Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (16 page)

So I am sitting with the gang guy who is violent and will die, or I am sitting with the man full of art dreams who has no schooling but explodes with paint on cliff sides, or I am sitting with the young woman who banks it all on cosmetics, thong panties, and a sullen face protecting a heart full of hopes.

Here’s the deal: Given the choices, what would you do? I’d kill to get in the gang, I’d put on the high heels and the perfume, I’d pick up the guitar, I’d go through the wire, I’d open the bottle, I’d sniff the glue, I’d say tell me the lovers are losers and I’d certainly piss on the winners anointed by the authorities. And I’d maybe kill in Juárez, but far more certainly, I would die in Juárez. With a shout and a scream and a head full of dreams.

And I imagine sitting with Miss Sinaloa, who should have known better. I can hear the voices of reprimand in my ears that announce with certainty that sensible women of good features do not go to private parties in Juárez, where many men will gather whom they do not know—yes, I can hear these wise voices telling me the facts of life. I say dream, I say fantasize, I say escape, I say kill, I say do not accept the offerings of the cops and the government and the guns that have slaughtered hopes for generations and generations.

I say fantasy.

I say go to Juárez.

I say, Miss Sinaloa, will you take my hand?

The nights grow more difficult. The Mexican newspaper photographers learn to avoid the military roadblocks, to swing down side streets and chart a new city of alleys and detours. This is the only sensible thing to do.

One night in early April, just days after the full military presence swarmed into the streets of the city, two photographers respond to a police call and find two municipal squad cars. One of the cops is a woman. They are to transport a sick man, but when the squad tries to leave, the army blocks them. They let one squad car go on, but keep the other vehicle carrying the policewoman. When finally rescued from the custody of the army, she is not in good shape and so her fellow cops take her to the police station. Her panties and bra are torn and she goes into shock, her face paralyzed. She cannot speak of what happened, because she says they would kill her if she talked. Three policewomen have been raped in recent days, but the department will not say if she is one of them.

Her adventure occurs on a city street at night and takes up a lot of time—and during her adventure, no one comes out of a house to see what is going on. When a photographer for the paper raises his camera to photograph her, she covers her face.

Later, he tells me that if he had not happened on the scene, he is not sure she would have come back from the embrace of the Mexican army.

Jaime Murrieta always has a smile and, with luck, a bottle of beer. When I first met him in 1995, he had already photographed hundreds of murders for the Juárez newspapers. On September 9, 2006, he was out cruising in the night, looking for his dream photograph. In this ultimate image, he will be holding his camera, the killer will come toward his lens, and Jaime Murrieta will faithfully record his own murder. I remember him telling me in the 1990s of this dream shot with a smile on his face and passion in his eyes.

But on that September night in 2006, he comes very close to his dream. He and two other members of the press stumble upon a street party of Aztecas and a herd of Chihuahuan state police, including three comandantes. They are drinking and having an impromptu fiesta. He raises his camera.

They beat him close to death. He winds up in a hospital with a police guard—and of course, given the circumstances, such a guard is hardly reassuring. He loses the sight in one eye—but luckily, not his shooting eye. He refuses to leave town even when I send him money for such a flight.

After all, he did not get the photograph of his dreams, although he came close to that ultimate image.

Of course, none of this can be really happening. Mexico was to become a modern nation, and then when Mexico did not become a modern state but lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was papered over by successive American governments since a quiet neighbor was, and is, the best neighbor for a global empire. When Mexico became a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, then it was the fault of American habits and addicts. Finally, when even this rhetoric of deceit failed to paper the wounds, NAFTA was ballyhooed by the administration of President Bill Clinton and President Carlos Salinas (a man reputed to have stolen ten to twenty billion dollars for six years of service) as the answer that would bring prosperity and end illegal immigration.

The trade agreement crushed peasant agriculture in Mexico and sent millions of campesinos fleeing north into the United States in an effort to survive. The treaty failed to increase Mexican wages—the average wage in Juárez, for example, went from $4.50 a day to $3.70. The increased shipment of goods from Mexico to the United States created a perfect cover for the movement of drugs in the endless stream of semi trucks heading north.

American factories went to Mexico (and Asia) because they could pay slave wages, ignore environmental regulations, and say fuck you to unions. What Americans got in return were cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration into the United States. This result is global, but its most obvious consequence is the destruction of a nation with which we share a long border.

The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason people sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason people go north, aside from the legendary beaches of Kansas, Chicago, and other illegal destinations, is to survive. This is not simply an economic exchange. Unless you are one of those people who own a factory, this is a deal with death and money. Juárez, the pioneer city of Mexico in foreign factories, is full of death, poverty, and violence after decades of this busy notion of the future.

Let me ask you one question: Just what is it you don’t understand that every dead girl here understands, that every dead
cholo
understands, that everyone ending a shift at the plant understands, and that every corpse coming out of the death warehouse understands?

To sit on the curb by a death house in Juárez is to smell all things that cannot be said out loud in American political life.

And as El Pastor said, “Dementia smells.”

The clothes hang on barbed wire, on old loading-dock pallets that now serve as fences, on bushes and shrubs. Water in many of the new colonias comes by truck and is stored in containers also pilfered from the factories and still rich with toxic chemical residues. The street will be dirt or sand, the electricity stolen off power lines, the wires snake on the ground to the individual shacks. The air feels like a solid because dust and fumes wrap Juárez in an atmosphere that can be chewed.

The city trails along an ebbing river and is cradled by dunes, and when the wind rises, the air goes brown and the dirt is everywhere. This is where the women come into a miracle: Almost every morning, Juárez teems with poor people in clean clothes, and these clean clothes come from the labor of women who lack running water or even conventional clotheslines. They are the secret engine of the city, the cooks and bottle washers, the laborers in the factories where women have been supplanting males for decades, the beasts of burden carrying groceries, the mothers of children, and always the dirt police who turn out family members each and every morning in clean clothes. Their hair pulled back, their lips red, their eyes weary, the women are the washing machines in a city of dust.

Every time I come to Juárez, I swear it is for the last time. And then, I come again and again. I seldom write about these visits, so that is not why I come. I seldom enjoy these visits, so that also fails to explain my returns.

I think it is about tasting the future. Juárez is the page where all the proposed solutions to poverty and migration and crime are erased by waves of blood.

I feel at one with El Pastor.

He keeps telling me of his mission, how back in 1998, when the bad snow came, and “I was driving that day and singing to the Lord and it was snowing. I said, ‘Lord I’m working with you,’ and the Lord pulled my hair.”

That is the moment when he began scooping the crazy people off the streets and creating his asylum in the desert.

Now El Pastor is jubilant because he is talking about Juárez.

“I love Juárez,” he says, “I know it is dirty and very violent but I love it! I grew up in Juárez. I love it. It is a needy city and I can help my city. I can make a little difference.”

As he blurts out his love, we are at a red light. A boy with needle marks racing up and down his arms fills his mouth with gasoline, raises a torch, and then spits fire into the air.

I tell people I hate Juárez. I tell people I am mesmerized by Juárez. I tell myself Juárez is a duty. And I keep going back, month after month, year after year. I tell people I go to Juárez for the beaches. Or I tell people I go to Juárez for the waters.

Often, people tell me I don’t know the real Juárez, a place of discos, party-hearty souls, laughter, and good times. I do not argue.

I go for what I do not know. I go in the vain hope of understanding how a city evolves into a death machine. I watch modern factories rise, I see American franchises pop up along the avenues. Golden arches peddle burgers, but old MacDonald no longer has a farm. He lives in a shack in an outlaw colonia, there is no water, the electricity is pirated, and dust fills his lungs.

Everyone has a job, according to the authorities.

Every year, some mysterious form of accounting belches forth new economic statistics, and these numbers get bigger and bigger.

The city slowly crumbles, the dead clutter the
calles
.

And I keep going back and I have given up explaining my task to others. Or to myself.

Like so many people in the city, I am a slave to it and no longer question my bondage.

The new death house is about a mile from the old death house, the one uncovered in January 2004 that had twelve bodies buried in the patio. And about halfway between the two death houses is another house where the Mexican authorities staged a raid and found a lot of guns and bullets. It is a lovely two-story building with nice tile forming a frieze just under the roofline. The front door is open—it’s been smashed by a battering ram, but no one is at home at the moment. They’ve been taken to a frisky interrogation by the authorities. Two cameras stare at me—and I know they are operating because the wheel on the electric meter is spinning.

I reach down and pick up a big key made out of wood with little hooks for all those household keys. It has the name of a man and a woman burned into it, plus the phrase, “Remember Durango,” and two scorpions, the famous symbol of that Mexican state.

But the wooden key is not what catches my real notice, nor do the surveillance cameras matter much. It is the red Jeep Cherokee with dark, tinted windows and two burly men that suddenly shows up, slows, and rolls on. Then it comes by again, and the men do not smile. Across the street, I see a man standing next to a fine black Audi. He is on his cell phone, staring at me. In traffic, a few moments later, the red Cherokee again appears by my side. I peel off and return to the newly discovered death house.

I have been given notice, and now I feel at home.

Eventually, thirty-six bodies come out of the second death house. The Mexican forensic pathologist at the dig begs the newspapers not to publish her name or face, though the story reveals the name of the cadaver dog, “Rocco.” The neighbors say they noticed nothing and thought the occasional gatherings at the walled compound must be for fiestas of some sort. The bodies have a curious fate. The government will not reveal where they are, or permit families with missing relatives to view them.

In late February 2008, ten or twenty men with automatic rifles and black masks descended on a poor barrio of shacks in the hills above Juárez. The area is home to men and women who work in the maquiladoras. One man, a former municipal cop in his early thirties, runs a little store that sells beans, bread, and milk. That day, the armed men tortured him until he revealed who supplied him with the drugs he also sold out of his little store. He could not have been really surprised by the visit—after all, he’d been warned in two phone calls to stop selling drugs. The armed men took him to where his supplier made concrete blocks. There they beat up some workers until finally, one man came out of a building and said, “I am the man you are looking for.” The armed men then took the two captives off a short ways and executed them—everyone in the barrio heard the shots. All this action was hard to miss since it happened around noon on a sunny day.