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

  Four days after the kidnapped and beaten cop appeared in the bakery, Rodriguez offers me a roll and refuses payment. When I ask him about the frightened cop begging that he not call the police, he says softly, “I can no longer say that.”

  Silence has returned again to this city of two million souls. The governor of Chihuahua has been in seclusion since January—they say his face is frozen due to some mysterious medical condition. The city police have announced they will no longer be answering calls but prefer to stay in their station houses.

  The newspaper account of that night notes that the cop’s safe return was a miracle, a historic act, because his captors—never named or identified, and they most likely never will be—“pardoned his life.”

  Over the previous weekend, seven men died in executions, one of them a Mexican army captain who worked in intelligence and died driving his car on Sunday morning down a Juárez avenue. By Monday, March 3, eighty-nine murders had been tallied since New Year’s Day.

  In 1999, Juárez went a solid year without public evidence of an execution—meaning 365 days without a corpse being left on the street in the customary style of hands bound with duct tape, mouth taped shut, and a bullet through the brain. Then, on the 366th day, the bodies began appearing again. Locals think the year of silent murder came as greeting to the newly elected governor, Patricio Martinez. And the return to executed bodies being left on the street also came as a message to this governor after his first year in office.

  Juárez has long supplied Americans with what they wanted—booze during Prohibition, women at all times, opiates when they were outlawed in the United States, quick divorces when the marriages soured—and like the rest of Mexico, the city has operated as a partnership between criminal organizations and government. Geography has made the city the link between the center of Mexico and the transportation arteries of the United States. But in the 1980s, major cocaine routes shifted from Florida to Mexico, and Juárez became the beneficiary of this change. Profits increased manyfold, and by 1995, the Juárez cartel was taking in $250 million a week, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Violence grew accordingly, as did corruption of the local government to protect this money. But nothing in this past of vice, drugs, corruption, and money prepared the city for the violence it was suddenly experiencing. Juárez had tasted two hundred to three hundred murders a year in the 1990s and most of the new century. Suddenly, a month of forty or fifty executions seemed quiet—the previous record slaughter for the city was thirty-nine in September 1995. A new day had begun and it looks like night.

  I sit on a curb on a heavily rutted dirt street. About ten blocks away rises a new Catholic church, a huge edifice with red-tiled domes etched with yellow tiles, fine new wooden doors, the walls gleaming with stained-glass windows. The church is encircled by new pickup trucks and SUVs, all with deeply tinted windows. Inside, people pray. Set against the surrounding dirt streets and general poverty, the new huge church seems like a miracle. But in this city, it is not. Like the huge discos and fine restaurants of Juárez, it is built not of bricks and mortar but of narco-dollars.

  No one speaks of this.

  No one doubts this.

  But where I sit on the curb, the world is linked to the church and the people praying there this Sunday. Across the street is a two-story home painted yellow and green with iron trim and a satellite dish. Up and down the dirt street, men in dark uniforms with flak jackets and machine guns stand around and watch for something. They are busy digging for bodies in a building just down the street. I can hear the soft voices of people, the bark of dogs, the swish of clothes drying on a line. Overhead, the sun hunts through the clouds. In the yard behind me, there is a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, grape vines, and a large rose bush.

  The digging goes on and on for days. There is much to uncover.

  I am standing in the desert. A crazy man is talking to me. He says, “Someone is attacking me. I was contracted to make a killing. My family is American.”

  He wears a pink sport shirt.

  I am sitting in a café.

  The waiter asks, “Why did you come back? Aren’t you finished yet?”

  I tell him the people of the city keep killing each other.

  He laughs.

  I am in the crazy place when a retarded man hands me a children’s book.

  It reads, “One windy day during the harvest time, Quail sings a song—just as Coyote walks by.

  “‘Teach me your song, or I shall eat you up,’ cries Coyote.

  “But Quail’s song is no ordinary song, and Coyote may end up swallowing more than he bargained for. . . . ”

  That is clearly the risk.

  On a Sunday, a man in a Dodge Neon is gunned down.

  On Wednesday, two beaten and tortured cops are found under a bridge near the cemetery.

  On Wednesday night, that cop crawls into the bakery.

  On Thursday, another man is executed.

  On Friday, seven men are slaughtered in a house in the state capital by the authorities.

  On Saturday, a man in a car is machine-gunned near the crazy place.

  On Sunday, a police bodyguard is cut down.

  At first, I keep a list, try to see things in sequence, search for cause and effect.

  Then I learn and give up.

  The kidnapped and beaten cops that turn up, well, they were never reported as kidnapped until they suddenly reappeared.

  The cop cut down, his name is not printed, nor the fact that the comandante he was guarding had his name on a certain list.

  The names of the seven men killed in the state capital are also never made public.

  When I cross from El Paso to Juárez in January, the river is dry. Nine thousand jobs have vanished in the past few months as the economy sinks. It is thirty-three degrees and very still. Air presses down like Jell-O and has a gun-metal blue cast from the wood fires of the poor. A vendor walks with a stack of newspapers on his head and carefully plods between the puddles.

  Everything has already begun, but at this moment it has not yet been said out loud. The beginning will come later, when the dead get so numerous we can no longer silence them.

  He is really unimportant. He seems to move in and out of jail in New Mexico. He is in the United States illegally, that is true, but he has a list of injustices he wishes to state, injustices that cover thirteen years in the country.

  For example, U.S. authorities try to interview him when he is too tired to talk. Also, he suffers from gastrointestinal problems and he is seldom given the right medication at the right time. He has an infection in his right arm, and he does not get proper treatment for that, either. Detention officers have pounded on him and dislocated his shoulder. He says the guards mess with his medications so that he will go crazy. Also, once a dentist drilled his tooth and that tooth disappeared.

  He has been drinking fairly hard since age seventeen. Yes, there have been blackouts. When he was young, he did marijuana and inhalants.

  As for his family members, they have no history of suicide. True, his dad drank a lot and was violent and his mom got violent also and once tried to choke him when he was a boy.

  The examining doctor notes that he has a poorly groomed beard and sometimes does not make sense. He can’t quite figure out what is wrong with him, but the physician does not think the man can represent himself before the authorities. Eventually, the United States kicks him back into Mexico.

  And then he winds up at the crazy place in the desert outside Juárez.

  He is part of a story that never gets told.

  There is a rhythm of casual violence in the city that almost always goes un-mentioned. The mayor of Juárez lives in El Paso so that he can keep his hand on the pulse of the city. The publisher of the daily paper in Juárez also lives in El Paso. The publisher of the daily paper in the capital of Chihuahua lives in New Mexico. A growing number of the businesspeople of Juárez live in El Paso. Leaders in the drug industry also keep hom
es in El Paso.

  But for the average citizen of Juárez, such a remove is not a possibility. They lack the money and the legal documents to live in the United States. As winter slides into spring and the killing season accelerates, the poor continue their lives in Juárez and often find their deaths there. The new violence is simply an increase in the volume of their tired lives.

  A woman and her boyfriend sit in a car drinking and arguing. Her young daughter is in the car, also. Then the man sends the girl to a nearby Laundromat. When she comes back, she notices her mother is not moving. The boyfriend says that she is sleeping. He takes the girl home. Later, the authorities determine the woman died from a laceration to her liver. She was forty-seven when her boyfriend paused in his drinking to beat her to death. It is early March.

  On Sunday, March 15, a violent dust storm sweeps the city. In the past thirty hours, there have been six reported murders. People fly kites all over the city.

  There is a report of a woman who is beaten by her husband. And she flees for her life with her two daughters. He follows. Her Mercedes is found empty.

  The daily paper reports that local citizens are complaining of traffic delays because streets get suddenly shut down as police investigate and do forensic investigations at kill sites.

  Far down the road, long after the killings splattered across the city, the mayor of Juárez gives an interview. It is June and he says now that he knew in very early January that the killing season was coming—he does not explain how he came to possess this gift of prophecy. He says he was informed that the murders would begin on January 6, but actually, he learned they began January 5. No matter, because you see, the killings are really between two criminal organizations and do not actually involve the decent citizens of Juárez. He is the man in charge and he says, don’t worry.

  There is a comforting system here. No one really knows who the bad people are in Juárez. Until they are murdered, and once they are murdered, then everyone knows they are bad because good people have nothing to fear. The mayor says only 5 innocents can be found among the 500 people that have been murdered so far. Which means the killers, whoever they are, have revealed to the city 495 bad people that no one really knew about until the gunfire unmasked them.

  He does admit that Juárez suffers from “a lack of tranquility.”

  Miss Sinaloa

  She came to this place in the desert to live with the other crazy people under the giant white horse. She did not belong, but then neither did the caballo. The half-mile-long horse was sketched on the Sierra de Juárez with whitewash by a local architect in the late 1990s. He copied the design from the Uffington horse in Great Britain, a three-thousand-year-old creation deep from the dreamtime of neolithic people. He said he was doing it as an exercise in problem solving (this horse faces right, the original faces left and is three times as large) and as a way to draw attention to the beauty of the mountains. What he did not say is what some in the city whispered, that the horse was sponsored by Amado Carrillo, then head of the Juárez cartel.

  The cartel begins in the mists of time, but with the flow of cocaine starting in the mid-1980s, it becomes a colossus. In the spring of 1993, the head of the cartel is murdered while on holiday in Cancún, and Amado Carrillo takes over. He has a genius for business, and soon ten to twelve billion a year is flowing into the cartel coffers. Carrillo becomes the organizational genius who brokers cocaine shipments for the other Mexican cartels, buys the Mexican government, and lands full-bodied jets full of cocaine at the Juárez airport. By the time he is murdered in 1997, he has taken the Mexican drug world from that age of the outlaw into the era of a multinational business.

  But the era of Carrillo was the golden age of peace in Juárez, when murders ran two or three hundred a year and, at any one moment, fifteen tons of cocaine was warehoused in the city and waiting to go visit American noses.

  There was a time when death made sense in Juárez. You died because you lost a drug load. Or you died because you had a drug load. Or you died because you tried to do a drug deal. Or you died because you were a snitch. Or you died because you were weak and a woman and it was dark and someone thought it would be fun to rape and kill you. There was a pleasant order to death, a ritual of federal police or state police or the army taking you, then tying your hands and feet with duct tape, torturing you, and finally killing you and tossing your body into a hole with a dose of milk, the friendly term for lime. Your death would be called a carne asada, a barbeque. Life made sense then, even in death. Those were the good old days.

  Now, the world has changed. Since the first of January 2008, El Paso, the sister city of Juárez and just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, has had one murder in two months. In the first two months of the year, Juárez has officially had ninety-five, and there is likely some slippage in these numbers. Two of the dead were Juárez police commanders, the one shot twenty-two times—a third commander somehow survived and was taken to the bridge (according to rumor, in a tank, but actually in a Humvee—every fact in this city soon succumbs to magical fraud) and transferred to an ambulance and then to an El Paso hospital, where he was guarded by local and federal agents. Now he has vanished and left no forwarding address. As of February 2008, besides the people murdered in the Juárez area, another three hundred have died in Mexico, also mainly in drug killings. Thirty thousand Mexican soldiers are said to be fighting the drug world. By 2009, there will also be twenty thousand U.S. Border Patrol agents on the line facing down Mexico. Just two governments taking care of business.

  Just yesterday, a friend came upon the body of a cholo who had been executed and left on the street. This killing did not even merit the attention of the newspapers. But then, outside of a few mentions, the U.S. media paid little notice of the slaughter until early 2009, when it became clear that neither the change of the calendar year nor the presence of the Mexican army had done anything to decrease the death toll as the months passed. True, the commanders at Fort Bliss in El Paso declared Juárez off limits to soldiers because they might get hurt. But like almost everything else that happens in this city, the response has been silence. Amado Carrillo had a thorough-bred racehorse he named Silencio, Silence. It is a good trait to have in this place.

  She was beautiful and they called her “Miss Sinaloa.” She was a teenager when the white horse was created in the late 1990s. At that time, Miss Sinaloa knew nothing of giant horses painted on mountains, nor of the cartels or of the crazy place here in the desert. She came here very recently to visit her sister, sometime in December 2005. She stayed some months and then went home to Sinaloa, the Mexican state on the Pacific coast that is the mother of almost all the major players in the drug industry in Mexico. She was very beautiful. I know this because Elvira is telling me everything as I stand in the wind with the sand whipping around me.

  Elvira is heavy with a coarse sweater, pink slacks, dark skin, and cropped hair with a blonde tint dancing through it. She is one of fifteen caretakers at the crazy place—the asylum in the desert—and receives fifty dollars a week for cooking three meals a day, six days a week. A man straddles a bicycle by her side, a boy in red overalls carrying a pink purse stares, and sitting on the ground is the lean and hungry dog of the campo. Smoke fills the air from a trash fire behind the asylum where they all work. The facility—a concrete block wall with various rooms inside—hosts a hundred inmates. A doctor drops by on Sunday to check on the health of the crazy people, and the whole operation is sponsored by a radio evangelist in Juárez, a man all the inmates call El Pastor.

  Every five days, the staff takes the blankets from the inmates, washes them, and then comes out beyond the walls and clumps them on creosote or yucca plants for drying. They now huddle in the wind like a herd of beasts—green, red, blue, violet, and one is gray with a tiger and her kitten on it. My mind spins back to the mid-1990s, when Amado Carrillo ran Juárez and for a spell was leaving bodies wrapped in tiger blankets. He was rumored to have a private zoo with a tiger, one he fed wi
th informants, but of course, such a custom was a common legend in the drug industry. Then for a spell, he was wrapping informants in yellow ribbons as gifts to the DEA. All this happened in the quiet days of the past, when the killing was not nearly so bad.

  Elvira explains how people wind up in her care: “There are many brought here because they tried to stab a father, or they are addicts, or they have been robbed or assaulted and broken forever. Many of the women here have been raped and lost their minds forever. There is a thirty-four-year-old woman here who saw her family assaulted and then she was raped and lost her mind.”

  She says this in a calm voice. It is simply life. The inmates consume twelve kilos of beans a day, she continues on, and could I bring them some frijoles?

  The wind blows, the dust chokes, the white horse watches, and suddenly, Elvira starts talking about Miss Sinaloa, her exact phrase, this Miss part, yes, Miss Sinaloa she says, a beauty queen who came to Juárez.

  “Once,” she says with pride, “we had a very beautiful woman, Miss Sinaloa. She was here about two years ago. The municipal police brought her here. She was twenty-four years old.”

  And then Elvira takes flight about her beautiful hair that hung down to her ass, and how very, very white Miss Sinaloa’s skin was, oh, so white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and replaced by elegant tattooed arcs to echo the hair. The police had found her wandering around on the street one morning. She had been raped and she had lost her mind. Finally, Elvira explains, her family came up from Sinaloa and took her home.

  The asylum facing the giant horse is not a place in Juárez where beautiful women with white skin tend to stay. Just down the road to the east is La Campana, the alleged site of a mass grave where Louis Freeh, then head of the FBI, and various Mexican officials gathered in December 1999 to excavate bodies. That story slowly went away because the source was a local comandante who had fled to the United States, a man known on the streets of Juárez as El Animal. And he could produce very few bodies, basically only a handful, and each and every one of them he had personally murdered. The burying ground itself was owned by Amado Carrillo. One of his killers, who worked there, now teaches English to rich students in a Juárez private high school. Of course, he continues to take murder contracts between classes. And then to the southeast of La Campana is the Lote Bravo, where dead girls have been dumped since the mid-1990s. All this history comes flowing back to me as I hear the story of Miss Sinaloa.