So drop the notions you carry about who is clean and not clean. Who is honest or dishonest will get you closer to reality.
Her husband is driving in Juárez, she sits beside him, the three-year-old is in the backseat. It is Sunday, April 20, 2008, and Algae Amaya Nuñez is twenty-nine years old at this moment and the moment is 10 P.M. Her brother, mayor of a community in Chihuahua, was assassinated on September 24, 2006. Her father, a former mayor, was assassinated in February 2007. Algae rides in a red 2007 Fusion with Texas license plates. The family straddles both sides of the line. One bullet goes through her neck, the other her belly. Five spent 9 mm casings are found by the vehicle. The husband pulls over to help his wounded wife. He vanishes—witnesses saw commandos in two pickups take him away. But they leave the three-year-old. Kin come over from the Texas side for the child. They are pursued along the road that leads to the bridge by the hit men who shoot at them. They make it back alive to the United States.
Algae helped found the school where she taught history and sociology.
Now she is a corpse and joins her executed brother and father.
So tell me, what does clean mean?
The lunch is very long—a feast of carnitas, pork chunks fried in a big vat of oil. The man wolfs down his food. He was a sicario, an assassin. His work was for Barrio Azteca, the key Juárez gang, which has at least three thousand members. The other five hundred or so gangs work for Barrio Azteca and dream of making the grade and joining the big shots. Once, when he was arrested by the police, it took ten cops to beat him down. He did enough killings to join the leadership under the late legend El Diablo. I do not ask him how many he has killed. Surely over twenty if he was in a council with El Diablo.
“When you are an Azteca, the police protect you. And you kill for the police.”
He explains a thing called La Linea, a consortium of the Mexican army, the mayor, gangs, the federal police, the state police, and the city police.
I ask how Aztecas move drugs into the United States.
He looks at me with mild surprise and says, “We bribe the Border Patrol and the U.S. Army.”
Who is killing all these people in Juárez?
He says, “Now the military is killing people who are no longer useful. If there is any dispute over drug money, they kill.”
He has no idea what the Juárez cartel is up to. “Such information is only available to the highest-ranking police officers.”
The meal is over.
He has one more thing to say when I ask him about the late Amado Carrillo, the fabled head of the Juárez cartel.
“He is a god.”
Daniel Escobedo, twenty-one, is driving to school in Juárez. He stops at a roadblock and hands over his ID to uniformed men. Then, he is taken away by a team in two SUVs, and for six weeks, he is blindfolded as the men deal with his lawyer father over a ransom. Eventually, he is rescued by the military during one of its sweeps on April 1. Some U.S. security firms figure Mexico is experiencing thirty to fifty kidnappings a day—of course, they only count ones where real ransom money is involved. As a rule of thumb, maybe one out of ten kidnappings is reported to the police. A study found that only 52 percent of the Mexicans surveyed thought they would “very probably” report being the victim of a crime. For example, Daniel Escobedo’s father never reported his son’s kidnapping.
Dead Reporter Driving
The priest goes to the fiesta to christen a child. The food is lavish, as is the rancho. There are many men of power there, men who have survived the life and now live large and feast on danger. One old man there is the boss and he wears a very large crucifix of gold. This gleaming treasure catches the priest’s eye. Later, when the padre has left the fiesta, he goes to the federal police and tells them of this convocation of narco-traficantes . He is a very good source for the police because he takes confessions from the men in the life and then sells this information. The police hit the fiesta and they find a lot of cocaine, which, of course, they seize for resale. And they take a million in cash from the partygoers. The priest gets the gold crucifix as his reward. He blesses it and now it links him to his God.
Emilio Gutiérrez sits and watches the video captured by the security camera. A long caravan of fine pickup trucks with darkly tinted windows takes up both lanes of the highway leading into Ascensión. There must be twenty or thirty vehicles rumbling into the isolated community of eighteen thousand in the Chihuahuan desert. The town is surrounded by dying farms, many of them abandoned because of low prices for what they produce. Now the army has seized some of these farms and squats on them. People live off a few bars, some small stores, and the drug industry. Right now, at the moment the caravan arrives, the streets are empty and no one looks out a single window. The man cannot make out any faces in the video of the big, fine trucks with dark glass. He will never know who this convoy is guarding. He will never ask. Just as the Mexican army stationed in the town will never record the arrival of this force bristling with machine guns. Rumors say it is Chapo Guzman, a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, but it could be the ghost of Jesus Christ or the ancient frame of Adolf Hitler. To investigate such matters is a fatal decision.
There is a curious disconnect between the Mexican press and the U.S. press, one where the U.S. press pretends that reporting in Mexico is pretty much the way it is in the North, where the Mexican press considers American reporters to be fools. Sometimes, Gutiérrez deals with American reporters who are fluent in Spanish, but that is not enough because “they imagine things but they don’t know, and so the U.S. reporters are marginalized by the Mexican reporters because they figure they are hopeless.”
We are sitting in the sun somewhere in the United States of America as he tosses out the tale of the priest and the story of the strange caravan of fine pickup trucks. He is hiding now with the family of a man who has connections in northern Chihuahua. But if this fact were known, the man’s relatives in Chihuahua would be kidnapped and possibly killed, his businesses seized. As we soak up the sun at this fine moment, Ascensión is in a state of siege. Four women have vanished and are probably murdered. The head of the bank there and his wife have been kidnapped and then returned in bad shape. Also, the bank has just been strafed by machine gun fire. In Palomas, a border town in the same county as Ascensión, two dead women have just been found in the dump—one of them pregnant.
The Mexican army is everywhere and can be ill tempered. Six months ago, I was with a friend who took a photograph of them in downtown Palomas, a block from the port of entry, and they came racing at us with machine guns. The town is dying. Few people cross from the United States to shop because of the violence. In the streets, children beg, their skin a gray cast that suggests malnutrition. Work has fled—the people-smuggling business has moved because of U.S. pressure in the sector, and so the town is studded with half-built or abandoned cheap lodgings for migrants heading north. Also there is an array of narco-mansions whose occupants have moved on to duck the current violence. And there are eyes everywhere. I walk down the dirt streets tailed by pickups with very darkly tinted windows. The biggest restaurant in town for tourists closes every day at 6 P.M.—get home before dark. Last year, the U.S. port of entry was accidentally strafed during a shoot-out in Palomas. There is more dust than life in the air of the town.
The Mexican army arrived in new numbers in April 2008 in northern Chihuahua, and the general in command held a meeting with the press to lay down some ground rules. He said there would almost certainly be a spate of robberies and rapes, but these were to be explained by the press as the evil deeds of poor Mexicans who came from the far south and who were migrating through the zone to reach the United States. Any questions?
As I sit in the sun with Emilio he tells of the current violence in the towns he once covered, and none of these incidents have been reported in the U.S. press or the Mexican press. Nor will they be.
He knows what is happening because he has retained his sources. And he knows that it will not be reported
because to publish is to invite death.
He is one of eight children and was raised in Nuevo Casas Grandes, a small Chihuahuan town against the Sierra Madre. His father was a master bricklayer, his mother a housewife. His childhood was poverty. He always wanted to be a writer and worked on the high school paper, a weekly printed on a mimeograph machine.
The army has a post in his town. One day, a very pretty classmate named Rosa Saenz shows up, her hair and skin coated with mud. Her breasts have been sliced with blades and she has been stabbed fifty times. She has been raped. Her body is found in an abandoned chicken farm on the edge of town. Emilio sees her body in the back of a car in front of the police station, a vehicle dragged in as a monument to a quest for evidence. Two of her classmates are blamed for the murder. The police smash the testicles of one. The other flees, and when he returns much later, he is kind of crazy and never recovers. In the end, no one is charged with the crime. But everyone in the town knows the girl was raped and murdered by the army. And no one in the town says anything about it.
Emilio is thirteen years old.
This is part of basic Mexican schooling: submission. I remember once being in a small town when the then-president of Mexico descended like a god with an entourage and massive security. The poor fled into their huts until it was over. The streets emptied, and when the president did a staged stroll to greet his subjects, no one stood on the sidewalks except party hacks. Just as when I attended the fiesta for the official candidate for the state governorship (a man who had spent most of his years in Mexico City and far from his claimed home), the campesinos had to be bused in by the government and given free food and, even with that, proved so listless the crowd seemed to be on sedatives. Every Mexican learns early on, by watching the elders, to retreat or cower before authority and to lead very private and quiet lives. Mexican literature is rich with recording this obliteration of public self and sequestering of private self amid the illusion that family provides security. Mexico’s Nobel laureate poet, Octavio Paz, etched this trait indelibly in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.”
Of course, there are releases from this in fiestas, drinking into the night with friends, and jokes. I have almost never had an intelligent conversation in the United States about what life means. But I have had many after midnight, sitting outside under a tree with a bottle in Mexico. Emilio emerges as a young man in high school with a first-rate mind in a country where intelligence can be a fatal trait.
He learns photography, and when he graduates at eighteen, a new daily is starting in Ciudad Juárez, El Diario, and he gets hired to take pictures. Soon he is a reporter.
He learns corruption almost instantly. He is paid very little, and payday is every Friday. He explains the system in simple terms. Let’s say, he offers, that a reporter earns a hundred dollars a week. Every Monday, a man comes who represents the police, the government, the political parties, and the drug leaders. He gives each reporter a sum that is three or four times his actual wage. This is called the sobre, the envelope.
“Every since I was a little kid,” he continues, “I listened to my parents criticize bad government. We knew it was corrupt.”
Now he is part of a corrupt system.
“Corruption at the paper,” he explains, “was subtle. The politicians would win over my boss with dinners and bags of money. The reporter on the beat would get pressure sometimes from the boss not to report certain things like the bad habits of politicians, the houses they own, the girlfriends. And it was understood that you never asked hard questions. The narcos also gave out money but I was always afraid of them. They own businesses, buy ads, have parties and celebrities and horses and you cover that, they would pay you to cover that, but you never mentioned their real business.”
He sees his Mexico as genetically corrupt. A corrupt Aztec ruling class fused with the trash of Spain—the conquistadors—and produced through this marriage a completely corrupt Mexico. This thesis helps him face the reality around him.
“In Mexico,” he says, “we operate in disguise. There is one face and under that is another mask. Nothing is upfront. The publisher wishes to perpetuate the system. But if it is clear you are taking bribes, you will be fired. You must take it under the table because if you talked about it openly, that would affect the image.”
He is entering a bar one night, when he sees the mayor of Juárez leaving with some narco-traficantes. The mayor pauses by the street, drops his pants and pisses into the gutter. Emilio writes up a little note and puts it in the paper. He is nineteen and he does not understand.
The next day he is called to the mayor’s office.
The man is at a big desk with a check register.
He says, “How much?”
He wants Emilio to publish a story saying his earlier story was a lie.
Gutiérrez does not take any money. He realizes later this is a serious error because he learns the mayor and the publisher are very close.
“I quit and take a job in radio before something bad can happen.”
Later, when things calm down, he returns to Diario a wiser man.
Here is what a wise man knows: that certain people—drug leaders, the corrupt police, the corrupt military—these things cannot be written about at all. That other people should be mentioned favorably unless they are caught in circumstances so extreme that the news cannot be suppressed. Then, they appear in the paper, but the blow is softened as much as possible. Nor are investigations favored. If someone is murdered, you call the proper authorities and you print exactly what they tell you. But you don’t poke around in such matters.
Emilio loves politics and develops page-one stories by dutifully interviewing politicians and then nakedly publishing their inane answers. Sometimes, when a leading drug figure is arrested, usually as a show to placate the U.S. agencies, he interviews this person, also. He is hard-driving, at least until his son is born. After that, he becomes cautious because he must think of his son and not give in to the dangers of ambition.
For a while, he works for a small radio station and he makes one report on how a mayor in a neighboring town has fired the local drug counselor for the schools. He wonders on the air if the officials themselves are actually clean.
He soon finds out because a mayor of another town is listening. This mayor has just gotten out of a treatment center in El Paso for cocaine addiction. He storms down to the radio station and offers the owner ten thousand pesos to fire Emilio. The owner obliges him.
He moves from paper to paper and eventually winds up at the paper in Ascensión, the region of Chihuahua where he was raised. He has mastered, he thinks, the rules of the game. He writes down answers and publishes them. He avoids drug dealers. He is careful about offending politicians. He does not look into the lives of the rich, nor does he explore how they make their money. He is clean, he avoids taking bribes. But he also ignores the fact that other reporters are taking bribes. He is not looking for trouble.
This is the reality of Mexican reporting, where a person is inside but outside, where a person knows more than the public but can only say what is known in a code and this code had better not be too clear. A world where submission is essential and independence is eventually fatal.
He is stressed because, even though he plays by the rules, he cannot know all the rules and he cannot be certain when the rules change. He can understand certain things. When a general comes to Chihuahua in April 2008 with an army and says if there are any rapes and robberies, they are to be assigned to Mexican migrants, well, that is the way it will be reported.
He will obey his instructions for a very simple reason.
For three years, he has been afraid he will be murdered by the Mexican army. He has, to his horror, committed an error. And nothing he has done in the past three years has made up for this mis
take. He has ceased reporting on the army completely. He has focused on safe things such as fighting the creation of a toxic waste facility in the town. He has apologized to various military officers and endured their tongue lashings. Still, this cloud hangs over him.
He can remember the day he blundered into this dangerous country.
Miss Sinaloa
After two months or more, Miss Sinaloa seems to recover some of her mind. El Pastor estimates that she eventually regained 90 percent of her sanity. He locates her relatives, and her family comes up from Sinaloa. They must be surprised that she is alive. I am. After such a frolic, death would not be unusual, and Miss Sinaloa would be just one more mysterious dead woman in the desert on the outskirts of Juárez.
But something saved her—perhaps her madness set her apart.
And so she came here and lived with people considered beneath even the dirt flooring the city of Juárez, people from the streets, people rejected by the mental institutions of the state, people beyond the help of families, people who slept on sidewalks and ate out of garbage cans.
She said she knew many languages, but she never spoke them. She would sing all the time, but she sang badly. Her favorite songs were very romantic. She moved around the crazy place like a queen. She read the Bible a lot. She remains a myth even standing in the yard at the crazy place. El Pastor decided that 5 percent of what she says is true and the other 95 percent is her imagination.
That is the world of Miss Sinaloa, a place of dreams and songs, a place for a beauty queen to rule. She sits and draws, mainly lines and spirals. And lips, lots of kissing lips.
She dresses well, always a blue dress that shows her legs to advantage. Also, high heels—she navigates the asylum in stilettos.
To El Pastor’s horror, she says a lot of bad words. He thinks maybe the rapes made her talk this way.
Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields Page 10