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

by Charles Bowden

  He was one of the eight cut down in the drug center at around 7:15 P.M. as dusk slowly descended on the city by the river.

  I stare into the baby’s wide, dark eyes and try to make out what is and what will be. A golden crucifix, Christ with arms outstretched in His agony, floats over the face so still now, the eyes closed. The baby stares with round eyes of wonder.

  I look into two versions of myself, the body in the coffin and the babe in arms. I am possibly past due for the coffin, but I remember through the haze those early glimpses of life when I was younger than I can even recall, those blues and greens, the smell of fresh apples, the feel of the grain in the floor-boards in the old farmhouse, the cluck of the chickens, the strange sounds coming from the mouths of adults. So I am in a small room full of people, the body is against the wall in a glass-topped coffin, the baby looks down at the still, dead face, and I can smell fresh hay from some forgotten summer when I first caught the light gleaming into my eyes. And I know that my early days were somehow similar, that bodies were still displayed in the house, that wakes were home affairs, the children and babies were not sheltered from the fate of all living things, and that all of life that mattered took place in the kitchen.

  The city’s fatigue seeps into my pores, the midday sun bakes my mind, and I wander between the coffin and the killing ground, and this is easy because the boy in the coffin lived next door to the rehabilitation center where he was murdered.

  The gate is open to the center, and I enter. Men are tearing the place apart, and they seem frantic in their work. They are all from Sonora, and the story is very simple and clear. A week and a half earlier, armed men came to one of their three clinics in Juárez and herded fifty people into rooms, and then they took the director and a visitor out and executed them. The group, centered in Cananea, Sonora, decided to close all three facilities and leave the state of Chihuahua. They painted the word CLOSED on the center where the murders occurred. They called the police and army in Juárez and told them they were shutting everything down as fast as they could. They asked both the police and the army to give them protection until they could close down the centers—this request was denied. They piled into vans and drove over on Wednesday, their plan to load all the beds and office equipment into the vans and flee back to Sonora. The group arrived two hours after the killings.

  He stands on the roof looking down at me in the small patio of the center. He refuses to give his name. Yet he cannot stop talking. They came through the office, he says, and then entered this patio. I look around and see a row of rooms—office, infirmary, lounge, detox, kitchen, sala—all open onto this concrete slit called the patio. He points to the corner of the patio—yes, there, there is where they took four from the sala, put them on the ground and executed them. I see the bullet holes.

  He is a solid man in his forties with cropped hair and quick eyes. He has worked for the centers for six years, and he refuses to give his name. This last fact is to be expected. The neighbors quoted in the newspapers about that night also remain nameless. Only the dead get to have names. Everyone else—killers and survivors—are without identity. He says, “Come here, come here,” and he leads me from his rooftop perch into a narrow defile between the concrete block center and the wall sheltering it from the street. The passageway is less than three feet wide, and down this corridor the secretary ran with AK-47s firing at him. The man on the roof makes me look at the steel casement around a window—the bullet holes through the metal are the size of a quarter. Then I turn the corner and see the staircase ahead and, on top of the building, the cyclone fence that is torn apart where desperate patients leapt from the roof to some hope of survival on the ground below. The secretary himself made it to the top of the open staircase before he was cut down by gunfire. He now is near death in a hospital. Terror lingers in the narrow passage. I climb up the stairs and enter the little rooms that line the roof and functioned as barracks for the addicts. On the walls are photographs—a pinup of a singer, a 1970 Mercedes convertible, and a velvet painting of a Mexican águila, eagle. On the floor is a book touting creationism over evolution, a workbook that teaches parenting without anger problems. It is still. No one is coming back for their things. And no one on site can really tell if these remnants belong to the quick or the dead.

  Men tear apart metal beds—there is the screech of hacksaws and banging of hammers—a manic act of salvage. Other men carry out piles of blankets—the cheap Chinese ones made of synthetic fiber that have inundated Mexico. Today, two men were found wrapped in such blankets, their hands cut off and left by their sides, the bodies showing signs of torture. So the men carry out mounds of these blankets, but they do not put them in the vans. They toss them into trash barrels and say nothing. That scent of what were once people coming off the blankets they slept in every night, this fragrance of a life lost, is more than even the men salvaging materials can bear. So they stick to saving metal and trash the blankets.

  I look up at the man on the roof, and he says, “They don’t want us in Chihuahua. We get the message.”

  I enter the sala, the killing chamber where people were raising their hands to God when the gunmen entered. Flies buzz, and the sound sizzles in the empty room. In back is the tiny bathroom where people piled atop each other in some fantasy of escaping death. On the front wall are the twelve steps to curing addiction in Spanish. Also, the Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niehbur’s contribution to sanity in World War II when it fluttered across American life.

  DIOS CONCEDEME SERENIDAD PARA ACEPTAR LAS COSAS

  QUE NO PUEDO CAMBIAR

  It is posted in the front of the room, where the woman stood at the podium soliciting the addicts to come forward for Christ. On the floor, the tiles are brown, red, white, gray, and beige. A map of the Holy Land is underfoot. A crucifix leans in the corner, a candle sputtering before it.

  VALOR PARA CAMBIAR LAS QUE SI PUEDO

  There are three bullet holes in the floor, and the wall has dribbles of blood and one red palm print. The floor has been mopped, but still, there is the blood on the wall and the blood that has seeped into the grout between the tiles. The flies buzz and buzz.

  SABIDURIA PARA DISTINGUIR LA DIFERENCIA

  The man from the roof tells me, “I believe the police are scared. Our own people started pulling people into the vans because no one came.”

  Yes, amid the noise, the men hurrying to load the vans, everyone is quite alone here. The largest slaughter in the history of the city, and there is no yellow police tape, no visible investigation of the crime scene. A set of clinics for addicts is leaving the city because of terror, but there are no reporters, no cameras. Just silence. And this sense of being alone.

  Luis Angel Gonzalez Corral was nineteen years old and a member of Locos 23 and had a habit of sniffing glue—a habit that was getting the best of him. So a week or two ago, he went next door and joined the rehab program. On Wednesday night, his family heard the shooting next door and hid during the fifteen minutes of thundering gunfire. Then emerged and found a dead son.

  The yard is dirt with a vine trailing over a leaning fence to the north. Two poles support big sheets of canvas and provide shade for the mourners sitting on old chairs or concrete blocks. They are mainly women, and the oldest is maybe in her forties. The ancients that should be clogging such a wake have been left behind in the country. This is a barrio of people driven off the land, and of people barely surviving in the new world of the city. Only one woman wears a dress. Everyone else is in clean shorts or jeans and T-shirts. Voices are muted, a kind of murmuring floats across the ground. The faces are tired, the eyes glazed. There are few males in attendance: just gang kids come to honor one of their own and two or three older men. It is early afternoon, the men are either at work or looking for work. This is also a barrio where each day is an effort to find some way to provide food. There is no future here, but a constant struggle in the present.

  The small house of three little rooms shares a common wall with the a
bandoned center. The body lies in the kitchen. A sheet blocks the window and has been painted with a message of support from Locos 23. Women sit in a row of folding chairs before the sheet and face the coffin. They are also very tired and pass for the matrons of this street of dust.

  One woman lost her son six weeks ago. She says he was twenty-five years old and did work now then as a plasterer or drywall hanger. They came in the night, and she did not see them, she says, because she was in bed. The next day, his body was found. He had been tortured. Neighbors told her he was taken away by the municipal police. Four young men of this area have been executed in the last few months, four who lived within a few blocks of each other. Her voice is soft and flat as she recounts the loss of her son. Little or no emotion colors her tale, perhaps it would be too taxing on the soul. Here, getting killed is part of growing up for young men.

  I ask the mother of the dead boy who rests in the glass-topped coffin what he planned to be when he grew up.

  She stares at me silently as if slowly digesting the question.

  Then, she holds her hands out palms up and shrugs at the implication of such a question. Ambitions do not grow here, and the future does not exist here. At least not in a way recognized by governments. Ambition is displayed on the sheet where Locos 23 states its claim to the dead boy. It is in the eyes of the people at the wake who see death but expect no justice beyond a life lived and ended by slaughter. A girl in tight black pants and a black lacy blouse enters the kitchen, gets a soft drink from the refrigerator, and smiles at friends. She is pregnant with the dead boy’s child, and for a few hours this afternoon she is the center of a kind of mild attention. Just as the mother dressed in black holds a kind of low-key standing in the heat, flies, and dust.

  The boy had been in treatment before, and failed. Then, last Friday, the family could tell he was on drugs again, and so they took him next door and put him in the center. He’d basically been raised by his grandmother. After the shooting, the boy was one of the wounded put in a van for transportation to the hospital. He didn’t make it and was left on a street corner. His grandmother found him and wailed. His head was a mess, he was covered with blood, and he seemed very still to her. He was gone. The old woman had planned to take him out of the center that Saturday. Thursday morning, she was taken to the hospital with a heart attack. And now, at the wake on Friday afternoon, everyone is quiet and tired and the mother shrugs when explaining what ambition her son might have harbored.

  There is nothing puzzling at the wake next door to the slaughterhouse. The killers give no reason for killing, they simply fire. The army parks down the street and does nothing. The neighbors hide during the fifteen minutes of murder. No one wants a real name publicized. The police do not come, the ambulances stay away. Gang kids paint a sheet, drift into and out of the wake, and look at the body with blank eyes. The girl, maybe sixteen years old, is pregnant, and she sips Seven-Up a few feet from her boyfriend’s body. The mother answers questions with a flat voice. And a whisper begins: that the church deacon killed had a premonition that he should not come. That he froze when he was to read a Bible verse and could not speak. Soon other signs will be remembered, and somehow the blood and the flies will be erased and made smooth by legend. The baby leaning over the coffin—the glass top now covered with rosaries brought by local people, the base surrounded by carnations and gladiolas and daisies and roses—will grow up learning tales and stories and miracles associated with the killing, and this will be part of being alive on this street with the dust in the air. After all, one pregnant woman at the meeting survived—the dead deacon’s body was draped over hers. She will be proof of God or the devil or some force besides the flies and dust and sun, the water that fails, the electricity that comes and goes, the police who might kill you, the army who might kill you, the gangs that might kill you. And the gang that is all you have or ever will have in your short life. After all, there is that photo of you and your friends taped on your coffin lid, and you are all tossing out gang signs with your fingers.

  So much depends on a blue carnation and fingers flicking messages into the void. The white carnations have a blue dye by the body resting in the coffin. And I think, okay, this is what it is about, doing the best, the very best one can do under the circumstances. So much depends on the people in the neighborhood, who say the gunshots could be heard for blocks and blocks. About the time of the killings at the center, the government announced that there have been about 839 murders in the Juárez area this year, but only eighteen people have been charged.

  So much depends on the worker at the center who is busy loading the vans so that all can flee Juárez, and I ask him, just what do you think is going on here? and he says, “Something evil. Something very, very evil.”

  To ask what your son wanted to become is to imagine a world that is not a thought in the yard with the dust, the canvas hoisted on poles for shade, the vine wilting on the fence in the afternoon sun, and the coffin resting in the kitchen by the dirty pots and pans.

  On the kitchen wall, the tear-away calendar has stalled at August 13/14, the night of the killing. But of course, time goes on, and the boy in the box will not be the last to die, nor the last member of Locos 23. We are in a place without beginning or end, and all the ways to tell the story fail me and repel me. There are many dead, and they each have a tale. Beyond that, the efforts to explain are to me efforts to erase truth or deny truth or simply to tell lies. I don’t know what is going on, nor do the dead or the living. But there are these stories of the killings, there is the tortured flesh, the individual moments of horror, and I rest on those moments because they are actual and beyond question.

  Dead Reporter Driving

  The woman and Emilio collect his son. They stop by his house to get some clothes and then flee to a small ranch about six miles west of Ascensión, where he can hide. He is terrified. Later that night, a friend takes him back to his house once again. He wears a big straw hat, slips low in the seat. He sneaks into his house and gets vital documents. A friend delivers a small black car out at the ranch.

  All day Sunday, he tries to think of a way to save his life. He comes up with only one answer: flight. No matter where he goes in Mexico, he will have to find a job and use his identity cards and the army will track him down. He now knows they will never forget his story from 2005, that he cannot be redeemed.

  He tells his boy, “We are not going back to our house. The soldiers may kill me, and I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  Monday morning, he drives north very fast. He takes all his legal papers so that he can prove who he is. He expects asylum from the government of the United States when he crosses at Antelope Wells, New Mexico.

  What he gets is this: He is immediately jailed, as is his son. They are separated. It is a common practice to break up families to crush the will—often jailing men and tossing the women and children back over the fence. He is denied bond, and no hearing is scheduled to handle his case. He is taken to El Paso and placed in a private prison. Had he entered the United States illegally and then asked for asylum, he would have been almost immediately bonded out. But since he entered legally by declaring his identity and legal status at a port of entry and applied for asylum, he is placed in prison because Homeland Security declares that Emilio has failed to prove that “he does not represent a threat to the community.”

  It is possible to see his imprisonment as simply the normal by-product of bureaucratic blindness and indifference. But I don’t think that is true. No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum, because if the U.S. government honestly faced facts, it would have to admit that Mexico is not a society that respects human rights. Just as the United States would be hard pressed, if it faced facts, to explain to its own citizens how it can justify giving the Mexican army $1.4 billion under Plan Merida, a piece of black humor that is supposed to fight a war on drugs. But then, the American press is the chorus in this comedy since it continues to report that the Mexican army is i
n a war to the death with the drug cartels. There are two errors in these accounts. One is simple: The war in Mexico is for drugs and the enormous money to be made by supplying American habits, a torrent of cash that the army, the police, the government, and the cartels all lust for. Second, the Mexican army is a government-financed criminal organization, a fact most Mexicans learn as children.

  Emilio Gutiérrez becomes a new kind of man, one who has lost his career, failed to protect his son from jail, a man with no clear future. He is deloused, given a blue jumpsuit, and set to work scrubbing floors for a dollar a day or an apple. He has tried to enter the United States legally and now makes less than what the illegal migrants who work in the country make. He also remembers all those bribes, all those sobres, he refused for years. He thinks, “If I had taken bribes, I wouldn’t be here in prison.” And of course, he is right, because if he’d been dutifully corrupt, he’d be safe inside the system and still living and writing in Ascensión, Chihuahua, with his son. Instead, he is surrounded by 1,200 to 1,300 Africans, Middle Easterners, East Indians, Russians, and, of course, Mexicans swept up in the increasing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. The Mexicans are forlorn because the raids have separated husbands from wives and parents from children.

  “The Mexicans,” he explains, “are treated the worst. The staff curses us and calls us rats, narcos, and criminals. The work of the prison is done by the Mexicans and Central Americans. It is ironic, the illegals are arrested for working and then put in prison and made to work for nothing.”

  When he crossed, he imagined that the U.S. government would take him to some safe house, perhaps guard him and protect him. He did not expect jail. Now he feels impotent. He is angry at the United States because they criticize other nations for human rights abuses, and when he flees for his life, they treat him like a criminal. He has nightmares of being deported. And he is desolate because he cannot learn anything about his son. He remembers those moments he loved: making his son’s breakfast, washing his son’s clothes. Now he can do nothing for him. Emilio cries a lot.