The Fight to Save Juárez (48 page)

As with everything in Mexico, it was impossible to know with certainty what was factual and true beyond doubt. Not being an accountant, not having been privy to the transactions, and having no way of evaluating the validity of documents I'd been shown, I had no way of certifying what I was told by García Luna and his people. What was undeniable, however, was that Mexico's war against the cartels turned as much on what people believed to be true as it did on what was actually taking place. Another way of framing the problem, however, was just as true: if people had been living relatively free of fear in their communities, rumors such as those that impugned Genaro García Luna would have found much less traction.

Notes

1
. In Juárez, federal authorities had arrested 262 people affiliated with the Juárez cartel and only sixty affiliated with the Sinaloa cartel.

2
. Alarcón and the three lieutenants were subsequently charged and sent to federal prison.

3
. This meeting took place a month prior to the February 24
Washington Post
story disclosing just this kind of collaboration.

4
. WikiLeaks suggested that part of the U.S. government's rationale was that the federal police were better positioned to interface with Mexico's judicial institutions and thus were the logical ones to be in the forefront of the cartel war—which, in any event, had been the strategy from the beginning.

5
. Arturo Guzmán Loera, whose nickname was “The Chicken,” had been arrested in 2001. During the seven years that El Chapo was in the Puente Grande prison, until his escape in 2001, Arturo Guzmán played a key role in managing the Sinaloa cartel for his brother. Arturo Guzmán was assassinated at the La Palma maximum-security federal prison in 2004.

C
HAPTER 29

The Election

José Reyes Ferriz walked out of his oak-paneled office, through an ample foyer and a conference room, to his personal elevator. It was the fourth of July 2010, a day of national elections in Mexico, elections that most pundits viewed as a referendum on Calderón's drug war policies. Reyes Ferriz was on his way to vote. In a number of states, including Chihuahua, governorships were up for grabs, in addition to congressional seats and mayorships.
¹

The PRI slate for the Chihuahua elections had been set the night of March 9 at the Westin Soberano hotel in Ciudad Juárez, when the representative of the party's National Executive Committee, Adela Cereso, had arrived from Mexico City to meet with the contenders. Typically, the exiting governor had great influence over the selection of candidates, and José Reyes Baeza had his lineup: Héctor Murguía would replace him in the governor's slot and Víctor Valencia would be the party's candidate to be the mayor of Juárez. But Reyes Baeza had not counted on César Duarte, who had recently completed his second term as a federal deputy in congress, where his skill at working with other political parties had earned him the influential position of president of the Chamber of Deputies. Duarte, who had the support of Mayor Reyes Ferriz, was well liked within the party at a national level. Much to the governor's dismay, Cereso told him that César Duarte, not Hector Murguía, would be the PRI's gubernatorial candidate. Duarte had succeeded in outflanking the governor's plans.

Cereso then convened the six aspirants for the Juárez mayor's job, one of whom was Víctor Valencia, who'd arrived at the meeting under the impression that he had the position sewn up. Cereso announced to the group that Héctor Murguía would be the party's “unity” candidate to be mayor of Juárez. Furious, Víctor Valencia stormed out of the meeting in protest. Duarte strenuously opposed Murguía's candidacy, but was given no choice: it was a bone thrown to Reyes Baeza, who'd been preempted in terms of the gubernatorial succession.

Foiled in his campaign to secure his party's nomination for the governor's slot, Murguía had accepted the consolation prize: he hoped to land
his
second stint as mayor of Ciudad Juárez, where he'd been mayor between 2004 and 2007, the term immediately preceding that of Reyes Ferriz. The animosity between the mayor and Murguía was such that Reyes Ferriz decided to back the PAN candidate for mayor, a man named César Jáuregui, rather than Murguía.

Everything about César Jáuregui communicated that he came from a modest background. Early in the campaign, Jáuregui had appeared on
El Malilla
(
The Bad Boy
), a local TV show popular among the maquiladora workers and working-class Juarenses. El Malilla, the host, was fast-talking and quick-witted in a streetwise sort of way, sparring with his guests in his customary short sleeves, jeans, and skullcap. El Malilla's language was chock-full of street slang, his manner Mexican urban hip-hop; he exuded working-class sensibilities. All of this would have seemed to stand in contrast to Jáuregui, dressed in a pressed baby-blue dress shirt and slacks, but Jáuregui came across as a guy who was more comfortable with a beer in hand at a backyard barbecue than at an upper-class cocktail reception. He was chubby, with short-cropped hair and the look of the sharp-witted elementary-school kid who had found his place in the peer group despite an absence of cool.

Jáuregui invoked his class origins by telling El Malilla that his background was “of the people.” He wanted to help people in their communities, in their barrios, he said. He told El Malilla that the reason improving public transportation was a priority for him was that he had grown up taking the bus back and forth to school. By the end of the show, Jáuregui had apparently passed the test; he received El Malilla's on-camera endorsement.

But the heart and soul of Jáuregui's campaign was less about public transport (a major concern for working class Juarenses) than the more pressing issue, the more obvious issue: the violence that had eviscerated Ciudad Juárez over the last three years. His pitch was consistent: a vote for Murguía was a vote for the dark narco-forces that were destroying the nation, not just the city. His campaign spots were thinly veiled accusations that Murguía was under the control of the Juárez cartel, if not an outright “Godfather.”

“It's a horrible feeling, going through our city that has accumulated so much pain,” Jáuregui said in one of his commercials. “With more than six thousand families in mourning because they've lost a loved one in a war that few can make sense of, we need a municipal president
a quien no le den línea
(who won't toe the line).” In the spot, the words “the line” echoed in reverberated accentuation, bringing home an obvious reference to La Línea, the Juárez cartel's feared shock troops. That reference was not lost on anyone in Juárez. But Jáuregui also took on the Sinaloa cartel, saying that the city also did not need someone who would “sell it short.” The specific phrase he used, however, was a play on words, because
achaparrar
means to shorten
or
to make short, and everyone knew that El Chapo's nickname meant “shorty.” The message that Jáuregui wanted the voters to take home was that he would not deliver the city to either La Línea, that is, to the Juárez cartel, or to El Chapo Guzmán. In one of the campaign's face-to-face televised debates, Jáuregui directly accused Murguía of being a Juárez cartel operative, citing a report that had appeared in
El Universal
, a respected Mexico City newspaper, claiming that Murguía had purchased eleven million pesos worth of property on behalf of the Juárez cartel. He also cited a purported DEA report linking Murguía to La Línea (neither of these reports has ever been confirmed). A visibly furious Murguía threatened to sue Jáuregui over the allegations.

Though Héctor “Teto” Murguía presented himself as a populist, his background was upper class. He had started out running family businesses over thirty years ago, and at the time of the campaign he was president and general manager of twelve different companies, in addition to serving on the board of directors of several banks. But his public persona was that of a guayabera-wearing ordinary man who talked
norteño
slang and felt a kinship with the working class.

The Juárez mayoral campaign was a referendum on the local narco-war and the violence it had spawned. Jáuregui's views on Murguía were widely shared in Juárez. This was the same Murguía whom
El Diario
had accused of making Saulo Reyes rich with insider deals and who had imposed Reyes on the municipal police, making him its director of operations. Jáuregui insisted that electing Héctor Murguía was tantamount to delivering Juárez back into the hands of the Juárez cartel.

In the days prior to the election, Murguía's numbers were up and it was looking like the old guard was going to be back in the driver's seat in Juárez. That eventuality created a great deal of uncertainty as to the future of Calderón's project in the city. In his campaign spots, Murguía had attacked the federal police and the army, accusing them of committing rampant human rights abuses and of wreaking havoc upon the city. The federal forces were making things worse, not better, Murguía argued, calling for them to leave Juárez. On one radio show he'd mocked the “
chilangos
,” a term of derision for people from Mexico City (most of the federal police were from the Federal District), making fun of their Mexico City accents and describing them as useless. José Reyes Ferriz made no effort to mask his dislike of Murguía. “He's absolutely nefarious,” Reyes Ferriz told me.

One might have thought that such antics would alarm the citizens of Juárez, but throughout the city there was an emerging nostalgia for the ancien régime. The old days might have been laced with corruption, but the violence had been mostly “private” and limited to the narcos themselves; it had rarely spilled over into the public sphere, much less into every nook
and
cranny of the city, as it had over the last three years. The idea that a vote for Murguía was a vote for the Juárez cartel, whether or not it was true, had lost its toxicity. Like the national elections, the municipal elections were, in effect, a referendum on the city's stomach for continuing the fight.

.   .   .

As José Reyes Ferriz left his office to cast his ballot, members of his security detail were posted at the door to his office and at every door along the way to the elevator. As the mayor approached, Roberto, the head of the security detail, punched in the code that opened the elevator door. Two other bodyguards in bulletproof vests, carrying AR-15 automatic rifles, flanked the mayor. Roberto had managed the Ferriz family's security since the early 1980s, when Reyes Ferriz's father had been mayor of Juárez. Roberto was like family; his balding gray hair and sad brown eyes gave him the look of a kindly grandfather, but with the demeanor of a man whose entire identity was bound up with the concept of security.

Throughout much of the country, the elections were fraught with fear, but this was especially so in the numerous states where the narco-traffickers held sway. The prior week, in the border state of Tamaulipas, the leading gubernatorial candidate, Rodolfo Torre Cantú from the PRI, had been executed along with most of his entourage at eleven in the morning as they made their way to a local airport during a final campaign swing. Calderón had described his assassination as “an assault against democratic institutions.”

In Juárez, for days now the cartels had been threatening to attack and kill people at voting precincts and to assassinate candidates. I'd spent an afternoon at the electoral center where workers were preparing ballot boxes to be delivered to the various precincts, and it was evident that people were nervous. No one knew what to expect. Under the circumstances, it took courage, not just a sense of civic duty, for these men and women to do their jobs. Just two days earlier the cartels had left signs all over the city threatening to behead Mayor Reyes Ferriz and execute his wife and children.

This very morning the mayor had awoken to the news that in Chihuahua City five men had been executed and left hanging from bridges. As in recent elections in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan, in parts of Mexico elections were being conducted under the threat of mass violence against citizens who showed up to vote. It was full-bore narco-terrorism: the intent of the cartels was to intimidate and frighten the populace and thereby shape electoral outcomes, in a context in which some experts were saying the number of narco-candidates was unprecedented. Such efforts would have their intended effect: in Juárez only about a third of the electorate would turn out to vote.

The mayor was in constant touch with the commander of the Juárez garrison, assessing the state of security. “
Mi general
,” Reyes Ferriz said, taking a
call
on his cell phone. “What else is going on?” A call from the representative of the federal forces informed him that there were renewed threats to burn polling places and shoot voters and candidates. “We're on alert,” the mayor responded.

For José Reyes Ferriz and his team, there was tension in every move. Everyone knew that the threats were real. One could see it in the eyes of his security detail: they approached the mayor's movements with the same deliberation that combat soldiers use when traversing open terrain in a war zone. The security challenges were daunting, but showing up at his precinct to vote was an obligation that came with the office of mayor. This was especially true given the circumstances; public figures all over the country would be out today performing their civic duty. There wasn't even a discussion of the matter: the mayor had to appear in front of the cameras and vote.

Three of Ferriz's security detail stepped into the elevator with him and descended to the first floor, which opened to a private garage where three Suburbans lay in wait. The mayor's Suburban, with the highest armor rating, had the door to the back seat open, with a guard posted next to it. Once the mayor entered the vehicle the engine was fired up and the garage doors opened. The lead car exited the garage into the city hall parking structure, where a fourth Suburban was waiting for the convoy outside. This vehicle led the way through the garage and into the street, where it assumed a blocking position: the body of the vehicle was perpendicular to oncoming traffic. The mayor's car roared into the street past the blocking car and onto Malecón Boulevard (near the spot where Enríquez and Redelfs had been assassinated a few months prior), en route to the mayor's precinct. The other three Suburbans followed, one occupying the right lane so that no one could pull alongside the mayor's vehicle (the favored
sicario
modus operandi for executions), and the other two trailing close behind. Each of these other vehicles was carrying four bodyguards, armed with an AR-15 and a pistol each. The rear seats of the two trailing Suburbans had been configured so that they faced backward, making it easier for the security team to monitor the rear of the convoy and detect approaching danger.