Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (31 page)

Forty-one hours later, the street is midday sun and dust. Broken buses line one side, where men tinker to get them ready for one more bumping journey down the rutted lanes of the city. I am here against my will. I had decided that six months of killing was enough for me and everyone else, and that anything beyond that merely meant repeating what was already known. I had determined I could not look at one more corpse, that I was ill, and that the toxic elements floating through my cells and through my mind came from this city and this slaughter. I had determined to leave and stay away and never return, eat wholesome food, drink bottled water, fill bird feeders religiously, and keep the slightest tremor of stress at bay and barred from my life. But people slaughtered while praying bring me back.

The street is broken earth, rock, and ruts. On one side is a row of vans from Sonora, the drivers sitting with stone faces and anxious eyes. On the other side, the buses. The drug rehab center itself is muted, its name whitewashed out since the killings. Dogs bark and snarl from behind iron gates of the houses lining the street. Trees struggle, leaves limp in the summer heat. A few blocks away, the cement plant towers over the barrio. It is thought that the people who jumped from the roof were fleeing toward the cement plant. Just down the road is the prison. And the military base for the city. On the walls everywhere, spray paint spells out “LOCOS 23,” the local gang. Everything here is coated with fatigue, all the faces, the machines, the tiny houses, the plants, everything. The sky itself sags with fatigue, and the sun seems to struggle not to fall to earth.

From here each day, the addicts would spill out into the city selling candy and gum to earn their keep in rehab. Mexico is not a good place to need help. The average wait for entry into a rehab facility for substance abuse is ten years. Other problems mean even longer delays in treatment—people with anxiety disorders wait in line thirty years before their first treatment. What this means is that treatment for most Mexicans means absolutely nothing at all. The government has programs, the government makes pronouncements, the government produces studies, but if you are a Mexican with a problem, you must take care of it yourself because no one else is going to help you. Or you find this strange treatment center where they give you a bunk bed in a dormitory and talk you down and then send you out to peddle candy and gum to pay for your room and board. And you will be grateful for a spell as you find shelter from the streets that are killing you.

But the nature of life here does not seem to penetrate the minds of people in other places. They seem to think that there is treatment available here, but because of the poverty, it is just more austere than in the wealthier zones of the earth. They talk about police corruption, but seem to think in terms of a place like Chicago, and so they do not perceive this as a real problem. They read about the murders, but tell themselves that murders are high in Detroit. They know people are poor, but convince themselves that the people are slowly rising and soon things will be fine. They read that the Mexican army can be rough, but never grasp the fact that the Mexican army historically has been stationed all over the country in order to repress and terrorize the people of Mexico.

Sometimes I think I am living in a hall of mirrors like those I saw as a child in the carnival funhouse—huge mirrors that distort every form and yet retain enough of the actual form so that you think you are seeing a kind of visual riff on actual reality. And so we learn to pretend that what is happening is not really happening. Or we learn to pretend that what is happening is merely some kind of high range of normal experience, a slight exaggeration of what we already know. And so we kill both the slayers and the slain and make them go away by insisting they are part and parcel of the world we already know.

There is a body in the coffin. He is nineteen years old, small, faint moustache, proud member of Locos 23. He is in the kitchen, the sink full of dirty pots and pans. He sleeps, his face under glass, a pink-and-white striped shirt on his chest. Rosaries dangle from the coffin lid. A young mother hoists her baby up to look at the body. She stares, eyes wide.

He was one of the eight cut down in the drug center at around 7:15 P.M. as dusk slowly descended on the city by the river.

I stare into the baby’s wide, dark eyes and try to make out what is and what will be. A golden crucifix, Christ with arms outstretched in His agony, floats over the face so still now, the eyes closed. The baby stares with round eyes of wonder.

I look into two versions of myself, the body in the coffin and the babe in arms. I am possibly past due for the coffin, but I remember through the haze those early glimpses of life when I was younger than I can even recall, those blues and greens, the smell of fresh apples, the feel of the grain in the floor-boards in the old farmhouse, the cluck of the chickens, the strange sounds coming from the mouths of adults. So I am in a small room full of people, the body is against the wall in a glass-topped coffin, the baby looks down at the still, dead face, and I can smell fresh hay from some forgotten summer when I first caught the light gleaming into my eyes. And I know that my early days were somehow similar, that bodies were still displayed in the house, that wakes were home affairs, the children and babies were not sheltered from the fate of all living things, and that all of life that mattered took place in the kitchen.

The city’s fatigue seeps into my pores, the midday sun bakes my mind, and I wander between the coffin and the killing ground, and this is easy because the boy in the coffin lived next door to the rehabilitation center where he was murdered.

The gate is open to the center, and I enter. Men are tearing the place apart, and they seem frantic in their work. They are all from Sonora, and the story is very simple and clear. A week and a half earlier, armed men came to one of their three clinics in Juárez and herded fifty people into rooms, and then they took the director and a visitor out and executed them. The group, centered in Cananea, Sonora, decided to close all three facilities and leave the state of Chihuahua. They painted the word CLOSED on the center where the murders occurred. They called the police and army in Juárez and told them they were shutting everything down as fast as they could. They asked both the police and the army to give them protection until they could close down the centers—this request was denied. They piled into vans and drove over on Wednesday, their plan to load all the beds and office equipment into the vans and flee back to Sonora. The group arrived two hours after the killings.

He stands on the roof looking down at me in the small patio of the center. He refuses to give his name. Yet he cannot stop talking. They came through the office, he says, and then entered this patio. I look around and see a row of rooms—office, infirmary, lounge, detox, kitchen,
sala
—all open onto this concrete slit called the patio. He points to the corner of the patio—yes, there, there is where they took four from the
sala
, put them on the ground and executed them. I see the bullet holes.

He is a solid man in his forties with cropped hair and quick eyes. He has worked for the centers for six years, and he refuses to give his name. This last fact is to be expected. The neighbors quoted in the newspapers about that night also remain nameless. Only the dead get to have names. Everyone else—killers and survivors—are without identity. He says, “Come here, come here,” and he leads me from his rooftop perch into a narrow defile between the concrete block center and the wall sheltering it from the street. The passageway is less than three feet wide, and down this corridor the secretary ran with AK-47s firing at him. The man on the roof makes me look at the steel casement around a window—the bullet holes through the metal are the size of a quarter. Then I turn the corner and see the staircase ahead and, on top of the building, the cyclone fence that is torn apart where desperate patients leapt from the roof to some hope of survival on the ground below. The secretary himself made it to the top of the open staircase before he was cut down by gunfire. He now is near death in a hospital. Terror lingers in the narrow passage. I climb up the stairs and enter the little rooms that line the roof and functioned as barracks for the addicts. On the walls are photographs—a pinup of a singer, a 1970 Mercedes convertible, and a velvet painting of a Mexican
águila
, eagle. On the floor is a book touting creationism over evolution, a workbook that teaches parenting without anger problems. It is still. No one is coming back for their things. And no one on site can really tell if these remnants belong to the quick or the dead.

Men tear apart metal beds—there is the screech of hacksaws and banging of hammers—a manic act of salvage. Other men carry out piles of blankets—the cheap Chinese ones made of synthetic fiber that have inundated Mexico. Today, two men were found wrapped in such blankets, their hands cut off and left by their sides, the bodies showing signs of torture. So the men carry out mounds of these blankets, but they do not put them in the vans. They toss them into trash barrels and say nothing. That scent of what were once people coming off the blankets they slept in every night, this fragrance of a life lost, is more than even the men salvaging materials can bear. So they stick to saving metal and trash the blankets.

I look up at the man on the roof, and he says, “They don’t want us in Chihuahua. We get the message.”

I enter the
sala
, the killing chamber where people were raising their hands to God when the gunmen entered. Flies buzz, and the sound sizzles in the empty room. In back is the tiny bathroom where people piled atop each other in some fantasy of escaping death. On the front wall are the twelve steps to curing addiction in Spanish. Also, the Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niehbur’s contribution to sanity in World War II when it fluttered across American life.

DIOS CONCEDEME SERENIDAD PARA ACEPTAR LAS COSAS
QUE NO PUEDO CAMBIAR

It is posted in the front of the room, where the woman stood at the podium soliciting the addicts to come forward for Christ. On the floor, the tiles are brown, red, white, gray, and beige. A map of the Holy Land is underfoot. A crucifix leans in the corner, a candle sputtering before it.

VALOR PARA CAMBIAR LAS QUE SI PUEDO

There are three bullet holes in the floor, and the wall has dribbles of blood and one red palm print. The floor has been mopped, but still, there is the blood on the wall and the blood that has seeped into the grout between the tiles. The flies buzz and buzz.

SABIDURIA PARA DISTINGUIR LA DIFERENCIA

The man from the roof tells me, “I believe the police are scared. Our own people started pulling people into the vans because no one came.”

Yes, amid the noise, the men hurrying to load the vans, everyone is quite alone here. The largest slaughter in the history of the city, and there is no yellow police tape, no visible investigation of the crime scene. A set of clinics for addicts is leaving the city because of terror, but there are no reporters, no cameras. Just silence. And this sense of being alone.

Luis Angel Gonzalez Corral was nineteen years old and a member of Locos 23 and had a habit of sniffing glue—a habit that was getting the best of him. So a week or two ago, he went next door and joined the rehab program. On Wednesday night, his family heard the shooting next door and hid during the fifteen minutes of thundering gunfire. Then emerged and found a dead son.

The yard is dirt with a vine trailing over a leaning fence to the north. Two poles support big sheets of canvas and provide shade for the mourners sitting on old chairs or concrete blocks. They are mainly women, and the oldest is maybe in her forties. The ancients that should be clogging such a wake have been left behind in the country. This is a barrio of people driven off the land, and of people barely surviving in the new world of the city. Only one woman wears a dress. Everyone else is in clean shorts or jeans and T-shirts. Voices are muted, a kind of murmuring floats across the ground. The faces are tired, the eyes glazed. There are few males in attendance: just gang kids come to honor one of their own and two or three older men. It is early afternoon, the men are either at work or looking for work. This is also a barrio where each day is an effort to find some way to provide food. There is no future here, but a constant struggle in the present.

The small house of three little rooms shares a common wall with the abandoned center. The body lies in the kitchen. A sheet blocks the window and has been painted with a message of support from Locos 23. Women sit in a row of folding chairs before the sheet and face the coffin. They are also very tired and pass for the matrons of this street of dust.

One woman lost her son six weeks ago. She says he was twenty-five years old and did work now then as a plasterer or drywall hanger. They came in the night, and she did not see them, she says, because she was in bed. The next day, his body was found. He had been tortured. Neighbors told her he was taken away by the municipal police. Four young men of this area have been executed in the last few months, four who lived within a few blocks of each other. Her voice is soft and flat as she recounts the loss of her son. Little or no emotion colors her tale, perhaps it would be too taxing on the soul. Here, getting killed is part of growing up for young men.

I ask the mother of the dead boy who rests in the glass-topped coffin what he planned to be when he grew up.

She stares at me silently as if slowly digesting the question.

Then, she holds her hands out palms up and shrugs at the implication of such a question. Ambitions do not grow here, and the future does not exist here. At least not in a way recognized by governments. Ambition is displayed on the sheet where Locos 23 states its claim to the dead boy. It is in the eyes of the people at the wake who see death but expect no justice beyond a life lived and ended by slaughter. A girl in tight black pants and a black lacy blouse enters the kitchen, gets a soft drink from the refrigerator, and smiles at friends. She is pregnant with the dead boy’s child, and for a few hours this afternoon she is the center of a kind of mild attention. Just as the mother dressed in black holds a kind of low-key standing in the heat, flies, and dust.