To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (15 page)

Rafael says about a thousand pesos ($75). The comandante checks to see if the money is still there; it is.

“Look,” the comandante says to his two hooded captives, “Your things are all here. We are not street rats. We don’t want you coming here because all you do is say pure bullshit and heat up the
plaza
. We do not want to see you here, assfucks. We’re going to let you go, but we do not want to see you here because you heat up the
plaza
. And don’t even think about publishing that we kidnapped you because we are present in every state in the country and if we want to we can kill you anywhere in the country. Nothing happened here.”

When he hears the words “We’re going to let you go,” Rafael realizes that he is still alive. He had been a dead man for a few hours, and those words give him life again, and with that life, hope.

The gunmen lead them back into the SUV, still hooded. They drive for some fifteen minutes and then park. They remove Eduardo’s handcuffs; they remove the hoods from both men. They open the doors and lead them out. They are standing in front of a pharmacy. Their rental car is parked right next to them with the keys in the ignition. Rafael and Eduardo stand there, dumbstruck, unable to move. Rafael feels a strange, somewhat insidious urge to thank the man with the tattooed neck who had interrogated and beaten him for hours; he thinks of giving this man his watch.

And the man shouts, “Go suck dick, bitches! Get the fuck out of here!”

“Thank you,” Rafael says, “thank you very much.”

They walk to the car, get in, start the ignition, and floor it. They head for their hotel to get the rest of their things. Rafael turns on his mobile phone and calls his editor in Mexico City. “We got picked up by the narcos,” he says, “I’m headed to Monterrey, now. Fuck this.” He hangs up. He becomes aware of the aching pain in his knees from where the gunman repeatedly beat him with the pistol. Two minutes later his phone rings. His editor says, “Don’t go to Monterrey, go straight to the airport, the director of Milenio just got off the phone with the federal police and they are sending a unit to stand guard until the flight leaves.”

They drive to the airport and take the first flight out to Mexico City. Upon arriving they talk to the top editors at Milenio and tell them what happened. The editors are extremely worried. Rafael says, “I don’t want my name or anything linked to my name out there. If you want to write about this, denounce what happened, don’t mention me.”

Ciro Gómez Leyva, the Milenio news director responsible for sending the crew to Reynosa, will write in his column, “Every day in more regions in Mexico it is impossible to do reporting. Journalism is dead in Reynosa.”

A few days later, Alfredo Corchado of the
Dallas Morning News
travels to Reynosa to report on the story of disappeared journalists. While he is filming street scenes with a television crew from Belo Television, a stranger approaches him and says, “You have no permission to report here. It’s best you leave now.”

Corchado files his story, “Cartels use intimidation campaigns to stifle news coverage in Mexico,” and leaves town. Months later, the two journalists kidnapped while Rafael was in town are still disappeared, along with three others.

I spoke with Rafael in Monterrey several months after he and Eduardo were
levantados
and miraculously released. Just days before we met, Monterrey had been completely paralyzed by gun battles and
narco-bloqueos
, the drug gang practice of stopping motorists at gunpoint, taking their cars, and using them to shut off major avenues and thus impede enemy cartel, police, or army pursuit. The gunmen favor eighteen-wheelers and city buses but use any and all vehicles on the road. Often the gunmen lie in wait to ambush their pursuers. Gun battles rage throughout the city.

Monterrey, with a greater metropolitan population of more than 4 million people, is Mexico’s second-largest city after Mexico City. The wealthiest municipality in the country is San Pedro Garza García, one of the municipalities making up the greater metropolitan area and the headquarters of Monterrey’s business elite. For many years, Mexico’s drug lords quietly bought property in San Pedro and kept their families there. Some of Mexico’s largest transnational corporations are based there, such as Cemex, the third-largest concrete company in the world, and FEMSA, Mexico’s largest beverage company and owner of the OXXO convenience store chain, again, the biggest such chain in the country. Far from being a dusty, forgotten border town, Monterrey is the poster image of Mexico’s “free trade” ideal of development: towering skyscrapers, sweeping plazas surrounded by art museums, glitzy shopping malls, bustling nightclub districts, elite private schools and universities. Monterrey represents the myth that the Mexican elite likes to tell itself about the country’s future. From the hills of San Pedro Garza García everything looks shiny. For many in Monterrey the drug war was as distant and abstract as the economic destitution in which half of Mexico’s people live.

In 2010, with the split between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, things changed. Monterrey became yet another urban battlefield. In mid-March, drug gangs shut down the highways leading in and out of town, blocked some thirty major avenues and streets in the metropolitan area, and engaged in pitched gun battles with each other, the federal police, the army, and the navy. In one gunfight two young graduate students at Mexico’s top-ranked private university, the Tecnológico de Monterrey, were slain in the street. Army soldiers hid their student IDs, planted guns on them, and later told the press that they were Zetas. Almost immediately their true identities were discovered—Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso, 23, and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, 24, both on full scholarship for academic excellence—and the news of their killing and the Mexican army’s botched cover-up became a national scandal. Consuelo Morales, the director of Citizens in Support of Human Rights in Monterrey, told reporter Sanjuana Martínez at the time, “We are swallowing the idea that everyone the military kills is a criminal, and that is what they tried to make us believe with the Tec students, who they said at first were hit men and planted guns on them. But since the students were from a certain social class, the theater did not work for the army.”

In April 2010, seventy-eight people were gunned down in Monterrey, the highest monthly execution tally in the city’s history up to that point. In one case, some fifty gunmen blocked several downtown streets and then stormed a Holiday Inn, demanding at gunpoint that the front desk clerk search the hotel records for a list of names. Once the gunmen had the room numbers of those they were looking for, they proceeded to go up to the fifth floor, pull five people from their rooms, march them out of the hotel, grab a clerk from another hotel across the street, and drive off. Those six people have not been seen since. In May 2010, there was another wave of
narco-bloqueos
, leading prominent business executives to take out advertisements in the daily newspapers demanding an end to such impunity.

Between August 13 and 17, 2010, the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas again engaged in open warfare throughout Monterrey. Drug gangs blocked some forty streets and avenues, threw grenades at businesses and television stations, fought gun battles in the streets, and summarily executed more than ten people, including the mayor of Santiago, one of the eleven municipalities making up metropolitan Monterrey.

By June 2010 the eruptions of urban warfare and drugland executions reached such a level that the arrival of Hurricane Alex with its 110-mile-per-hour winds and pounding rain was greeted as a respite from the gunplay.

“Alex was a break for us; we could do journalism again,” said Luis Petersen, the director of Multimedia in Monterrey, a media company that publishes the regional daily newspaper
Milenio Monterrey
and broadcasts throughout the northwest on more than thirty radio stations and two major television stations. “It was a break for the state government as well. The governor, ten months after taking office, could in fact finally assume office. He went out to the affected villages and spoke to people on the ground. He could work on actually solving a problem. That lasted about two weeks.”

Luis and I drove through Monterrey one day in late August as rumors circulated that a convoy of forty SUVs bringing Zetas reinforcements into town had just arrived. I asked him how one should cover the drug war.

“We can’t do journalism here anymore,” he told me. “For me it is very difficult to do journalism when you have to take sides from the outset. It seems that we have to do that here, and the side to take is that of an institution in danger, the Mexican state. It is in the hands of people without broad popular support; the only thing they have is firepower. The twenty years of Mexican struggles for a democratic opening . . . that doesn’t exist anymore. Who exercises sovereignty? Where is power located? It is in the hands of
those
people. And the police? Infiltrated.

“So we can’t do journalism. Why? Because we have to have a preconceived stance. Here’s an example. The army does not recognize its errors, which means deaths. And they are not going to recognize them and we can’t force them to. In the case of the Tec students, we can’t say it was the army’s fault. Why? Because we are choosing to favor them.”

Luis received a call on his cell. “We are calling it a detention,” he said. He paused, and then: “They are asking us to not publish anything yet.” He glanced at me and gestured at his cell as if saying, “See what I mean?” After a bit he hung up and said, “That’s it. The army is asking me not to publish information about a shoot-out that happened today. The army is not asking me directly; the state government is doing the asking. There is no way. We can’t do journalism here.

“The state governments have been defeated through the infiltration of their police forces. The municipal governments are defeated. Business leaders are defeated.”

“How do you understand this war?” I asked him.

“The government lost control. This war is a war to regain control of drug trafficking from the perspective of the state. And this, to me, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Drug trafficking isn’t going to go away. Perhaps the only deep, long-term solution would be to legalize, and from that position control many aspects, not just the violence, but health issues as well. Why not legalize drugs? It seems to me that there are many people for whom it is much better for drugs to remain illegal.”

Three days earlier, on a Friday night, Rafael and I walked through central Monterrey and an area of town known as El Barrio Antiguo, famed as a hub for nightlife that once housed scores of bars, restaurants, and dance clubs. There was no one in sight. “Before,” Rafael said, “these streets were filled, jam-packed on a Friday night. Now look around.” Buildings were shuttered,
FOR RENT
signs hung on walls, entire blocks were dark and empty. A bit later, we passed a family sitting in their doorway talking. “That’s another thing,” Rafael said, “people used to set up chairs on the sidewalks in front of their houses to talk, drink, spend time together. It is very hot here, and at night it is often cooler outside, if you don’t have air-conditioning. So people would sit outside, whole families up and down the street. But not anymore, that too is lost.”

Rafael and I met on multiple occasions and spoke for hours about his experiences. When telling his story he constantly circled back to the issue of impunity, the brazen way in which the drug gang he witnessed and was then abducted by moved and operated in plain sight. “This is tangible proof of impunity and that they are the ones who call the shots in Reynosa,” Rafael told me. “They can drive around in convoys, with men with assault rifles hovering in the windows, and no one says a thing. Even the way they drive is a form of impunity. They go balls-out and people clear out of the way. No one confronts them; no one gets in their way.”

“In a goddamned public square they were beating us,” he said at another point. “They were interrogating us, they were reloading their guns in the middle of the street. And no one even walked outside. No one looked over. Not a single police car drove by. No police or soldiers went by on patrol. The city belongs to them. And the government’s discourse is ‘We’re going to send more troops to the border, send more soldiers.’ But there is a military base right there in Reynosa! It is impossible to prove anything, but things happen that make you think there is something here that doesn’t quite fit.”

Terror is the given of the place.

—Joan Didion

EL DIARIO DE JUÁREZ
IS A NEWSPAPER IN MOURNING
. Two newsroom desks now serve as altars honoring two murdered reporters. No one sits in these desks now. Every morning
El Diario
’s readers find printed on the newspaper’s front page, just to the right of the masthead, a black ribbon tied in a bow. The text under the ribbon reads, “President Calderón: We Demand Justice for Armando and Luis Carlos.” Two large printed banners hang from the roof over the front of the building facing traffic on the busy Paseo Triunfo de la República. The first carries the image of Armando “El Choco” Rodríguez and says:
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR ARMANDO. THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY WITHOUT JOURNALISTS
. The second bears the image of Luis Carlos Santiago holding a camera in the moment of taking a photograph. It reads:
WHOM CAN WE ASK FOR JUSTICE? LUIS CARLOS SANTIAGO 1989–2010
.

El Diario
’s editors first posed this question to the nation the day after a death squad killed Luis Carlos Santiago, a
Diario
photographer, and wounded a friend of his who was a photography intern at the newspaper. It was September 16, 2010, the bicentennial celebration of Mexico’s independence. The two young men were finishing up their lunch break and heading back down the street to the office at 2:35 in the afternoon when the death squad gunned Luis Carlos down in the Rio Grande Mall parking lot. The gunmen fled the scene, driving down one of the main avenues of a city occupied by thousands of federal police and army troops. No one pursued Luis’s killers.

The two-year anniversary of Armando Rodríguez’s murder was approaching. Rodríguez was shot dead one morning in November 2008 while warming up his car; his 8-year-old daughter was in the passenger seat and witnessed his murder. No one has been arrested or put on trial. After Luis Santiago’s killing and two years of waiting for justice in Armando Rodríguez’s case,
El Diario
published an editorial with the headline, “Whom can we ask for justice?” Throughout the long September day that followed no one ventured an answer.

Such answers are nearly impossible to find. The Chihuahua State Attorney General’s office has brought to trial less than 3 percent of the 7,341 homicide cases registered between 2008 and 2010. Most of the people detained in army and federal police operations were later released. A federal prosecutor actually posted bail for the prime suspects in the Villas de Salvárcar massacre, a case in which gunmen slaughtered fifteen people, most of them young students, and seriously wounded another ten at a house party in January 2010. The prosecutor was later found dead. You can imagine, in such a climate, why
El Diario
’s editors would not simply ask for justice, but ask to whom they could direct their demand.

“The government is impervious to these calls for justice. They don’t hear them. They don’t react to such things,” said Pedro Torres Estrada,
El Diario
’s main news editor. After Luis Santiago’s murder, he said, “We thought, okay, how can we make them react?”

The following Sunday, September 19,
El Diario
published a front-page editorial with the following headline, “What do you want from us?” The question was not addressed to the array of federal, state, and local officials ostensibly tasked with ensuring safety in the streets of Juárez, but to the members and directors of the death squads and assassination crews—whoever they may be—that have made Ciudad Juárez the most murderous city in the world for two years running.

“Señores of the different organizations disputing the
plaza
of Ciudad Juárez,” the front-page editorial begins in a sober, gentlemanly tone, “the newspaper’s loss of two reporters in less than two years represents an irreparable damage to everyone who works here and especially to the victims’ families. We would like to bring to your attention that we are reporters, not fortune-tellers. Thus, as information workers we would like you to explain what it is that you want from us, what you would prefer that we publish or refrain from publishing, so that we know what to bear in mind. You are, at present, the de facto authorities in this city, due to the fact that the legally established rulers have not been able to do anything to keep our colleagues from falling, despite our repeated demands that they do so. And it is for this reason that, faced with this unquestionable reality, we address you to pose this question, because what we least want is for another of our colleagues to fall victim to your bullets.”

After this opening appeal to the “de facto authorities,” the editorial proceeds for nearly four pages to state that the message is “not a surrender” but a truce of sorts, an attempt to understand what the rules are, for, the editors note, “even in war there are rules.” The editors eviscerate the federal and state governments for their blind military strategy and failure to respond to civilian cries for justice: “The State as the protector of citizens’ rights—and thus journalists’ rights as well—has been absent in these bellicose years, even when it has tried to appear present through diverse [military and police] operations that in practice have been sovereign failures.” The editors note that small business owners and doctors have been discussing potential tax resistance and labor strikes as drastic ways of trying to force the government to heed calls for justice, while, in contrast, “those with the highest obligation to protect citizens get lost in sterile disquisitions on whether Mexico is equal to or worse than Colombia twenty years ago, an affirmation that came from the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was taken up by such serious media as the
Washington Post
.” The editors reserve extra venom at the end for one state politician. “And if the atrocities, assassination attempts, and intimidations against the media were not enough, yesterday the State Secretary of Education and Culture, Guadalupe Chacón Monárrez, came to rub more salt in the wound by declaring that we are responsible for the psychological terrorism with which people live here in the city.”

The following day, Monday, September 20, much of the world media turned to Pedro Torres. They called from Japan. They called from London and from Amsterdam. They called from Israel, from Chile. They called from all across Colombia, the United States, and, of course, Mexico. His three cell phones and two office lines all rang at the same time, nonstop. Colleagues at the paper received calls for him on their cell phones and came knocking on his door, phones in hand.

“It was horrible, horrible, I mean . . . you can’t imagine,” Pedro Torres told me. “That day was frightening, profoundly. They started calling me at three in the morning that Monday and kept calling up until midnight; after twelve I didn’t answer anything.”

But from those whom the editors had been addressing Torres did not take a single call. The “Señores” who dispute the
plaza
never sent word. The federal government attacked the editorial in a series of press releases and press conferences in Mexico City, but not one federal official called.

“Those whom we had hoped would respond in a more positive way never did. We were really, at the end of the day, looking for a response from the government. But instead they came out very defensive,” Torres said. “That was when they said that Luis Carlos’s murder was not related to his profession but to some personal affair. We don’t know their basis for that statement. The reality is this: Do we feel like there was an investigation? No. There wasn’t. The same as in Armando’s case.”

While the world media turned, for a moment, to
El Diario
to ask its directors why they had written the editorial and what they hoped to achieve, federal officials only mentioned the editorial to denounce it before the international media.

“It made us angry,” he said. “They don’t react to reality, to events. They react to pressure in the media. This is very serious. I mean, if gunmen kill a thousand people here in a month, it won’t cause any reaction from the government. But if the
New York Times
or
El País
in Spain publishes a story about it then they shout, ‘Ah!’ For the government this is when something happens, not when it
happens
, but when it gets published. This is a gravely serious problem.”

Torres said that in the past three years of a supposed war against drug trafficking, the state and federal governments have spent “all their efforts against a perception, not against a reality. They want to win over the media with campaigns in the media. So they take action against what gets published, not what happens. This is the main problem. The government’s interest is political, to win or lose sympathies amongst voters. This is a serious part of what is sustaining this mess.”

Julio César Aguilar holds the record among the
nota roja
photographers in Ciudad Juárez; in one eight-hour workday he took photographs of seventeen bodies, an average of two corpses per hour in a city of 1.5 million souls. The first night that I went out riding with him in late October 2010, eight people had been executed when he started his shift at 4:00 p.m. When he picked me up after seven o’clock, he had already photographed two more. In two and a half hours we went to three more, thirteen total, an average day. After he dropped me off and finished his shift, in the predawn hours, gunmen opened fire on a bus taking maquiladora workers home after their shift, killing four and wounding fifteen, an early start on the next grim day of murder. (October 2010 would become Ciudad Juárez’s most violent month on record up to that point, with 352 executions, 2,660 in the city so far that year, and some 30,000 across Mexico since Felipe Calderón first sent the army into the streets in December 2006.)

Six days a week, from Tuesday to Sunday, Julio César Aguilar—a 32-year-old who wears thick horn-rimmed glasses and button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up to reveal tattooed forearms—drives through the most homicidal city on the planet guided by tips from colleagues and anonymous callers. He doesn’t scan the police radio frequencies anymore, he said. After a massacre of six federal cops all the frequencies have been jammed. When, while driving through town, he gets a call that a body has fallen, he puts on his hazards, floors it, and disregards all manner of traffic laws. Once while he was driving, I observed him answer a call on one of his cell phones: a body. The caller, however, wasn’t quite sure of the best directions out to the crime scene. Julio César reached out for a second cell phone to call another colleague and consult on the best way out to that part of the city. As he carried out both conversations simultaneously, driving thirty miles an hour through unlit Juárez back roads, he guided the steering wheel with his elbows.

In the past few years of the drug war his job has evolved into a sort of urban death race. From four in the afternoon until midnight, Julio César and his colleagues in the press crisscross the city from one end to the other, responding to anonymous calls and reports from their respective media, constantly calling each other on the road to confirm and consult, zigzagging at top speed through traffic, cruising through stop signs and red lights in deserted parts of town, navigating to and within the most marginalized areas and ultimately dealing with families and police who are not always understanding about their profession. Arriving at the scene of an execution they receive news of another. En route they get word of a
narcopinta
, or narco graffiti, or a
narcomanta
. Once there, they hear of another execution. And so they twist and race through the city until their shift is up.

Julio César has been doing photojournalism for six years, working the night shift for
El Diario
for four. He studied journalism at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, he said, because he did not want to get stuck behind a desk. “I went into journalism because I knew that I needed to study and I didn’t see myself sitting in an office,” he said while driving from one execution scene to another, “I wanted a profession that would liberate me from that.”

Born in Hidalgo State in central Mexico, he came with his mother and six younger brothers and sisters to Ciudad Juárez in 1988 when he was ten years old. His mother began working in the maquiladoras and studying on the weekends. Now she is a nurse. Julio César, not yet a teenager, taught himself to play the guitar and would sing for tips on Juárez city buses. Now, in a way, he has returned to working in public transit, but as a driver for the eyes of a society at once terrorized by and obsessed with the symbols of this city’s daily binary lot of death and impunity: the corpses wrapped in tape, hanging from bridges, mutilated, decapitated, or posed on park benches and left in the very streets where thousands of masked federal police constantly patrol in convoys of three to five vehicles, their eyes and their machine guns ever at the ready.

The first night I rode with Julio César he photographed the scenes of three executions—one of them half a block from an elementary school—and a car wreck. The second night, he crossed Juárez completely three times to photograph a
narcopinta
, the scene of a police attack in a shopping mall parking lot, and three execution scenes. The edges of the city on these two nights were desolate, but not entirely empty. A very small number of people still sat with their families on the porch of their home, played soccer in an outdoor field, or walked down the street with a handful of friends within blocks of or just around the corner from a dead body illuminated with the red and blue lights of police sirens.

At one scene we apparently arrived only minutes after the killing of a very young man. Two men and a woman were there; one man was emotionally wrecked. Julio César and two other photographers riding with him approached the off-ramp of a highway through town where the young man’s body lay twisted in the middle of the asphalt, a pool of blood extending from the head. As the photographers approached, the distraught man charged at them, screaming at them not to take pictures. No one raised their camera. The federal police officers already there approached us in combat mode with their automatic rifles aimed. Julio César, accustomed to such dynamics, walked to the other side of the police truck parked in the road and took a couple of shots of the body from there. Another federal officer approached, drawing a notebook and pen from his bulletproof vest. He asked us for our names and media outlets. Julio César asked him why he would want that information. The commander then asked, “How did you get here so quickly? Who notified you?”