The Fight to Save Juárez (3 page)

The window at which the mayor stood faced south and spanned nearly the entire length of the wall. Outside and below lay the city of Juárez. The more proximate buildings were readily discernible, but beyond them, in the desert night, the city was aglitter with twinkling lights, like so many diamonds cast upon a sheet of black velvet. Upon assuming office a few months earlier, Reyes Ferriz had instructed his people to remove the blinds and the wood panels that divided the window into sections. He wanted to optimize the view, and the vantage from this particular window was already the mayor's favorite. He loved the view, but it was also the light; he loved natural light.

The federal government's intelligence operative arrived shortly, escorted into the office by the mayor's bodyguard, who left them to talk in private. Reyes Ferriz greeted him at the door, next to the larger-than-life print of Benito Juárez, Mexico's revered first president (following the reign of Maximilian in 1867). The two men sat down in the chairs and couch that formed a small seating area at this end of the office, under Juárez's watchful eye. (During Mexico's war against French intervention, Benito Juárez had taken
refuge
from the French forces in what was then a remote hamlet called El Paso del Norte; Juárez's stay during that turbulent time eventually gave the city its name).

“What's going on?” Reyes Ferriz asked. It was evident that the intelligence officer had something pressing on his mind.

“Mayor,” the federal officer said, “I have some disconcerting news.” The agent proceeded to describe new intelligence indicating that in all likelihood a bloody war was about to erupt in Ciudad Juárez between the Sinaloa cartel and the Juárez cartel. “It will happen sometime this coming month,” he said. He couldn't be more specific.

A corporate attorney by training with a master's degree from Notre Dame in international law with a specialization in international business, José Reyes Ferriz had only been in office since October. There was little in the mayor's curriculum vitae or in his appearance that would suggest him as a likely candidate to face off with the most violent cartels in the history of Mexico or cast him in the role of the would-be savior of Juárez. In addition to his law practice, he also held a part-time appointment teaching law at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, arguably the best university in the city, something he'd done for years (he had decided to keep his classes notwithstanding his new responsibilities). A man of modest stature with a mild-mannered style and a jowly, rather cherubic face framed by wire-rimmed glasses, the forty-six-year-old mayor did not look the part of a border city politician, certainly not in the old-school Mexican sense of the role. His speeches were rarely strident, and some might even have described him as soft-spoken. The affable mayor dressed conventionally—blue or charcoal-gray suits, pressed white shirts with cufflinks, and muted primary-colored ties, his feet typically ensconced in loafers. None of it added up to the challenges that lay in store for José Reyes Ferriz and his city. Had he known, Reyes Ferriz might well have passed on the opportunity to run for mayor of Juárez. State and local politics were flush with intrigue, and there was no shortage of cutthroats and backstabbers, but being at the epicenter of his country's war against the drug cartels was another matter.

The intelligence officer's report pointed to something ominous looming on the horizon, adding a new dimension to the mayor's worries. Reyes Ferriz was not one given to overreaction, but alone again in his office, staring out upon the flickering lights of his city, the mayor felt a sense of foreboding.

.   .   .

José Reyes Ferriz had been elected on a platform that included cleaning up the city through a program he called the Municipal Accord of Order and Respect (AMOR, or “love” by its Spanish acronym). Reyes Ferriz planned to put an end to the proliferation of cars without registrations and license plates and address criminal impunity by shoring up the district attorney's procedures, among other things. One could safely say that the program's
vision
fell short of the earth shattering. In addition, however, the mayor had ambitious economic goals for the city. He wanted to increase its importance as a financial hub for business between the United States and Mexico. Mexico was already the United States' third-most important trading partner, but most of that trade centered on the maquiladora assembly plants along the border or the big Mexican companies like Bimbo and the Moctezuma Brewery. “Midlevel and smaller companies didn't know how to interact with U.S. markets,” the mayor told me. He felt that the Juárez business community's expertise could make the city a key player in helping these midlevel companies find a home for their products in the U.S. Another initiative of interest to the newly elected mayor was medical tourism. “We have great hospitals in Juárez,” he told me. “And the U.S. has a medical crisis.”

Whatever its merit, the mayor soon discovered that his agenda for the city was easily derailed by unforeseen events. For example, a wave of car thefts in Juárez had produced this odd fact: the cars were turning up again, abandoned on the street, days or sometimes only hours after they had been stolen. The mayor and his police chief concluded that the cartels were using the stolen cars to ferry drugs across the river before driving them back and abandoning them. To disrupt these operations, the mayor decided that he would provide American customs officials with car descriptions and VIN numbers of stolen vehicles as soon as these were reported. Reyes Ferriz announced the new program one morning at 11 a.m.; that afternoon, while the mayor was at his private law office, one of his bodyguards rushed in to tell him that armed men had surrounded the building. When Reyes Ferriz peeled the curtain back to peer out he saw two Suburbans and a dozen or so men with assault rifles forming a perimeter around the office. With only four bodyguards, the mayor's security team was no match in either number or firepower: the mayor's men were armed only with pistols. “It was a clear threat,” the mayor would later tell me. The Juárez cartel was letting the novice mayor know that there was a cost to interfering with their operations. He'd only been in office a month. “It was my initiation,” Reyes Ferriz noted. The mayor increased his personal security team to six and arranged for them to be trained in the use of automatic weapons.

Not long thereafter, a series of mutinies occurred at the Juárez city prison, known as the CERESO (the Spanish acronym for Social Rehabilitation Center, as Mexican prisons are called). A local gang called Los Aztecas took over the prison and systematically killed rival gang members. Video footage from security cameras caught the bloodletting on tape and order was difficult to restore at the prison, where Los Aztecas were armed with automatic weapons that someone had smuggled in to them. The authorities conducted a systematic search after regaining control of the prison, but the weapons were never found. The incident underscored the extent to which gangs held sway in the Juárez prison.

While
José Reyes Ferriz may have had plans for his city, others clearly had their own agendas. There were powerful forces at work in Juárez, and Reyes Ferriz's “initiation” was but the sparest of gestures intimating what lay ahead.

.   .   .

From his bunker at the Secretariat for Public Security on Avenida Constituyentes in Mexico City, Genaro García Luna, Mexico's top law enforcement official, had a vantage that was different from that of Reyes Ferriz. Since Felipe Calderón had assumed the presidency and declared war on the drug cartels in December 2006, García Luna had been a busy man. He was a key player in the president's security cabinet, and his federal police
¹
were second in importance only to the Mexican Army in the now-declared war. Over the course of that first year other regions in Mexico had occupied García Luna's attention. For example, there was open warfare between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels for control of Nuevo Laredo, across the river from Laredo, Texas. The violence in Nuevo Laredo had included many deaths, an ambush by municipal police on a column of federal police as it was arriving in the city, the execution of the Nuevo Laredo police chief within hours of his installation, and an assault on the offices of the city's main newspaper in which cartel hit men had thrown hand grenades and sprayed the newsroom with AK-47 fire. Nuevo Laredo was a major commercial hub between Mexico and the United States and thousands of commercial trucks crossed the border there every day. The Mexican government had been attempting to tamp down the violence in Nuevo Laredo, but the battle between the two cartels was raging full force.

And there were other hotspots in Mexico that were demanding García Luna's attention. In Michoacán, an important transit point for Colombian cocaine into Mexico, a new cartel had formed and was now at war with the Gulf cartel and its military wing, a group of former elite military troops who had defected over to the dark side and were known as Los Zetas. Michoacán was producing almost daily headlines in the national press because La Familia, as the new cartel was called, had taken to severing the heads of its victims and putting them on display. In the highlands town of Tepalcatepec, in August 2007, a note was pinned to one such head with the following message: “See. Hear. Shut up. If you want to stay alive.” In another incident, in Uruapan, they had rolled the heads of five victims onto the dance floor at a nightclub. Such tactics had a kind of shock-and-awe effect and were spreading fear throughout the country. Similarly, a rift between the Sinaloa cartel and the Tijuana cartel was leaving a trail of blood and horrific acts of violence in Baja California, where hundreds had died. And there were other states in Mexico where grisly executions were taking place on a daily basis.

These
battle zones were getting all the media attention and absorbing a great deal of García Luna's time. Ciudad Juárez remained far down on the list of priorities or concerns. American intelligence was not picking up much on Juárez, either. The Congressional Research Service's February 2008 report to Congress merely described the Juárez cartel as one of the four most important Drug Trafficking Organizations operating in Mexico and mentioned, almost in passing, that the Juárez cartel “may no longer be tied to the Federation due to murders committed by another Federation member” (the Federation was the name given to the Pax Mafiosa that had held Mexico's main cartels in a tenuous peace since 2006). That clause was the only reference in the CRS report that suggested that things between the Juárez and the Sinaloa cartels might be taking a different turn.

To be sure, there were rumblings. García Luna's people were picking up reports about Ciudad Juárez through the network of federal intelligence sources and what he heard worried him. He knew that in 2004 the Sinaloa cartel had executed Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, the brother of the head of the Juárez cartel, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. An enraged Vicente Carrillo Fuentes had purportedly put in a call to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a long-standing ally of both Vicente Carrillo Fuentes and of El Chapo Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. Zambada was also a member of the so-called Federation to which the CRS report had made reference. “Are you with me?” Carrillo Fuentes is said to have asked. Zambada said he was. “Then I want you to deliver the head of that son of a bitch!” Carrillo Fuentes said, in reference to El Chapo Guzmán. But the head never came, and later El Chapo's son, Edgar Guzmán, was assassinated in a hail of AK-47 fire when Juárez cartel operatives ambushed him in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. This was the assassination to which the CRS was referring in its report.

Squabbles and conflicts between the cartels were nothing new. It was in the nature of their business. The tit-for-tat aggressions between the Sinaloa and Juárez people had been going on for a while, but these flare-ups had a way of being short-lived, after which the cartels went back to their day-today work. At the same time, García Luna was keenly aware that in the world of the drug cartels incidents like these also did not simply disappear from the institutional memories. They remained part of the backdrop to what went on between them, pools of resentment and discontent that could be tapped and which could burst into the open like molten lava when triggered by a new incident or by shifting allegiances within the cartel world. What was surprising was that such resentments could be sealed over at all, given that what most often fueled them were the assassinations of blood relatives, close friends, or long-standing associates.

By December 2007, the Gulf cartel had succeeded in beating back the
Sinaloa
cartel's attempt to seize control of Nuevo Laredo. As a result, the Sinaloa cartel had turned its sights on Ciudad Juárez. García Luna knew that the Sinaloa cartel was preparing to make its move. The intelligence suggested that war had been declared, although in Juárez a relative calm reigned, like the still waters that precede the arrival of the hurricane. It was a war that was partly fueled by revenge, but it was also mobilized by greed: the Sinaloa cartel believed that the Juárez cartel had become weakened because of rivalries and internecine conflict, and it saw in this weakness an opportunity to move on what all of the cartels knew to be prime real estate—the city of Juárez, which had long been one of the most important transit points for crossing illicit drugs into the United States. Factoring all of these threads together, García Luna had decided it was time to alert Mayor Reyes Ferriz about the coming storm.

The Christmas warning to Reyes Ferriz foretold a coming war, but even with the warning the mayor had no way of grasping what lay in store or how his life and the life of his city would be irretrievably transformed. “I couldn't imagine the possible scale of what was coming,” Ferriz would later tell me. And it was precisely that failure of the imagination, that failure to grasp or to conceive, that amplified the feeling of apprehension. The mayor of Juárez knew that somewhere beyond his window lay a threat, but he could not yet fully fathom its contours.