The Fight to Save Juárez (20 page)

Not surprisingly, the local media did not take well to the new arrangement. “The media lives off of police reports,” the mayor noted, not unsympathetically. It seemed that Orduña was hell-bent on creating as much enmity as possible between himself and the press. The media was so incensed at Orduña's unavailability that they took to calling him, with obvious derision, “the pajama chief.” But Orduña was hard as nails, and the thought of making enemies discomforted him not in the least. He worked from his second-floor bunker surrounded by his police officers, most of whom he knew disliked him and most of whom he knew he could not trust. Orduña was at war with his own force and thus alone and unprotected; he was living in the very jaws of the beast. That took nerves of steel. But Orduña had faith in his instincts and the judgments he formed, and on this basis he selected the people from within the municipal police that he believed he could bring into his inner circle to help him carry out the difficult work that lay ahead.

Within days of Orduña's assuming the position of chief, the cartels made their discontent with his selection known in three separate incidents: ten people were found shot execution-style, three of them beheaded. Then a narco-message was left on a bridge with a new list of police officers to be executed. Finally, a police officer's head was found in a plastic bag with a note signed “La Línea”—the officer was apparently one of the ones who had crossed over to the Sinaloa side.

Roberto Orduña's approach to his police was that of a tough drill sergeant. He announced at his first department meeting that he planned to “bring discipline” to the force. “
Señores
,” he told them, “if you don't like the work you have here, the door will be open for whoever does not want to follow the new procedures.” He seemed intent on running the department like a military unit. The “procedures” included an edict that the police shifts would be thirty-six hours on and twelve hours off. It was not well received. It was one thing to give such orders to a group of army conscripts; it was something else to give them to officers who had families. Orduña's order immediately set off protests within the force. A crack tactical group called the Delta Group led the protests, refusing to go on patrol or leave the station until Orduña met with them. The chief refused.

Historically, police officers had eight-hour shifts, but six months earlier, shortly after Guillermo Prieto had become chief, these had been increased to twelve-hour shifts. The proposed thirty-six-hour shift, the officers complained, was unacceptable (it was an effort to extend police coverage in the city). Orduña finally relented after extensive negotiations that included Mayor Reyes Ferriz, who said that there had been a “misunderstanding.” The twelve-hour shift was reinstated, but officers would be required to work
six
days a week. Orduña also issued a stern warning to the malcontents on the force: “I won't tolerate insubordination,” the former army major declared.

Another confrontation between Orduña and his force occurred shortly thereafter when Orduña instructed that officers would no longer be permitted to take their weapons home. Instead, they would have to be turned into the armory at the end of every shift. The practice of allowing police to keep their weapons and bulletproof vests was recent. It had been instituted earlier in the spring when the “For those who do not believe” list had been left at the monument and when a rash of police executions had led the mayor and Chief Prieto to put the police on red alert. The new edict made the police feel vulnerable, given that police executions were still epidemic.

Orduña's weapons edict activated another mini-insurrection within the police department. This time, however, Reyes Ferriz backed Orduña. The rationale given was that the military and federal police were now patrolling the streets and feared an “accidental” armed confrontation between the police and the military. According to the mayor, the agreement he had signed with the federal government stipulated that police would only carry their weapons during the hours they were in service. “The military doesn't want a situation in which they are confronted by people in civilian dress who are carrying weapons,” the mayor explained.

There may have been another agenda at work as well. The so-called Technical Preventive Group, or Delta Group (its name had changed, but its functions and responsibilities remained the same), had been created during the administration of Héctor Murguía, during a time when the former mayor had vowed to “militarize” the police force. The elite, specialized force was deployed in a variety of ways. They were permitted to set up roadblocks when they felt the need, and they oversaw neighborhoods that had been identified as high-crime areas. One of their most important assignments, however, was investigating the city's retail drug markets, which presumably brought them into direct contact with the cartels and the gangs that were working for them, such as Los Aztecas. It was in the performance of these duties that the specialized force was most at risk for cartel corruption and coercion. The new chief suspected the Technical Preventive Group of collusion with the Juárez cartel. Those suspicions were reinforced when a narco-message was left outside of the Technical Preventive Group's administrative offices at 7 a.m. on the morning of May 30. The message listed the names of a dozen members of the group, under the heading “For the ones that are still left.”

Although the names on the new narco-list were all members of the Technical Preventive Group, the message sent waves of terror throughout the entire force. The audacity of the act (someone had walked right up to the building to leave the message) was itself shocking. It also suggested
that
perhaps it was an inside job. Such evidence tended to stir a great deal of paranoia within the police force, given that no one knew whom they could trust.

The entire circumstance further fueled tensions over the directive that police would no longer be allowed to carry their service weapons at the end of their day's tour. Incensed officers called on Orduña to take into account the present level of danger in the city; they asked him to back them up. Some police claimed that the decision was a reprisal for their protests over the thirty-six-hour shift. “We aren't going to disarm ourselves,” a police officer told one of the Juárez newspapers. “There are threats against us and we refuse to relinquish our weapons. . . . No one [on the force] is in agreement with this.” But the only concession the protesting officers garnered was that they would be permitted to wear their bulletproof vests home.

Once again, there was massive unrest within the Juárez municipal police. At all six of the city's command centers officers threatened to strike, and there were work stoppages and slowdowns. Officers reported to the stations but were not going out on patrol; they stopped patrolling the northwest side of the city altogether. Neighborhoods with a disproportionate number of
picaderos
and where a disproportionate number of executions were taking place had no police presence. Some officers took to the police radio frequency to shout, “Strike!” “Strike!” “Strike!” The entire force was threatening to walk out.

But Roberto Orduña stood his ground in the face of the widespread unrest, reiterating his earlier “the door is open for those who wish to leave” statement. The police were on the brink of striking on three different occasions, but each time the protests were cancelled at the last moment. In the end, the officers caved. Orduña won the game of chicken, and the officers went out on patrol, although still “under protest.”

From his bunker, Roberto Orduña set out to clean up the Juárez municipal police and rid it of the corrupt cops. The federal police continued running Orduña's officers through the Confidence Tests, and Orduña was counting on them to help him separate the good cops from the bad.

The army and the federal police were patrolling the city as well, but their distrust of the municipal police was so great that they refused to patrol jointly with them. All the while, the city of Juárez continued tumbling into the abyss. It was an anarchic war zone, and its institutions and social structures, many already taxed and deficient, were fraying rapidly. For the citizenry, ordinary crime had become as demoralizing as the daily tally of cartel executions. Bank robberies hit an all-time high and kidnappings, extortions, and car thefts were rampant. With the police force imploding, it was the army and a small contingent of federal police whose convoys were patrolling the city, while the municipal police presence in the streets was reluctant
and
sputtering at best. But the army knew little about law enforcement; they were trained for armed confrontation and direct engagements, not criminal investigations. The federal forces were also outsiders; they often had a difficult time negotiating the city, whose ad hoc
colonias
and ever-changing street names formed a disorienting urban labyrinth.

Despite their criminal activity, when the police were under the sole control of the Juárez cartel, they had also done real police work, at least the “preventive” police work that was the mandate of the national municipal police forces. There were units that were less compromised, for example, and even those units whose commanders were in the pay of the cartel still carried out functions that were not in conflict with the cartel's needs and desires. In other words, the police still had informants, patrolled, and arrested people. Even at the height of the narco-police, the police had managed to keep something of a lid on garden-variety criminals and day-to-day crime. But with the police now in shambles, there were no controls on criminal activity. This gave urgency to the planned Confidence Tests; they would be the foundation for building a new police force.

The federal police started processing municipal police agents through the Confidence Tests in May. Groups of forty to fifty officers were ordered to present themselves at the large warehouse that the city government had leased for the purpose and converted into the assessment center. It was hoped that the tests would prove effective in ferreting out untrustworthy officers.

.   .   .

In late summer of 2008 the federal police informed the mayor that the results of the Confidence Tests were ready. The mayor and Orduña rounded up the police in each of the six precincts, checked their weapons in, and waited for the federal people, but, according to the mayor, they didn't show. The city's entire force had been mustered amid a great deal of tension and apprehension, but it was all for naught.

In my subsequent conversations with them, the federal police blamed the mayor, suggesting that he had balked, fearing he would be assassinated. Notwithstanding the reality of those fears, they continued, it should have been his duty to fire the officers who were found to be questionable. However, Mayor Reyes Ferriz was unapologetic about leaning on the federal government to do the dirty work. He had every reason to believe that any of his personnel associated with the Confidence Tests would be executed: in an unmistakable signal early in the summer, as the assessments were starting up, the police department's head of personnel, a woman who scheduled officers for their testing dates, had been executed in a brutal assault. Her assassination had shaken the mayor profoundly. It made clear that as far as the Juárez cartel was concerned, every step to clean up the police would
be
taken as a direct attack. Cartel operatives also repeatedly jumped on the police radio frequency, shouting that the mayor would be executed if he fired any police.

From that point on, the mayor made every effort to position the police cleanup in the hands of the federal police, hoping to reduce the likelihood of more assassinations. He flew to Mexico City to meet with Genaro García Luna's people at the Secretariat for Public Safety. “I need you to fire them. I can't put my people in because they will kill them,” he told them. The federal police were equally adamant that firing local police was outside of their jurisdiction. Reyes Ferriz would not budge: “I decided that no one on my staff or within the Juárez municipal police would so much as touch a single piece of paper [related to the Confidence Tests],” Reyes Ferriz later told me. Reyes Ferriz and the federal police were at an impasse.

The tug-of-war between the mayor and the federal police continued for several weeks, with the mayor insistent that the federal police handle the firings and the federal police equally insistent that under federal law they had no jurisdiction over municipal workers and hence could not legally fire them. In the end, Reyes Ferriz broke the impasse by hiring a Mexico City law firm to handle the firings as official representatives of the municipality. In Mexico City, the federal police gave the legal team the test results for the entire Juárez police force, and on October 16, 2008, the team flew to Juárez, where they spent a nervous night at a La Quinta hotel. The next morning, city staff delivered severance packages for every single officer on the force to the attorneys. The intent was to underscore the fact that only the Mexico City people knew the test results indicating who was to be fired and who was to be kept on. The police were simultaneously mustered at each of the city's six precincts, with the team of attorneys distributed accordingly, announcing who had passed the test and giving severance packages to those who had failed. The process was sloppy, tense, and unwieldy, but at the end of that day 334 police officers had been dismissed for not having passed the federal government's Confidence Test. Another 227 police had left the force since January out of fear of being executed or having their cartel alliances discovered, and a score had been assassinated.

Since spring, the police radio frequency had been in constant use by the narcos. These were analog radios, and anyone could purchase the requisite technology at a Radio Shack for a few hundred dollars. Thus, in addition to the police, the narcos and Juárez journalists could listen to the police frequency, and the narcos themselves also sometimes communicated on the frequency. At first, every time a police officer was assassinated, the narcos would play a
narcocorrido
on the frequency, all the while mocking the victim and threatening others. The Sinaloa and Juárez cartels had their respective
narcocorridos
, making it easy to know which cartel had carried out the
execution.
Into the summer, the cartels had taken to playing their
narcocorridos
prior to executions, sowing panic within the police force. There had been many threats against José Reyes Ferriz on the police frequency that spring, but the Confidence Tests took them to a new level. “You'd better watch your boss!” the narcos would shout onto the radio waves, referring to the mayor. “Throughout the day I fired the police I kept asking my bodyguards, ‘How are the radios doing?'
” Reyes Ferriz would later tell me. There had been a flurry of threats all day. “It was no game,” the mayor said. “We knew it was dangerous.”