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

by Charles Bowden

  Forensic experts huddle in these digs at death houses. They have no names, and their bodies appear in the published images, but not their faces. There are few, if any, reports of their findings. They are the costume of order more than the substance of hard facts. For that matter, the various elements of law enforcement at these special charnel houses appear in the newspaper wearing masks. Only the cadaver dogs show up with clear faces.

  And then public notices of the death house and its bodies vanish from the papers much as the dead vanished from the city itself. Memory ebbs, and the cavalcade of the vanished and of the dead disappears from sight and becomes some ghost column winding through the city streets that no one professes to see. Or the dead sit in the cafés where they had their last cup of coffee, belly up to the bar where they had that last drink, huddle in the dust and wind at bus stops where they awaited that last ride.

  Sometimes, the vanished never reappear. Normally, there are killings because of the drug industry, and these executed souls are found at dawn on city streets like the litter that slaps the eye in the morning light after a boisterous fiesta. But there are periods when no such bodies appear with hands tied with duct tape and a bullet through the skull. There is no way the drug industry with its implicit contractual protocols can take a holiday from death. It is simply impossible in a multibillion-dollar industry that has no standing at law to collect debts or enforce discipline without murder. Sometimes the vanished never even become a name on a list. People fear reporting their missing kin—in one instance, twelve bodies were dug up at a death house and not a single person slumbering in that ground had been reported missing.

  So, there are clearly two ghost patrols out and about in the city. Those murdered and secretly disposed of by the drug industry, and those who vanish for whatever reason and are never reported.

  During the season of violence that swept through the city and brought me into the circle of Miss Sinaloa, I stopped at a convenience market to buy a bottle of water. Taped below a pay phone was the photograph of a cop with the date he went missing, his name and a phone number where someone waited for a message about his fate. I thought the city’s magical powers had reached a new level when even the police must seek anonymous tips to find one of their own. Just down the road was a huge billboard soliciting recruits for the very same police force, an image of a man in a helmet who wore a black mask and carried a machine gun.

  Vanishing here is always a possibility and it gives the city a special aura. Kidnappings are frequent, but they at least mean someone wants to return the missing and is acting in a rational manner where a human has a value in money and a feasible transaction is possible. Vanishing means a page left half-written, a tale never fully told. It is more final than execution because it means not simply being murdered but being erased from any real memory or participation in the human community.

  Certainly, the city police have become alert to this vanishing thing. Traditionally, they must leave their guns at the station house when they finish their shift. But now they are publicly complaining about this practice that forces them to travel home like any other citizen, without a weapon. They say this policy is now unacceptable.

  The avenue curves down by the river and enters the zone in the southeast where Juárez has been migrating to flee its moldering core. The car flows past the giant flagpole erected in the 1990s by then President Ernesto Zedillo so that a gigantic Mexican flag would gently wash across the face of El Paso, but the Mexican park later became a popular dumping ground for bodies.

  Finally, the neighborhood looms where the army has detained twenty-one men and seized guns, ammo, and other tools of the trade. It is a “narcolandia,” a place where those in the life build their dreams and live out time until their mostly early deaths. The streets have names like Michigan, Alaska, Arizona, Oregon, a roll call of states in the nation just across the river. Mansions rise up—one is three stories of gray concrete with the orange girders still uncovered and is a work in progress, maybe six thousand square feet or more. Next door, workmen install expensive wooden doors on yet another mansion. The men glare. No one is to come here unless they belong here. My friend will not come here alone, and as he drives down the calles, he cautions me about taking notes.

  Many of the new houses are for sale—perhaps sudden promotions have prompted the owners to new quarters. But there is a second possibility. The killings constantly create vacancies. Just as some architects—and the rising narco-class is a keen market for architects in a city of grinding poverty—have vanished after finishing narco-mansions. No one asks why.

  It is a blue-sky day and the sun hits empty streets. No one is out in the yards, no one is walking, no one is visible at all. It looks like a ghost town, but there is a constant feeling of being watched. In the 1990s, a photographer from the local newspaper vanished after taking images in such a district. When he appeared weeks later after his colleagues publicly protested, he had little to say. Except that it was a misunderstanding because he had simply on impulse decided to go to the beach in Sinaloa. A yellow sign tacked to a telephone pole advertises tarot card readings and amulets. This is a world of change and random fates.

  We come upon it in a cul-de-sac, two and half stories, gray with dark trim. A black, wrought-iron fence protects the front. The gate and door are pad-locked. A colored flyer has been stuffed between the bars touting a furniture sale. This house is empty. Here the military found twenty-one men, a lot of arms, and what they claim was a factory filling little bags with drugs. The supply of drugs was modest. But in Mexico, seized drugs have a way of disappearing once in the custody of the authorities. Sometimes, tons vanish—in the 1990s a full-bodied jet filled with cocaine somehow fell into federal hands, and yet, within a week, by some kind of sorcery, the load was being peddled on the streets of Los Angeles, according to U.S. agents.

  The houses are orange, red, green, yellow, blue, and purple, the columns rise at the porticos, the huge windows are tinted and some soar two stories. The garages stare out like blank eyes. Large dogs bark from within. This is “narcotecture,” the three-dimensional statement of the dreams of the poor who now prosper. There is no real effort to comprehend the scale of the business here. Officially, the population of Juárez is 1.2 million (or 1.4 million or 1.6 million—even something as simple as a census is hard to pin down here), but all urban populations are pegged by the federal government at a low number so that tax monies that are repatriated to the various cities can be kept low. In the case of Juárez, the population is possibly 2 million, but this is an estimate, just as no accurate map of the sprawling city and its squatter colonias exists. But taking this number of 2 million and making a conservative estimate that 5 percent of the population lives off the drug industry suggests that the minimum number of the people in the life and their dependents is one hundred thousand. By the mid-1990s, conservative students figured 30 to 40 percent of the local economy ran on laundered drug money—others set the figure at more like 60 to 70 percent.

  Tijuana, a city officially at around 2 million, is credited with lower drug usage than Juárez. A recent study found over twenty thousand retail drug outlets in Tijuana, mainly cocaine and heroin. In Juárez, there are at least as many such venues. The peddlers earn three hundred dollars a week, there tend to be three shifts, so let’s posit for Juárez twenty-five thousand outlets (a conservative estimate) and figure a payroll of seventy-five thousand retailers, each earning three hundred dollars a week. This amounts to a bigger payroll than that earned by the two hundred thousand factory workers earning on average seventy-five dollars a week. And of course, the real money is not in the retail peddlers but in the organizations that control them and import and package their products. This is the economy of the city. This is supply-side economics flooring the killing ground.

  The city is studded with narco-McMansions. They have bright colors and often feature domes with brilliant tiles. They are the reward for work.

  The work is constant and wearing. The city of
Juárez has a monument to fallen officers on a traffic circle, and suddenly that list appeared taped to it, naming cops who would die.

  A few days later, four cops on the second list were killed. Forty cops have left the force since the first of the year. In February, a drive-by shooting at the house of a dead cop was accompanied by yet another list taped to the building. This list was not made public. But the police announced they would no longer be answering calls but preferred to stay in their station houses.

  All this notice will vanish, that is what happens in this city. When the migration north was just beginning to pick up in 1993, the line between El Paso and Juárez was where the first real effort was made to block Mexicans, an operation that became the source for all the notions of a massively beefed-up Border Patrol. When Amado Carrillo was running a cartel that hauled in $250 million a week in the mid-1990s, Juárez was barely a speck in the mind of the American government or media. When he used the same private banker at Citigroup in New York as the then-president of Mexico, this, too, was of no interest. When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed and went plowing into the lives of millions like a greed-seeking missile in the early 1990s, this city that pioneered using cheap labor to bust unions and steal American jobs continued to be ignored. Only brief flickers of interest in the dead women of Juárez captures any American audience, and that, too, is a hit-or-miss thing, something that lives in the limbo land of issues rather than of solutions or actions. Only as the killing of 2008 accelerates does Juárez get new press attention and finally draw attention to a simple fact: It is dying.

  On February 26, Ricardo Chacon was in Ciudad Chihuahua, the capital of the state. He’d left Juárez even though he was second in command of the unit once headed by Comandante Lozano, the man who survived a fifty-one round barrage and was now hiding in a U.S. hospital. Chacon planned to quit his job. Instead, he was shot in the head and killed. Two days later, Juárez officials decide to address the problem of crime. They launch a campaign against jaywalking in the city.

  Murder Artist

  He lives in fear. He cannot trust me. Or anyone. We could betray him and then he will die. I hear out these concerns as I sit with my back to the levee. The sun sparkles, the air is brown with dirt. Two big concrete lions guard my flanks, and two blue and white swans cut from truck tires beam plants and flowers into my face. Fluted Greek columns hold up the porch.

  It is one of those mornings when the world brushes against me, says nothing, but sits there waiting me out. In Juárez, a gang of killers now operates and calls itself the Murder Artists. There is an abundance of new art. I am far from Juárez. I have come a long way to meet the secret part of Ciudad Juárez. And so I wait in a rough barrio down by the river.

  A drunk comes up the lane.

  He is asked, “How many times have you been in jail?”

  He cannot recall.

  “Why do you keep doing dope and booze?”

  “I like living this way.”

  He takes fifty pesos and leaves with his morning thirst.

  I return to waiting. I knew he would not be at the café but would send new instructions. I suspect he was watching me in the café parking lot, but I cannot be sure. I suspect he is watching me now. The phone rings about every half hour. He says that he has been delayed but will be there shortly.

  Then twenty minutes later it rings again. And so forth.

  He is watching me now. And I think he will never arrive until I leave.

  This will take time.

  Waiting fills my life, a ribbon of motel rooms, cafés, parking lots, bars, and street corners. Time always belongs to someone else and they portion it out in slabs and I simply wait. Two groups in my life have shared my interest in the subject of waiting: drug dealers and narcs. They can never have control and can never be impatient because fast moves lead to nothing at all, the case busted, the deal gone cold. There is an empty book waiting to be written by those who wait listening to the roar of air conditioners in motel rooms and staring at silent phones.

  He lives in fear.

  He has killed thirty-four people for hire. Or more. Sometimes the number is exact and sometimes the number is a blur because of the nature of the life.

  Now fellow professionals are hunting him. They nearly nailed him three months back, it was very close, and so his caution has grown. He was at church when he was spotted. He fled a thousand miles.

  So he moves carefully, but he knows that all his caution can only delay the inevitable.

  He is a rumor that keeps crossing my mind. He belonged to a crew and they traveled in Mexico killing people for money. They had three sets of uniforms, nicely starched—municipal police, state police, federal police. Also, they would have cars with the proper police insignia on them depending on whatever area they were operating in at the moment. Ambulances also would be mimicked. They would pull you over in their police uniforms and police cars, murder you, and then haul your body away in their faux ambulance.

  They traveled constantly, sometimes only being in a city or state for two or three days. The prices varied. For his part, he would earn one grand a killing or five grand or twenty grand. Or more. They had abundant arms.

  I walk up to the top of the levee, and a great blue heron lifts off the river and pumps its wings slowly as it courses downstream. The barrio is very poor, the houses often built of scrap materials. The sun feels warm on my face.

  I have waited many years for this meeting. Before, I have had glancing blows with contract killers, brief words over beers, they would make vague references to their toils. These were always accidental collisions as we hunted the same ground for our varied prey. They never seemed strange enough. They simply seemed like everyone else, a fact I could not abide.

  I am certain he and I agree on some facts. One, if he meets me he is taking a risk because this can only work if he trusts me, and trusting another human being is dangerous. Two, he will be killed, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, no matter, he will be killed. I have come to this place I cannot name to meet a man who will never have a name. We are on the line, but the line is over eighteen hundred miles long.

  It must be intriguing for him to be prey after so many years of being the predator. He knows how they will do him. He knows almost certainly it will not be a clean and easy death.

  He often has nightmares. Always he is killing someone and they are begging for mercy, for a quick and easy death, and in his dreams, he always hears laughter, his laughter. He calls this “gangster laughter.”

  He knows fear, and that is why the duct tape is so important. First, you quickly tape their mouths, then put the plastic bag over their heads and bind it tight around the neck. But attention must be paid to the hands and feet. The hands are taped behind the back, the feet cinched together. Because always, once they realize what is happening, they start “jumping around like chickens that have had their heads cut off.”

  I ask him something: Why is the duct tape sometimes gray and then other times beige? Is this simply a happenstance, or a deliberate decision, a kind of homage to the importance of color in life?

  He ignores the question.

  There is a thumbnail of his life and I have no idea if it is true. He begins as a gofer for the state police, the little guy who scurries when someone wants coffee or some tacos. He is good at serving people, he seems born to such a role. He comes from poverty but he is quite bright. For example, he knows accounting.

  In the state police, he makes a friend among the cops he serves, a man who goes on to be the bodyguard of the governor and then rises and joins the cartel. They drift apart, but this relationship will prove important to him.

  For himself, he finds he can kill—I don’t yet know the details of how he comes into this knowledge. He joins a crew and operates the uniforms, the cars, the ambulances, the trips. The easy money.

  He winds up as the bodyguard for the adolescent son of the boss, and this job is taxing because the boy, seventeen or eighteen, is an
asshole. Still, it is a good job—saving the boy from brawls in discos, killing people the boy does not favor, simple chores like that. Also, at times he collects money for the boss, and kills for him. It is a life.

  Then he has a problem. He is sent to collect five thousand dollars and he does this. But he spends all the money in one night on a party for himself. This is bad, but he can make up the money. However, the boy he guards has some kind of grudge against him now.

  One day, the son tells him to go to the store and get shovels and picks.

  He knows what this means.

  The other bodyguards take him down to a dry wash and beat him long and hard. But they let him get away—this is simply part of the legend that follows him.

  So he gets away. He pays a coyote a thousand dollars to get him into the United States in 2007. He is cheated, of course—the coyote dumps him on the levee. But he crosses, gets works, moves his family north, joins a church. Watches his back.

  That is why I wait here in the sun by the levee with a great blue heron wandering the river at my back. He is watching me, I am all but certain of this. I sip ice water out of a clear glass. I am outside in a plastic chair so he can study me. A cat rubs against my leg. I do not blink.