Mario Antonio Martinez Hernandez, thirty-eight. Owned a junkyard. The wife came to pick me up, and I climbed in when suddenly two guys got out of a black Yukon and tried to open my door. I grabbed it and held it shut. This was January tenth. They stepped back and started firing.
I lean back and close my eyes. I simply listen and swim in the stories that fall from the pale lips.
Look, I went down the next day. They dumped me in a vacant lot after the torture. Some nines in the head. No name, please.
I took some rounds in the chest. I hobbled over to a security guard and asked for help. Then I died.
Enrique Enriquez Armendariz, fifty-one. A lot of torture, but I’ll skip over that. Hands and feet tied with duct tape. Dumped near a subdivision.
It’s a family thing. I’m a cop and so was my brother—he caught his back in May 2007. I took twenty-two rounds of 5.27x28 mm. I’m Police Captain Julián Cháirez Hernández, thirty-seven. I was on patrol at that moment.
I was coming out of my house to go to work when this van rolls up. Took thirty-five rounds from an AK-47. Never made it to the job. Francisco Ledesma Salazar, thirty-four, city police. Back then I drove a Ford Expedition.
They came for me on January twenty-first, ten of them wearing ski masks and toting machine guns. It was over a week before anyone found me. Some nines were scattered around my body. My name is Fernando Javier Macias Rivera, twenty-three.
They found my body next to his. Luis Carlos Contreras, twenty-one.
José Luis Piedra, thirty. They kidnapped me and then gave me six from a .380 in my neck and head.
I was just driving. They pulled me out of my car at an intersection. Seven in the chest. Juan Garcia Vazquez, thirty-two. That’s about it.
I guess I’m the change of pace. Javier Leal Saucedo, thirty-three. Beat me to death.
Me too. Bernardo Rafael Hernandez Vasquez, thirty-nine. Beaten to death.
Look, I don’t even know if I should talk. I was out driving with my wife in my white pickup. Then they took me. No reports about me since then, so I think I’ll leave it at that.
Well, I’m different. Raymundo Daniel Ruvalcaba, twenty-nine. They put a plastic bag over my head and duct-taped my hands and feet. Then they wrapped me in a blanket. The people who found me saw pools of blood around my body.
I open my eyes, and it looks as though there are still hundreds waiting their turn to speak. I notice the brevity of the people speaking. Name, age, wounds. They don’t really say much. Maybe they think no one cares. Or maybe they think everyone already knows. You will die. You will not really see it coming, no matter what warnings or signals you have received. You will ignore the warnings because you will think bad things happen to other people and not to you.
Jesus Duran Uranga, thirty-one. Put me in the trunk of a ninety-five Ford Escort. Finally, the neighbors complained of the smell, and that’s how I got found.
I’m thirty. Francisco Macias Gonzalez. Shot in the head in my Dodge Ram with a Hemi. Hands tied behind my back with those plastic handcuffs the cops use.
Look, I work for the state prosecutor’s office. I drive a Durango. That’s where they shot me.
So you will die and be surprised, and yet you will die and expect to die. The explanations other people crave hardly matter to you because the cause of your death is just a detail. You fucked up, or someone wanted your business, or maybe, just maybe, you looked too long and too hard at the wrong woman. That would actually be kind of nice—to die for love. But in the end, you will die because killing is part of life here, and all the things called motives and reasons don’t tell you much in the end, because you can imagine a different kind of place where you behaved in the same way, and you would not be murdered in this other place.
I drift off. I listen and don’t listen, in the same way a person sits in a bar and takes in the band and yet is hardly aware of the music.
Of course, nothing Miss Sinaloa knows matters to most people. Just as the dead of Juárez will vanish from memory.
As I watch the new Our Town in the abandoned rehab center, I see one little image in my head, a fragment that whispers of a murder. There is a barrio near here where people scavenge old televisions and bits of metal from both Juárez and El Paso and sell them. The barrio is poor and is a place that eats the cast-off entrails of a richer world. A man sells cocaine on the street, and he is warned to stop, but he is in his thirties and has no other livelihood. So he persists and then armed men come with masks and blow his brains out, and he falls on the street near his mother’s house. That is not the image in my mind. What I see is his mother. It is night now, the body has been taken away, and there is a light on, the screen door is pushed open, and an old woman with a blank face stares down at the street, and she is there all alone and her son is not coming home, and her face is as inscrutable as a block of stone. Her arms are crossed, and she is a portrait of grief Juárez-style, silent, enduring, and doomed.
I am eight years old. They poured two hundred and fifty rounds into my dad’s truck and killed him. They shot my arm off. And then I died.
I am a disabled police officer in a wheelchair, my partner is legally blind, and we were making sure no one was using parking spaces for the handicapped when we were machine-gunned.
My name is David Miranda Ramirez, I’m thirty-six, and I was driving patrol in an industrial park at 10:30 A.M. when at least twenty rounds ripped through my car and my body.
I have no name now. They found my body in a kettle used for frying pork.
December’s children arise. First, four cops killed in their stations and cars in a coordinated attack during the night. They say they were merely doing their duty. They sit with over sixty dead cops slaughtered during the year.
Four guys sit near them, also machine-gunned during the same day as the four cops. One holds his head in his lap, the severed skull wearing a Santa Claus hat. It is nearing Christmas, and everyone has the spirit. The kills have streaked past 1,500 for the year.
This program will take some time.
Miss Sinaloa tosses her hair and takes in the show.
God brought her to this city, you know, so that she would suffer and lose her mind, go to the crazy place and meet her true love, who slipped food into her cell and talked sweetly to her. It was meant to be. She knows this. And may know other things.
Did I tell you about her eyes? They see through you to the other side. Scent wafts off her as we sit and listen and yet do not listen. We are being told what we already know and, in my case, refuse to understand.
Of course, Miss Sinaloa is different.
Her skin is so white, her hair long and glossy, the lips red as ripe fruit.
Murder Artist
He is calm now. The kidnappings, the tortures, the killings, brought back a sense of self he could not control, the workman’s pride that fills a man when he sees the wall, the house, or perhaps even the church he has built. True, he would express regret, tell me such things give him nightmares, and he tries as a rule to put them out of his mind. He would indicate that he is revisiting this evil time simply for my benefit.
He takes his various drawings—how to do a hit, where some people were buried in a death house—looks at the green schematics he has created and then slowly tears them into little squares until the torn heap can never be reconstructed.
His life is relatively peaceful until late 2006. He worked all over Mexico for different groups, and the various organizations generally got along. There were small moments such as when others tried to take over Juárez, and it was necessary to burn their heads with tires. But his life in the main was peaceful.
So peaceful, he did not need to know certain things.
Such as who he really worked for. Such knowledge could be fatal.
“I received orders from two people. They ran me. I never knew which cartel I worked for. Now there is Vicente Carrillo against Chapo Guzman. But I never met any bosses, so when the war started around 2006, I did not know which one I did the
killing for. And orders could cross from one group to another. I am living in a cell, and I simply take orders. In thirty minutes in Juárez, sixty well-trained and heavily armed men can assemble in thirty cars and circulate as a show of force.
“Then at my level, we began to get orders to kill each other.”
He is kidnapped but let go after an hour. This unsettles him, and he begins to think about escaping his life. But that is not a simple matter, since if you leave, you are murdered. As the war quickens, he begins to distance himself from people he knows and works with. He tries to fade away. By this time, a third of the people he knows have been disappeared—“they were seen as useless and then killed.”
He doesn’t know the boss, he is still not even sure who his boss is. He drinks at home. The streets are too dangerous. New people arrive, and he does not know them. He is not safe.
So he flees.
He confides in a friend. Who betrays him.
He pauses at this point. He knows he is guilty of a fatal error. He has violated a fundamental rule: You can only be betrayed by someone you trust. So you survive by trusting no one. Still, there is this shred of humanity in all of us, and in the end, we feel the need to trust someone. And this need is fatal. It is the very need he has exploited for years, the need he used when he put people in the police car and told them they would be all right if they cooperated, would be back with their families in no time if they were calm. And by God, they did trust him and rode across Mexico, went through checkpoints and said nothing, never told a single soul they had been kidnapped. They would trust him as they were tortured in the safe houses. They would promise him fine things when they were returned to their families. They would help mop the floors, clean up the vomit and blood. They would compose songs. They would trust him right up to that instant when he strangled them.
So his friend gives him up. He is taken at 10 P.M., and this time, he is held until 3 A.M.
But something has changed within him. And some things have not changed. Four men take him to a safe house. They remove all of his clothing but his shorts. They take pool balls in their hands and beat him.
But he can tell they are amateurs. They do not even handcuff him, and this is almost disturbing to him. He is the captive of third-raters. As they beat him, he prays and prays and prays. He also laughs because he is appalled by their incompetence. They have not bound him, and their blows do not disable him. He sizes them up and in his mind plans how he will kill them, one, two, three, four, just like that.
And at the same moment, he is praying to God to help him so that he will not kill them, so that he can stop his life of murder. He has been sliding toward God for some time now, brought to the fact of Christ by one of his first mentors when he joined the state police and became a professional killer. As he sits in the room, sipping coffee and recalling this moment, his face comes alive. He is passionate now. He is approaching the very moment of his salvation. Some people pretend to accept Christ, he says, but at that moment, he could feel total acceptance fill his body. He could feel peace. And yet there was this tension within him. He prays so ardently, and still at the same time he cannot stop laughing at his captors. He knows that in the Christian faith, the lamb is a symbol of belief and of redemption. But he also knows he can never be a lamb. If he is to be a Christian, he must be a Christian wolf.
They point rifles at him. He cannot stop laughing.
“I was afraid,” he explains. “I realized I would have to kill them all. I said to God, don’t do this to me, I don’t want to do this anymore. God, give me time.”
Two of the armed men leave. Another guy goes to the bathroom.
Here is his chance. The chance he is praying that God will not let him use. He can see no way out but killing, and now he knows that is no way out.
He looks at the remaining captor.
“The guy says, ‘I don’t have a problem with you. Once, you told me to be careful or they would kill me. You did me a favor.’
“So, I am praying to God, help me! I don’t want to kill these people. And I know I can do it rapidly.
“The guy turns his back on me and says, ‘Get out, go.’”
He opens the door and runs without his shoes or clothes. He goes to his home, takes his family out the back way, and sends them to different parts of Mexico. He knows that his killers will not go after his family, because they still fear him and know he can raise some men and kill their families.
“I had no one but God now. I still had some assets. I had a pilot assigned to me, I had knowledge of the organization. I had lived fully. I had risen. Often, I would simply supervise. I might fly to a distant city on a Saturday. Then on Sunday, I would supervise an execution and make certain the individual died. Sometimes, I would give the coup de grâce. I was on a monthly salary. I had a house, a good car, all that I needed was given to me. The boss is like God because everything comes from him. You worship him. When I was kidnapped, I finally realized I had been worshipping a false god. And I turned to the real God.”
His face is stern now. He has come to the place, the very moment that has permitted him to recount the kidnappings, the tortures, the killings. He is selling, and what he is selling is God. He is believing, and what he believes, based on his own life, is that anyone can be redeemed. And that it is possible to leave the organization and survive.
“I learned more as I was running. I asked God, if I am such a tough guy, why are they letting me go? I realized no one is a tough guy. I start seeing billboards in Juárez that said you must turn toward God, actual billboards. They had always been there, but I had been blind.
“After the second kidnapping and my escape, I asked God to help me so I didn’t have to kill. Tell me, God, how are you going to get me out of this? I was trained to kill. Back in that house, I knew which one I would kill first, and it would have been easy. But I was crying, crying out of fear, because I did not want to kill. One of the kidnappers was the son of a boss, and I knew if I killed him, then I would lose my family because with such a killing, no one would respect my family. The guy who let me run, he was a rich kid, he was just there for the fun.
“There were people who would tremble when they saw me because they knew I was violent. I could go to the door of a bar and simply beckon for a guy to go with me, and he would come because he knew he had to come. I was feared. But my captors, they were only playing.”
And so he lives, and now he must explain to himself why he lives, and now he must somehow redeem himself from his earlier life. But he cannot simply denounce this life: He was feared, he was trained, he was the good soldier in his war.
“I had never had free will, I had just followed orders. You never had time to think of the killings, of the executions. If you did that, you might feel remorse. But because of the way I worked, I could leave a torture scene, I could close off my mind. Also, I was using a lot of drugs. I always had to be awake, I always had to be aware of talking on the street, of what was being said about the people I worked with.”
His thoughts are a jumble as he speaks. He is telling of his salvation, and yet he feels the tug of his killings. He feels the pride in being feared. Back at the beginning, when he first starts with the state police, that is when Oropeza, the doctor and newspaper columnist, is killed. And his killers, he now recalls, were his mentors, his teachers. He remembers after the murder, the state government announced a big investigation to get the killers. And one of them, a fellow cop, stayed at his own police station until the noise quieted, and the charade ended.
He is excited now, he is living in his past.
“The only reason I am here is because God saved me. I repented. After all these years, I am talking to you. I am having to relive things that are dead to me. I don’t want to be part of this life. I don’t want to know the news. You must write this so that other sicarios know it is possible to leave. They must know God can help them. They are not monsters. They have been trained like Special Forces units in the army. But they never realize t
hey have been trained to serve the Devil.
“Imagine being nineteen years old and you are able to call up a plane. I liked the power. I never realized until God talked to me that I could get out. Still, when God frees me, I remain a wolf. I can’t become a lamb. I remain a terrible person, but now I have God on my side.
“I don’t carry a gun now.
“I carry God.”
His eyes are glowing now. He is on fire.
“God will get them out when they are ready.
“You leave without money.
“You need faith. And prayer.”
He stares at me as I write in a black notebook.
His body seems to loom over the table.
This is the point in all stories where everyone discovers who they really are. Do you believe in redemption? Do you believe a man can kill for twenty years and then change? Do you even believe such killers can exist? In every story, there is this same moment when all you hold dear and believe to be true and certain is suddenly called into question, and the walls of your life shake, the roof collapses, and you look up into a sky you never imagined and never wanted to know. I believe his conversion to Christ, I believe he can change, I believe he can never be forgiven. And I am certain my knowledge of his life and his ways will haunt me the rest of my days.
He says, “I have now relived something I should never have opened up. Are you the medium to reach others? I prayed to God asking what I should do. And you are the answer. You are going to write this story because God has a purpose in you writing this story.
Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields Page 24