The Fight to Save Juárez (28 page)

Reyes Ferriz had succeeded in outflanking his adversaries within his party and garnered the nomination for mayor. But the animosities remained. There was no love lost between José Reyes Ferriz and Víctor Valencia.

.   .   .

I had read many newspaper accounts over the course of researching Juárez, and during my first interview with José Reyes Ferriz, I, too, remarked that it was my understanding that he was living in El Paso due to concerns for his own and his family's personal safety. The mayor's reaction was immediate: “I must correct you,” he responded, politely but firmly. “I do not live in El Paso. My wife and children stay in El Paso because we have been the object of many death threats. But I live in Ciudad Juárez. I live in
this
city, not over there,” he said definitively, gesturing toward the north-facing window behind his desk with a view of the Rio Grande and downtown El Paso. I was surprised by the mayor's correction, and not altogether convinced of it given that the contrary view was common currency in the local, national, and international media.

Across the street from my hotel, the Lucerna, was a Sanborns restaurant. One evening not long after that first interview with the mayor, I joined a group of Juárez journalists who were decompressing from a day's work over a few beers. The discussion was lively and far ranging. At one point the conversation drifted to the mayor, with whom the journalists did not seem to be particularly enamored. They were aware of the fact that I'd interviewed him and asked me what he had to say about what was taking place in Juárez. I volunteered at one point that the mayor had told me that he did not live in El Paso, as had been so frequently reported in the media. “He says he lives in Juárez,” I told them. The journalists were emphatic: “He lives in El Paso!” they asserted.

The
mayor had been so adamant about living in Juárez, however, that I pressed the journalists. “Why don't you investigate it?” I asked. “It would be easy enough to do, you know where he works; you could trail him.”

That suggestion drew protests. “We might be killed,” one of them volunteered. No one was interested in pursuing the question of the mayor's domicile, even as they strenuously upheld the common view that he lived across the river.

Some months later, on a Saturday afternoon, I was interviewing the mayor again in his offices. He seemed to feel beleaguered. Despite his efforts, he had yet to succeed in dampening the rate of the killings or other crime in Juárez. He knew the city was growing restive about the situation, and he threw in the press's insistence on the notion that he actually lived in El Paso as a reproach against the media. In response, I suggested that perhaps he could show me where he lived in Juárez and, to my surprise, he readily agreed. Within minutes we were headed out of his office.

The convoy exited the Presidencia Municipal and roared down the border thruway until we turned right onto a boulevard off of which were a series of relatively new housing developments. One bore a large stone marker that said Bosques de Aragón; fifty yards past the marker we pulled up to a gated community. The security detail deployed to strategic spots as the gate opened slowly and we passed through. Once inside, we came to a stop in front of what Reyes Ferriz said was his house.

The gated community was nice but not ostentatious; the homes were arrayed around a central, expansive lawn, at one end of which was a well-worn children's playscape. The mayor exited the Suburban and made his way over to greet some neighbors clustered near the playscape, their children entertaining themselves on the swings and slides.

Next we headed inside the house, where the mayor gave me a tour. There was a living room/dining room area partitioned by an iron railing. In the living room were family pictures of his wife and children. The decorations were modest, some appearing to be gifts he had received over the course of his term in office, but there were also paintings and other artwork on the walls. In the kitchen the mayor offered me something to drink. I noticed that the refrigerator held food, the condiments shelf was full, and there was a case of water bottles and a six-pack of Dos Equis beer. On the kitchen counter, next to a toaster, I spotted half-consumed bottles of DayQuil and NyQuil, which suggested that the mayor had been battling a cold. Also on the counter I spotted two letters addressed to him at this address: one from a bank and the other from his telephone service.

The landing at the foot of the stairway took me by surprise. An enormous steel door, like one would find at a bank vault, was used to seal off access to the stairway. It was easily one inch thick. “I close this when I go upstairs for
the
night,” the mayor said, adding that this door and one upstairs had been installed following a rash of death threats against him when he'd fired the police after the Confidence Tests in the fall of 2008.

Upstairs, there were several bedrooms and a workout area. The master bedroom was somewhat in disarray. One of the nightstands had a stack of DVD movies as well as books and what appeared to be an assortment of medications. There was also a handheld electronic device with an LCD screen and numerous security cameras that Reyes Ferriz could control with the device. “I can see what's going on downstairs with this,” he explained. To illustrate, he changed stations. The door to the house came into view on the LCD screen, then the living room, then the landing by the stairs. Standing in front of the only bedroom window was a three-quarter-inch steel plate that spanned the length of the window. “When the death threats against me intensified, we installed this in order to prevent a sniper from shooting through the window,” he said matter-of-factly. Finally, the mayor showed me his “panic room.” It was actually a large master closet with rows of suits, shirts, and trousers, and shoes haphazardly arrayed on the floor. “I've got food and water in here,” he told me. “I've also got a weapon in case of an emergency,” he said, referring to the AR-15 that he had begun keeping when he'd fortified the house. The panic room had an enormous vault-like steel door, like the one that sealed off the stairway downstairs. The house had the unmistakable feel of a bunker.

José Reyes Ferriz's residence was more like a professional person's bachelor pad than the home of the mayor of an important city. But all indications were that he lived here, at least during the week, visiting his wife and children on weekends, as commitments permitted. It was evident that in the steady chorus of “He lives over there,” the mayor felt maligned.

I asked him why he hadn't brought other people here. “In Juárez it's dangerous to talk openly about death threats,” he answered. “It is easy for the cartels to take that as an act of defiance, as a challenge to them. That can make them feel that they
have
to take you out. It has not been worthwhile for me to do that. People can think what they want. I know the truth.”

Notes

1
. A skeleton force of municipal police had been retained.

2
. Héctor Murguía owned a home in El Paso as well, but his “residency” was never an issue in his campaign.

C
HAPTER 20

Addicts

Juárez was awash in drugs and addicts (150,000 of them by one official count).
¹
Drugs were being sold all over the city—on street corners, in parks, in bars, even from street vendors' push carts, which ostensibly sold tamales or steamed sweet potatoes but whose owners made their real profit selling drugs. As a result, drug addiction had metastasized. The explosion of
picaderos
was paralleled, if not exactly matched, by an increase in the number of treatment centers catering to strung-out addicts seeking help; they had sprung up everywhere, most supported by churches and nonprofits, others by government programs.

Casa Aliviane, the Center for Attention to the Health of Addicts, was on Uranio Street in Norponiente, just a short walk south of the Rio Grande and within sight of downtown El Paso. The center was not difficult to find: the entrance to the building, which had once been a private residence, had a distinctive arabesque-shaped narrow doorway, as if one were entering a set from
1001 Arabian Nights
. The exterior was painted bright pink and purple, its barred windows outlined in bold burgundy stripes. A short, red-tiled ledge sheltered the entryway, and above it “Casa Aliviane, A.C.” was painted in large red and orange block letters. The center had multiple rooms that served as dormitories, as well as a kitchen and dining room area, an office space, classrooms, and a space that served as a large meeting room. Twenty addicts were living at the center. Some of them had day jobs, returning in the evenings for dinner, prayer, and the group classes and meetings that were part of their recovery program. Others spent the day at Casa Aliviane, performing a variety of jobs that kept the center going.

The staff at Casa Aliviane knew that theirs was dangerous work. The men who walked through their doors were not only strung out, many also had complex ties to Juárez's drug world, which was rife with gang warfare and killings. Not all of the clientele were there in good faith. The staff at the treatment centers often worked in fear that gang members had infiltrated the centers and were living among the addicts who were genuinely trying to work their recovery programs. For example, gang members who were on a rival gang's hit list sometimes sought refuge in the rehabilitation centers,
masquerading
as addicts seeking treatment, when in fact they were merely trying to hide out until the heat was past. And as often as not, the pushers themselves were addicts. By virtue of their gang affiliation, the pusher-addicts retained their predatory edge within the rehabilitation centers. It gave them power; they represented an ever-present threat of violence. Ordinary addicts feared them. Thus, within the rehabilitation centers there was often a great deal of tension.

The addicts were part of a chain of realities that could be traced back to the cartels and the vicious battles taking place between their proxy gangs for control of the retail drug markets. Each rehab center had its own place within the ecology of the Juárez drug world. Pushers and addicts had alliances or arrangements with specific gangs by virtue of where they lived and the source of their drugs. If you were an addict living in a twenty-block area in Bellavista that was controlled by Los Aztecas, then you purchased your drugs from one of their pushers. You were living out your addiction within a Los Aztecas–controlled universe, but rival gangs (from a few blocks over, or perhaps even from the same neighborhood) were constantly trying to move into this piece of turf to push their own product on the neighborhood's residents. Each of the substantive players in this game pressed people into service. Upcoming wannabes had to prove their mettle by pushing drugs and were sometimes forced to test rivals' terrain. They also shared responsibility for identifying the incursions of rival gangs into their part of the
colonia
. All of this created flux and tension between gangs and within neighborhoods, and addicts were caught in between. It was a combustible mix that was producing many of the Juárez dead.

The fratricidal hatreds between the Juárez street gangs ran so deep that treatment centers could not cater to addicts from rival gangs. In the natural course of things and not by design, there was an informal sorting of the centers. As often as not, specific centers became associated with particular gangs and the addicts that they served.

.   .   .

The
sicarios
arrived at Casa Aliviane on the night of September 2, just as the evening prayers had begun. They wore ski masks and brandished assault weapons. There were eight in all, and they broke down the door and moved briskly, in single file, through the narrow arabesque entryway and into the hallway, where they encountered the first residents. They eventually rounded up twenty men, whom they lined up and forced to their knees before shooting. All told, seventeen people were executed that night at Casa Aliviane. Sixteen were found dead in the interior hallway amid pools of blood and another died later that night at a nearby hospital (the remaining three were gravely wounded). One of the treatment center's two pit bulls, ostensibly there to protect the facilities, had also been gunned down. The other dog, later found cowering in the courtyard, was spared for some reason.

The
Casa Aliviane killing was the third such attack on a drug treatment center in Juárez in recent months. It was also the biggest massacre on record for a city that had already witnessed more than its share of violence.

.   .   .

An operative of the Juárez cartel from the Amado Carrillo Fuentes days during the 1990s
²
told me that at that time the culture within the cartel dictated that few of them used cocaine. People who violated that ethos were demoted and pushed to the margins, and if they persisted and their substance abuse interfered with their duties, they were executed. A decade later that ethos had all but disappeared. In fact, cocaine use had become extensive. In April 2010, state ministerial police intelligence video cameras caught a ninety-minute narco-takeover of Creel, Chihuahua, a small town on the edge of the Copper Canyon. The raid involved a dozen SUVs and a score of
sicarios
. At the beginning of the raid the
sicarios
, assault weapons in tow, are clearly visible coming up to a capo's car—a man subsequently identified as Jesús Ernesto Chávez Castillo, an important Juárez cartel operative—and reaching through the car window into the bag of cocaine in Castillo's hand before heading off to assassinate their targets. (In the course of the massacre fifteen people were killed, and yet, even as a state police agent in the Command and Control Center tracked the commando group's actions, zooming in and out, there was no response by the state police. It clarified what everyone in Chihuahua already knew: the Juárez cartel ran the state ministerial police.)