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

by Charles Bowden

  The U.S. State Department has issued a travel alert for Americans visiting Mexico, especially Juárez. The federal diplomats advise that if an American feels he or she is being followed, then the prudent thing to do is immediately contact Mexican authorities. Also, it is advised that American visitors stay out of areas where prostitution and drug dealing take place.

  The alert states: “Violent criminal activity fueled by a war between criminal organizations struggling for control of the lucrative narcotics trade continues along the U.S.-Mexico border. Attacks are aimed primarily at members of drug trafficking organizations, Mexican police forces, criminal justice officials, and journalists. However, foreign visitors and residents, including Americans, have been among the victims of homicides and kidnappings in the border region.”

  Miss Sinaloa

  I am looking in at her cell in the asylum. A small mattress fills it, and at the foot of the mattress is a yellow five-gallon bucket for defecation and urination. The walls are white tile because patients such as Miss Sinaloa tend to smear their feces on surfaces. The door is solid metal with a tiny slot because the Miss Sinaloas of the world tend to throw their feces at the staff. Plaid blankets cover the mattress.

  This was her home for at least two months. No one could reach her. She raved, she was very angry. In part, she was locked up to protect her from the other patients who craved her fair skin and beauty. And in part, she was locked up because she would go berserk without warning.

  And she was bald. The staff had to cut off her long, beautiful hair because it is an occupational risk here. Other patients have a tendency to take long hair and strangle the person with it.

  At first, Miss Sinaloa is very violent. She cries constantly and throws things. So the staff gives her pills and she sleeps for two or three days. Then she awakens and is more calm. She tells everyone in the crazy place that she won a contest, she is a beauty queen and also a model. She says that she has known oh so many men who wanted to fuck her, but she had known no one like Ramon, who truly loves her for herself.

  Her beauty becomes a problem. When she is let out of her cell into the yard in the crazy place, she stands out in her glory. El Pastor says, “She was like the last Coca Cola in the desert and so proud and the other ladies were jealous.”

  She would spend all day doing her makeup, doing it over and over and over. She was very clean. Each morning, she made the bed in her tiny cell and washed all the walls, scrubbing endlessly.

  Ramon is a twenty-five-year-old drunk who has wandered into the crazy place and earns his keep serving meals. He is a homely man—El Pastor thinks he may be the ugliest man in the world. He takes plates of beans to Miss Sinaloa in her cell. She falls in love with him and he falls in love with her. Ramon has never had a girlfriend before—he is dazzled by even this ghost of the Miss Sinaloa who arrived in Juárez to party at the Casablanca.

  She says, “How wonderful that this happened to me. Because of it I was able to find you, the most beautiful creature ever created by God.”

  El Pastor overhears Miss Sinaloa whispering her love to Ramon and is alarmed. Then he notices love marks on Ramon’s neck and dismisses him.

  Miss Sinaloa regresses and soon returns to her deep madness. She denounces El Pastor for ruining the great love of her life.

  El Pastor stares with me into the cell—maybe nine feet by five feet.

  Originally, he came out here and lived in a hut with his wife. He had two donkeys for gathering wood. He started stacking up blocks and bricks. This went on for three years. The police would bring the rejects of our world—whores burned out by lust and drugs, illegal immigrants kicked back by the United States because it did not want to tend to their damaged minds, topless dancers who had lost that half-step, street people who had sniffed so much glue and paint that they were now residents of oblivion, all the damned of our world.

  El Pastor now houses and feeds one hundred. He walks me around and shows his expansion dream that will give him the capacity for two hundred fifty souls. He will have the patients making bricks—those who can still function well enough to mix up mud. He will sell these blocks and so give people a kind of dignity and himself some cash flow for the medicines they require in order to bottle up their rages.

  A small, retarded man stands next to me clutching a children’s book. It is in English, but then, he can’t read any language. On October 11, he murdered another patient.

  “You can’t do anything to be safe here,” El Pastor explains as we stand in the yard with eighty of the maimed milling about us.

  “Heroin in the city,” he explains, “is twenty-five pesos.”

  This means less than $2.50 a hit.

  “Cocaine,” El Pastor continues, “is everywhere here and cheaper than marijuana. And now they smoke cocaine with marijuana. We’re talking about people eighteen to twenty-five now, the people who get executed. They are ghosts, human trash walking naked in the city.”

  In Nuevo Laredo, the sister city to Laredo, Texas, people notice a huge banner floating over one of the major thoroughfares. The message is simple: “Operative group ‘The Zetas’ wants you, soldier or ex-soldier. We offer a good salary, food and benefits for your family. Don’t suffer any more mistreatment and don’t go hungry.” The banner also advises, “We don’t feed you Maruchan soups [a brand of ramen noodles].” It lists a cell phone number. In Tampico, another banner appears that says, “Join the ranks of the Gulf Cartel. We offer benefits, life insurance, a house for your family and children. Stop living in the slums and riding the bus. A new car or truck, your choice. What more could you ask for? Tamaulipas, Mexico, the USA and the entire world is Gulf Cartel territory.” The authorities in Mexico City say they think the advertisement is authentic.

  The Zetas, besides maintaining training camps for new employees, also equip their people with automatic weapons, grenades, dynamite, and rocket launchers. Presumably they also get machetes since the group sometimes decapitates its adversaries. One of the Zetas’ leaders is said to have elite Guatemalan soldiers as bodyguards. On March 17, Mexican authorities in the state of Tamaulipas seize a Jeep Cherokee with special features: a smoke-screen generator, bulletproofing, and, attached in the rear, a device to throw spikes on the road.

  The Mexicans slaughtered in this killing season get to die twice. First, at the hands of their murderers, and then later, they are killed again by the explanations of their deaths. They are said to die from a cartel war, or from a war between the president of Mexico and the cartels, or a war between the Mexican army and the cartels or possibly as a result of drug consumers in the United States financing evil people with their habits and thus creating the slaughter every time they roll a joint.

  These explanations are efforts to streamline a messy torrent of events. But what is happening in Juárez and increasingly throughout Mexico is the breakdown of a system. There are no jobs, the young face blank futures, the poor are crushed by sinking fortunes. The state has always violated human rights, and now, in the general mayhem, this fact becomes more and more obvious.

  Killing is not deviance, it is a logical career decision for thousands floundering in a failing economy and a failing state.

  There are certain economic incentives in becoming a murderer. Not only is the pay good, but it is an actual job with actual skills. The other choice of decent wages entails illegally migrating to the United States. Thirty years ago, about 10 percent of the Mexicans coming north were women—now females are at least half the migration.

  Zacatecas, an old Mexican state initially settled because of a silver strike, testifies to the job opportunities in Mexico. Over half its population is now in the United States, and more Zacatecans live in Los Angeles than in their home state’s biggest city. As one longtime resident of a Zacatecan town put it, “There is nothing here.”

  Or as a professor at the University of Zacatecas in the Department of Economics explains, “Work opportunities here are nonexistent, so this is going to cause more migration to the Unite
d States, even though it is getting harder to find work over there.”

  There are some openings in journalism. In Ciudad Victoria in the Gulf state of Tamaulipas, members of the local police kidnapped the pressmen of the daily paper to end its irksome publication. Some radio reporters were mowed down in Oaxaca. In Agua Prieta, Sonora, a border town facing Douglas, Arizona, a protest march marks the first anniversary of the killing of newspaper editor Saul Noe Martinez. He was kidnapped from the town jail by gunmen, and his body was later found in Chihuahua.

  Underneath the headlines and the news bulletins, these hard facts grind people up and remold them into new destinies and sometimes monstrous decisions.

  “It’s beautiful,” she begins, “I’ve been a policewoman for years. It’s something I have inherited. My father was a police officer. I can serve my country. But it is dangerous, our society, our times, well, values have changed. People don’t respect police officers now. And the violence—families are falling apart.”

  She stands in the bright sunlight on the edge of a mall parking lot, one with a police tower in the center to guard the shoppers and their cars. Her uniform has no name, her badge has no number. She is fat, and carries a .40-caliber semiautomatic. She belongs to the municipal police, the same force that has been losing comandantes to executions.

  Her post is across the street from the monument to fallen officers.

  There are thirty-five names on brass plaques on the monument. The first dead cop came in 1969, but things sort of ambled for almost twenty years, and then around 1990, business picked up, with thirty-five of the dead coming since then. And the most recent dead cop memorialized is September 2007—none of the recent corpses have been recorded. Nor does the monument pay any heed to missing cops. The monument is painted a faint green. The statue of a giant cop stands before it and stares down at the hat of a fallen officer.

  Twice, she refuses to speak of drugs in the city.

  And when asked if she had heard about fellow officers picking up a raped beauty queen on the streets of the city, a woman called Miss Sinaloa, she snaps, no.

  She answers this question very fast and her face does not smile at all.

  Fear has been my pale rider. I have never faced an audience without fear, nor gotten out of the car to do that first interview on a story in some strange city without fear. Sentences also cause fear, as does that blank page waiting for words to fall on its white expanse and clot it with stabs at meaning. Violence rocks my body with fear, as does great sorrow in others since I fear my inability to stop the tears.

  When I was in high school, in freshman English one of my fellow students read a paper on fear, and it was about chemical changes in our bodies and how these various juices both signaled our fear and created the state of being we call fear. I was struck at that moment and rather disappointed. I wanted fear to be something exalting, like courage, not compounds that could be written on a chalkboard like a recipe. And I was suspicious of the argument because it seemed to reduce something out of control to order. Fear is not only paralyzing, but also explosive. I have learned in life to never trust people who are afraid, because their behavior cannot be predicted. The killer facing me over a plate of food is rational. He kills and sometimes he feels nothing. There are such people, those who are calm while taking a life. They do not induce the fear in me that I feel when around the fearful.

  But for me, fear is a sometime thing, almost a special event. But what if it is like oxygen, part of the very air one breathes, and so is not noticed and yet is not ignored? To notice it would require concentration, to ignore it would be an invitation to death. Imagine living a life of constant caution, of fearing police, of avoiding the authorities, and yet this blanket of fear is so steady and pervasive that awareness of the sensation ebbs because fear becomes the fabric of life. All doors must be locked, the windows barred, the drapes—should one have the money for such things—be pulled tightly shut, the stranger knocking at the door suspect and possibly dangerous, the traffic cop on the corner a predator, the sirens in the night promising no succor to a single soul but simply blaring the obvious danger that rises like a vapor from the very ground under one’s feet.

  There is recourse to magic. If things are not said, then these things do not exist. Just as some people cleanse their vocabularies of racial slurs or sexist terms and, by that act, convince themselves they are altering reality and ending tribal or religious or racial strife and bringing men and women into some kind of parity and joy, so there is a magical belief that to ignore the killings, to deny the violence, to refuse to admit to fear, these decisions lower the temperature of human rage or human mayhem and erase fear or the things to fear. It is a form of prayer practiced without a church or priest. And it is a return to childhood when we all had secret ways—don’t step on the crack of the sidewalk, carry that lucky stone—to slay the sensation of dread.

  So it is quite possible to live in a violent place and not speak of fear and for days at a time not to truly feel fear. Just move and act in a fog of fear. If you are a success in the drug industry, you will have police credentials, most likely federal or state, and these credentials will identify you as an officer. If rich, you move with bodyguards in a car with bulletproof glass and slabs of armor—and if you are a significant person in the drug industry, your bodyguards will be federal police officers, your own private posse. If not so rich, you live in a gated community. If not rich at all, you lock things up, try to arrange a life where someone is always home. And get robbed now and again.

  Regardless of your station in life, you may vanish or be murdered. There is this fatalism in Mexican life, and it is based on fatalities.

  You try to recall incidents, but this is difficult, because all the moments when someone brought out a gun or when the police swarm you and demand papers and there is no one else around, or when the gang kids eye you, and you stare into the emptiness that seems to take up all the space in their skulls—all those events have ceased to be events and have been sanded smooth by time. And by fear. The fear especially grinds away at them until they can no longer be glimpsed and never really happened. The only incident you will ever truly remember clearly and vividly is when you are taken, perhaps tortured and raped, and then killed. And you will not remember that one very long.

  I have a friend who tries to explain this way of living. His small pickup is his joy, and he keeps it secure at night behind a heavy metal gate. But when he drives, there is always the risk of someone swerving ahead of him, pushing him to the curb, and coming to his truck window with a pistol in his hand. Auto theft is almost a white noise here, the random buzz of small violence below the larger barrages from machine guns. In the past, he notes, there was always some name, some number you can imagine calling and at the other end of the call would be someone with power who could speak for you or speak to someone yet more powerful, and so there was a way to feel safe.

  Now, he tells me sadly, there is no one to call. No one at all.

  So you are left with the fear, a fear you no longer recognize and yet never seem to escape.

  Since the time of troubles began, the police of Juárez have responded in kind. Many have fled, and so now at any given shift there are, at most, two hundred cops looking over the city. Also, if they leave the station, they are careful about getting out of their patrol cars. Residents complain they no longer see them out and about. Then, there is the fear the cops now have of the army since fellow officers are periodically snatched by the military and return with tales of woe. People have discovered that if they call the police, no one comes.

  Bank robberies, store robberies, and car theft have boomed. Increasingly, guys are robbing stores armed with nothing but toy pistols.

  Mexico itself is exploring a new kind of installation art, beheadings. In the first four months of 2008, there had been at least forty decapitations. Some are left on fence posts.

  On the U.S. side, Margarita Crispin, a thirty-two-year-old U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent,
gets twenty years in prison. For four years, she’d worked at the bridge separating Juárez and El Paso, and for four years, she’d waved drug shipments through. One load, the one that did her in when the van broke down, held almost three tons of marijuana. The federal government seized $5 million she had stashed and a lot of jewelry.

  It is hard to stay clean when such possibilities dance before one’s eyes.

  We put too much emphasis on who is clean and who is not clean. There are places where being clean is meaningless and Juárez is one such place, and the entire border is like Juárez when this issue of being clean comes up. There is too much money made both in the drug industry and in the people-smuggling industry for this wealth not to flow across everybody’s life. If you refuse to be in the business, someone in your family is in the business, and someone in your family who is totally clean is bankrolling little business ideas off drug money or people-smuggling money. You might be a DEA agent, but you’ll have a brother who has a nightclub bankrolled by people from this other world or you’ll have a sister who marries a guy who works for a cartel. And you’ll spend your own free time running a “Just Say No to Drugs” basketball league to keep kids clean, but these facts will just be facts. And this sketch I’ve just laid down is not a hypothetical, it is the human architecture of a friend of mine. And he is hardly unique.

  I’ve never done any kind of drug deal in my life. But I’ve loaned out scales to friends who felt differently.