Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (6 page)

He allegedly earned about three hundred dollars a week as his cut of the retail cocaine business, more than three times what the neighboring factory workers, his customers, make. As he lies in a pool of blood in the bright sunlight, his brown jacket is neatly folded on the traffic island, his cap on the pavement, where it tumbled from his shattered skull. A woman in a tube top takes his photograph with her cell phone while uniformed schoolgirls stand in a pod and watch.

There are more than twenty thousand such retail outlets in this city, many employing vendors working three shifts a day. Now there is a battle going on for these small ventures in cutthroat capitalism.

A friend of mine can barely leave anything in his house, because local addicts rob it the moment he exits. He is on his third large dog. The previous two were poisoned. He has hopes for the third guard dog.

The day after the killing, the vendor is the cover story in
P.M.
, the tabloid he peddled on his traffic island. His street name was
El Cala
, The Skull.

On March 27, 2008, the army admits it is taking Juárez by force. In front of the hotel downtown, a soldier stands with a .50-caliber machine gun. Over 180 armed and armored vehicles hunt evil on the streets, plus an air wing that includes a helicopter gunship. Two thousand troops arrive, or more. Or so the government says, the press repeats, but no one is ever allowed to make a real count. The soldiers wear black masks and are short and dark. The officers have lighter skin that loses pigment steadily as the rank gets higher until there is the rarefied air of the generals who look like Europeans dropped in some colonial outpost.

Roadblocks go up everywhere, especially at night, when events are difficult to see and impossible to monitor. The authorities say this is necessary because two hundred people have been murdered since the first of year. There will be ten patrol bases and forty-six roving units. Night life in Juárez collapses because the local citizens dread hitting a military checkpoint in the dark.

It is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Semana Santa, Holy Week, a time for families to reunite and for men to gather and drink themselves senseless as they bask in the grace of God. Two police cars convoy through the quiet of Juárez, one with a city comandante, the other with bodyguards. Suddenly, they are pinned at a traffic light by a car in front and then another car pulls alongside and machine-guns the vehicles. Customers at the nearby gas station duck as bullets plunge through metal.

The comandante’s bodyguard dies and others are wounded. This bodyguard has a curious past. In January, the comandante’s name—Victor Alejandro Gomez Marquez—was posted on the list that appeared on the monument to the fallen policemen as a person scheduled to die. But the bodyguard is the man who truly hears death whispering in his ear. He recently told his mother he had fifteen days to live. Then, he came over to his mother’s house again and sat with a friend as they drank a liter of whisky. This time, he told his mother he had at best eight days to live.

She told him, “Be positive. Christ’s blood is covering you and protecting you.”

Now, he is done with living.

The mural depicts a conquistador, another wall is a collage of snapshots from the work. A sign says, “God is greater than my problems.” In the corner rests a metal statue of a man in armor. This is the office of El Pastor, José Antonio Galvan, the radio evangelist who took in the battered remains of Miss Sinaloa and gave her succor in the crazy place. He is sitting right in front of me, a mop of graying hair, a fleshy body, a ready smile. He is showing me a movie of the asylum—men beaten by police and dumped half crazy on the streets, addled addicts with seeping ulcerated wounds, women who will never remember what happened to them and never want to remember.

I stare at the ruined faces in the video and ask, “Does your congregation support this work?”

He smiles, points to the crazy people on the screen, and says, “This is my congregation.”

There was a bad storm in the winter of 1998, and El Pastor was driving in Juárez when he saw a mound on the street and swerved just as a man emerged from the pile of snow where he slept. God spoke to him at that moment and so El Pastor rounded up friends and for a day gathered the wounded off the streets—brain-damaged addicts, ruined gang members—everyone left at the mercy of the snows in a city without mercy.

“Oh, they smelled bad,” he says, “covered with shit and all that.”

The office of El Pastor once was a drug house where addicts punctured their veins and savored their dreams. He descended on this place as a street preacher raving in the
calles
. The local priest called him a devil. But he drew others to him. As for the devil, El Pastor fights him daily—he keeps a black and red punching bag near at hand and slams it with his fists as he fights Satan.

Everything about El Pastor is vital and coarse, his language often vulgar, his feel for the crazy people visceral. The world is lucky he gave up the bottle and the drugs and turned toward God.

El Pastor spent sixteen years as an illegal in Los Angeles and learned to be a crane operator, do lots of drugs and alcohol, and earn sixteen dollars an hour. He could be rough on the job—twice he threw men out of buildings and he was not on the first floor. Eventually, he went to prison and then was deported back to Mexico. He became a street addict in Juárez. Then in 1985, he was born again and began preaching on the street to drug addicts. Rough edges remain and keep him honed. On one arm he has a tattoo of a good-looking
mestiza
and on the other, a good-looking Indian woman. Before he went to work in the United States, he hated white people and despised Mexicans who crossed over. But then he married, had children and went to El Norte. And found that this country he disliked fed him and his family and now he says, “I love Mexico, but not the Mexican system.” He has two kids in college in the United States, and one son has served eight years in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Now he must raise ten thousand dollars a month on the radio simply to meet the medical, food, and staff costs of this crazy place he has created.

He gives me the short course in the history of his city.

“The violence is high in Juárez,” he says in a soft voice. “A lot of young people come to Juárez and have the American dream—it is so close. But now the border is closed. People come from the south, they are clean and hard-working and they don’t know anything about the streets. And guys take them in, and soon they are selling their bodies and using drugs. After a year, they have gang tattoos. The capos now sell drugs here where there is a growing market because then they don’t have to cross them into the United States. Now fourteen-year-olds are moving a ton of cocaine.”

I ask if he remembers a patient called Miss Sinaloa.

“Oh, yes,” he says. “She was at an orgy.”

The Casablanca is, of course, white and has many rooms with parking beside each one and metal doors to protect the privacy of the cars and license plates from prying eyes. Men bring women here for sex and love and joy and whatever other terms they prefer. This was Miss Sinaloa’s eventual destination. In front stands Valentino’s, a large nightclub with red-tiled domes, the party haven that also beckoned her.

Miss Sinaloa came here from her Pacific Coast home. For days she was raped by eight policemen. Her buttocks bore the handprints of many men by the time she got to El Pastor, and there were bite marks on her breasts.

She arrives at the crazy place on December 16, 2005, after 5 P.M. The city police bring her out and dump her. They have, they say, had her in jail, but she is too much to handle. She fights and yells and is no fun at all.

She has lost her mind and now she comes to the place of kindred souls.

Everyone is not as lucky as Miss Sinaloa. Heidi Slauquet was very good-looking and made paintings. For years, she was a party girl in Mexico City, and in the early 1990s, she wound up in Juárez. For a while, she had a nightclub where
narco-traficantes
liked to go. For a while, she was a lover of Amado Carrillo. And then when that wore out, she became a kind of hostess and made sure beautiful girls came to the parties, girls like Miss Sinaloa.

On November 29, 1995, she takes a cab to Juárez International Airport. The cabby eventually turns up dead. Heidi never reappears. People at the airport say that Heidi’s cab was stopped by what looked to be federal police.

Nobody talks about them, because silence means everyone can pretend they do not exist. They are on every street, sometimes asleep on the sidewalks or huddled in a doorway. No one knows their real numbers because a real count would slap reality into everyone’s faces. They are the brain-damaged of the city. The mother could not get enough food when she was big with child, or she had bad habits, the booze, glue, paint sniffing, all kinds of habits. Or she managed to deliver a healthy child but then the street finally beckons and the child goes to the glue and the paint or maybe meth claws the brains out. Still, they are there, on every
calle
, legs shortened by hunger, wizened heads from malnutrition, jerky movements from the chemicals, madness in the eyes, and often there are voices, brilliant voices that speak to them even though the rest of us are not privileged enough to hear these voices.

I am on the main avenue, I have just crossed the bridge, and the morning is sunny and bright with promise. She walks up with a shuffling gait, her head rocking as she jabbers. She’s wearing Capri pants, black running shoes, and a knit blouse, and her hair is clean. She has some of her teeth and is coasting somewhere in her thirties. She is a whore and from the looks of her emaciated body I guess heroin or meth, but I don’t know. What I know is this: She is a product of the city, a testament to the cheap drugs and the expendable lives, and her story will never be in the newspaper, nor will she—or the army that wanders the city and is just like her—ever be counted and considered in the studies and essays about life in Juárez.

That is part of my attraction to El Pastor. He gets the rejects of the Mexican health system, of the Mexican jail system, and of Mexican compassion. He also gets the people the U.S. Border Patrol apprehends who are crazy with the damage of life. The agency tosses them back in order not to take care of them. And El Pastor scoops them up and takes them to his crazy place in the desert, and for the first time in years, these people have someone touch them and not cringe.

I look at her and say, no.

She continues weaving and bobbing around me, and then, with a smile, she staggers off to find some other hope of a blow job, a few pesos and a fix in the early morning Juárez light.

But she is everywhere in this city and sometimes she is a woman and sometimes she is a man, and sometimes she is a child, but always she is a casualty of the life of this place. And a hero because simply dealing with the life here and refusing to give in takes courage that is absent among the rich and powerful of this city.

El Pastor is a small lens, and if you look through this lens, you see these invisible people because he is their last and only hope. And he has files, over a thousand files on the invisible people of Juárez.

Here is one.

He goes by a lot of names and one he really likes is Pedro Martinez. He is forty-two when American psychiatrists interview him. The agents have caught him yet again in the United States illegally and then they decide he is a crazy person and so he becomes something for American medicine to explain.

This is not easy. He says he has been in the Kansas State Penitentiary, but a search turns up no records. He says he was evaluated in the county jail in Danville, Kentucky, but these records also cannot be found. He does say this: Five years ago, he was hit on the back of the head and lost consciousness. He had a urinary infection in Florida. He had gonorrhea and injected himself with penicillin. He has also tried things. From age seven, he smoked marijuana for ten years. He has been treated four or five times, he notes, for inhaling thinner. He tried crack cocaine but this only lasted four months. He likes beer and figures he has been an alcoholic since age eleven. Actually, he offers, he lost his license in North Carolina for drunk driving. So he’s been around and really toured these United States.

He was born in Tabasco, Mexico, but was raised in Veracruz. His mom is dead, his dad alive somewhere, and somehow he managed to get through the sixth grade.

Oh, and he is married to a woman from Iran, one he met in prison in Kentucky, and they had several children together. The marriage lasted two years. Here the doctors falter and find his stories from Kentucky hard to follow, something about a guy named Jim Buster and woman known as De Fannie.

He has worked. He has done gardening and manual labor and been out in those fields. He has also worked with growing tobacco.

There have been bumps on his road. In Kentucky, his girlfriend was difficult and so he was convicted of burning down a house. He tries to explain, but the doctors cannot follow the flow of words he spews—something about homosexuality, medical stuff, mental health stuff, small brains. He did a year in Mexico, he says, for selling marijuana. Six times he has been jailed for entering the United States of America. Also, he laughs as he answers the doctors’ questions and they find this inappropriate.

So they decide he is suffering from a psychosis.

But Pedro Martinez insists he is not mentally ill. He is six feet two inches tall and weighs 149 pounds and his body temperature is 96.3.

The doctors notice that he has poor eye contact and sometimes he is hard to hear because he lowers his voice. Also, during one interview he asks the doctor, “Do you hear the voices?” He would turn to a corner of the room and talk to a woman named Peggy, but the doctors noted that they could not see Peggy. Besides that, he has poor grooming.

When he was told he would face a hearing on his mental competency, he said, “The judge, I am the judge.”