Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (25 page)

Meanwhile, the killing plods on. No one really pays much mind to it anymore because everyone grows numb. In January, the city was stunned when 40 human beings were executed. In March, almost a 120 crossed over. Then, the army took over and April was such a relief, only 52 dead. So Juárez tasted a solution that was even bloodier than January. May topped 100. In the first nine days of June, 48 souls go to paradise. The missing are no longer counted, and many of the dead remain unidentified, just tossed in those common graves.

The city now is murder, extortion, arson, kidnapping, rape, robbery, car theft, and the sweet haze of drugs and alcohol. The temperature bumps 110, but the marijuana and the cocaine and the heroin and the cold beers save the human heart from the human violence.

I see no problem.

I see a future.

I see the way things will be here now and the way things will be where you live in good time.

I see a city where basic institutions erode and then burn or die, and yet in the morning, my fellow human beings get up, smell the coffee, and continue on with their lives.

I see Alexia’s funeral, her little brown twelve-year-old face in the open coffin, her mother weeping and a lot of pink balloons because that was her favorite color, and she was going to graduate from elementary school in three days and so all her friends are there.

A friend of mine is taking photographs at Alexia’s funeral when the army comes and grabs him. This could be bad since people who leave with the army tend not to come back. But the crowd holding those flotillas of pink balloons storms over and says, “Hey, leave him alone, go find and catch the bad guys.” And the soldiers let him go and so he is fine.

Yes.

We’re gonna have us a time.

Juárez is where we are learning the very first steps of the dance that will come sweeping through our lives.

But we turn a deaf ear to the music of Juárez. We think this act will keep us sane and safe.

I sit under towering cottonwoods near the border, and hundreds of birds feed on scattered seed, a squirrel forages under a feeder hanging from a pole, and just then, in the early rays of morning, a Cooper’s hawk banks against the stand of carrizo and the air explodes with wing beats as the birds flee for cover. But I notice that the squirrel, busy feeding, does not even look up.

I am sitting with a contract killer, another
sicario
, in that café, and we are eating carnitas as he softly tells me of his work. A few tables away, a trucker in a dirty T-shirt and faded blue jeans shares a meal and beers with a blond woman spilling out of her half-unbuttoned blouse. They drink beers, and it is clear that she is bought and paid for and is by no means a wife. But what I notice as the killer murmurs his account of slaughter and drug movements and gang wars is that they are oblivious to the death machine a few feet away from their carnal dreams.

This is my Juárez, a place that seems normal if you make the effort not to see or hear. Or feel. A place where many die, but they are the bad people and we are the good people and so death will not come to our door because the Lord of Hosts will spare us.

So I sit here and tally the dead, and try to keep an honest count of the killing. But most moments, as the stench and dust of the city floats over me, and I sit in some flyblown café and drink a beer or a cup of coffee, none of the deaths really exist for me, and the violence of the city does not exist either. I am sure that Miss Sinaloa is sitting outside somewhere and birds are singing in a patio around her and she smiles and cannot really be sure that she was gang-raped in Juárez and then went to the crazy place and met the true love of her life. I understand the feeling. I often have coffee at a small café that is two blocks from where a prominent Juárez lawyer was murdered two years ago in broad daylight. As I sip my drink, I hardly ever recall this killing, and when I pass the very corner where he died, I often fail to remember the event.

That is how we survive.

If we could truly remember, we would not be able to go on. And if we truly forget, we will have a small patch of bliss until that bullet, and it is possibly already arcing through the air, slams into our skull.

But the city itself goes on murdering with or without our memory.

We can only endure the place that kills by pretending the place will not kill us.

She goes into the room, her skin fragrant, and men’s eyes light up and their lips say Miss Sinaloa. She is offered a drink, there is a line of white powder on the table top.

Dead Reporter Driving

I am sitting in the Hotel San Francisco
in Palomas almost four years to the day since the moment Emilio Gutiérrez destroyed his life. The small restaurant has eight tables, the walls host an explosion of plastic flowers screaming yellow, red, and pink. Carved wooden mallard heads spike out as hat racks for Stetsons. In the lobby is a large statue of San Francisco, and in his hands and at his feet illegal immigrants have left handwritten messages and offerings. The tile floor is the color of flesh. Just five blocks away, the poor plunged through the line and headed into El Norte—none of the notes are very recent. The river of misery has changed course for the moment. Music floats through the air, Bob Dylan singing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”

The notes whisper of people in flight: “Father, help us all who pass as wet-backs. Help us Our Father. Bless us all who think of You, who trust in You.

“And I ask You to bless and help my mother, my father and me and my brothers and sisters and all of my family. In Your hands we place our good luck to pass ALIVE. Adios Our Father.”

Or a note says: “Please I ask You with all my heart look after and protect my husband that he pass safely. Amen.”

A Bible lies open, and someone has dropped this plea on the page:

God bless us and protect us
along the way
Yonathan
Manuel
Tomaz
Yumbo
Graciela
Norma
Olinda
Guide us on a good road
and protect us.

There are no customers here, just these prayers from the height of the migration two years ago and the dust outside in the street.

The walls in the lobby are murals of an imaginary Sierra Madre in an imaginary Mexico. A huge buck deer stands in an alpine meadow, an eagle swoops down on a lake, a caballero in a sequined suit stares with love at the beautiful senorita. In the kitchen, short, dark women chop vegetables for salsa. Their movements are very slow and their faces blank.

Across the street, in a rundown hotel for migrants going north, is where Emilio’s life began to end. No one here remembers. Within an hour or two of a killing, there is no one left to describe the murder but the flies buzzing over the drying blood on the ground. This loss of memory is not because of cowardice. It is wisdom that comes with survival. When some townspeople witnessed a night of kidnappings in 2008, familiar faces were recognized. But no one would name these faces. As I leave the hotel and restaurant, Johnny Cash is singing:

You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down

On January 29, 2005, six soldiers came to the hotel across the street, took food off people’s plates, and robbed the customers of their money and jewelry. Emilio got calls in Ascensión, and so he phoned the local police chief and the manager of the hotel. He called the army also, but as is its custom, the army refused to answer any questions from the press. Then he filed a brief article about the incident, one of three he wrote in that period noting similar actions by the army in the area.

That is how he destroyed his life.

Late at night on February 8 of that same year, Colonel Idelfonso Martinez Piedra calls Gutiérrez at home, explains that he is “the boss,” and orders him to come immediately to the Hotel Miami in downtown Ascensión. Emilio explains that he is getting ready for bed, and some other time would be better.

The colonel says, “If you don’t come, we’ll come looking for you at home or wherever you are.”

So he puts his then-twelve-year-old son in his truck and goes there. He notices fifty soldiers in the four-block area around the hotel, and two vans full of bodyguards for the officers. He leaves his son in the truck and walks up to the officer. It is a very cold night.

In his mind, he is thinking, “What the fuck are these
cabrones
up to?” Soldiers swiftly surround him. He is in front of the Hotel Miami, but he is in solitary confinement.

The colonel says to another officer, “Look, General, the son of a whore who has written all kinds of stupidities has arrived.”

Then the general, Garcia Vega, says, “So you are the son of a whore who is lowering our prestige. You son of a fucking whore, you are denigrating us, and my boss, the minister in Mexico, is extremely bothered by your fucking lies, idiot.”

Emilio feels very small, and he cannot think of a way to escape his fate. He tries to form words to excuse himself but he cannot. The general is in charge of all of Chihuahua. He is short, and his uniform is brilliant with gold trim.

Emilio is very frightened, and he says that he only writes what the officials or the victims tell him.

The general says, “No, you have no sources for that information. You made it up. Just how much schooling do you have, asshole?”

Emilio lies and claims two years of communication studies in the university.

The general explains that Emilio lacks an education equal to his own.

To have a general speak to you is not something to be desired. They can hand out death like a party favor.

The general suggests he should write about drug people.

Emilio says he does not know any, and besides they frighten him.

“So, you don’t know them and you fear them,” the general bristles. “You should fear us, for we fuck the fucking drug traffickers, you son of a whore. I feel like putting you in the van and taking you to the mountains so you can see how we fuck over the drug traffickers, asshole.”

The guards now surround him, he can see his son in the truck about fifteen yards away, and the boy looks very frightened and nervous. People walking past the hotel greet Emilio, and he thinks this is what saves him from more curses or a beating.

He grovels, apologizes profusely to the general.

“You’ve written idiocies three times, and there shall be no fourth. You’d better not mention this meeting, or you’ll be sent to hell, asshole.”

The colonel tells him he is under surveillance “and should not fuck up.”

Then, he is dismissed. He gets back in his truck, and his son asks what is going on. He says, they want to kidnap me. He drives aimlessly and finally calls his boss, who tells him, “This is serious. This is a problem.”

He decides his only chance at safety is making the threats known. Because if he remains silent, he senses they will return and kill him.

On February 10, he publishes a third-person account of the incident and files a complaint with the assistant public security minister in Nuevo Casas Grandes and meets with the boss of the ministry, a woman, who warns him, “You better think it over carefully because it is very dangerous getting involved with the militaries.” But he is building a paper record to try and save himself. He files a complaint against General Garcia Vega and Colonel Piedra and the soldiers with the National Commission of Human Rights. Three months later, the state police begin an investigation that goes nowhere. The representative of the Commission of Human Rights proposes a conciliatory act between them and the military. Emilio agrees, but he knows this means nothing because he will “continue to be in the eye of the hurricane as the weakest one.”

He does not write anything unseemly about the army again. He becomes almost a ghost and hears no evil and sees no evil. He hopes they will now leave him alone. On February 12, 2008, he merely notes in the newspaper that a convoy of seven hundred soldiers and one hundred vehicles sweeps the area from Palomas to Casas Grandes. In Ascensión, they ransack the house of a friend, a guy who runs a pizza parlor. The friend is given the
ley fuga
, the traditional game of the military where they let you run and, if you can dodge the bullets, you live. His friend is mowed down in the street in front of his home. That night, twenty people vanish from the town and only one ever returns, a Chilean engineer who is saved by his embassy. The others simply cease to exist. The reporting of these events illustrates how the press functions: In his first story, Emilio mentions an army convoy sweeping the area. But in later stories about the killings and people vanishing, there is no army, simply armed commandos. That is how an honest reporter tries to avoid becoming a dead reporter.

He thinks, “This is behind me,” and he will put it out of his mind.

When the president of Mexico floods his zone with soldiers in April 2008, he learns the army has a long memory.

After midnight, on May 5, 2008, he hears a loud knocking on the door of his home. Fifty soldiers raid the house. Emilio screams, “Press, the Press from
El Diario,
” and a soldier says, “Hands up, asshole. On the ground!”