories gleam in industrial parks sculpted by the local rich. The city grows. There is talk of even building a new city off to the west, where the giant white horse watches over the desert flats. That is why I like to go there.

  I sit on the sand in the desert under the giant white horse by the place of the crazy people and I think of Miss Sinaloa.

  She understands. And soon I think I will if I am given enough time on the killing ground.

  I insist on getting out of the truck even though I know everyone in the narco neighborhood is watching me. I suck in the dusty air, feel the warmth of the sun. Across the street, a large German shepherd barks through the iron fence. He stares me down and does his work of guarding a world where only large, angry dogs go about unarmed.

  There are a few basic rules about the Mexican army. If you see them, flee, because they famously disappear people. If you are part of them, desert, because they famously pay little. In the 1990s, President Ernesto Zedillo formed a new, pure force to fight drugs and had them trained by the United States. They were paid a pittance—a friend of mine in the DEA grew close to them because his agency instantly put them on the payroll and he was their pay-master. By 2000, the special antidrug force had joined the Gulf cartel and became known as the Zetas, U.S.-trained military killers with discipline and skill with weapons. The original Zetas are mainly dead, but their style—decapitations, military precision in attacks—spread and now they are the model for killers in many cartels. They are also an inspiration and a constant lure for Mexican soldiers who desert for the cartels—over a hundred thousand troops fled the army and joined criminal organizations in the first decade of the new century. The pay is better and so is the sense of power.

  In 2000, the election of Vicente Fox ended the seventy-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The drug industry ceased to be controlled by the central government, many independents entered the business, domestic drug use skyrocketed, and federal control of the nation grew ever more feeble. The razor-thin election of Felipe Calderón in 2006 brought the very legitimacy of the president into question. He responded by unleashing the army against the drug industry ten days after his election as a show of force. And that is when the killing began to spiral to previously unimagined levels. First, he sent twenty thousand troops to his home state of Michoacan. Then, the military mission grew to thirty thousand nationally, and eventually forty-five to fifty thousand. With each escalation, the number of murdered Mexicans exploded. At about the same time, the United States began mumbling about Plan Mexico, a billion and a half dollars to help our neighbors to the south fight the good fight, with the lion’s share going to the army. Put simply, the United States took a Mexican institution with long ties to the drug industry—the army was a partner in the huge marijuana plantation in Chihuahua, Rancho Bufalo, of the mid-1980s, and it was a Mexican general who became the drug czar in 1997 until it was discovered he worked for the Juárez cartel—and bankrolled it to fight the drug industry.

  And so in Juárez tonight, the army does the killing, the United States gloats over a battle against the cartels, the president of Mexico beams as Plan Mexico comes close to his grasp. And the street soldiers of the drug industry either duck down or die—the kills in Juárez are largely of nobodies or of their local cop allies. And the Zetas, the thousands they have trained, and their imitators get friskier. They have training camps in northern Mexico—they killed four cops from Nuevo Laredo in such a camp and then burned them in barrels. They have heavy arms, grenades, rockets, good morale, and high pay. Desertion is not an option.

  By the late 1990s, the cartel in Juárez was said to have rockets. And was hiring former Green Berets to make sure its communications systems were up to snuff. But as the bodies mount in Juárez, the capos are not the ones with bullet holes. In fact, there is no evidence they are even concerned by this military exercise. It is a mystery.

  During this season of gore, Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, the former head of the Tijuana cartel, was released in El Paso in early March after doing about ten years in Mexican and U.S. prisons. He crossed the bridge into what the DEA claims is enemy territory, the turf of the Juárez cartel. By all reports, he expressed no concern as he made his way to the airport.

  I sit on the patio drinking wine in a barrio named after Emiliano Zapata. The city has a statue of the murdered revolutionary hero, and he looks spindly as he holds an extended rifle with one hand. Originally, Zapata pointed his weapon toward neighboring El Paso, but then one mayor thought this impolite and turned the dead hero around. About a hundred and fifty yards away runs the drainage canal for floods in the city, a conduit that also doubles as a kind of freeway into the poor barrios that coat this hillside.

  At around noon on March 10, Juán Carlos Rocha, thirty-eight, stands on an island in this freeway peddling P.M., the afternoon tabloid that features murders and sells to working-class people. Two men approach and shoot him in the head. No one sees anything except that they are armed, wear masks, and move like commandos. They walk away from the killing. A city cop lives facing the murder site.

  A crowd gathers and watches police clean up the murder scene.

  Rocha, the people in the barrio say, sold more than P.M. He also offered cocaine at four to six dollars a packet. He’d been warned twice by mysterious strangers to cease this activity. He did not listen.

  He allegedly earned about three hundred dollars a week as his cut of the retail cocaine business, more than three times what the neighboring factory workers, his customers, make. As he lies in a pool of blood in the bright sunlight, his brown jacket is neatly folded on the traffic island, his cap on the pavement, where it tumbled from his shattered skull. A woman in a tube top takes his photograph with her cell phone while uniformed schoolgirls stand in a pod and watch.

  There are more than twenty thousand such retail outlets in this city, many employing vendors working three shifts a day. Now there is a battle going on for these small ventures in cutthroat capitalism.

  A friend of mine can barely leave anything in his house, because local addicts rob it the moment he exits. He is on his third large dog. The previous two were poisoned. He has hopes for the third guard dog.

  The day after the killing, the vendor is the cover story in P.M., the tabloid he peddled on his traffic island. His street name was El Cala, The Skull.
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  On March 27, 2008, the army admits it is taking Juárez by force. In front of the hotel downtown, a soldier stands with a .50-caliber machine gun. Over 180 armed and armored vehicles hunt evil on the streets, plus an air wing that includes a helicopter gunship. Two thousand troops arrive, or more. Or so the government says, the press repeats, but no one is ever allowed to make a real count. The soldiers wear black masks and are short and dark. The officers have lighter skin that loses pigment steadily as the rank gets higher until there is the rarefied air of the generals who look like Europeans dropped in some colonial outpost.

  Roadblocks go up everywhere, especially at night, when events are difficult to see and impossible to monitor. The authorities say this is necessary because two hundred people have been murdered since the first of year. There will be ten patrol bases and forty-six roving units. Night life in Juárez collapses because the local citizens dread hitting a military checkpoint in the dark.

  It is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Semana Santa, Holy Week, a time for families to reunite and for men to gather and drink themselves senseless as they bask in the grace of God. Two police cars convoy through the quiet of Juárez, one with a city comandante, the other with bodyguards. Suddenly, they are pinned at a traffic light by a car in front and then another car pulls alongside and machine-guns the vehicles. Customers at the nearby gas station duck as bullets plunge through metal.

  The comandante’s bodyguard dies and others are wounded. This bodyguard has a curious past. In January, the comandante’s name—Victor Alejandro Gomez Marquez—was posted on the list that appeared on the monument to the fallen policemen as a person scheduled to die. But the bodyguard is the man who truly hears death whispering in his ear. He recently told his mother he had fifteen days to live. Then, he came over to his mother’s house again and sat with a friend as they drank a liter of whisky. This time, he told his mother he had at best eight days to live.

  She told him, “Be positive. Christ’s blood is covering you and protecting you.”

  Now, he is done with living.

  The mural depicts a conquistador, another wall is a collage of snapshots from the work. A sign says, “God is greater than my problems.” In the corner rests a metal statue of a man in armor. This is the office of El Pastor, José Antonio Galvan, the radio evangelist who took in the battered remains of Miss Sinaloa and gave her succor in the crazy place. He is sitting right in front of me, a mop of graying hair, a fleshy body, a ready smile. He is showing me a movie of the asylum—men beaten by police and dumped half crazy on the streets, addled addicts with seeping ulcerated wounds, women who will never remember what happened to them and never want to remember.

  I stare at the ruined faces in the video and ask, “Does your congregation support this work?”

  He smiles, points to the crazy people on the screen, and says, “This is my congregation.”

  There was a bad storm in the winter of 1998, and El Pastor was driving in Juárez when he saw a mound on the street and swerved just as a man emerged from the pile of snow where he slept. God spoke to him at that moment and so El Pastor rounded up friends and for a day gathered the wounded off the streets—brain-damaged addicts, ruined gang members—everyone left at the mercy of the snows in a city without mercy.

  “Oh, they smelled bad,” he says, “covered with shit and all that.”

  The office of El Pastor once was a drug house where addicts punctured their veins and savored their dreams. He descended on this place as a street preacher raving in the calles. The local priest called him a devil. But he drew others to him. As for the devil, El Pastor fights him daily—he keeps a black and red punching bag near at hand and slams it with his fists as he fights Satan.

  Everything about El Pastor is vital and coarse, his language often vulgar, his feel for the crazy people visceral. The world is lucky he gave up the bottle and the drugs and turned toward God.

  El Pastor spent sixteen years as an illegal in Los Angeles and learned to be a crane operator, do lots of drugs and alcohol, and earn sixteen dollars an hour. He could be rough on the job—twice he threw men out of buildings and he was not on the first floor. Eventually, he went to prison and then was deported back to Mexico. He became a street addict in Juárez. Then in 1985, he was born again and began preaching on the street to drug addicts. Rough edges remain and keep him honed. On one arm he has a tattoo of a good-looking mestiza and on the other, a good-looking Indian woman. Before he went to work in the United States, he hated white people and despised Mexicans who crossed over. But then he married, had children and went to El Norte. And found that this country he disliked fed him and his family and now he says, “I love Mexico, but not the Mexican system.” He has two kids in college in the United States, and one son has served eight years in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Now he must raise ten thousand dollars a month on the radio simply to meet the medical, food, and staff costs of this crazy place he has created.

  He gives me the short course in the history of his city.

  “The violence is high in Juárez,” he says in a soft voice. “A lot of young people come to Juárez and have the American dream—it is so close. But now the border is closed. People come from the south, they are clean and hard-working and they don’t know anything about the streets. And guys take them in, and soon they are selling their bodies and using drugs. After a year, they have gang tattoos. The capos now sell drugs here where there is a growing market because then they don’t have to cross them into the United States. Now fourteen-year-olds are moving a ton of cocaine.”

  I ask if he remembers a patient called Miss Sinaloa.

  “Oh, yes,” he says. “She was at an orgy.”

  The Casablanca is, of course, white and has many rooms with parking beside each one and metal doors to protect the privacy of the cars and license plates from prying eyes. Men bring women here for sex and love and joy and whatever other terms they prefer. This was Miss Sinaloa’s eventual destination. In front stands Valentino’s, a large nightclub with red-tiled domes, the party haven that also beckoned her.

  Miss Sinaloa came here from her Pacific Coast home. For days she was raped by eight policemen. Her buttocks bore the handprints of many men by the time she got to El Pastor, and there were bite marks on her breasts.

  She arrives at the crazy place on December 16, 2005, after 5 P.M. The city police bring her out and dump her. They have, they say, had her in jail, but she is too much to handle. She fights and yells and is no fun at all.

  She has lost her mind and now she comes to the place of kindred souls.

  Everyone is not as lucky as Miss Sinaloa. Heidi Slauquet was very good-looking and made paintings. For years, she was a party girl in Mexico City, and in the early 1990s, she wound up in Juárez. For a while, she had a nightclub where narco-traficantes liked to go. For a while, she was a lover of Amado Carrillo. And then when that wore out, she became a kind of hostess and made sure beautiful girls came to the parties, girls like Miss Sinaloa.

  On November 29, 1995, she takes a cab to Juárez International Airport. The cabby eventually turns up dead. Heidi never reappears. People at the airport say that Heidi’s cab was stopped by what looked to be federal police.

  Nobody talks about them, because silence means everyone can pretend they do not exist. They are on every street, sometimes asleep on the sidewalks or huddled in a doorway. No one knows their real numbers because a real count would slap reality into everyone’s faces. They are the brain-damaged of the city. The mother could not get enough food when she was big with child, or she had bad habits, the booze, glue, paint sniffing, all kinds of habits. Or she managed to deliver a healthy child but then the street finally beckons and the child goes to the glue and the paint or maybe meth claws the brains out. Still, they are there, on every calle, legs shortened by hunger, wizened heads from malnutrition, jerky movements from the chemicals, madness in the eyes, and often there are voices, brilliant voices that speak to them even though the rest of us are not privileged enough to hear
these voices.

  I am on the main avenue, I have just crossed the bridge, and the morning is sunny and bright with promise. She walks up with a shuffling gait, her head rocking as she jabbers. She’s wearing Capri pants, black running shoes, and a knit blouse, and her hair is clean. She has some of her teeth and is coasting somewhere in her thirties. She is a whore and from the looks of her emaciated body I guess heroin or meth, but I don’t know. What I know is this: She is a product of the city, a testament to the cheap drugs and the expendable lives, and her story will never be in the newspaper, nor will she—or the army that wanders the city and is just like her—ever be counted and considered in the studies and essays about life in Juárez.

  That is part of my attraction to El Pastor. He gets the rejects of the Mexican health system, of the Mexican jail system, and of Mexican compassion. He also gets the people the U.S. Border Patrol apprehends who are crazy with the damage of life. The agency tosses them back in order not to take care of them. And El Pastor scoops them up and takes them to his crazy place in the desert, and for the first time in years, these people have someone touch them and not cringe.

  I look at her and say, no.

  She continues weaving and bobbing around me, and then, with a smile, she staggers off to find some other hope of a blow job, a few pesos and a fix in the early morning Juárez light.

  But she is everywhere in this city and sometimes she is a woman and sometimes she is a man, and sometimes she is a child, but always she is a casualty of the life of this place. And a hero because simply dealing with the life here and refusing to give in takes courage that is absent among the rich and powerful of this city.

  El Pastor is a small lens, and if you look through this lens, you see these invisible people because he is their last and only hope. And he has files, over a thousand files on the invisible people of Juárez.