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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise

  DEAD MAN IN CANAL WAS A STREET CORNER CLOWN

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  Miss Sinaloa

  Dead Reporter Driving

  Murder Artist

  Miss Sinaloa

  Dead Reporter Driving

  Miss Sinaloa

  Murder Artist

  Dead Reporter Driving

  Murder Artist

  Dead Reporter Driving

  Murder Artist

  Afterword

  After That Year

  APPENDIX - THE RIVER OF BLOOD

  EXTENDED PHOTO CAPTIONS

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Also by Charles Bowden

  Killing the Hidden Waters

  Street Signs Chicago: Neighborhood and Other Illusions of Big City Life

  (with Lew Kreinberg)

  Blue Desert

  Frog Mountain Blues (photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)

  Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions (with Michael Binstein)

  Mezcal

  Red Line

  Desierto: Memories of the Future

  The Sonoran Desert (photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)

  The Secret Forest (photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)

  Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

  Chihuahua: Pictures from the Edge (photographs by Virgil Hancock)

  Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau (photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)

  The Sierra Pinacate (by Julian D. Hayden; photographs by Jack Dykinga;

  with essays by Charles Bowden and Bernard L. Fontana)

  Juárez: The Laboratory for Our Future (preface by Noam Chomsky;

  afterword by Eduardo Galeano)

  Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family

  Blues for Cannibals

  A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior

  Inferno (photographs by Michael P. Berman)

  Exodus/Éxodo (photographs by Julián Cardona)

  Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

  Trinity (photographs by Michael P. Berman)

  His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

  —ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman

  But you see that line there moving through the station?

  I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those.

  —LEONARD COHEN, “FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN”

  Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.

  —ANATOLY RYBAKOV, Children of the Arbat, FICTITIOUSLY QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN

  I shot a man in Reno

  Just to watch him die.

  —JOHNNY CASH, “FOLSOM PRISON BLUES”

  Thank you for waiting.

  —ANONYMOUS, THE FINAL WORDS OF THE FOURTH DEATH LIST OF COPS

  POSTED IN CIUDAD JUÁREZ, JUNE 2008. THIS ONE WAS LEFT OUTSIDE THE

  STATION.

  DEAD MAN IN CANAL WAS A STREET CORNER CLOWN

  Armando Rodriguez, El Diario, Ciudad Juárez,

  November 13, 2008

  The man assassinated

  Tuesday night in the Diaz Ordaz viaduct

  was

  a street clown,

  according to the state authority.

  Nevertheless, this person has not been identified,

  but it was reported

  that he was between 25 and 30 years old,

  1.77 meters tall,

  delicate,

  light brown complexion,

  short black hair.

  The victim’s face was painted as a clown,

  green with a red nose,

  reported the State Prosecutor’s office.

  He wore a red polo shirt,

  a navy blue sweatshirt, blue jeans,

  white underwear,

  gray socks labeled USA,

  gray and white Converse tennis shoes

  and a dark, cherry red beret.

  The body was found in the Diaz Ordaz viaduct,

  at Norzagaray Blvd in the colonia Bellavista,

  on November 11 at 9:40 pm.

  The body was found on its side,

  with bullet wounds in the right side,

  chest

  and head.

  At this time, the motive for the murder is unknown as well as the

  identities of the murderers.

  For Armando Rodriguez, who was gunned down

  on November 13, 2008, after filing 907 stories on the

  murders of that calendar year.

  Like the rest of us, he was a dead man walking.

  His last story appeared hours after he was killed.

  BLANCA MARTÍNEZ RAISES THE PHOTOGRAPH OF HER HUSBAND, ARMANDO RODRÍGUEZ, WHILE REPORTERS AND EMPLOYEES OF EL DIARIO PAY THEIR LAST RESPECTS TO THEIR MURDERED COLLEAGUE. SHE IS ACCOMPANIED BY ROCIO GALLEGOS.

  PROLOGUE

  GET IN THE CAR

  Here’s the deal.

  We’re gonna take us a ride.

  Now be quiet.

  Time’s up, you gotta ride.

  We brought the duct tape—do you prefer gray or tan? No matter, get

  your ass in.

  We have the plastic bag, the loaded guns.

  You have been waiting?

  Everyone is waiting, but our list is so long.

  Everyone pretends we will never come.

  But everyone is on somebody’s list.

  Well, for you, the wait is over.

  Let me tell you about a killing season.

  What?

  You don’t like violence?

  I understand.

  But get in the car.

  You say it hard to see because of the darkly tinted windows?

  You will learn darkness.

  Miss Sinaloa is a detail. She was special, so fine.

  Of course, she took the ride, my God, what a ride.

  Okay, yes, there is the matter of cocaine and whiskey and sanity that might undercut her standing in the community.

  See those people on the street pretending you don’t exist and this big machine with tinted windows doesn’t exist, pretending that none of this is happening to you?

  That was you until just a few minutes ago.

  The killings?

  Murder itself is simply a little piece of life and so it can be dismissed as exceptional or irrational or extreme.

  Though it is curious how, if you kill with style, it does get everyone’s attention.

  Surely, we know that even at our best we can only know little pieces of life.

  What, you are uncomfortable? The tape binding your hands behind your back is too tight?

  Shut your fucking mouth.

  You want this pistol cracked over your ugly face?

  No?

  That’s better.

  Now shut up before I have to tape your mouth.

  What was I saying?

  Oh, yes.

  We can still believe that destroying another human life is an extreme act.

  Unless of course, the slaughter is done by governments. Or the killing is done to some vague group variously dubbed as terrorists or gangsters or drug dealers or people—and this varies with location—of other color or religious notions.

  Still, you can see, there is really nothin
g to worry about since people know how to ignore whatever interferes with the way people want to think about the world.

  Yes. I mean this. People can have murders all around them and have people vanish in broad daylight and still go on just fine and say, well, those people were bad, or it doesn’t happen that often.

  What?

  Stop shaking your head. You say nothing and do nothing.

  You understand?

  You are simply along for the ride. And all those things you said didn’t matter, well, now maybe you will change your mind, just a little bit.

  The trick is to leave, fade away and stop thinking about the killings.

  In the first eleven days of August, seventy-five go down. On Monday, August 11, fifteen are murdered.

  Let it go, fade away, turn the page, change the music.

  Let me tell you of an incident.

  I come back from the shadows against my will.

  What?

  You don’t believe me?

  Believe me.

  This incident, yes, this incident. There is this woman, and she is very nice-looking, and a friend invites her to a party being hosted by men who apparently work in the drug industry. The woman, the one I am talking about, and damn you, listen as if your fucking life depended on it, well, this woman lives in southern Chihuahua and so she has little to do with Juárez just as Juárez has little to do with the real world, you know, the United States, Europe, all those kind of places where the real world exists.

  When the car comes and she gets in it, her friend takes money from the men but does not come along for the ride.

  For the next few days, she is gang-raped.

  When she returns to the workaday world, she gives a deposition to the authorities, and suddenly she is on the front page of the newspaper. She goes into hiding, though she is still bleeding from her vagina and rectum. She remembers that at the hospital, she was shunted aside because her case was not considered an emergency.

  And so she becomes a detail. That is the way of life. Everything becomes a detail if it interferes with the big picture.

  She has never met Miss Sinaloa, but now, they truly know each other and they talk throughout the dark hours of the night, I can hear them, and this makes sleep difficult for me.

  But I hide from such matters. I am a coward by nature and I do not like cities, loud sounds, guns, violence, or open sewage systems.

  Twice I was at a fresh kill, and the freshness does matter, and flies buzzed up into my face from the blood. I cannot remember the names of the dead, hardly anything about them, but the flies buzz in my face all the time, follow me into good restaurants, trail me to fine venues where people read poems or play serious music in the calm air of the fortresses of culture.

  Perhaps you think I am mad? I can see that look in your eyes, and yes, I understand why you have your reservations. But then you do not have to listen to those two women talking into the night. I cannot decide what is worse: when they are crying or when they are laughing.

  And something has changed inside, something in a deep part, near that place we can never locate but often claim is the core of our being. In the past, I have covered kidnappings, murders, financial debacles, the mayhem that my species is capable of committing. I spent three years mired in reporting sex crimes. There is little within me that has not been battered or wrenched or poisoned. But the path I followed with Miss Sinaloa proved all my background to be so much nothing. I have not entered the country of death, but rather the country of killing. And I have learned in this country that killing is good.

  For years, I toyed with a history of my earth, and I found that the way I could understand my earth was through its elemental fury.

  Freeman Dyson, a major physicist, once tried to express the allure of power and killing. “I have felt it myself,” he warned. “The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

  I think Dyson erred in one detail: This attraction to slaughter and power is not simply a temptation of the mind.

  I found this glitter in a room with flies buzzing off the fresh blood on the floor and walls. A candle glittered in the corner by a crucifix. The bodies had been taken out, the machine gun fire had died. There was nothing left but the flies and the flame.

  Imagine living in a place where you can kill anyone you wish and nothing happens except that they fall dead. You will not be arrested. Your name will not be in the newspapers. You can continue on with your life. And your killing. You can take a woman and rape her for days and nothing will happen. If you choose, if in some way that woman displeases you, well, you can kill her after raping her. Rest assured, nothing will happen to you because of your actions.

  Enough. I can barely speak of this change within me. I can hardly expect others to understand.

  How did this change come to pass?

  It began with a woman.

  In the beginning, I was not looking for Miss Sinaloa. In fact, I had never heard of her and had no reason, no reason at all, to think she even existed. I remember clearly, it was a bright winter day, the sun poured down on me, and the desert seemed so kind and generous after spending time in the colonias and bad bars of the border city.

  Suddenly, she appeared in my life.

  Miss Sinaloa is . . . waiting.

  Relax.

  This is a nice car, no?

  We’re gonna have us a time.

  I have been to the far country with her and now I am back.

  The air of morning tastes fresh, the sunrise murdered the night,

  and now the light caresses my face. I chew on ash and bone, this has become

  my customary breakfast. I drink the glass of blood for my health.

  She does not speak. I no longer listen.

  The far country lingers on my clothes and in my hair.

  I can still smell it here in the morning light. I have brought her

  with me and now we will live together for the rest of my days.

  Her lips gleam a ripe red and fragrance

  floats from her white skin.

  Ernesto Romero Adame is thirty-three years old on New Year’s Day, 2008. He sits in his 2005 black Jetta Volkswagen. Bullet holes mark his neck, throat, and chest as he waits stone dead at Paseo Triunfo de la Republica Avenue. He is the first official kill of the season.

  It is twenty minutes after midnight on Sunday, January 20, when Julián Cháirez Hernández is found dead by gunshot. He is a lieutenant in the municipal police and thirty-seven years old. Seven hours and ten minutes later, Mirna Yesenia Muñoz Ledo Marín is found inside her own home. She is naked and has been stabbed several times. She is ten years old. On Monday, January 21, at 7:50 A.M., Francisco Ledesma Salazar is killed in his SUV. He is thirty-five years old and the coordinator of operations for the municipal police. The gunshots come from men in a minivan. At 9:30 A.M., the body of Erika Sonora Trejo is found by police in the bathroom of her home. She is thirty-eight and eight months pregnant, and officers think her father-in-law has had at her with an axe. Later that Monday, at 5 P.M., a year-old skeleton turns up in the desert. That evening around 8:40 P.M., Fernando Lozano Sandoval is cut down in his SUV by a barrage of fifty-one rounds. He is fifty-one and the commander of the Chihuahua Bureau of Investigations. Two vehicles, a red SUV and a gray car, figure in the attack. Later, Lozano is transported to an El Paso hospital since Juárez has had recent incidents of killers visiting the wounded in hospitals in order to finish their work.

  A list appears on a Juárez monument to fallen police officers. Under the heading THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE are the names of five recently murdere
d cops. And under the heading FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE NOT BELIEVING are seventeen names.

  As the killings increase in early 2008, rumors begin to spread of Mexican army troops suddenly increasing in Ciudad Juárez and northern Chihuahua. On February 13, the soldiers go to a house and find twenty-five big guns, five small arms, seven fragmentation grenades, 3,494 rounds of various calibers, a bunch of bulletproof vests, eight radios, and five cars with Sinaloa plates. On February 16, they find twenty-one men, ten AK-47s, more than 13,000 hits of cocaine, 2.1 kilos of cocaine base, various uniforms—some of the Mexican army, some of AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigación, the Mexican equivalent of the FBI), 401 cartridges, 760 grams of marijuana, and three vehicles with Sinaloa plates. On February 21, they seize a helicopter.

  On the twentieth, seven men are picked up by the army. Later, they say the soldiers beat them with cables, among other gestures.

  Around 8 P.M. on Wednesday night, March 5, he crawls across the white tile floor of a small bakery near central Juárez. He has been gone two days and is a member of the city’s traffic cops. Juán Rodriguez, sixty-five, looks down from his counter of bread, sweet rolls, and candies and sees that the man is barefoot and beaten and that all the insignia have been ripped from his tattered traffic-cop uniform.

  Then, he hears Carlos Adrián De Anda Doncel say, “No! No police, please! Do not call the police!”

  Instead, he calls his wife and says, “My love, I am well.”

  Within five minutes, members of his own unit arrive and whisk him away. Two days later, he flees the city. His commander says that since he is absent from duty, he will lose his job. He has three children.