The Fight to Save Juárez (10 page)

Following
his meetings in Chihuahua City, Patiño boarded his federal plane and made his way up to Ciudad Juárez. Because the recent assassinations of police officers and the Sinaloa cartel's open threats had created a pervasive sense of alarm throughout the city, a security meeting had been organized that included the city's key business, civic, and religious leaders, in addition to Mayor Reyes Ferriz and Governor José Reyes Baeza. The meeting took place later that same day, at a large, upscale venue called Cibeles, on Tomás Fernández Boulevard, which hosted everything from quinceañera parties and weddings to the annual Ciudad Juárez Press Association Awards Ceremony.

When he stepped up to the podium at the Cibeles meeting, Patiño outlined the federal government's security analysis and strategy for the region. Specifically, he said that in Mexico the emerging war between the drug factions was no longer exclusively to control the border access points to American drug markets, but rather it was increasingly for control of specific neighborhoods, schools, and streets. Patiño said that competition over retail markets was spawning the spiral of violence throughout the country. Patiño also told the civic and religious leaders something that most Mexicans did not understand at the time, namely that gradually, over the course of the last decade, the country had ceased being merely a transit point for drugs and had become a significant consumer of drugs as well. “The cocaine that isn't being sold over there is staying here with us,” Patiño noted, making reference to the United States. He observed that for the first time in Mexican history, cocaine consumption had become a national problem, from large cities to small towns.

This new epidemic of domestic cocaine consumption was the centerpiece of the federal government's analysis of the national crisis. The violence that was emerging on a national scale had as much to do with seizing and controlling retail drug markets as with the traditional efforts to control the border cities that were key access points to the American drug market. Patiño concluded his comments at the Cibeles meeting with the sobering observation that violence had spread to virtually every corner of the country: “No one is exempt from this maelstrom, but you can be certain that it is not a problem that is unique to Chihuahua.” Places where historically it had been rare to find evidence of retail drug sales and violence were now facing those very problems. Even states like Yucatán, Campeche, and Aguascalientes, which had long enjoyed reputations for being among the most peaceful regions of the country, were facing similar challenges. “People in every state are being victimized [by drug crime],” Patiño noted.

One other observation that the federal intelligence officer made at the Cibeles meeting may have gone unnoticed by most in attendance. It had to do with the drug cartels' growing media and public relations sophistication.
Patiño
noted that the cartels were beginning to use production techniques to enhance video material that they were disseminating via the Internet, tactics similar to those being used by insurgents in Iraq. “These videos are being used to sow fear among citizens as well as among the police,” Patiño stated. Although he made no specific reference to it, it is likely that he was thinking, among other incidents, about the Sinaloa cartel's calculated, media-savvy “For those who do not believe” message at the Monument to Fallen Police just two weeks earlier. Virtually every newspaper in the country had given the incident extensive coverage.

Still at the podium, toward the end of his talk, Patiño turned to mayor Reyes Ferriz to pointedly urge him to clean up the Juárez municipal police. Before the assembled audience, Patiño offered to have the federal police administer “Confidence Tests” to the entire force: “If the mayor is in agreement, we need to see how ill the patient is so that we can give him the necessary medicine,” he said. Confidence Tests included drug and psychological testing, polygraphs, and other tests to evaluate the honesty and reliability of police force members.

As Patiño spoke at the podium before the city's business, civic, and religious leaders, it would have been difficult to miss the fact that he was putting pressure on the mayor. The two men did not know one another; Reyes Ferriz had not participated in the Chihuahua City meetings. The situation suggested that the federal authorities were not exactly sure where Reyes Ferriz stood, a circumstance that may have been further accentuated because Reyes Ferriz belonged to the PRI, whereas president Calderón's party was the PAN. There was no ambiguity, however, regarding the audience's response to Patiño's remarks about cleaning up the Juárez police: a thunderous applause erupted from those in attendance. The people of Juárez were fed up with the status quo, and Patiño had touched on something deeply pent-up and charged. Everyone in Juárez knew what was going on within the police force. It was at that precise moment that Patiño chose to invoke the already-infamous Saulo Reyes affair: “We all lived, at a national level, the case of the ex–director of operations who was detained across the river,” Patiño said. “And how is it that we weren't aware? No? So, that's what it's about,” he concluded, referencing the proposal to clean up the police once and for all.

When Patiño returned to the proscenium, he and mayor Reyes Ferriz exchanged some brief words. “I happened to be seated next to Patiño,” the mayor later recalled, making the encounter appear serendipitous. “I asked Patiño to send me some support and he said, ‘I'm going to send you two hundred federal police.'
” The promised reinforcements were nearly a threefold increase over the number of federal police presently in the troubled city, and to Reyes Ferriz the promise of two hundred crack federal police seemed like an entire army.

Patricio
Patiño made many astute observations during his speech in Juárez, and he was effective in outlining the challenges the Mexican state faced in relation to the drug war, but one thing that Patiño did not do publicly, either in his address or in the subsequent press conference, was promise a massive infusion of federal forces. On the contrary, during the press conference following his Cibeles talk, Patiño said that at present he saw no need to increase the current force level of five hundred federal police deployed throughout the state, noting that these forces were primarily engaged in intelligence work to support the state ministerial police and underscoring the strong spirit of collaboration that existed between the federal and the state police forces. While Patiño did indicate that there was a contingency force of two hundred federal police available for mobilization, especially to Ciudad Juárez, for reasons that are unclear he chose not to share with the press the commitment he'd made minutes earlier in his private conversation with the mayor.

While Patiño's speech drew ovations inside the Cibeles hall, outside the apparent reluctance on the part of the federal government to send a meaningful force drew an angry response from the press. One
El Diario
editorial headlined the question: “Who are they trying to hoodwink?” The piece chastised the federal Secretariat for Public Security, and, by implication, its director, Genaro García Luna, for coming into Chihuahua (by sending his emissary, Patricio Patiño) intent on convincing the state's citizens that the appeal for federal help was due to overblown concerns. The editorial also took the federal authorities to task given that, by their own admission, the police forces in the state of Chihuahua were under-equipped, poorly trained, and underpaid, making them vulnerable to corruption. “It's more than established that organized crime has infiltrated the police rank and file as well as their commanders,” the editorial observed, specifically referencing, as a way of underscoring the point, the still-fresh arrest of Saulo Reyes in El Paso. Given this state of affairs, the need for federal forces was obvious.

Patiño appeared to be walking a fine line. What could not be said or acknowledged by the federal representative was that at that moment there were insufficient federal forces to address the emerging crisis in Juárez. Too many other cities were already in the line of fire. It seemed that Patiño had been dispatched to reassure the people of Juárez but was not in a position to deliver substantive assistance beyond the two hundred officers he'd promised the mayor, a force that, technically, was not an increase given that they were already allocated as reserves in the event of a crisis.

One comment Patiño made during the press conference especially incensed
El Diario
. The federal intelligence officer volunteered at one juncture that the state's crime problem was “more perceptual than real,” noting that several other states had higher indices of violence when compared
to
Chihuahua. It was clear that Patiño had gotten tangled up in his own words, and the farther he went to try to explain himself, the deeper he dug himself into a hole. Patiño noted that 73 percent of the crime in the state was robbery, while only 1 percent was assassinations, prompting
El Diario
to editorialize with a big dollop of sarcasm: “So watch out for the thieves, but never mind the
sicarios
!” (the common term for hit men). Since robberies were under the purview of the municipal and state police authorities while organized crime (and, hence, cartel-related executions) fell under the purview of federal authorities, the Patiño statements were taken to mean that the federal government was sidestepping its responsibilities. In the end, Patiño's visit to Juárez failed miserably in its mission to reassure, drawing instead a flood of media criticism.

The federal government appeared to be vacillating. On the one hand, they had taken the very significant step of informing Mayor Reyes Ferriz and, in a separate briefing, Governor Reyes Baeza, that according to their intelligence sources, there was a coming war. On the other hand, they were not mobilizing meaningfully to face the anticipated cartel violence, which was already at the city's doorstep. It appeared that the federal government had yet to fully grasp the full implication of its own warning.

The two hundred federal police started to arrive two days after Patiño left Juárez. For José Reyes Ferriz, that infusion represented a meaningful intervention. The state government, by contrast, continued to put the mayor off, remaining noncommittal and dragging its feet about increasing the number of state ministerial police units in Juárez. One detail from Patiño's press conference seemed stuck in the mayor's craw. He'd learned that on Patiño's second visit a meeting had taken place in Chihuahua City, where the federal intelligence officer had met with the governor, the state attorney general, the head of the state ministerial police, and key state legislators. This was the second time in as many weeks that the mayor had been excluded from key meetings concerning the fate of his city. That fact did not sit well with Reyes Ferriz.

.   .   .

The arrival of two hundred federal police in Juárez in mid-February of 2008 at first seemed to catch the cartels off guard. There was a short-lived dip in the number of executions, as the cartels appeared to be taking a wait-and-see attitude toward this new development. But the respite was brief. Within two weeks that lull had completely evaporated.

José Reyes Ferriz was an avid soccer fan. Sometimes when he had work commitments that overlapped with important matches, his wife called in periodic updates. He also used soccer metaphors when describing important events. For example, he'd once described the momentous election of Vicente Fox to the Mexican presidency in 2000 (the first time a non-PRI
candidate
had won, considered by most Mexicans as the juncture when Mexico began to emerge as a true democracy). “It was as if Mexico had won the World Cup,” he said.

On the 23rd of February, a Saturday afternoon, the mayor was watching a soccer match on television when the broadcast was interrupted. “They cut to a firefight that was taking place on the street right outside of the television station,” he recalled. What viewers saw on their TV screens was
sicarios
firing 50-caliber machine guns at one another in broad daylight on one of the city's main thoroughfares, which was lined with family restaurants chock-full of patrons. At the end of the skirmish, three of the establishments' walls were pocked with bullet holes but, miraculously, no civilians had been injured.

The incident betrayed a chilling indifference to the innocent people who might be caught in the crossfire. The cartels also evinced the kind of battlefield tactics typically associated with disciplined military units: “They left with their people, with their wounded and with their weapons,” the mayor remembered. The cartels were acting as if they owned the city and feared no one. “They even took their wounded to Star Medical hospital,” the mayor added with a tone of incredulity. Whatever the initial deterrence, it was obvious that the cartels were not the least bit intimidated by the newly arrived contingent of federal police.

C
HAPTER 7

La Cima

On a cold winter night, I traveled through neighborhoods on the poor northwest side of town, toward the city center. My route took me through La Cima, Juárez's legendary drug quarter where for decades American soldiers were regular customers. No more. The city's violence had forced American military authorities to declare Juárez off-limits to military personnel. La Cima sits at the top of a rise on the western side of the city, a barrio in the hardcore Altavista neighborhood. Any given evening a slow drive through La Cima (meaning “the top” or “the crest”) offered many an opportunity to buy hits of cocaine or heroin or any other drug. A green pickup truck just ahead of me pulled to an abrupt stop midstreet in front of a house, and a runner delivered a small packet to the car window, drive-in style. The two men in the front seat of a battered, white Dodge van had chosen to pull over. They parked, and a runner appeared at the driver's side window to take the order. Other people simply walked into one or another of the
picaderos
, where they could do their cocaine or heroin—syringes available for the asking—and hang out on the lumpy, moldy, stained mattresses scattered about until they came down enough to go home. No one would bother them. I spotted a young adolescent boy standing on the rooftop of a house on the corner; he was no older than twelve or thirteen. Kids like him were known as “falcons,” or “whistlers,” or “posts,” and they patrolled from the rooftops or other points with panoramic views, where they scanned the streets that ran through the neighborhood and sounded the alert when the army or (non-complicit) police made a pass through the area.