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

by Charles Bowden

  Everyone knows the facts and yet the facts slip from everyone’s hands. Walk a hundred feet from a body on the pavement—the blood puddled around the skull—and it never happened, the young girls smile, the traffic zooms past without slowing, the city beats on and on, and the dead no longer exist and soon the memory of the dead will be a rare bit of fact polished and cherished by the family and ignored or forgotten by everyone else. This is a survival tactic and it crosses all class lines. This is the fruit of living without history. This is the result of amnesia in television, radio, and print. This is the sweet drug that comes from fantasy. The authorities are real. The police enforce the laws. The courts function. The army protects. The streetlights sweep evil from the night. There is a consensus here to believe the unbelievable, to insist that things are normal—the government is in charge, the incidents, should they even come to notice, are accidents, little imperfections in the tapestry that is life and this tapestry is sound and beautiful to both the eye and to the hand as it strokes the elaborate weave of lives that make up the city.

  It took me a long time to accept that the present is acceptable. Period. I remember . . . a car pulls over, a man I know tells me with excitement in his voice that the police have arrested a man who has been killing all the women and the guy is convinced, the guy is intelligent—and I think at that moment that what the guy is telling me is nonsense. And then, the killings go on and on, and nothing is ever said of that moment, nothing is recalled of that bubble of excitement, nothing is mentioned of this fantasy that the police here solve crimes rather than commit them.

  The bodies are all over the city this spring. People executed who are of the lowest social order, people killed who have never owned an automobile or had a room all to themselves, people slaughtered who stand on street corners peddling this and that, and yet educated people over fine meals tell me the killing is a cartel battle even though not a single fact sustains this argument or satisfies a rational mind. The body is on the sidewalk, the crowd gathers, the police bumble about, then the corpse is put in a van and vanishes, the people disperse, and soon all is normal and there is no taint, not even that drying puddle where blood spurted out of the dead man’s head, no, there is not a trace of anything that suggests the world briefly went awry in this place. Just as the crack of the pistol shot vanished into the thin air, so did another life.

  I am sitting on the curb outside another death house. Soldiers wear masks to protect themselves from their fellow citizens. The media mill about, chatting, working cell phones, swapping lies and rumors. No one questions that the soldiers must wear masks, that the bodies will come out of the death house and go somewhere that is never revealed, and that the identities of the dead will either never be determined or made public. A woman drives down the lonely street in a fine, large pickup with tinted windows. Her hair is dyed blonde, her face a sea of cosmetics, her lips ruby red. She is stopped by a soldier, says something, and is allowed to continue on to her home, a place now sequestered behind the military barricades that shut off the street. She never even glances over at the death house where the digging goes on day after day. Her face reveals a slight irritation at the hubbub in her neighborhood but not a flicker of curiosity about the television trucks, the cameramen, the talent doing stand-ups as they file breathless reports about another house of death.

  Three times I have been blessed to witness the killing moment. I am always standing with a cup of coffee, and suddenly death falls out of the sky in the guise of a falcon. Twice, the killers were peregrines. Once, the blow came as a prairie falcon. Each time, I notice a sequence. The air is fresh, the birds singing, the leaves so very green on the trees, and then suddenly this freeze frame looms before me, a falcon, at the bottom of a dive that can reach speeds up to two hundred miles per hour, stops before me in the air, a dove clutched in its talons, death seeping into the eyes of the prey, and then suddenly both the slayer and slain vanish into the sky. Each time, I notice that a silence descends and continues for about twenty minutes. And then the birds reappear and life goes on as if nothing happened.

  The present is acceptable. Period.

  Suddenly, the army wishes to explain how things work. It reveals that it has discovered an account book in the possession of a cartel member and this ledger contains the payouts in Juárez for a ten-day period in March 2006. The tab for those days ran $336,000 and broke down into rivulets of cash. Twelve grand went for “comp. prensa,” apparently payoffs to the local press. Then came $135,000 for what is termed local troops, and another $80,000 to someone called Juan. Medical expenses ate up $12,000, and another $25,000 vanished in radios for communication. Someone referred to as “R3” is down for $5,473 and also for $320.

  “R4” gets $811, then $6,640, and finally, $4,760. The municipal police, according to the army, got $2,000 a week. A person going by the name Markesa got $1,160 and then, a bit later, another $955. Whoever “45” might be got $14,425. “Comp. Piolo” required $5,000, “Human 25” needed $10,000, and “Desp. Ofic. Parve” $200. Tete got a grand, but it is listed as a loan. On the plus side, “Cholo abono cab. Pollo” paid $159,000, and $39,820 flowed in from “R7 abono.” There is also mention of “Talon 452.”

  The accounting has the careful ring of Benjamin Franklin’s early efforts at frugality—a centavo saved is a centavo earned. It is a comfort to discover within the mysteries of the cartel the same attention to small sums that operates in the family budget. At times, the ledger seems like the butler’s accounting in some large English manor house. And even some of the unclear things—the listing of people with code names, the assignment of money to unexplained functions—these arcane matters remind one of the techniques of modern corporate accounting, where costs have vague descriptions and where losses spin off into separate funds with baffling names. Of course, there are some puzzles in the tallies released by the army. There seems to be no payment listed for the army, an oversight that staggers belief. Nor is there one for the federal police or for the state police, two outfits no sound drug merchant would leave out of his personnel plan. Then there is the opaque reference to what may be the press. I have a friend in Juárez who refuses to take payments from the cartel and so, even though he spent years working on the city’s newspapers, he is now virtually unemployable because, as he explained to me, “Now if you don’t take their money, they kill you.”

  At best, the information released by the army gives one a peek and no more into the money machine of the drug industry. For example, given the murder rate in the city over the past fifteen years, it is eye-opening that the ledger contains no entry for homicide, a basic requirement of the business. Nor is there a bribe schedule for U.S. agents, though it has been proven in U.S. courts time after time that such elements of American law enforcement demand payment for aiding the shipment of drugs into the republic.

  Still, it is a help, this partial ledger, like finding some rare manuscript from the ancient world that has survived the hurly-burly of life and speaks, as if from a tomb, of things that normally are beyond our comprehension.

  She began to notice little items in the Juárez papers in 1993. Esther Chávez Cano was then a retired corporate accountant who had worked for Kraft in Mexico. The body has been sodomized, strangled, and beaten. The body is half naked, raped, stabbed. The little items kept flowing, dead girls left in the dirt. Nothing much is done.

  Besides, women count more in Mexican beer commercials than on Mexican streets. Until 1953, they were not allowed to vote. Until the 1990s, they could not legally hold a job outside the house without their husband’s permission. Today, there are thirty-one Mexican states, and in all of them, if, say, a twelve-year-old girl announces that she’s been raped, well, she first has to prove she is “chaste and pure.” Statutory rape charges are forgiven in twelve states if the man marries the girl—though he then often simply walks out on the obligation. And of course, there is the concept of rapto, or bride abduction, which means a man carries a woman off, has sex with her, and then
either marries or dumps her, or does both. I once lived in a little place in Mexico where the potato chip salesman carried off a teenager—but then brought her back as unsatisfactory. She was in a state of mild disgrace, and when she walked down the street, I’d hear mothers tell their daughters not to look at her, but to pretend she did not exist.

  Esther Chávez waded into this world and by 1999 had founded Casa Amiga, a shelter for abused women in Juárez. That first year, she handled 250 clients. In 2007, the clinic treated 27,400. Of course, since Casa Amiga is the only shelter in the city and in the state, the numbers reflect who can manage the long bus ride to her building more than the actual level of violence against women in the city.

  She lives in a cul-de-sac in Juárez in a very nice neighborhood, and now she is seventy-two years old, battling cancer, and still driving each day to the shelter and pursuing the work. The slaughter of women continues, as does the slaughter of men. She is the gatekeeper on the city’s savagery against women. And she is very tiny.

  Her small house has two bedrooms, a warm kitchen, and a large living room with a fireplace and walls crawling with forty drawings and paintings. Family photographs watch from the coffee table. It is safe here. A raped and murdered woman was found in an abandoned building yesterday. Later, a bank was robbed. Esther has set the table with blue plates, glasses of pink grapefruit juice, and blue and yellow napkins. On the stairway to the upstairs bedroom, a large wooden angel says grace to the home, even though Chávez is not a believer. And her work for women has neither endeared her to the church nor brought the faith alive to her.

  We have eggs, chilis, squash, tortillas. And death.

  As she speaks, her thin hands with long fingers come together almost in prayer, but her voice, soft and low, has the force of authority. In Mexico, only women with a fierce will accomplish things. The rest go under the wheels of life.

  Her white hair is cropped short because of the chemotherapy, and her body has withered and is birdlike.

  At first she offers that the growing violence is a battle between cartels—this explanation is always a comfort to the civilized. She tells how the women who come to her shelter now say they are afraid to even go to the market because stray bullets may be flying anywhere. The city is rife with kidnappings, and they seem to observe no rules of class or neighborhood.

  But then, she continues, there are always these little gangs besides the major cartels, and these little gangs are everywhere and they are armed and they flourish now because drugs are everywhere and consumption in the city has exploded as people seek syringes and powders as a way to endure the strife of normal life.

  “I am trying to get a meeting with the mayor,” she explains. “Now things are different. In the nineties, women were being taken off the streets. Now they are killed in their own homes. There have been, as of this moment in February, ten women murdered this year and they were not victims of domestic violence, they were not killed by members of their own families.”

  The tales tumble out. The young woman from Guerrero who lived with her aunt, a student. She had no life, she studied, she did not go out. And she was killed. That ten-year-old child, her mother was in the hospital, she was left alone in the home—and here Esther clasps her hands together as her eyes burn into me—and the police now say it was men who came to rob the house, found a ten-year-old girl alone, and so raped and killed her. One of the arrested had been detained last year in the case of a raped child, his name is in Esther’s files, but of course, nothing had been done then. In both cases, he strangled. In the earlier case, the police said there was not enough evidence, but Esther Chávez knows better. She says that they simply did not believe that the child in the earlier case had been raped. Besides, she notes, the police are afraid to even leave their stations now. There is in Juárez a backlog of twenty-four thousand cases of all kinds, and women are now required to seek counseling with their attackers in order to clean up these files. The man is required to repent of his act and sign some papers and then he is released.

  Her eyes stare out from almost square glasses. She is very frail and yet on fire. She explains that her doctor has recommended she avoid movies with violence, lest they upset her.

  She laughs at the thought.

  “I have ten years in this,” she sighs. “The problem is that the violence will only increase because nothing has been done to treat the roots of the problem: corrupt police, the growing population of the city, poverty, drugs, and of course, people get frustrated and they sell drugs, and beat women. The men tell their women that if they go to Casa Amiga, they will kill them. And here the police never catch the murderer.”

  There is an old wood-cased pendulum clock on the wall in the corner. It has stopped.

  She passes a plate of cookies, pours coffee.

  “There is now a collective hysteria,” she continues. “I am a woman who is never afraid and now I’m afraid. I change my route to work. Two of the police were killed a few blocks from my home. Before, the violence focused on poor women. Now, it can happen to anyone. The gangs fight to control the drug business. Before, it was gangs killing gangs. Now, police chiefs are killed. For fourteen years, the business community here has blamed me for putting a blot on the image of Juárez. Now with this terrible violence, no one is talking about anyone slandering Juárez.”

  We talk for almost three hours. She says the violence is because of discrimination against women, it is because of the poverty, because of ignorance, because of the culture, because women have so little self-esteem here, because of a lack of faith in the authorities, because of social isolation since so many women come to the city for work without any family around them, because the maquiladoras are about making money, not about the well-being of people.

  She calls a cab and then we go outside.

  Across the street, a massive new home is going up, and it is topped with a huge dome done up in golden tiles. Two-story windows sketch the face, and big columns frame the portico.

  I glance at her and say, “Narco.”

  She smiles, and then points to the other homes on the cul-de-sac and says, “Narco, narco, narco, narco, narco, five of my neighbors are narcos.”

  But she contests my statement about the new house going up across the street.

  “No,” she explains, “ he says he is a professor. A very strange professor.”

  Two years ago, I was at another house a block or so from the home of Esther Chávez. It also was a fine residence. It was a place men in the city came to party and celebrate after performing executions. There would be food and drink, cocaine and women. In that case, they had maintained a death house a few miles away, one in which they committed twelve murders and then buried the bodies in the patio. The state police were paid to be executioners.

  I mention this to Esther and she nods without expression.

  She says, “I am going to put all the bad stories in my book.”

  But she is pressed for time, what with the cancer, the chemotherapy, the work at Casa Amiga. She is seventy-two, she notes, and is running out of time.

  But her book will be the real history of the city because the real history of the city is violence against the people of the city and the most powerless people in the city are the women. The real history of the city is written on the bodies of women, and this is not a history men are likely to sanction, even as they record it in the day and the night on bleeding flesh.

  Sometimes the bodies have tattoos that say Juárez. Or sometimes there is a marijuana leaf etched into the brown skin and the message: I Always Consume.

  The army’s work in Juárez is barely reported because writing or saying what the military is up to could result in serious injury or death. So, at best, the newspapers will report some execution and say that the neighbors described the killers as dressed like commandos. The exact meaning lurking in the word commando is never spelled out. On other parts of the border, where the army has descended in order to reinstall peace and tranquility, locals mention a sudd
en bloom of robberies by men wearing military-type clothing and masks. But this also is never elaborated upon. When, in a few instances, there have been demonstrations protesting the violence and heavy-handedness of the army, this has been dismissed by both the generals and the federal government because they insist these demonstrations are really shams sponsored by various drug cartels.

  The army has been operating in the Mexican state of Michoacan for at least a year before it arrives in force in Juárez. Norberto Ramírez says that in his village in Michoacan, the soldiers seized him, put a plastic bag over his head, cinched it tight, and spent all night taking turns suffocating him to the edge of death. They also beat him with rifle butts and shocked him with electric cattle prods. Of course, he did better than the seventeen-year-old boy shot dead. Ramírez, though lucky, can no longer work, because his frolic that night with the military damaged his liver and intestines beyond surgical repair. Also, he had a green card for working in the United States, but the soldiers took this away with his health. So far, over 421 human rights complaints have been lodged against the army since it began its war on drugs in December 2006. No soldier has been charged with any offense. Including the ones who gunned down two women and three children at a highway checkpoint in Sinaloa.