The Cartel

by Don Winslow

  “We have perfectly qualified medical personnel here.”

  “She is their physician.”

  “Dr. Cisneros is a woman?” Alvarado asks.

  “You’ve met her at least ten times,” Jimena says.

  “Can we see the prisoners from Valverde, yes or no?” Pablo asks.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Alvarado says, “Something that they say and that you report might compromise an ongoing investigation.”

  “Don’t police usually do criminal investigations?” Ana asks.

  “These are different times.”

  “Are you concerned,” Pablo asks, “that the local police are on the cartels’ payroll, as well? And if so, which cartel?”

  Alvarado doesn’t answer.

  “Suppose,” Ana says, “we just see the prisoners but don’t interview them?”

  “Then what would you have to report?” Alvarado asks.

  “That they haven’t been tortured,” Ana says.

  Alvarado answers, “But you have my word. Isn’t that good enough?”

  “No,” Ana says.

  Alvarado glares at her with the hatred that a macho man feels toward an uppity woman.

  So Pablo gathers up his courage and chimes in with rapid-fire questions—Do you intend to charge these men? If so, with what? When? If not, when do you intend to release them? Why won’t you produce them? What, if any, evidence do you have against them? Why haven’t they been allowed access to lawyers? Who are you? What’s your background? Where did you serve prior to the 11th Military Zone?

  Alvarado holds his hand up. “I don’t intend to be interrogated.”

  “Is it torture for you?” Pablo asks.

  “I have no comment for your paper.”

  “So we can print that you refused to answer,” Ana says.

  “Print what you like.” Alvarado stands up. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have real work to do.”

  “I’ve contacted the Red Cross and Amnesty International,” Jimena says.

  “It’s a free country.”

  “Is it?” Jimena asks.

  “Yes, unless you’re a criminal,” Alvarado says. “You’re not a criminal, are you, Señora Abarca?”

  The threat is clear.

  He scribbles out a pass and hands it to Ana. “This will get you back to Juárez with no difficulties. May I suggest that you stay there? These roads can be very dangerous these days.”

  “Really?” Ana asks. “But we passed so many army patrols on the way.”

  —

  “Those are two brave women,” Ana says in the car on the way back to Juárez.

  “Indeed,” Pablo says.

  “And you have a hard-on for the lady doctor,” she adds.

  “Who wouldn’t?” Giorgio asks from the backseat.

  “Me,” Ana says.

  “You would if your gate was hinged that way,” Giorgio says. “It’s not, right? You’re not double-hinged, are you?”

  “I wouldn’t want to ruin your adolescent fantasies with a denial,” Ana replies.

  “They take my mind off things,” Giorgio says.

  “What things?”

  “All of it,” Giorgio answers. “The killing, the corruption, the oppression—the enervating sameness of it all. The fact that we’ve fought how many revolutions and end up with the same old shit. But here, check this out.”

  He leans forward and shows them the screen of his camera.

  A beautiful close-up of Colonel Alvarado.

  “How did you do that?” Pablo asks.

  “While you were firing at him, so was I.”

  “Will Óscar print it?”

  “With what?” Ana asks. “What story do we have? ‘Colonel Denies Torturing Prisoners’? That’s not news, that’s the opposite of news. News would be ‘Colonel Admits Torturing Prisoners.’ ”

  “Yes, but there’s a bigger story here,” Pablo says. “If you accept Abarca’s and Cisneros’s version of events, the army is allied with the Sinaloa cartel to wipe out the Juárez cartel, and not only that, to move normal citizens out of the Juárez Valley.”

  If true, the Sinaloa cartel and the army are the same beast.

  —

  That night, Ana comes out on her back step, sits down next to Pablo, and lights a cigarette.

  “When did you start again?” Pablo asks.

  “I think it was when I started going to the morgues again,” Ana says.

  Pablo knows what she means—the cigarettes help get the smell out of your nose. Not entirely, nothing can do that, but it helps.

  “What do you think about today?” Pablo asks.

  “It’s a hell of a story.”

  “Will Óscar print it?”

  “Not the speculations,” Ana says. “He’ll run the fact that the army is holding prisoners in Práxedis without regard to legal rights.”

  They sit in silence for a while, enjoying the soft night and the faint sound of norteño music coming from someone’s radio down the street. Then Ana asks, “Pablo, can I talk to you about something?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s very awkward,” Ana says, “and you can’t say anything to Giorgio or Óscar about it.”

  “Dios mío, are you pregnant?”

  “No,” she snorts. “No…It’s just that…while you were gone…a man came up to me outside the office and handed me an envelope.”

  Pablo feels his stomach flip. “An envelope?”

  “He called it la sobre.”

  “A bribe?” Pablo asks, choking on his own duplicity. “What did you do?”

  “Well, I didn’t know who he was,” Ana says. “A cop, some politico’s stooge, a narco…”

  “So what did you do?”

  “What else?” Ana says. “I shoved it back at him and told him that I wasn’t interested.”

  Pablo tries to tell her, but shame stops him. Ana was always, he thinks, better than me. Every Monday, as promised (“threatened” is more like it), the man appears outside the office and gives (“forces on”?) Pablo the sobre. Pablo doesn’t know what to do with the money, so he keeps it in an ever-growing manila envelope in his backpack.

  You could just give it to charity, he told himself. Give it to the poor, give it to the homeless. (Shit, he thinks, you are the homeless.) Give it to the church if you can’t think of anything better.

  Then why don’t you?

  Because you could really use the money, is the answer. For trips, legal fees, court costs.

  He hasn’t so far, but still it sits there, a growing fund.

  And the odd thing is that they haven’t asked him for anything yet. They haven’t demanded that he write a story, or kill another one, or give them a source, or anything. They just come every Monday, as inevitable as the post-Mateo hangover, and hand him the envelope.

  He still doesn’t know who they are. Juárez cartel? Sinaloa cartel? Somebody else?

  Pablo was even tempted to talk to Óscar, but he feared what the reaction would be—contempt and disdain, maybe an immediate sacking—and he can’t afford to lose this job.

  So he kept his mouth shut.

  And the money stacked up.

  Betrayals start that way, with lies hidden in the shadows of silence.

  “Are you on my sofa tonight?” Ana asks.

  “If that’s okay.”

  “Giorgio’s probably driving back out to Valverde to bag that doctor.”

  “He’s not her type.”

  “Oh,” Ana says, both amused and annoyed at the easy assertion, thinking, I hate to tell you, bud, but Giorgio is about every woman’s type. She gets up, tosses down the last of her beer, and crushes her cigarette out on the step. “See you in the morning.”

  Pablo sits for a while, enjoying the silence. Then he crashes on the sofa and indulges in a brief, consciously futile fantasy about Marisol…excuse me, Dr. Marisol Cisneros. Christ, he thinks, even my imagination knows that she’s out of my league.

  He and Ana
go into the office in the morning and pitch the story to Óscar. He listens carefully, then tells them to cowrite a descriptive piece about the valley—what it looks like, how it sounds, the army patrols, the checkpoints, the bullet-riddled buildings.

  Óscar says, “Ana, do the piece about the men being held in Práxedis. Quote the colonel’s no-comment, call officials in these other towns and see if they have any people being held.”

  “What about what Jimena and Marisol told us?”

  “On deep background,” Óscar says. “Don’t use their names, just write that some citizens in the valley believe that the army is favoring the Sinaloa cartel in the struggle, something like that.”

  All three articles run that week.

  —

  Juárez is a horror show.

  The Juárez cartel and their Zeta allies put up banners promising to kill a police officer every forty-eight hours until the new police chief—a former army officer—resigned.

  After the first two officers were murdered, the chief did resign. The Zetas then sent the Juárez mayor a message that if “you put in another asshole working for Barrera, we’ll kill you, too.” Signs went up around the city promising to decapitate the mayor and his family. He moved his wife and children to El Paso but, contrary to rumor, stayed in Juárez himself, albeit under heavy round-the-clock security.

  The administration sent five thousand more troops into Juárez.

  The new police chief was another former army general, and the mayor disbanded the entire municipal police force and announced that the army would take over all city police duties.

  In effect, Juárez is under martial law.

  —

  Summer burns off spring.

  Sweltering becomes scorching.

  And the violence in and around Juárez goes on.

  On the first official day of summer, eighteen people are killed in Juárez. Pablo, Ana, and Giorgio hop around the city like drops of grease on a hot pan. One of the bodies, found out in the desperately poor colonia of Anapra, just along the border, is decapitated and dismembered, just a trunk in a bloody T-shirt.

  Pablo’s glad that he, and not Ana, caught this call.

  By week’s end, three more are killed, although the headline story is that the $1.6 billion Mérida Initiative has gone into effect.

  In July, the police commander in charge of antikidnapping is himself kidnapped, and the chief of Juárez’s prison system is gunned down in his car along with his bodyguard and three other people.

  By August, Pablo thinks he has seen it all when he gets a call to go out to the colonia known as First of September in the southwest part of the city to something called CIAD #8.

  Center for Alcohol and Drug Integration.

  A rehab clinic.

  It’s about 7:30 on a Wednesday night, still light out, enough to see the blood on the sidewalk outside the newly whitewashed little building. The metal gate that leads onto a front patio is open. Cops are everywhere.

  Pablo counts seven bodies on the patio, and by now he’s experienced enough to know that these men—recovering addicts and alcoholics—were dragged out here, shoved against the wall, and executed with shots to the back of the head.

  He looks up.

  A lifeless body, bullet holes punched in the back, still grips the rungs of a fire escape ladder.

  The outraged neighbors are eager to tell the story. An army truck pulled up at the end of the block and stopped. Then another vehicle—some say it was a Humvee, others a Suburban, roared up and started blasting.

  The neighbors screamed for help, phoned emergency services, ran down to the army truck and pleaded. The truck never moved, the soldiers didn’t help, emergency services never came. The survivors and neighbors loaded the twenty-three wounded into the center’s old van in shifts, until finally a Red Cross ambulance came to take several of the rest.

  Pablo examines shell casings before the cops take them away. He’s not concerned about contaminating evidence, knowing by now that there will be no arrests, never mind trials.

  Like most Juarense reporters now, Pablo has become a semi-expert in forensics. The casings are from 9mms and 7.62s, and 5.56s. The 7.62s could be from AKs—the narco weapon of choice—or military weapons. The 5.56s are consistent with several of the NATO weapons used by the Mexican army. The 9s are Glock or Smith and Wesson sidearms.

  Pablo sees a cop he knows from…who knows what recent killing. “You have any suspects?”

  “What do you think?”

  “There were soldiers fifty yards away,” Pablo says. “They didn’t do anything.”

  “Didn’t they?”

  True, Pablo thinks. They blocked the street, maybe they were lookouts, maybe they scared the police and the EMTs from coming.

  “Why would anyone want to kill rehab patients?” Pablo asks.

  “Because the cartels use them to hide gunmen,” the cop says. “Or because they’re afraid of what a clean and sober ex-gunman might confess to. I don’t know. Unless you have some answers for me, Pablo, get the fuck out of my way. I have to collect evidence that will never be used.”

  “The weapons might have been military.”

  “Go have a beer, Pablo, huh?”

  Pablo goes him eight better. He’s working on nine when he gets a phone call from Ana.

  The army has taken away Jimena Abarca’s older son.

  —

  The sergeant at the gate won’t admit them to see Colonel Alvarado.

  But when they insist that they won’t leave until they do, and that television trucks will be there soon, the colonel finally comes out to the gate.

  At first, he denies any knowledge of Miguel Abarca.

  “At least ten people saw soldiers throw him into an army truck,” Jimena says.

  “Unfortunately,” Alvarado says, “the narcos sometimes use stolen army uniforms and vehicles.”

  “Are you really saying,” Ana presses, “that you’re so careless with your equipment that you allow it to be stolen by the very people you’re supposed to be controlling? Do you have an inventory of these missing vehicles?”

  Alvarado will neither confirm nor deny that his unit is holding Miguel.

  “But you can check,” Pablo says. “Presumably you keep better track of people than you do of equipment.”

  Glaring at Pablo, Alvarado sends a lieutenant to check the day’s paperwork. The subordinate comes back with a report that they do indeed have an “Abarca, Miguel,” age twenty-three, in custody.

  “On what charges?” Jimena asks.

  “Suspicion,” Alvarado answers.

  “Of being my son?” Jimena asks.

  “Of colluding with narcotics traffickers.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Marisol says. “Miguel is a baker.”

  “Osiel Contreras was a car salesman,” Alvarado says. “Adán Barrera was an accountant.”

  “I want to see him,” says Jimena.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “As an official of the Valverde town government,” Marisol says, “I demand access to Miguel Abarca.”

  “You have no authority here.”

  “As his physician, then.”

  “Perhaps,” Alvarado says, “if his mother weren’t so busy attending demonstrations and spent more time supervising her children, her son wouldn’t be in this difficulty.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Jimena asks.

  “Isn’t it?” Alvarado asks. “Aren’t you just a publicity seeker? I noticed you brought the media with you.”

  “They’re my friends.”

  “Exactly.”

  Pablo looks around and sees that the commotion in front of the gate has attracted a few onlookers. Within minutes word gets around, people start to walk down the dirt street toward the post, and a crowd forms around the gate. The people in Práxedis know the Abarcas, and Marisol Cisneros is their doctor.

  Someone shouts an insult at the soldiers.

  Someone else throws a rock.


  Then a bottle smashes against the wire.

  “Don’t do that!” Jimena shouts.

  “You see?” Alvarado says. “You’re causing an incident.”

  Pablo sees that the soldiers are getting nervous. Rifles are unslung, bayonets fastened.

  “Please, don’t throw anything!” Marisol yells.

  The missiles stop, but one of the townspeople starts to holler, “Miguel! Miguel! Miguel!” and the rest pick up the chant, Miguel! Miguel! Miguel! Miguel!

  “These people are not doing your son any favors,” Alvarado says.

  But the chant keeps up—Miguel! Miguel! Miguel!—and more people come down the street. Cell phones come out—calls are made, pictures and video taken. The whole valley will be alerted soon.

  “I will clear this street,” Alvarado says to Jimena, “and hold you personally responsible for any civic unrest.”

  “We hold you responsible for civic unrest,” Marisol says.

  When Giorgio starts taking pictures of the crowd, Alvarado yells at Ana, “Tell him to stop that!”

  “I’ve never been able to control him.”

  “Release my son,” Jimena says.

  “I do not respond to threats.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Arms outstretched, Jimena and Marisol move the crowd back about twenty yards from the gate, but more people keep coming until about two hundred are gathered in the long light of the summer evening.

  Two television news trucks pull up.

  “You’ll be on the Juárez news tonight,” Marisol tells Alvarado. “The El Paso news by morning. Why don’t you just let him go? I know Miguel—he isn’t even politically active.”

  “If Señora Abarca would agree to mind her own business from now on,” Alvarado says, “perhaps something could be worked out.”

  “So Miguel is a hostage.”

  “Your word, not mine.”

  “I will call the governor,” Marisol says, “I will call the president, if I have to. I am not without influence.”

  “Indeed, you are out of your social setting, Dr. Cisneros.”

  “Meaning that I’m not an indio?”

  “Again, your words,” Alvarado says. “I am only stating that I see you more in a Mexico City salon than on a dusty street in rural Chihuahua.”

  “My family have been here for generations.”