“God has given you this mission.
“No one will understand this story except those who have been in the life. And God will tell you how to write this story.”
Then we embrace and pray. I can feel his hand on my shoulder probing, seeking the power of the Lord in me.
I have my work to do now.
And so we go our separate ways.
In the parking lot, he moves with ease, in a state of grace. The sun blazes, the sky aches blue. Life feels good. His eyes relax and he laughs. And then I see him memorize my license plate in a quick and practiced glance. He has told me he is bathed in the blood of the lamb, but his eyes remain those of the wolf.
The pace roars in December, and then, just around Christmas, there is a faint slowing. But on December 30, three go down. Number 1,600 is a man who resisted a robbery in an auto repair shop. After him, a guy is murdered on the street when he walked out of a money exchange. Another person is snatched, and his fate left to the imagination. Then, a man is murdered in his boutique dress shop. His customers are beaten and robbed. By New Year’s Eve, 1,602 are dead and 195 people had been slaughtered in December, a month rivaling August, when 228 died.
Then, they go down until just minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, and then there are 1,607 dead. The final body is an act of love, according the Juárez tabloid, P.M.:
A man who began celebrations to welcome the New Year with a woman
was shot to death near midnight in the colonia Plutarcho Elias Calles
thus becoming the last mortal victim of 2008, number 1,607.
According to residents of the neighborhood
just a few days ago, the woman broke off her relationship with another man
who had been planning some kind of revenge fueled by jealousy
and thus, he could be the author of the criminal act.
It is said that it could have been a crime of passion, although state
authorities will investigate
to find out if this was the motive of the aggression.
It occurred near the stroke of midnight marking the end of 2008 and the
beginning of the New Year
at the intersection of Isla Santo Domingo and Isla Quisca streets in the
aforementioned colonia.
According to first reports to Emergency 066, three individuals who looked
like cholos
one of them riding a bicycle
shot at a white car where a man and woman apparently were
resulting in the death of the man.
The deceased, identified by the nickname “El Mango,” twenty-eight years old
received several gunshot wounds in different parts of his body
including the head according to witnesses
who said they had seen the woman’s ex-boyfriend among the aggressors
and so now, the authorities are looking for him.
They added that the woman who accompanied the victim was not injured
and she managed to get out of the car and hide in her house which was near
the scene of the crime.
According to some sources, “El Mango” had intended to get some
bodyguards
but these guys abandoned him and after running a little way
they fell dejected and downhearted in the street.
State agents came to the scene and it is presumed that they interviewed the
surviving woman
in order to get some facts about the possible identities
of the aggressors.
At 2:40 A.M., the first person is gunned down in the New Year. The next kill comes at 4 A.M. The year of our Lord 2009 is launched.
The next morning, the city is spent. Green, yellow, red, orange, blue, and white balloons flap from a palm tree in front of the club Beach, and the sidewalk is littered with confetti and garbage bags broken open with their reeking contents attracting clusters of pigeons.
On January 6, the day of the three wise men, a huge holiday sweet bread that is over a mile long feeds fifteen thousand people in a park in Ciudad Juárez. Late that afternoon, Mario Escobedo Salazar and his son Edgar Escobedo Anaya have visitors to their law office. The elder Escobedo Salazar, fifty-nine, is killed at his desk. The son runs and is slaughtered just down the block. His own brother, Mario Escobedo Anaya, was executed by the Chihuahuan state police in 2002 after representing a defendant accused of the murder of a group of women found buried in a cotton field. His law partner, Sergio Dante Almaraz, also represented one of the accused in that case. He was executed in January 2005 in downtown Juárez. Almaraz had publicly predicted his murder and said he would be killed by the Chihuahuan state government. Some message has been delivered, some circle closed, but the only part of the statement fully understood by everyone is death.
There is supposed to be an answer to such a number of killings. Some kind of explanation and then, following this explanation, a solution achieved through an orderly series of steps. I go to see El Pastor, and he prays for me, a thankless task for which I thank him.
The year has not been easy for El Pastor. He watches his city die around him. He has men come with guns demanding money. He is at a stoplight one afternoon and sees a man executed three cars ahead of him.
I ask him, “Tell me what the slaughter of the year 2008 means.”
He says, “Not even in the Mexican revolution did they kill so many in Juárez. This year of death shows the brutality inside the Mexican government—death comes from inside the government. Not from the people. The only way to end the violence is to let organized crime be the government.
“The crime groups are fighting for power. If the toughest guy wins, he will get everything under control.
“Now there is no respect for the president.
“People now say to the president, ‘Fuck you, man.’
“I am a miracle, but I am not a martyr. I don’t want to be killed.”
We sit outside his house. His red car stares at us with a front plate that says, WITH GOD, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE.
As we enjoy the blue sky and the warmth falling from heaven, more die in the city.
That is the answer.
Both the sun.
And the blood.
Miss Sinaloa goes on and on. Her name changes as does her face. Every day, week, month, she shows up in the city with a new identity with her face made up, her high-heeled shoes, tight skirt, and fragrance. And each time she comes to the city, she is adored, raped, thrown in the trash, and lives on with a maimed mind. She never forgets, and the city always forgets her.
She has those lush lips, that long hair and fair skin. She can never be important. She is not the drug industry, she is not free trade, she is not national security.
She is the blood and dreams of a people.
I will never forget her.
Just as she will never be remembered.
Afterword
At one point, I was hanging around Palomas, a border town an hour or so west of Juárez, and near Palomas is Ascensión, where an ice chest arrives at police headquarters.
The chest was shipped as freight (properly encased in shrink-wrap) via a bus company and addressed to a local clinic. But one by one, the clinics checked their records and realized they had not ordered any drugs or other vital materials that must be shipped on ice and shrink-wrapped. The chest winds up at the police station by a kind of default mechanism. The cops open it and find four severed human heads.
The newspaper says an investigation has been launched.
At the same time, two laborers on a local ranch stumble into some armed men and are promptly cut down.
I read the World War II memoir of Eric Severeid, a son of Velva, North Dakota. At that time, he was a CBS radio correspondent. Later, he was part of television news and for years read brooding and vague commentaries each evening, a voice sandwiched amid the mayhem of nightly items.
He went off to his war as a young man who believed in a raft of
ideas labeled progressive, who believed that people were basically decent and wanted to live in peace in democratic societies.
The war threatened his beliefs.
He found an appetite for murder, and he had trouble with this fact. He saw U.S. soldiers kill prisoners without a qualm. He saw average people, French and Italian, turn into killers once the fragrance of “liberation” floated over their towns and villages.
On the American election day, a man is found against the metal bars of a window, arms spread in the crucifixion style, feet firmly on the ground, his face hidden by a pig mask. Children walk past on their way to school. A few days later, a man is found at dawn dangling from a bridge. His severed head is located wrapped in a black plastic bag at the Juárez monument to newsboys in the Plaza of the Journalist.
Like many such tales in the city, it was written up for the daily paper by Armando Rodriguez, who has this very morning, a week after the severed head was left at the monument to journalists, filed his 907th story of the year, and then he takes ten hits from a 9 mm as he warms up his car, his young daughter beside him, in order to take her to school.
The burned body is dumped at the police station, arms severed at the elbow, each hand holding a grill lighter.
He has been strangled and then burned with cigarette lighters.
He has been shot with an AK-47.
A message left with the carcass denounces the dead man as an arsonist.
At the time the crisp body is found, the local police get death threats over their radios.
The cops take down the blanket on which the accusation against the dead was painted, that he was an arsonist.
Then a message comes over their radios to put it back up, pronto.
They do.
This police district is very productive in producing dead policemen.
Since the killing began warming up last January and the first message was posted of cops to be killed, this area has been rich in dead police.
Back then, the message, placed over a funeral wreath of flowers, contained the names of seventeen agents, identified by surname, code, and sector.
For those who continue not to believe: Z-1 Juan Antonio Román García; oficial Martín Casas, Z-4 del distrito Aldama; Adán Prieto, Z-3 del distrito Babícora; Eduardo Acosta, Z-4 del distrito Chihuahua; oficial Arvizu, Z-6 del distrito Aldama; oficial Rojas, Z-5 del distrito Benito Juárez; oficial Rojas, del distrito Cuauhtémoc; Originales Z-4 del distrito Cuauhtémoc; oficial Balderas, Z-3 del distrito Aldama; oficial Villegas, Z-3 del distrito Delicias; oficial Casimiro Meléndez, del distrito Babícora; Evaristo Rodríguez, oficial del distrito Cuauhtémoc; oficial Silva, Z-5 del distrito Cuauhtémoc; oficial Vargas, del distrito Cuauhtémoc; oficial Guerrero, del distrito Cuauhtémoc; Gerardo Almeralla, agente de Vialidad; y el oficial Galindo, del distrito Aldama.
Since that greeting, many on the list have died. Or quit. Or fled.
This is something new and yet something old. This is what Eric Severeid saw in June 1944 on the day Rome was liberated from the Germans. He was thirty years old and battle hardened by all the reports he’d filed from China and Britain and North Africa and Italy. He’d bailed out of a plane on the Chinese/Burma border into jungle controlled by the Japanese and made it out alive. He’d seen men die. He’d learned there was a chasm between his educated beliefs about the war and the feelings of the soldiers who had to fight and die in the war. So when Rome was liberated, he already knew about killing and evil and violence and things he never really wanted to know, and now knew he could never forget. He left a brief page in his memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, published in 1946:
At midnight I wandered toward my hotel and in the moonlight came upon two tired American paratroopers from Frederick’s regiment, who were sitting disconsolately on the curbing. They were lost, had no place to stay. . . . I took them to my room and they stretched out on the floor. We talked a while, and one of them, a brawny St. Louis man who had been a milk-wagon driver, said: “You know, I’ve been reading how the FBI is organizing special squads to take care of us boys when we get home. I got an idea it will be needed, all right. See this pistol? I killed a man this morning, just to get it. Ran into a German officer in a hotel near the edge of town. He surrendered, but he wouldn’t give me his pistol. You know, it kind of scares me. It’s so easy to kill. It solves your problems, and there’s no questions asked. I think I’m getting the habit.”
Esther Chávez Cano died on Christmas morning 2009.
She lived to help heal the wounds of Ciudad Juárez,
she insisted on justice from those in power.
And demanded action from the rest of us.
After That Year
More troops arrive and more corpses arrive. By the summer of 2009, Juárez looks back on the slaughter of 2008 as the quiet time. This book began because I was astounded by the killings of January 2008—48. This would have spelled out to 576 murders a year, almost double the previous record of 301 in 2007. Now a murder rate of 100 a month would feel like the return of peace to the city. July 2009 is the bloodiest month in the history of the city, with 244 murdered. In August, 316 more go down. There are at least 10,000 troops and federal police in the city, with the murders, 1,440 to date, surpassing the 788 for the same date in 2008—an increase of 83 percent. Small businesses fold all over the city as the extortion rates rise. Forty percent of the city’s restaurants close. The city now has an estimated 150,000 addicts. El Pastor believes that 30 to 40 percent of the population depends on drug money for income.
MONTHLY MURDER TALLIES
FOR CIUDAD JUÁREZ, 2008-2009
2008 2009
JANUARY 46 154
FEBRUARY 49 240
MARCH 117 73
APRIL 55 85
MAY 136 127
JUNE 139 221
JULY 146 260
AUGUST 228 316
SEPTEMBER 118 310
OCTOBER 181 324
NOVEMBER 192
DECEMBER 200
TOTAL 1,607*
From various Juárez press sources.
* This total does not include the 45 bodies recovered by federal agents in February and March in clandestine graves in two houses. With these added, the total rises to 1,652.
I am sitting with a Juárez lawyer at a party, and he explains that there has been a failure of analysis. He tells me criminology will not explain what is happening, nor will sociology. He pauses and then says that we must study demonology.
Some blame the violence on a war between cartels, some blame poverty, some blame the army, some blame the army’s fighting the cartels, some blame local street gangs, some blame drugs, some blame slave wages, some blame corrupt government.
But regardless of the blame, no one can figure out who controls the violence, and no one can imagine how the violence can be stopped.
But everyone grows numb. Murders slip off the front page and become part of the ordinary noise of life. By early December, 2,400 have died.
Juárez is rated by some counts to be the most violent city in the world.
ON AUGUST 13, 2008, EIGHT PEOPLE WERE KILLED BY ARMED COMMANDOS AT CIAD #8, A DRUG REHABILITATION CENTER FOR THE POOR IN COLONIA PRIMERO DE SEPTIEMBRE IN CIUDAD JUÁREZ. THEY WERE HOLDING A PRAYER MEETING. THE BOY IN THE COFFIN, LUIS ÁNGEL GONZÁLEZ, “SIGNO,” 19, A MEMBER OF LOCOS 23 GANG, HAD CHECKED IN FOR TREATMENT FOUR DAYS BEFORE HIS MURDER. THE MEXICAN ARMY REMAINED OUTSIDE THE REHAB CENTER WHILE THE SLAUGHTER WENT ON FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES, WITNESSES SAID.
APPENDIX
THE RIVER OF BLOOD
People with brown skin are next door to invisible.
—GEORGE ORWELL, 1939
At first, it is simply a clerical task. Read the papers and put down the names, if given, and the time and cause of death. Then the volume grows, and the reports get sketchy. People disappear, and their fates never get reported. Nor are there any real numbers on the kidnapped since families hardly ever report such events, because they are afraid of being murdered. Then, the
killings per day get larger, the reporters more and more threatened. By June 2008, the city cannot handle its own dead and starts giving corpses wholesale to medical schools or tossing bodies into common graves. The list of the dead becomes a dark burden as solid information dwindles. And so it finally trails off, a path littered with death and small voices whispering against the growing night. But it gives a sense of the rumble of daily life as the bullets fly and the killers roam unimpeded. In January and February 2008, newspapers and voices on the streets all marveled at the horror of more than forty killings in a month—a number never before recorded in Ciudad Juárez. By May 10, the work becomes unbearable, and the tally of that moment records only a fourth of the slaughter the year would bring. Of course, all this happens before things get really bad in the city. By the end of 2008, the monthly totals reached beyond two hundred. By summer 2009, more than three hundred murders in a month became normal in Juárez.
JANUARY
El Diario, Ciudad Juárez, January 1, 2008
State agents know the nickname of the murderer. “El Popeye” shot César Seáñez to death in Colonia Chaveña Sunday night. The assassin, known by the nickname “El Popeye,” at this time has not been arrested by the Ministerial Police.
El Diario, Ciudad Juárez, January 3, 2008
EXECUTED MAN IDENTIFIED IN PASEO TRIUNFO
The man shot to death in his car on the Avenida Paseo Triunfo de la Republica was identified yesterday by his family. The victim, Ernesto Romero Adame, 33, bled to death from bullet wounds in his neck, face and thorax. One bullet perforated his aorta, causing rapid death, said the spokesman for the State Prosecutor’s Office, Mario Ruiz Nava. The homicide occurred on December 31, 2007 at 3:00 A.M. in the Avenida Paseo Triunfo de la Republica. . . . According to witnesses, the victim was pursued by an armed commando traveling in several late-model vehicles until they caught up with him in front of a hotel.
Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields Page 25