The Fight to Save Juárez (45 page)

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Saturdays at the Barquito de Papel (Little Paper Boat) were always busy. The two-story, lemon-yellow venue decorated with brightly colored children's blocks on Insurgentes Avenue catered to families with young children, and it was a favorite for birthday parties and special events among Juárez's middle class. On Saturday, March 13, one of the Mexican employees at the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juárez was hosting a birthday party for her child at Barquito de Papel, and most of the attendees were fellow consular couples with preschoolers. It was around two in the afternoon, and after the children had had time to romp around on the various playscapes and the usual round of balloons, presents, and cake, the party was breaking up.

Two couples left the Barquito de Papel at the same time. Jorge Salcido and his wife, Hilda, had come in separate cars. Jorge loaded up the Salcidos' three children (two, four, and seven years of age) into the family's white 2009 Honda Pilot and headed out of the establishment's parking lot with Hilda following in her car. Jorge Salcido was thirty-seven years of age and worked as a production manager at a Dallas-based Ciudad Juárez assembly plant called Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. Hilda worked at the consulate. Just moments after the two cars began heading east on Insurgentes Avenue, a wide street with two lanes in each direction, a commando group in a Ford Explorer pulled up to Jorge Salcido's car as he idled at a stoplight and began firing at him, killing him instantly. Hilda jumped out of her car and ran up on the
sicarios
, screaming at them to stop, that her children were in the car, but they paid her no mind. They finished their job and then coolly boarded their vehicle and left. Hilda was fortunate not to have been
killed.
She was also fortunate that her children were not killed, although two of them, the four-year-old and the seven-year-old, were wounded (one having been grazed by a bullet and the other cut by shards of flying glass from the car's shattered windows).

Lesley Enríquez and her husband, Arthur Redelfs, left the party at the same time as the Salcidos. They'd just strapped their seven-month-old daughter into the back seat of their white Toyota RAV4 before pulling out into the flow of traffic on Insurgentes Avenue. Lesley Enríquez was three months pregnant. She and her husband lived in El Paso, although Lesley commuted into Juárez every day to her job at the U.S. Consulate. They initially headed west on Insurgentes, driving in the opposite direction the Salcidos had been traveling, before jagging north toward Chamizal Park and Malecón Avenue (which runs east-west next to the Rio Grande) on their way toward the international bridge. They were unaware of the fact that all the while they were being followed by a black Suburban.

Just as the couple reached the back side of city hall, less than a hundred feet from the turnoff to the Santa Fe International Bridge, the assassins aboard the Suburban came up on them and raked their vehicle with AK-47 and 9mm fire. With Redelfs dead or mortally wounded, the car veered across the lanes into oncoming traffic, striking two more vehicles before coming to rest almost directly beneath the windows of Mayor Reyes Ferriz's office. Above the crime scene, the Santa Fe International Bridge made its ascent over the Rio Grande before sliding back down into El Paso on the other side. It being Saturday afternoon, typically a heavy day for foot traffic as Juarenses crossed over to shop, a line of pedestrians filled the entire span of the bridge; many of them witnessed the cold-blooded assassination from that vantage. It was 2:40 p.m.; the interval between the two executions had only been ten minutes.

The municipal police, their redoubt only a hundred yards away—testimony to the indifference of the cartel operatives to local law enforcement—quickly arrived at the scene on Malecón Avenue. Both of the adults in the vehicle were clearly dead, Lesley from a shot to the head, Arthur from multiple wounds. But the police could hear the weak cries and whimpers of the little girl still strapped into her car seat behind her parents. They assumed she was wounded and worked feverishly to pry the car's door open, a task made difficult because it had been crushed by the impact with the other vehicles, but it turned out that she was only frightened by the violence and the bloody sight of her bullet-riddled, lifeless parents in the front seat.

There had been some forty documented murders of Americans over the course of the drug war, but none of them had been employees of the U.S. government, with the exception of a U.S. Army soldier murdered in a Juárez bar a year earlier when
sicarios
had killed several people at the establishment.
Scattered
across Mexico over the course of three and a half years, those murders had hardly raised a stir, but the targeted assassination of three individuals with ties to the U.S. Consulate in Juárez was another matter.

The executions sent shock waves through both the Mexican and the U.S. governments. In a public statement, President Barack Obama expressed his outrage and sadness, and other American officials vowed to “break the power” of the Mexican drug cartels. But the stronger gesture came from the U.S. State Department. The day following the consulate executions, on March 14, 2010, they released the following statement: “The Department of State has issued this Travel Warning to inform U.S. citizens traveling to and living in Mexico of concerns about the security situation in Mexico, and that it has authorized the departure of the dependents of U.S. government personnel from U.S. consulates in the Northern Mexican border cities of Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros . . .” Further on, the State Department Travel Warning also noted that “recent violent attacks have prompted the U.S. Embassy to urge U.S. citizens to delay unnecessary travel to parts of Durango, Coahuila and Chihuahua states.” The U.S. embassy in Mexico City instructed its employees to postpone all travel to the troubled states. In short, the U.S. government was resorting to extreme measures to protect its personnel, the kind of measures it typically employs in war zones like Iraq, Libya, or Pakistan.

Even as the U.S. government updated its travel warnings, both the U.S. and the Mexican governments simultaneously sought to lower the incident's public profile. The U.S. government issued a statement asserting that its directive authorizing the departure of dependents of employees at the six consulates and temporarily postponing all travel to the three states had already been “in the pipeline” prior to the three executions in Juárez.

U.S. officials were also quick to point out that neither Lesley Enríquez nor Hilda Salcido had been involved in “sensitive” operations within the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juárez that would have made them cartel targets, underscoring the fact that neither worked in drug- or intelligence-related areas. Lesley Enríquez's job (she had dual citizenship, Mexican and Canadian) was in the American Citizen Services section and involved assisting U.S. citizens needing travel-related documents such as passports and consular reports of births abroad, in addition to occasionally helping American citizens get the remains of loved ones who happened to have died in Mexico back to the United States. Hilda Salcido, also a Mexican citizen, had been employed by the consulate for thirteen years and worked in the Consular Services section, which meant she had some exposure to Mexican citizens seeking visas to travel to the United States. Four days after the murders, the FBI in El Paso issued a statement indicating that “at this point we have no reason to believe any of the three victims were targeted because they were U.S. citizens or because of their jobs, but the investigation is continuing.”

In
a flurry of hypotheses and freewheeling flights of fancy, each of the victims (or their spouses) was woven into one scenario or another in an attempt to make sense of the executions. One of the primary strategies for defusing the crisis was to suggest that perhaps the
sicarios
had made a mistake. Under this theory, the target had been Jorge Salcido, whose status as a non–U.S. citizen who was also not a U.S. government employee conveniently distanced the killings from anything related to the consulate. The U.S. consul, Raymond McGrath, told
El Diario
that “from the first hours on Saturday, after the attacks, the available information has been that the attack against Lesley Enríquez and Arthur Redelfs was a mistake. . . . As for Mr. Salcido, we don't know yet.” Many in the media pounced on that explanation and gave it play. CNN, for example, headlined a story that noted that the authorities had “not ruled out a case of mistaken identity.”

Within this narrative, Lesley Enríquez and Arthur Redelfs had been killed because they, like Salcido, had also been traveling in a white SUV, a fact that purportedly had confused the
sicarios
, leading them to wipe out both vehicles rather than running the risk that their prey might elude them. It was also reported that Salcido had been the object of extortion threats, requiring him to change his home, work, and cell phone numbers. One of the Mexican newspapers reported that “it has been said” that Jorge Salcido might have been a former municipal police officer or state ministerial police officer, implying that perhaps he had links to the cartels. But Narco News, a popular website for people following Mexico's narco-war, cited anonymous law enforcement sources suggesting that Lesley Enríquez had perhaps been the main target. On at least two occasions, according to those sources, an individual “in consulate-related settings” had tried to pressure Enríquez into “doing something with a document” without the proper paperwork. Reflecting on the universe of theories, Narco News speculated that Salcido might have been the individual pressing Enríquez.

One of the more persistent theories initially making the rounds centered on Arthur Redelfs, who was a detention officer with the El Paso Sheriff 's Office. His job was to ferry prisoners from their holding cells to their courtroom appearances when they had hearings. That meant that Redelfs routinely handcuffed prisoners, which may have meant tense exchanges with prisoners. The idea that Redelfs had been the target as revenge for some unknown conflict with prisoners was seemingly buttressed by the Mexican Army's arrest of a man named Ricardo Valles, purportedly a member of El Paso's Barrio Azteca gang, considered a “sibling” of Juárez's much-feared Los Aztecas. Valles claimed to have received orders from within El Paso's county prison, a Barrio Azteca stronghold, instructing him to kill Arthur Redelfs. He claimed that he then followed Redelfs to the party at Barquito de Papel. The killing of Jorge Salcido had been a mistake, Valles maintained, due to the fact that he was in a white SUV similar to the one that Redelfs
was
driving. The motive, Valles asserted, was that Redelfs had threatened and mistreated Barrio Azteca prisoners. Redelfs's coworkers in the Sheriff 's Office scoffed at that idea, noting that he was too smart to have tangled with Barrio Azteca gang members, and Redelfs's family described him as mild-mannered and friendly, a man whose personal qualities made him anything but prone to hostile interactions.

Finally, one of the more bizarre theories was that perhaps the killings had been a consequence of a directive issued by the consulate the day prior to the murders forbidding consular employees from entering a nearby bar called El Reco. The bar was presumably a narco hangout, but the idea that the bar owner, even if he was affiliated with a cartel, would carry out such an execution out of revenge seemed far-fetched, even though McGrath acknowledged it as merely “a hypothesis” that was “floating around.”

It all added up to a tangle of contradictory and irreconcilable theories and speculations, most of which were, on their faces, implausible or simply too far-fetched. The concreteness of the government's theory (emphasizing that since neither of the consulate employees had been working in an area related to security or drug investigations, it was unlikely that they would be cartel targets) ignored everything known about the cartels and how they operate. It pretended that narco-logic was linear, as if it were beyond the cartels to select targets because of their symbolic value or because of the message that they might be intending to send. In fact, both governments knew that the cartels were masters of this kind of communication; there were countless examples of it. But the one theory that neither government put forth, the one theory that the media did not pick up, was the most obvious one: that one of the cartels was sending a message to American authorities that it viewed the high-profile involvement of American FBI and DEA agents in Juárez as an escalation. One of the cartels was answering that escalation with an escalation of its own. The message to the U.S. government was that there were plenty of “soft,” vulnerable targets for the cartels to strike (in fact, the U.S. Consulate in Juárez is one of the largest in the world), and they could do so with ease if they so chose.

Supporting this thesis was the fact that the
Washington Post
story was covered extensively in the Juárez and El Paso media for several days. Even though there had been collaboration between American and Mexican federal agents for some time, the public announcement, whether or not it actually signaled a change or escalation, altered the perceived dynamics of the war in Juárez. And the cartels were not easily intimidated; they were brazen and bold and any student of their tactics knew that striking at the underbelly of American interests in Mexico was not beyond them if they deemed it necessary or useful (in March of 2011, cartel operatives killed ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata in San Luis Potosí, even though the agent had clearly identified himself to the
sicarios
).

The
video of the executions I saw during my visit to the CERI left me with an appreciation for the sophistication involved in cartel hits. In fact, when I described the videotape to a former American intelligence official, he said that it was evidence that the
sicarios
had undergone extensive training and were highly disciplined.
Sicarios
did not commit impulsive mistakes. They also knew the difference between a Toyota RAV4 and a Honda Pilot (even if both were white). They knew the difference between a Texas license plate and a Chihuahua license plate. These
sicarios
were professionals, not a ragtag group pumped up on cocaine and armed with AK-47s. There were plenty of the latter among the cartels' hit squads, gangbanger types who were enforcing neighborhood retail drug markets and carrying out petty vendettas against rival groups, but assignments to take down important, high-level targets in coordinated hits were given to seasoned professionals. Those people knew what they were doing.