The Fight to Save Juárez (43 page)

But in addition to venting complaints and anxieties, the business owners also put forth specific proposals. One of the most persistent was that Juárez and the border be declared a free trade zone; the argument was that this would allow them to be more competitive with American companies. Among the other proposals was a six-month moratorium on federal taxes. The Hotel Association had numerous proposals for beefing up tourism, including developing the nearby Salamayuca Dunes for ecotourism and designating Juárez one of Mexico's “cultural treasures.” The group also proposed that instead of having government conferences in the nation's beach resorts, the government could schedule major conferences in Juárez. They called for a major PR campaign in Mexico, the United States, and Europe to restart the Juárez tourism industry.

However, in all of the forums that I attended, the clamor returned to the same fundamental reality: an awareness that the city's massive crisis was not only the product of a lack of security but also of pervasive social problems whose origins went back decades. Approximately 25 percent of the population was between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two and, not coincidentally, the modal age of the
sicarios
was between seventeen and twenty-four. On the whole, the Juárez youth had no education, no jobs, and no prospects for the future. Given that stark reality, for the NiNis the temptation of two hundred dollars a week, with the bonus of a car and cell phone, was compelling indeed.

I attended several other forums and most had the same format, although the content varied as a function of the sector of the city that each was addressing. The surprise was the forum on the judiciary, at which several of the state supreme court justices were present. The judges defended the work of the Chihuahua judiciary. They seemed apathetic to the fact that the conviction rates were minimal in relation to the tens of thousands of arrests over the course of the last two years. They rationalized the fact that judges had set free some of the most notorious criminals on the basis of “human error.” In a state where the problems with the judicial system were obvious and almost universally recognized, the judges' attitudes were entrenched and arrogant.

.   .   .

The launch of the Todos Somos Juárez intervention was set to culminate on February 17, when all of the working groups, toiling away feverishly, would
present
their proposals to the president and his cabinet at a plenary session.

On the day of the meeting, there was a glaring absence from the list of groups scheduled to present: the human rights working group was nowhere to be found on the agenda. According Gustavo de la Rosa, the original members of the working group had included several NGOs working on human rights issues, including Centro de Derechos Humanos Paso del Norte, Red de Mujeres, and Centro de Información y Solidaridad Obrera. Laura Carrera, of the National Commission for the Eradication of Violence against Women, within the Ministry of the Interior, had chaired the group. According to de la Rosa, the group had planned to present twenty cases of human rights abuses committed by the military. “It was shut down by someone in the president's office,” de la Rosa said. The day before the presentations the human rights group was deleted from the list. “It was shortsighted, an error on their parts that they couldn't recognize the importance of including them,” de la Rosa complained. He argued that the federal government found the human rights issue inconvenient, an “obstacle to their operations.”
¹

Security was high that day at the Camino Real Hotel when Felipe Calderón arrived to preside over the forum. Each working group was to present proposals for how federal funds might be spent in Juárez. As had been the case during the president's prior visit, several groups announced that they would mobilize large anti-Calderón protests.

I made my way to the Camino Real, arriving early because it had been predicted that the protests would make it difficult to reach the hotel. The national and international press convened in a parking lot next to the hotel, where they were being accredited for entry into the assembly. The atmosphere was testy. The large group was funneled into a narrow passageway where the first of three security checkpoints lay. We were packed in like fans trying to make their way into a sporting event due to start at any moment. In addition to the many army and federal police, there were also many Estado Mayor agents, all wearing suits and walking around officiously with communications plugs in their ears. In the distance, and at every intersection around the hotel, were teams of federal police dressed in ninja-type uniforms, including black ski masks and kneepads. The riot police were expecting the protesters to converge on the hotel at any moment, and they anticipated that the protests would be violent. Raymundo Ruiz's newspaper had assigned him to cover the protests, so he was out there somewhere beyond the thick cordon of black-uniformed federal police agents. We text-messaged one another periodically to stay in touch.

Inside the enormous auditorium, each of the committees gathered to present its proposals to the president, a process that took over two hours. There were two unanticipated highlights. One came close to the end, when the head of the culture group rose from the sea of attendees and looked
straight
at the president. He stood erect and spoke with a clear, if impassioned, voice. “Mr. President,” he said, “the city is to the point of paralysis due to fear. Artists are more than about theater; they are about a vision, about a capacity to see. I can tell you that the criminals are not going to stop killing because we build swimming pools. The
sicarios
will not stop killing. An exceptional situation requires exceptional actions, Mr. President. I was anticipating proposals that would help us attack this problem because Juárez is something magical and it deserves to be saved. The different workshop groups have met and presented you with their proposals and ideas. In order to change what is taking place we must reconstruct the social fabric. But we're being pusillanimous, not brave. If we're going to believe, to have faith, well, believing is the most serious game in this city. Many of us are so afraid of the killers that we are finding it easier to react against the military rather than against the assassins, it's safer that way.”

Felipe Calderón at the Camino Real Hotel, February 2010. Photo copyright © Ricardo Ainslie.

There were no points, lists of proposals, or “actionable steps” in the culture representative's words, only the truth of the extent to which fear was warping perception, shifting orders of importance. He articulated the fury that lives in the absence of faith, when citizens cease to believe in the greater social project of the city, of the nation. Most of all he spoke to the profound human toll such an absence creates. True to his calling, the artist had broken
with
the forms and conventions of the plenary session to give expression to what was most important about their having convened. His presentation was dramatic; the president and everyone else in the auditorium were spellbound.

Finally there was the student. A young man named Guillermo Asiaín stood and asked for the president's indulgence, given that he was not on the program. Indeed, he said, that was a problem with the arrangement: while different working groups had presented their ideas on how to save the youth of Juárez, he pointed out that nowhere were the youth of Juárez represented in the working groups. Those assembled in the hall grew silent. “You need to recognize the youth of this city, and the programs aimed at intervening with the youth should have input from us,” the young man said. There was a powerful response in the hall to Asiaín's comments. He received a thunderous ovation that was as spontaneous as his remarks had been.

At the end, the president himself addressed the assembly, assuring those present that he had listened closely and that his team would get to work on the proposals immediately. “I believe in Juárez and in the nation,” Calderón said. “And I believe that Mexicans will find a solution to the myriad problems that our country is facing at the moment.” Calderón emphasized that Ciudad Juárez occupied a special place in his deliberations about the crisis. He set a one hundred–day target for the implementation of the proposals. The three-month timeline seemed unrealistically ambitious given that most government projects involved more than three months of permits and paperwork before breaking ground. The president was promising bullet-train speed on all fronts. Whether Calderón could deliver on these promises, or whether the country was any closer to solving the conundrum of the national violence, remained to be seen.

.   .   .

The president's people structured a team that would coordinate and monitor the implementation of the federal government's intervention. Antonio Vivanco, one of the president's closest aides, led the team, and its members included a representative from each of the federal agencies that had been involved in Todos Somos Juárez. Beginning the next week, the twenty people on that team boarded the six a.m. Aeromexico flight every Monday out of Mexico City bound for Juárez, where they stayed all week until returning Thursday evening. “We had people who were in a position to make commitments on behalf of their respective agencies,” Adriana Obregón would later tell me. Obregón was one of the key players at Presidencia for the Todos Somos Juárez project, and she had been on those weekly flights.

The team stayed at the Camino Real Hotel, and there was a standing Monday morning meeting at ten o'clock that they called the “weigh-in.” “How's it going?” “Why is the school not getting finished?” “What are the
obstacles?”
I was told by one of the participants that the ethos of the team was “can do” and “must do.” If someone on the team from one of the federal agencies wasn't up to the task, that person was replaced. “Send me someone who can push,” was the guiding qualification. Vivanco, who cut a tall, imposing figure, chaired the process with a firm hand. The aim was to complete the adopted proposals by the president's one hundred–day target, which meant an enormous undertaking and considerable pressure. The effort to translate the Colombian experience in Medellín into something that would work in Juárez represented a vast expenditure of personnel and resources.

It was a complex challenge; the cities were different, the cultures were different. And yet, conceptually and strategically, public recognition that the solution to the violence in Juárez lay not only in quasi-military police actions but also in social programs addressing the realities in the long-neglected
colonias
that hung around the city's neck like a dead weight represented a vital step forward. For too long the city had deferred a reckoning with those realities, so long, in fact, that parts of the city were near the point of no return.

In all there were 160 formal commitments that became the focus of the one hundred–day target. The federal government created a website for Todos Somos Juárez where the status of each of the commitments could be tracked. Mexico had never seen such a massive mobilization of government resources, a mobilization so closely tethered to the perspectives and demands of the local working groups who knew their city's needs. As one editorial put it: “Todos Somos Juárez is something that we cannot allow to dissipate, it's an exercise in democracy.”

For once, the federal government had come to Juárez, breaking with the historical modus operandi in which NGOs and local and state agencies were forced to travel to Mexico City to gain audiences with government officials. For a city long-accustomed to indifference from Mexico City, the intervention represented a profound change. However, the payoff of the enormous undertaking would take a long time to assess. It was unlikely that the violence would drop immediately. A long-term rather than short-term vision had been put into play. It was an indispensable shift in strategy: in order to turn the city of Juárez around, the long-frayed social fabric had to be repaired. Such repair was the cornerstone to the future of a great city. Indeed, to the future of the country.

Note

1
. Two months later, in a compromise, Gustavo de la Rosa was named to head an office that would receive complaints of human rights abuses in the city and oversee human rights issues in relation to police operations.

C
HAPTER 27

No Accidents

In an article that appeared in the
Washington Post
on February 24, 2010, just a week after president Felipe Calderón's second visit to Juárez in the aftermath of the Villas de Salvárcar killings, William Booth reported that for the first time American intelligence agents would be embedding with Mexican law enforcement in an effort to help pursue drug cartel leaders and their hit men operating in Ciudad Juárez. The agents, the article continued, would be operating out of a Mexican command center, where they would share drug intelligence gathered from informants and intercepted communications.