As he blurts out his love, we are at a red light. A boy with needle marks racing up and down his arms fills his mouth with gasoline, raises a torch, and then spits fire into the air.
I tell people I hate Juárez. I tell people I am mesmerized by Juárez. I tell myself Juárez is a duty. And I keep going back, month after month, year after year. I tell people I go to Juárez for the beaches. Or I tell people I go to Juárez for the waters.
Often, people tell me I don’t know the real Juárez, a place of discos, party-hearty souls, laughter, and good times. I do not argue.
I go for what I do not know. I go in the vain hope of understanding how a city evolves into a death machine. I watch modern factories rise, I see American franchises pop up along the avenues. Golden arches peddle burgers, but old MacDonald no longer has a farm. He lives in a shack in an outlaw colonia, there is no water, the electricity is pirated, and dust fills his lungs.
Everyone has a job, according to the authorities.
Every year, some mysterious form of accounting belches forth new economic statistics, and these numbers get bigger and bigger.
The city slowly crumbles, the dead clutter the calles.
And I keep going back and I have given up explaining my task to others. Or to myself.
Like so many people in the city, I am a slave to it and no longer question my bondage.
The new death house is about a mile from the old death house, the one uncovered in January 2004 that had twelve bodies buried in the patio. And about halfway between the two death houses is another house where the Mexican authorities staged a raid and found a lot of guns and bullets. It is a lovely two-story building with nice tile forming a frieze just under the roofline. The front door is open—it’s been smashed by a battering ram, but no one is at home at the moment. They’ve been taken to a frisky interrogation by the authorities. Two cameras stare at me—and I know they are operating because the wheel on the electric meter is spinning.
I reach down and pick up a big key made out of wood with little hooks for all those household keys. It has the name of a man and a woman burned into it, plus the phrase, “Remember Durango,” and two scorpions, the famous symbol of that Mexican state.
But the wooden key is not what catches my real notice, nor do the surveillance cameras matter much. It is the red Jeep Cherokee with dark, tinted windows and two burly men that suddenly shows up, slows, and rolls on. Then it comes by again, and the men do not smile. Across the street, I see a man standing next to a fine black Audi. He is on his cell phone, staring at me. In traffic, a few moments later, the red Cherokee again appears by my side. I peel off and return to the newly discovered death house.
I have been given notice, and now I feel at home.
Eventually, thirty-six bodies come out of the second death house. The Mexican forensic pathologist at the dig begs the newspapers not to publish her name or face, though the story reveals the name of the cadaver dog, “Rocco.” The neighbors say they noticed nothing and thought the occasional gatherings at the walled compound must be for fiestas of some sort. The bodies have a curious fate. The government will not reveal where they are, or permit families with missing relatives to view them.
In late February 2008, ten or twenty men with automatic rifles and black masks descended on a poor barrio of shacks in the hills above Juárez. The area is home to men and women who work in the maquiladoras. One man, a former municipal cop in his early thirties, runs a little store that sells beans, bread, and milk. That day, the armed men tortured him until he revealed who supplied him with the drugs he also sold out of his little store. He could not have been really surprised by the visit—after all, he’d been warned in two phone calls to stop selling drugs. The armed men took him to where his supplier made concrete blocks. There they beat up some workers until finally, one man came out of a building and said, “I am the man you are looking for.” The armed men then took the two captives off a short ways and executed them—everyone in the barrio heard the shots. All this action was hard to miss since it happened around noon on a sunny day.
Now I am here at the kill site. A woman stares at me and shouts, “Who are you looking for?” and from her tone, I don’t think she is trying to be helpful. As I rolled in, I could feel the eyes of loitering cholos burn into my hide.
So I leave.
But I have a question. If the violence in Juárez is simply a battle between big cartels to control this crossing into the United States, then why are murders happening all over the city to small-time drug sellers like the man who ran the little grocery in this poverty-stricken neighborhood?
After the killing, the armed men took the bodies away and dumped them down by the river, where the huge Mexican flag lords over El Paso.
The giant flagpole was the creation of a Mexican president in the 1990s, a matter of national pride in the spot where his nation confronts its rich and powerful neighbor. This moment of patriotism has now been turned to other uses.
Killers seem to like this place, the linear park around the giant flagpole down by the river. Since 1997, at least fourteen bodies have been dumped here, including the former cop who ran the small store and sold drugs, and his friend who made concrete blocks and supplied him with drugs. The neighborhood facing the park is middle class, and signs ask residents to keep the park clean. At one point, a prominent lawyer who lived there posted his own sign asking people not to dump bodies or garbage. In October, he was executed in his home. A month later, one daughter was killed, and then, in the funeral procession for her, another daughter, a nurse from El Paso, was killed. The authorities blamed the murders on domestic problems.
For me, it is a piece of memory, as are other spots in the city. In the summer of 1997, when Amado Carrillo died, there was a spate of murders in Juárez as a new arrangement of power evolved. On August 3 of that year, two well-dressed men entered the Max Fim restaurant. When they left, six men were dead. Another killing happened nearby at Jeronimo’s, a popular bar and restaurant. Dozens died that month, and then the city calmed and everyone tried to return to business as usual.
I sit in a sushi parlor, the one whose owner was the former head of police and now faces serious charges in El Paso for running drugs. In 1997, another player in the drug world died two tables away from me. The restaurant is upscale, something that seems airlifted out of midtown Manhattan. The blank faces of the diners betray no awareness of the past. In a sense, it never happened.
History erases itself in Juárez. The newspapers cast out their photographs of murders, and the clippings vanish, also. Police records disappear. In the end, there is a spicy tuna roll on a small plate, some soy sauce, and the wind moving dust down the streets.
For years, people have sought a single explanation of violence in Juárez. The cartels are handy as an explanation. Serial killers also help in explaining dead women. The hundreds of street gangs also can be pulled off the shelf to retire any question. As can mass poverty, uprooted families that migrate here from the interior, corrupt cops, corrupt government, and on and on.
We insist that power must replace power, that structure replaces an earlier structure. And we insist that power exists as a hierarchy, that there is a top where the boss lives and a bottom where the prey scurry about in fear of the boss. Also, we believe the state truly owns power and violence, and that is why any nonstate violence by people earns them the name of outlaws.
Try for a moment to imagine something else, not a new structure but rather a pattern, and this pattern functionally has no top or bottom, no center or edge, no boss or obedient servant. Think of something like the ocean, a fluid thing without king and court, boss and cartel. Give up all normal ways of thinking. We live in a time where fantasies focus on omnipotent authorities. We think someone reads our mail, listens in on our conversations, watches us from spy satellites, stalks us with computers. As a mirror image of this, we imagine underground networks of power—cartels, terrorist organizations, mafias, rogue intelligence agencies, and the like. These
illusions are teddy bears we clutch in the dark hours, comforts that enable us to sleep.
Two towers fall.
Fifteen to twenty million people enter the country illegally.
The drugs reach Main Street on schedule.
The largest war machine in the history of the world grinds to a halt in the sands of Mesopotamia.
Violence courses through Juárez like a ceaseless wind, and we insist it is a battle between cartels, or between the state and the drug world, or between the army and the forces of darkness.
But consider this possibility: Violence is now woven into the very fabric of the community and has no single cause and no single motive and no on-off button.
Violence is not a part of life, now it is life.
Just ask Miss Sinaloa.
I sit on the mezzanine in the fine shopping mall and have a pastry with a cup of espresso. The air is cool and clean. Outside, men guide cars into parking spaces. This big chamber of business is an escape from the noise of Juárez. I buy ten kilos of beans for the people out in El Pastor’s crazy place.
A week or so later, there is a shooting in the parking lot. One of the old men who guides cars into the slots goes down, a sidebar to a barrage of automatic gunfire.
The city protects itself by telling stories about itself. The police captain who was machine-gunned with his eight-year-old son is now explained by the city in this fashion. He was a dirty cop, kidnapping rich people for ransom. But then the families of the kidnap victims grew angry about him. So, in order to stay safe, he always traveled with his child, since he believed no one would kill an innocent child in order to kill him. But, the city tells itself, he was wrong. A family member of a kidnap victim did kill the captain and in that act also murdered his eight-year-old boy. But this was excusable because the killings were an act of retribution.
And so in this story swirling around Juárez, the murder of a child is made sense of and thus made safe for everyone. The story is not based on facts. No one requires facts. The story is based on need.
And the need for explanation is great.
Good Friday brings eleven executions, La Gloria brings six, and on Easter Sunday, another eleven die. I float in a dreamtime of death.
It is 1 P.M. on Easter Sunday, and in a street of maquila workers, a crowd gathers to look at a corpse. The guy is nineteen and belongs to a gang. A hole in his head has blown out one eye. Members of the opposing gang sit in the bed of a police pickup truck while one cop fills out a form. I stare at a young gang kid. As a photographer raises his camera, he pulls his sweatshirt up to cover his face. His eyes are dead and empty, maybe the gaze left by too much glue and paint sniffing. But his middle fingers flash a gang sign and they are covered with blood.
A car stops, three young girls—twelve or thirteen years old—race across the street as the father keeps the motor idling. They hold hands as they skip into the crowd and form a smiling chorus line of Capri pants and tube tops. This has become the norm—kids, parents, babes in arms, all show up on the killing grounds. Some people bring their dogs, children make videos, snap photographs. Sometimes the kids get a bonus, since the bodies now and then are of children.
It is now 1:30 P.M. and suddenly the police race away with the body. Another killing has been called in. The city morgue is overwhelmed—by midnight there will have been 103 murders in Juárez in March. Forty bodies are tossed into a common grave due to lack of space and because the families either do not claim the corpses or cannot afford a funeral.
President Calderón’s war against drugs has been officially rolling since December 1, 2006, and so far, according to the government tally, 3,800 Mexicans have gone down in drug killings, 334 cops have been murdered, and 39 soldiers have perished. Since January 2008, the number of drug killings is officially up 30 percent nationwide, but in Juárez, it is more like 60 to 70 percent and rising.
The hillside is rock, soil, yuccas, and creosote. This is Granjas Unidas (United Farms), a sweep by the poor into the hillside just above Juárez. It is nearing 3 P.M. and the ambulance rolls down the dirt track with the body. Off the road, a valley fills with tires and other garbage, and around this dump, people live in shacks and raise a few pigs, chickens, turkeys, and goats. The tiny grocery store is called Illusion. Just off the track is a fading carton of Mr. Clean. A generous splotch of red blood gleams, and flies buzz around it. This is where the executed man fell. Broken glass glitters on the ground. The wind is about thirty miles per hour, and Juárez chokes on dust. A man walks his dog, mainly pit bull from its look, and he uses a tire chain as the leash. A woman comes by with three children. No one looks over at the flies buzzing above the fresh blood. The dead man has already been erased from memory.
At 5:21 P.M., the comandante of Grupo Delta dies in front of his home. His task force focuses on drug dealers and gangs. He is new to the job—the previous comandante of the unit was executed in January. A group of armed men machine-guns him. Then they leave, but soon return to rematar, to re-kill. Maybe they were worried their initial barrage was insufficient. Besides, they are in no hurry. It is broad daylight in the neighborhood, but the killers linger over the body for thirty minutes. An ambulance arrives, sees the killers, and is ordered over the radio to back off. The press arrives and also retreats. Finally, when it is safe and the assassins have left, the police arrive. That is the way it goes now in Juárez.
The day moves into night. In the dark hours near the Zaragoza Bridge, a major crossing point for trucks into the United States, five bodies are dumped. They have been tortured and strangled.
And then at the end of March 2008, the governor of Chihuahua suddenly emerges from his seclusion, thanks to some sessions with acupuncture that have unfrozen his face. He announces that every police element in the state has been infiltrated by drug people. He also says that federal experts are coming to cleanse the forces. A state legislator goes the governor one better. He says the economy of the state is completely overrun by narco-trafficking. But no matter, the governor promises that the violence will soon lessen.
The Mexican army arrives with yet more force on March 30-31, an additional two thousand men are added to those already patrolling the city. Before, the troops appeared unannounced. Now there is fanfare as the military begins the Joint Chihuahua Operation. For days, they have been noticed trickling into the city, and for days, the army has denied the presence of any new units. In addition, five or six hundred federal police agents descend. Juárez is now secure, that is the official word. The newspapers are suddenly empty of murders. The American press says order has been restored, which is odd in one way, since the slaughter in Juárez over the past three months has barely merited mention in the U.S. press. But of course, there have been quiet moments before, times when it seems Juárez wallows in a Quaker calm, and then, someone finds a death house and bodies come spewing out to make a lie of those moments of peace. Now, death goes underground in Juárez and citizens celebrate the return of normal times.
Six city cops are grabbed by the army when it discovers that the cops are broadcasting army movements. This last act is hardly strange since many cops feel the army is hunting and killing them. The six cops are tortured, pissed on, and eventually released by the army so that they can tell other officers of their lesson.
“If there are bad elements,” one cop with seventeen years on the streets tells the press, “then they should go after them, but those of us who are doing our jobs well and trying to do the best for the citizens, we do not deserve to be detained, nor arrested and accused of crimes. It is an injustice to us and our families who are filled with anxiety that they will arrest us or kill us.”
The vague “they” refers to the Mexican army sent to give Juárez peace and security. During March, forty-seven Juárez cops resign or request reassignment.
For over fifty years, Mexico has been reinventing law enforcement to pretend to fight drugs and placate the United States. Sinaloa in the 1940s was drug central and run by a former Mexican secretary
of war and defense. In 1953, a flying school in Culiacan was closed to placate the United States, and yet by the late 1960s at least six hundred secret airfields flourished in northern Mexico (the beat goes on—in 2007, the Mexican army claimed to close two secret narco-airports a day).
More recently, a series of agencies have tackled drugs. Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), trained by the CIA, was supposed to eliminate drug merchants and radicals in the early 1970s. By the 1980s, its staff either worked for or led cartels, including the one in Juárez. In the mid-1990s, a new force under a Mexican drug czar flourished, until it was discovered that the czar worked for the Juárez cartel and so did many of his agents. It was dissolved.
Under President Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), a new incorruptible force, Fiscalía Especializada en Atención de Delitos contra la Salud (FEADS), was created. One part deserted, became the Zetas, and functionally took over the Gulf cartel in the early days of the new century. In 1997, an organized crime unit was formed to tackle the cartels, and at the same moment in Mexico City, the agents of yet an earlier squad assigned to fight drugs were found dead in a car trunk. FEADS was finally dissolved in 2003 when it was found to be hopelessly corrupt. Under President Felipe Calderón, yet a new federal mutation emerged—AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigación). Its head was murdered in the spring of 2008. His dying words to his killer were, “Who sent you?” The government later determined the hit was done by the Sinaloa cartel, with the killers led by a former officer in the agency.
Now all hopes rest in the Mexican army. In over a half century of fighting drugs, Mexico has never created a police unit that did not join the traffickers. Or die.
Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields Page 12