The Fight to Save Juárez (22 page)

Every night at the end of the rosary there was a reflection on one of the five Glorious Mysteries. Tonight it was the Resurrection: “The risen Jesus has proved that man, together with Him, can have power over sin and therefore death . . .” The woman read; we listened. The reflection changed the tone in the room as it became silent save for her reading. But the silence was broken by restless children and by barking dogs out in the street as well as people shifting in their chairs, all of which brought relief from the lingering hypnotic echoes of the chanted rosary. I found it to be an intense experience.

My mind drifted from the reading of the reflection. If for every execution in Juárez a family did a novena, I thought to myself, that would mean that already thousands of rosaries had been chanted in rooms like this one all over the city. And the cartel war was little more than a year old.

.   .   .

The Juárez journalists were an embattled group. They suffered the typical professional rivalries and jealousies, but conflicting pressures also tore at them. On the one hand they had their journalistic ideals and commitments, on the other the brutal reality of intimidation and possible assassination. All knew that there was a line they could not cross in their work, but its location shifted on the whims of the cartels, making it an unreliable reference point. The federal authorities were not enamored of the media, either. Antagonizing them could mean confiscation of equipment, a beating, or arrest. Adding to the volatile mix was the fact that some of the local journalists worked for newspapers that were said to receive subsidies from the Juárez cartel.

As a photographer, Raymundo Ruiz was constantly factoring in details about crime scenes, assessing what was fair game and what was not. He
knew
, for example, that he had to be especially careful when photographing individuals on the periphery of an execution: they might well be the people who had carried out the killing or their allies. Ruiz had received death threats when cartel operatives had inadvertently appeared in the background at crime scenes that Ruiz had photographed. The rule of thumb for journalists was simple enough: the cartels allowed you to report the facts on the ground, what was in plain view for all to see. However, the cartels did not tolerate journalists naming them or their people, much less doing anything that smacked of investigative journalism. “What's on the street is fair game, but anytime you venture beyond that you run great risks,” one Juárez journalist told me. “It's suicide.” Some newspapers just used the byline “Staff” for drug-war related stories as an added measure of protection. Failing to take such precautions was a recipe for assassination, and there were plenty of Mexican journalists (almost thirty in the prior three years) who were now dead because they had not toed that line, or because they had been unsure as to just where the line was.

Raymundo Ruiz, Juárez photojournalist. Photo copyright © Ricardo Ainslie.

There was a new problem complicating Raymundo Ruiz's efforts to earn his livelihood: the
sicarios
had taken to circling back to crime scenes to make sure that their victims were dead. In the process, they were shooting witnesses they encountered and had even taken to killing ambulance workers who arrived while the
sicarios
were still there. Ruiz had been forced to factor
this
variable into his work habits. He now feared that if he arrived at a crime scene too soon, he might be added to the tally of the dead. If he delayed too long, however, he'd be unable to get the images that sold.

.   .   .

Armando Rodríguez was one of the Juárez journalists who were always thinking about that line, about what was fair game versus what the cartels might deem to be excessive coverage of their activities. Rodríguez was a crime-beat writer for
El Diario
, arguably the city's best newspaper (he'd authored the piece that had appeared on January 1, 2008, noting the record-breaking tally of the dead for 2007). Rodríguez was a prominent member of the Juárez Journalists Association who over the prior fifteen years had earned numerous awards for his coverage, which had included hard-hitting articles about the 1990s femicides. That fact may have had Rodríguez in a higher-than-usual state of alert. In early November, one of the cartels had decapitated a man (he was yet to be identified) and hung his headless body from the Rotary Club Bridge such that morning commuters, including parents driving their children to school, were terrorized by the ghoulish image. A few hours later, someone placed the victim's severed head in a black plastic bag and left it at a statue of a newspaper boy in Juárez's Plaza of the Reporter, across the street from a hull of a building that had once been home to a movie theater. The inescapable conclusion was that the incident was a message to the local press corps, but the precise meaning of the message had been the subject of much speculation in the days since the gruesome discovery. Armando Rodríguez, who went by the nickname “El Choco” (as in “the chocolate,” because of his dark complexion), covered the story for
El Diario
.

A week later, on the morning of November 13, Rodríguez and his eight-year-old daughter left their house in a middle-class Juárez neighborhood. Rodríguez was taking her to school in the family's white Nissan, a perk from his job at the newspaper, before heading to work at
El Diario
. Just as he was about to turn the ignition key, a man walked up to his car and pumped a hail of bullets into him, killing him on the spot. Though physically unscathed, Rodríguez's daughter was left with the horror of seeing her dead father's bullet-ridden body slumped over the steering wheel. Armando Rodríguez died instantly, and in the time it took for his wife to make it out the door and to the car, the gunman had already slipped into a waiting vehicle and left the scene.

Like virtually all of the killers in this city, Armando Rodríguez's executioner would most likely never be brought to justice. To further ensure their impunity and perhaps also to make a point, Rodríguez's killers subsequently assassinated the special prosecutor sent to Juárez to investigate his murder. Not long thereafter, when a new prosecutor was sent to replace the first
prosecutor
, he, too, was assassinated in short order. If a society requires functioning courts and judicial processes to operate, in Juárez and the state of Chihuahua, as in much of the rest of Mexico, the system was completely dysfunctional, rendered inert and ineffective sometimes because of fear and intimidation and other times by a mix of corruption and contorted, incoherent practices that rendered the judiciary a useless, pathetic shell. As evidenced by the fate of the two prosecutors, the cartels were much more efficient than the authorities when it came to meting out their perverse justice. Unlike Mexico's judicial system, almost everyone who crossed the cartels' line was executed.

.   .   .

Like most people in public office, José Reyes Ferriz had an ambivalent relationship with the media, but there was also a warm place in his heart for them. He knew well the challenges they faced because his paternal grandfather had been the owner and editor of
La Voz de Chihuahua
, one of the state's most important newspapers at the time of the Mexican Revolution. Because the newspaper supported Pancho Villa, Porfirio Díaz, the dictator who ruled Mexico at the time, had persecuted Reyes Ferriz's grandfather, who was forced to flee to exile in San Antonio, Texas. When he returned he became a state deputy and later the mayor of the small town of Aldama, Chihuahua.

When the young José's family visited Chihuahua City from Juárez, he enjoyed walking into the room at his grandparents' home where the old issues of
La Voz de Chihuahua
were archived. There, he especially delighted in the accounts of all that was taking place at the time of the Revolution, and he followed closely the events that had led to his grandfather's exile, stories that had also become family lore. There was no way for the young José to know, of course, that his own life would eventually be enveloped in a similar spasm of violence, a spasm that could destabilize not just Juárez and Chihuahua, but the whole nation.

.   .   .

Such was the level of fear among the Juárez journalists that in the aftermath of the Armando Rodríguez murder, Raymundo Ruiz had taken to wearing a bulletproof vest whenever he was out on assignment. But that did not last long—it was impractical for a photographer trying to manage multiple cameras and a backpack full of lenses and his laptop. After a few weeks, the bulletproof vest ended up a permanent fixture in the trunk of his car, its presence still reassuring.

Raymundo Ruiz and I sometimes spent a great deal of time together; when I didn't have interviews scheduled, I liked to tag along on whatever assignment he was working. It gave me a window into the life of the city, as we covered everything from flood-control strategies, to children's theme
park
renovations, to school problems, to unpaved streets, and, of course, executions. Ruiz's natural inclination was to be a bit taciturn. I had learned not to ask him anything about La Línea or the Juárez cartel, for example. This was our unspoken agreement, as if to say, “Ask me anything about the city, but don't ask me about La Línea because I prefer to stay alive.” I understood Ruiz's position and I respected it.

“It's dangerous to know too much,” he would tell me. It was part simple statement of fact, part warning. In this city, that axiom was a survival strategy. I didn't make a visit to Juárez without Ruiz giving me some version of the survival axiom, quaint Spanish sayings that translate, roughly, to the following: “Flies don't enter a closed mouth.” Or, “Playing stupid is better than playing dead.” I had to go elsewhere to learn about the parts of the city's life that were off-limits with Ruiz.

.   .   .

Around the time of the Armando Rodríguez assassination, a tragic event in Mexico City dealt a blow to the federal government's efforts against the drug cartels. A small jet had fallen from the sky, jerking and corkscrewing like a lightning-struck bird. The aircraft plunged into the Mexico City commuter traffic that was jammed and tangled all along Paseo de la Reforma and then exploded into a brilliant ball of flames. Aboard the Lear 45 on that November evening in 2008 were two of Mexico's most important men. Juan Camilo Mouriño was only thirty-seven, but his star was already shining bright: he was the secretary of the interior, one of the central players in President Felipe Calderón's government. Mouriño had made numerous trips to Ciudad Juárez to meet with Mayor Reyes Ferriz and to help strategize the government's response to the Juárez violence. Santiago Vasconcelos was also aboard the jet. Vasconcelos was the head of the division of the Procuraduría General de la República, the federal attorney general's office, whose job it was to bring down the drug cartels. Like Mouriño, Vasconcelos was one of Calderón's most important strategists. Both men had also worked closely with Genaro García Luna, the director of the Secretariat for Public Security. In a matter of seconds, two key players in Mexico's war against the cartels had been incinerated beyond recognition in a molten pyre of metal, glass, and rubber, along with four aides and the plane's crew.

There was immediate and widespread speculation that the crash was no accident, as the authorities asserted, but rather retaliation by one or another of the cartels for the role that these two men were playing in the government's war against organized crime. The Mexican government was forced to take the unusual step of bringing in American aeronautical specialists to investigate the crash, hoping that such a step would quell the rumors, but the conspiracy theories continued unabated.

.   .   .

As
Christmas of 2008 approached, crime in Juárez continued to metastasize. It was no longer possible to know what criminal act was tied to the cartels and their gangs and what acts were simply a function of the fact that criminals throughout the city were seizing targets of opportunity in a context in which the police department, whose recruitment of new officers was going slowly, remained broken and fractured. Every week there was a new wrinkle. In late November and early December, schools became the targets. In Mexico the tradition is to pay employees an
aguinaldo
, or an end-of-year holiday bonus. Criminals had begun threatening to execute teachers or their students and families if the teachers did not hand over their bonuses. At one school, seven bodies were dumped on a soccer field before dawn. The victims had been beaten, choked, and shot. The threats and resultant anxieties reached such a pitch that the city ordered schools to close days before the scheduled break. Juárez was living in the grip of terror.

As the one-year anniversary of his Christmas warning of an impending cartel war neared, José Reyes Ferriz could not help but be struck by the cards he'd been dealt. There were no models from which to draw to understand what he was facing. The city was slipping from his fingers; he could feel it. His police department was an intractable problem. There had been work stoppages, massive firings, and fifty of his officers had been killed over the course of the year. Crime was out of control, and the number of cartel-related assassinations had risen from 301 victims in 2007 to almost 1,500 (Juárez would end 2008 with a staggering 1,623 executions). There were other significant problems as well. The city's tax base was rapidly evaporating. The violence was causing record business closures, with owners and employees alike fleeing across the border into El Paso or to other cities in Mexico; tourism, once an integral part of the city's economy, was now nonexistent. Reyes Ferriz had long championed the North American Free Trade Agreement, believing that expanding the assembly plants was vital to creating needed jobs and that the future of the city and the solution to its problems lay there. But the American recession, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, was already having a profound impact on the Juárez economy. Half of the assembly plant jobs in the city were tied to the U.S. auto industry, an industry on the verge of bankruptcy. Reyes Ferriz also worried that the violence would lead parent companies to move their assembly plants elsewhere. The plants represented a relatively small investment on the part of the companies in terms of equipment and infrastructure. Any of them could pull up stakes and move to China or elsewhere at a moment's notice. Between the cartel war, the crime wave, and the economic crisis, the mayor's back was to the wall. “This was like a perfect storm,” Reyes Ferriz would later tell me. Every one of these problems was deep and consequential and none of them had obvious, much less easy, solutions.