Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (4 page)

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.

I have been coming to this city for thirteen years, and naturally, I have, like everyone here, an investment in the dead. And the living. Here is a story, and like all stories here, like Miss Sinaloa, it tantalizes and floats in the air, and then vanishes. A poor Mexican woman in El Paso wants drug treatment for her young teenaged son, but she cannot afford the facilities in the United States, so she checks him into a clinic in Juárez. A few days, later, he is back in the United States and housed in the very hospital where the Mexican comandante who survived assassination was briefly housed. The boy has been raped and has a torn rectum.

Then the tale erases itself from consciousness.

Jane Fonda cares, so does Sally Field, and so both have been to Juárez to protest the murder of women.
The Vagina Monologues
has been staged here, also. Over the past ten years or so, four hundred women have been found murdered, the majority of them victims of husbands and lovers and hardly mysterious cases. This number represents 10 or 12 percent of the official kill rate. Two movies have been made about the dead women. Focusing on the dead women enables Americans to ignore the dead men, and ignoring the dead men enables the United States to ignore the failure of its free-trade schemes, which in Juárez are producing poor people and dead people faster than any other product. Of course, the murders of the women in Juárez are hardly investigated or solved. Murders in Juárez are hardly ever investigated, and so in death, women finally receive the same treatment as dead men. At least eight prosecutors have claimed to tackle the murders. Last year, a forensics team from Argentina showed up to straighten things out. The team was state-of-the-art, thanks to Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s that disappeared ten thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thousand people—no one really knows the tally. The Argentineans had also worked in El Salvador, another country rich with mass graves. But none of this training prepared them for Juárez. They came to solve the mystery of murdered women in Juárez. They found the reality of the city.

They found heads sitting on the floor of the morgue, bodies without heads, bodies tossed willy-nilly into mass graves. DNA also failed them at times because the local forensic talent had boiled some of the bodies of the girls, a cooking technique that destroys DNA. At least three families, they discovered, had gotten the bodies of their loved ones back, had buried them, and now had to be told they’d been given the bodies of strangers.

But then, the local authorities can be a bit of a problem. The former police chief was busted in January 2008 for setting up a dope deal in El Paso. Two cops disappeared a week ago. Four days later, a vagrant discovered a shopping bag downtown with the uniform of one of the cops—it had his name, blood stains, and bits of duct tape, this latter being a favored shackling device of locals when they execute people. So apparently, there is a naked policeman wandering the city.

And then, there is the tale of Miss Sinaloa. She goes to a party with police, and then after the fun, the police bring her to the crazy place. A fair-skinned woman is a treat for street cops. When the girls began vanishing from Juárez in 1993 and then reappearing at times as raped corpses or simply bones, the local cops referred to them as
las morenitas
—the little dark ones—because the favored prey came from the poor barrios where young women who slave in American-owned factories for next to nothing live. Miss Sinaloa hails from a different world.

But there is always one enduring fact in Juárez: There are no facts. The memories keep shifting. Miss Sinaloa is a beauty who comes to party in Juárez and is raped. Miss Sinaloa is a beauty who comes to party in Juárez and consumes enormous amounts of cocaine and whiskey and becomes crazy, so
loca
, that the people call the police and the cops come and take Miss Sinaloa away and they rape her for days and then dump her at the crazy place in the desert. She has long hair and is beautiful, and a doctor examines her and there is no question about the rapes. She has bruises on her arms and legs and ribs.

She is now almost a native of the city.

Dead Reporter Driving

There is a man driving fast
down the dirt road leading to the border. A rooster tail of dust marks his passage. He is very frightened, and his fourteen-year-old son sits beside him in silence. The boy is that way—very bright, yet very quiet. They are unusually close. The father has raised him as a single parent since he was four after the relationship with the mother did not work out.

Now, father and son are fleeing to the United States. Back in their hometown of Ascensión, Chihuahua, men with automatic rifles are searching for them. These men are soldiers in the Mexican army and intend to kill the father, and perhaps the son, too. As the man drives toward the U.S. port of entry, they are ransacking his house. No one in the town will dare to lift a hand. The newspaper will not cover this event.

The man knows these facts absolutely.

His name is Emilio Gutierrez Soto, and he is the reporter covering this part of Mexico and that is why he is a dead man driving. He passes an
ejido
, one of the collective villages created by the Mexican revolution as the answer to the land hunger of the poor. Once, the army came here, beat up a bunch of peasants, and terrorized the community under the guise of fighting a war on drugs. The peasants never filed any complaints, because they are tied to the land and could not flee if there were reprisals for their protests. They also knew that any complaints would be ignored by their government. This is the kind of thing the reporter knows but does not write and publish. Like the peasants, he knows his place in the system.

It is June 16, 2008, and in two days, the man will have his forty-fifth birthday, should he live that long.

The military has flooded across Mexico since President Felipe Calderón assumed office in December 2006 with a margin so razor thin that many Mexicans think he is an illegitimate president. His first act was to declare a war on the nation’s thriving drug industry and his favorite tool was the Mexican army. Now over 40,000 soldiers are marauding all over the country in this war against the nation’s drug organizations. In 2008, between 5,000 and 6,000 Mexicans died in the violence, a larger loss than what the United States has endured during the entire Iraq war. Since the year 2000, 24 reporters have been officially recorded as murdered in Mexico, 7 more have vanished, and an unknown number have fled into the United States. But all numbers in Mexico are slippery because people have a way of disappearing and not being reported. The entire police force of Palomas, Chihuahua, fled in 2008, with the police chief seeking shelter in the United States, the rest of the cops simply hiding in Mexico. Between July and October 2008, at a minimum 63 people—Mexican cops, reporters, and businesspeople—sought political asylum at crossings in West Texas and New Mexico. In all of 2008, 312 Mexicans filed credible fear claims at U.S. ports of entry, up from 179 in 2007. Many more simply blended into U.S. communities. This is the wave of blood and terror suffocating the man as he heads north.

The reporter has tried to live his life in an effort to avoid this harsh reality. He has been careful in his work. His publisher has told him it is better to lose a story than to take a big risk. He does not look too closely into things. If someone is murdered, he prints what the police tell him and lets it go at that. If people sell drugs in his town or warehouse drugs in his town, he ignores this information. Nor does he inquire about who controls the drug industry in his town or anywhere else.

The man driving is terrified of hitting an army checkpoint. They are random and they are everywhere. The entire Mexican north has become a killing field. In Palomas, a border town of maybe three thousand souls, forty men have already been executed this very year, and another seventeen people have vanished in kidnappings. Some of these murders are by drug cartels. Some of these murders are by state and federal police. Some of these murders are by the Mexican army. There are now many ways to die.

The high desert is beautiful, a pan of creosote with lenses of grass in moist low spots. Here and there, volcanic remnants make black marks on the earth, and to the north and west, sierras rise. There is almost no water. Almost all the rivers flowing from the Sierra Madre die in the desert. But it is home, the place he has spent his life.

The reporter may die for committing a simple error. He wrote an accurate news story. He did not know this was dangerous, because he thought the story was very small and unimportant. He was wrong and that was the beginning of all his trouble.

This is because there are two Mexicos.

There is the one reported by the U.S. press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war against the evil forces of the drug world and using the incorruptible Mexican army as his warriors. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, and laws and is seen by the U.S. government as a sister republic.

It does not exist.

There is a second Mexico, where the war is
for
drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed.

The reporter lives in this second Mexico.

Until very recently, he liked it just fine. In fact, he loved it because he loves Mexico and has never thought of leaving. Even though he lives near the border, he has not bothered to cross for almost ten years.

But now, things have changed. He has researched the humanitarian treaties signed by the United States, and he thinks, given these commitments by the American government, he and his boy will be given asylum. He has decided to tell the authorities nothing but the truth. His research has failed to uncover one little fact: No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum by the United States of America.

Suddenly, he sees a checkpoint ahead, and there is no way to escape it.

Men in uniforms pull him over.

He is frightened but discovers to his relief that this checkpoint is run by the Mexican migration service and so, maybe, they will not give him up to the army.

“Why are you driving so fast?”

“I am afraid. There are people trying to kill me.”

“The narcos?”

“No, the soldiers.”

“Who are you?”

He hands over his press pass.

“Oh, you are the one, they searched your house.”

“I have had problems.”

“Those sons of bitches do whatever they want. Go ahead. Good luck.”

He roars away. When he stops at the port of entry at Antelope Wells in the boot-heel of New Mexico, U.S. Customs asks, as they always do, what he is bringing from Mexico.

He says, “We bring fear.”