by Don Winslow
“As landlords,” Alvarado says. “As patrones. Perhaps you should consider acting as such.”
“Oh, I am, Colonel.”
Off to the side, away from the crowd, Jimena breaks down in Ana’s arms. “They’re going to hurt him. They’re going to kill him, I know it.”
“No they’re not,” Ana says. “Not now. There are too many eyes watching them now.”
Pablo gets a call from Óscar. “Are you all right? Are you safe?”
“We’re fine.”
“How’s Jimena holding up?”
“As might be expected.”
“Tell Giorgio I need his photos.”
“I will.”
“Do you think they’ll release him?”
“No,” Pablo says frankly. “This Alvarado guy would lose too much face now.”
It settles into a siege.
When darkness finally comes, the candles come out and the vigil begins.
Marisol calls the governor and is told that he will “certainly look into it.” Then she takes the humiliating step of calling her ex-husband for help. He phones a friend, who phones a friend, who talks to someone at Los Pinos, who promises to “look into it.”
They don’t release Miguel that night, or the next morning.
The crowd fades away, but somehow it’s arranged that a few people always wait by the gate, with signs demanding Miguel’s release.
And Jimena Abarca goes on a hunger strike.
—
The hunger strike of Jimena Abarca doesn’t make international news.
Or even national news.
Óscar, though…Óscar makes it a daily, above-the-fold headline, telling his staff, “If we’re not here to cover something like this, we’re not here for anything at all.”
For three days straight he makes it front-page news, running stories under Ana’s and Pablo’s bylines about injustice in the valley, about the suspension of human rights, about the army running roughshod.
Pablo is there when the first phone calls start to come in. At first they’re official—the general in command calls to ask Óscar why he’s taking sides.
“We’re not taking sides,” Óscar says, perhaps a bit disingenuously. “We’re reporting news.”
“You’re not reporting our side.”
“We’d love to,” Óscar says. “What is your side? You can give it to me over the phone or I’ll send Ana right over. You know Ana, yes?”
“We’re not giving interviews at this point.”
“And if that’s your side of the story,” Óscar responds, “I’ll print that.”
A flack from the governor’s office phones to ask basically the same question and to observe that the other papers aren’t making this front-page news.
“I’m not the editor of other papers,” Óscar answers. “I’m the editor of this one, have been for quite some time, and in my experience this is front-page news.”
He hangs up, taps his cane on the side of his desk a few times, and then says, “The publisher will call next. Not until after lunch, though, when he thinks I’m mellowed by a glass of wine and a full stomach.”
The call comes at 2:05, ten minutes after Óscar has returned to the office. El Búho listens to his complaints, sympathizes with the angry calls he’s had to endure from the Defense Department, the governor’s office, and even Los Pinos, and then kindly says he will do nothing different than what he’s doing except to add an angry editorial for tomorrow’s edition.
He puts the phone on speaker so Pablo and Ana can listen.
“News articles are one thing,” the publisher says. “Editorials are quite another.”
“I have built my professional life on that principle,” Óscar says, smiling at Pablo. “I’m glad we agree.”
“So you intend to commit this paper to the position that the army is committing an outrage in Práxedis.”
“In the whole Juárez Valley,” Óscar says.
“I don’t know if the board can accept that.”
“Then the board had better fire me,” Óscar says.
“Now, Oscar, no one said anything about—”
“As long as I’m the editor of this paper,” Óscar says, “I will be the editor, and, by definition, the editor writes the editorials.”
It’s classic Óscar—firm, decisive, authoritative—but Pablo notices that he’s aged. The mischievous glint in the eye has dimmed a little, his blinks are more frequent, his hip seems to hurt him a little more, and Pablo knows that the events in Juárez have played on their boss. On all of us, I guess, Pablo thinks.
Two more days into the hunger strike and Óscar’s scathing editorial, the other calls come in.
The anonymous ones.
The threats.
“Stop what you’re doing if you know what’s good for you.”
“Don’t think bad things can’t happen to you.”
“I’m perfectly aware that bad things can happen to me,” Óscar says. “Dios mío, they put three bullets into me.”
“Then you should have learned.”
“Ah, but sadly, I’m a slow learner,” Óscar says. “My teachers in school despaired of me.”
“Who are they from?” Pablo asks, guiltily conscious of the sobres, the envelopes.
“Narcos?” Óscar asks. “The government?”
“Is there a difference?” Ana asks.
“Until you can prove otherwise, yes,” Óscar answers. He tells them to be careful, to watch their backs, and he increases security around the office. But he keeps running stories about Jimena Abarca.
—
For the first three days, Marisol explains, the body uses energy from stored glucose. It’s painful of course, as anyone who has experienced hunger knows, but not lethal.
But after three days the liver starts to consume body fat, a process known as ketosis, which is dangerous and can cause permanent damage. If the hunger strike goes into a third week, the body starts to “eat” its own muscles and vital organs. There is loss of bone marrow.
This is called starvation mode.
Marisol then gives them the old “4-4-40” rough standard for human survival: four minutes without air, four days without water, forty days without food.
They are in day seven now.
Fortunately Jimena has agreed to drink water, but won’t take vitamins or other supplements. She lies on a cot in a friend’s house in Práxedis, not far from the army post, and grows weaker every day. A thin woman to begin with, she now looks emaciated.
The army shows no sign of releasing Miguel, demanding instead that Jimena be arrested and force-fed, if necessary.
“Are we just going to let her commit slow suicide?” Ana asks. She has taken turns with other women from the “movement” sitting with Jimena. More people sit outside to make certain that if the army tries to arrest Jimena, they won’t do it easily and the seizure will be recorded.
“You’re a doctor,” Ana says to Marisol. “Don’t you have an obligation to intervene? Certainly you can’t assist in a suicide.”
“I won’t force-feed her,” Marisol answers. “It’s torture.”
“As opposed to starvation?” Pablo asks.
Going back and forth between Jimena and Alvarado, Marisol feverishly tries to find a compromise. Will Jimena stop her hunger strike if Alvarado will let her see Miguel? They both refuse. What if the army turns Miguel over to the Chihuahua state police? Jimena agrees, Alvarado refuses. What if the AFI takes custody of him? Alvarado agrees, Jimena refuses.
Then they both dig their heels in.
Jimena won’t quit until Miguel is unconditionally released, and Alvarado won’t release him.
It turns into a grim siege of wills.
And tactics—on the eighth day, a note arrives from Miguel, asking his mother to stop her strike.
“I don’t believe it,” Jimena says.
“It’s his handwriting,” Ana says.
“He was coerced.”
“He doesn’t want his moth
er to die!”
“Neither does his mother,” Jimena says, smiling as she lays her head back on the small pillow. “Neither does his mother.”
Later that day, they put Miguel on the phone.
“Mama, I’m all right.”
“Have they hurt you?”
“Mama, please eat.”
“Are they forcing you to make this call?”
“No, Mama.”
They take the phone away from him. Jimena’s younger son, Julio, asks her, “Mama, are you satisfied now? Please stop.”
“Not until they release him.”
“Miguel said that they weren’t hurting him.”
“What else was he going to say?” Jimena asks. “If I give in now, they win.”
“It’s not a game,” Ana says.
“No, it’s a war,” Jimena answers. “The same war it’s always been.”
Pablo gets that. It’s the war between the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless. The one has the power to inflict suffering—the other only to endure it.
Their only weapon is shame, if the powerful can even feel it.
The people in the “movement” do their best—there are daily protests now outside the army post, the governor’s office; a few allies in Mexico City even picket Los Pinos. The people in the small towns shun the soldiers, who can’t buy so much as a candy bar, a beer, a postage stamp in the Juárez Valley.
Pablo hears whispers that some are talking about darker measures. If the army is taking the side of the Sinaloa cartel, why shouldn’t we join with the Juárez people? La Familia Michoacana have attacked army posts, the Zetas have attacked prisons and freed convicts. If the army sees us as devils anyway, let’s give them true hell. The talk turns from passive resistance to revolution, an old Chihuahua tradition.
Jimena gets wind of the talk and shuts it down.
“We do not beat them by becoming them,” she says.
Others aren’t so sure.
Marisol uses the weapons she has—her looks and charm—and literally attracts the media. The camera loves her, as they say, and she consciously takes advantage of that to get in front of television cameras in her white coat and with her physician’s demeanor describe in graphic yet media-friendly terms what is happening to Jimena Abarca’s body.
She knows exactly what she’s doing, turning the Abarca ordeal into a soap opera—hoping that it will become a telenovela with a short run and a happy ending.
Marisol becomes “La Médica Hermosa”—the Beautiful Doctor. People turn on the news to see her, and Jimena’s case starts to get national attention. It’s hateful, Marisol tells Pablo and Ana privately—gross and demeaning—but it might be the way to save Jimena’s life.
Then there are Giorgio’s photographs.
It was a genius idea, Pablo thinks, Giorgio’s concept to run a photo of Jimena’s face every day, an increasing strip of them, so that readers could see the progression of her condition.
Day after day, people pick up their paper and see this woman starving to death. And the photos, they are beautiful, carefully, artfully composed in the half-light of the little house, each one a pietà of a mother grieving for her son.
The paper’s circulation goes up.
It becomes water-cooler conversation—Have you seen Jimena today? Newsboys shout it from traffic islands—Have you seen Jimena today? Housewives talk about it at lunch—Have you seen Jimena today?
An anonymous donor pays for a billboard at the base of the Lincoln International Bridge, so that people coming in from El Paso are asked the question Have you seen Jimena today?
It speaks to the photos’ effectiveness that no one has to ask what that means.
The army fights back with a public relations campaign of its own. The commander of the 11th Military Zone holds a press conference and says, “This woman is not Mother Teresa. She’s nothing more than a tool of the cartels.”
Ana is there to ask the questions. “Do you have information linking Jimena Abarca to drug trafficking? And if so, why haven’t you released it?”
“It might compromise ongoing investigations.”
“If you have such information,” Ana presses, “why haven’t you turned it over to prosecuting authorities so that they can file charges?”
“We will in due time.”
“What’s ‘due time’?”
“When we’re ready.”
“Will you be ready,” Ana asks, “before or after Jimena Abarca starves to death?”
“We are not starving Señora Abarca,” the general says. “She is starving herself. We will not be bullied or intimidated by these tactics.”
The next morning, a photo of the well-fed general in his dress uniform appears next to a picture of the emaciated Jimena with the caption BULLIED AND INTIMIDATED?
The following day, an editorial appears in a major Texas newspaper under the title IS THIS WHAT THE MÉRIDA BILLIONS ARE PAYING FOR? A Democratic congressman from California stands up on the House floor and asks the same question. This prompts a call from the West Wing to DEA basically asking what the fuck is going on down there and demanding that whatever it is, DEA get a handle on it.
There’s an election coming up, it’s going to be close, and the incumbent party’s candidate is from a border state with a lot of Hispanics. McCain was in Mexico City just last month, for Chrissakes, praising the Mérida Initiative as an important step, and the last thing he needs is the perception that the aid package he touted is being used to torture Mexican mothers.
The DEA director calls a colleague in the Mexican Defense Department, who listens and then says, “We can’t let ourselves be beaten by one woman. What kind of message would that send?”
“That you’re smart?” the director asks. “I suggest that if you want the helicopters and the aircraft to keep coming, you find a way to back down on this thing.”
It’s axiomatic that at certain points in any conflict, both sides think they’re losing. It’s true of wars and battles, lawsuits and strikes. It’s true now. Jimena’s supporters know nothing about the calls from Washington and don’t realize the immense pressure being brought to bear on the army.
What they see is no movement from the military.
And Jimena failing.
Ana breaks down one night.
“I can’t stand it,” she cries to Pablo, who holds her in his arms and rocks her. “I can’t stand the thought of her dying.”
“She won’t,” Pablo says, even though he isn’t so confident. “They’ll break first.”
“What if they don’t?”
Pablo doesn’t have an answer.
—
Adán watches La Médica Hermosa on television.
“She’s so pretty,” Magda says.
“I suppose.” Adán is familiar enough with women to steer around the obvious pothole. But the woman on television is stunning. And effective—no wonder she’s become a media sensation.
“And effective,” Magda adds. They’re lying in bed in her flat in Badiraguato, the one she comes to when she feels a need to be with him, less and less frequent now, he’s observed.
“Do you think so?” he asks.
“Face it, cariño,” Magda says. “It’s a new world now. Every war you fight, you fight on three fronts: a shooting war; a political war; a media war. And that you can’t win one without the others.”
She’s right, Adán thinks.
She’s absolutely right.
—
He gets out of bed and phones Nacho. “Who is this Miguel Abarca, anyway? I’ve never even heard of him. Is he with Fuentes? Los Aztecas? La Línea?”
“He’s a nobody,” Nacho says. “A baker’s kid.”
“He’s not a nobody anymore,” Adán says. “Neither is the mother. The army has turned them into celebrities.”
He’s so tired of endless, needless stupidity. How the army could take a simple incident and let it grow out of proportion.
Adán has plans for the Juárez Val
ley, and they don’t include creating a cause célèbre. He’s winning the war against the Juárez cartel and now a bunch of morons in uniform find a way to screw it up.
“I don’t want to read any more articles,” Adán says. “I don’t want to see this doctor on television. This needs to come to a quick and happy conclusion.”
“Agreed.”
“And we need better media control,” Adán says. “For the money we’re paying, you would think—”
“It’s being worked on.”
Isn’t everything? Adán thinks after he hangs up and as he actually gets a chance to take a shower. The media are being “worked on,” hunting down Diego is being “worked on,” going after the Zetas is being “worked on.” Killing Keller is being “worked on.” I don’t want something “worked on,” I want something completed.
—
Marisol’s phone wakes her in the small hours of the morning.
It frightens her, because at first she thinks that it’s about Jimena, that her body has gone into crisis.
It is about Jimena, but it’s Colonel Alvarado.
“I have a proposal,” he says.
—
Óscar walks out into the city room.
“I just got a call that they released Miguel Abarca.”
When Pablo, Ana, and Giorgio get out to the valley, Miguel and Jimena are already home in Valverde, with Marisol carefully easing Jimena back onto some solid food.
“I’m sorry I didn’t inform you,” Marisol says, “but that was the deal—no press coverage of Miguel’s actual release. They didn’t want film of him walking out to a triumphant crowd.”
“We understand,” Ana says.
“I hope you’ll also understand this,” Marisol says. “We can’t let you interview Miguel or take photos.”
“Why not?” Giorgio asks.
“He’s on a gurney in my clinic,” Marisol says. “Broken nose, two fractured ribs, and the soles of his feet have wounds consistent with la chicharra—burning with electrical wires. But he’s alive, guys, and so is Jimena.”
They drive back to Juárez and file a simple story stating that Miguel Abarca was released without charges, and that Jimena Abarca has ended her hunger strike. The story doesn’t mention Miguel’s injuries. The next day’s edition features a photo of Jimena sipping a protein shake, and La Médica Hermosa makes what she assures reporters is a final appearance on the evening news and describes her patient’s condition as stable.