To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (17 page)

“You see how these young girls are getting lost in the narco-culture and you ask yourself, ‘Where in hell is that girl’s mother?!’ Juárez is a city where you can very easily get lost, and I think this is relevant, the fact that women are more active in organized crime and there is no longer the same respect. Now they see the women as equals, and so as equals they torture them, decapitate them, burn them. This is a fact. And another fact is that all the nongovernmental organizations that always fought for ‘not another murdered woman!’ [
¡Ni una más!
], they have all stepped aside because they know that in this context there can really be consequences.”

I asked her about the common assumption that anyone found executed was somehow dirty, and she told this story:

“They throw somebody out all wrapped in tape and it is an execution, no? But then later you learn that the person had been kidnapped, that the family was negotiating the ransom, and that they killed the person even though the family had already paid two ransoms. And that’s when they say, ‘We were wrong.’ That is, we judge without knowing the stories behind the events. Until it happens to us, that is when we want the benefit of the doubt. But we still haven’t understood that even if someone was a drug trafficker they still have a right to life. As long as the person wasn’t from your family, you like the
nota roja
and even want to see the blood and the decapitations. That is a fact. Until it happens to you, and that’s when you say, ‘But no, it wasn’t like that.’”

At one point in our conversation Luz got a call on her cell—a report of a shoot-out and four dead bodies—and walks to another part of the office to take notes. I stared transfixed at the shelf in her cubicle against the wall, to the left of her desk. Broken and jagged pieces of seemingly random objects from crime scenes densely fill the space. A name-tag with dried blood on it. A stretch of yellow
CAUTION
tape. Red plastic pieces of a shattered taillight. Dozens of bullet casings, live ammunition, spent bullet casings, and bullet fragments. Wine corks and shotgun shells. A tiny Eiffel Tower and a plastic rose. Folded origami paper boats and small rocks. A bottle of spray paint and a tear gas canister.

Luz came back, saw me looking at all the objects on the shelf and started to describe them. She picked up the tag and said, “This is from Salvárcar,” referring to the January 2010 massacre of fifteen students at the house party. The broken pieces of taillight came from the car where Luis Carlos Santiago was murdered. One of the bullet fragments was extracted from his friend who survived; before the friend went into surgery he pleaded with the doctor to save the bullet then lodged against his spine, so he could give it to Luz as a present for her collection. She picked up a rock and told me it came from the scene where army soldiers murdered a young boy. A sparkly purple elastic hair tie caught my eye, and I pointed to it. “That is from the first case of a woman decapitated,” she said.

“This is part of the shoddy work that they do here,” she added. “All of this should be in a laboratory, not here. If something is here it is because they left it behind.”

The debris of impunity. I asked her why she collects it.

“So that you don’t forget,” she answered.

THERE WERE 3,111 KNOWN MURDERS
in Ciudad Juárez in 2010, while across the border in El Paso, there were only five. The killings in Juárez have left more than 10,000 children orphaned. Between 2007 and 2010, unemployment in Juárez rose from near zero to 20 percent, more than 10,000 businesses permanently shut their doors, and 120,000 jobs vanished. In the past two years at least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 230,000 residents have fled across the border, leaving their houses and apartments abandoned.

And yet there is one sector of the Juárez economy that is humming along just great. Juárez’s sweatshops, or maquiladora plants—where Mexican workers earn $5 a day on factory floors assembling imported components into for-export products—are expanding, hiring, and drawing foreign investment, undaunted by the bloodshed. Bill Conroy reported on the
Narconews
website in August 2010 that in the previous three years of murder only one homicide had taken place in the city’s maquila industrial zones. Conroy called this the maquiladora exception: “There is often an exception to most rules, and in the case of Juárez, the rule of violence does not extend to its industrial zones, which are home to some 360 maquiladora factories that employ more than 190,000 people.”

Tecma is an El Paso—based company that advertises “sheltering services” for foreign companies looking to outsource to Mexico. As the violence exploded in Juárez, Tecma signed new clients and made some $45 million in profit in 2009. Toby Spoon, the executive vice president of Tecma, told a reporter from the
New York Times
in December 2010 that “Juárez is open for business.” Spoon lives in El Paso. He shares his schedule with no one and takes different routes each time he visits factories in Juárez. He told the
Times
, “I have discovered maybe an unsavory part of human nature: If we can make money, and it’s not just too bad, then we are going to go for it.”

Two things to note in Mr. Spoon’s statement: first, his hubris in elevating to the status of “human nature” his discovery of something “unsavory” about his own business practices, and second, that 7,341 executions over the course of three years in a single city and the forced exodus of more than 100,000 people from their homes is “not just too bad” for him and his colleagues to keep making money. Tecma has been in business for 25 years. Apparently the more than ten years of ritual rape and murder of female maquiladora workers in Juárez that preceded the current homicide epidemic was also “not just too bad.”

It should not surprise that the Juárez-based maquiladora industry would surge unaffected by the murder and chaos all around it. Maquiladoras and illegal drug trafficking are two gears in one economy, and in Juárez those gears meet and turn together. More than 2,000 trucks and 34,000 cars cross from Juárez into El Paso every day. In 2009, more than $42 billion in legal trade crossed between Juárez and El Paso. An estimated $1.5 million to $10 million worth of illegal drugs moves over the border from Juárez to El Paso
every
single day
. How do you think the drugs—bulky, heavy packages of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and crystal meth—get across? Where does the infrastructure and organizational capacity exist to transport so much merchandise? On the backs of mules led out through the desert? In the backpacks of pedestrians? In the trunks or spare tires of SUVs and sedans going through customs? Sure, there are the occasional sensational discoveries of underground tunnels. But what about the thousands of daily cargo trucks with their NAFTA fast passes? What about the maquiladora warehouses? Recall, when
Forbes
first listed El Chapo Guzmán on its list of billionaires, the magazine, with no moral qualms or qualifiers, credited the source of his fortune as “shipping.”

Writer Charles Bowden called this place “the laboratory of our future” back in 1998 when he and a group of Juárez photographers published a book by that name chronicling the city’s impoverished sweatshop workforce, migrants, drug-related executions, and feminicide in the wake of NAFTA. “The book was strongly criticized by the government at the time,” said Julián Cardona, one of the Juárez-based photographers who worked on the book. “But now the present is so much worse than what was shown and described in the book. In other words, we were right, but few paid attention.”

Julián Cardona has worked as a photographer in Juárez since 1993. He shot for
El Diario
from 1993 to 2000. He has published several photography books with texts by Charles Bowden and has contributed photos for Bowden’s magazine articles and his recent book about Ciudad Juárez,
Murder City
.

In March 2008, Julián Cardona set out to document every homicide that took place that month. There were 181. Of those, he said, seventy-seven were corner boys, small-time local dealers. “El Chapo ordering the murder of corner boys?” he asked, incredulous. This would be like Bill Gates ordering the firing of computer salespeople at Best Buys in Los Angeles. “It’s absurd,” he told me. “These were poor people, corner boys. Many were tortured. There were executions before, but this was something unprecedented.”

Julián urged that one take a broader view than the gang war and cops-and-robbers explanation given by the government and repeated uncritically in the U.S. press. “It is important to emphasize the local factors that are kept out of public scrutiny: land speculation, the local oligarchy, and four decades of political manipulation of a global economic scheme. This has been an equation: land profits plus exploitation of cheap labor equals criminal machine. We can’t evade the fact that the city chose to be a maquila. And when I say the city I don’t mean the citizens, I mean the elite. If the problem could really be reduced to Chapo versus Vicente or good versus bad then the rest of society and the economy would be fine. What the citizens of Juárez are suffering is much worse than that. This is the manifestation of a failed state incapable of providing security, justice, or peace, where the role of the state has been taken on by a kind of parallel state where extortion and kidnapping are used instead of taxes. This is happening in other regions of Mexico. In Juárez, the state cannot guarantee the security of its citizens; it has lost the monopoly on violence.”

In late October 2010 when I arrived in Juárez, the top story in the news was a series of YouTube videos of former Chihuahua state Attorney General Patricia González Rodríguez’s brother, Mario Ángel, calming answering the questions of an off-camera voice while sitting handcuffed and surrounded by five masked men in desert fatigues aiming assault rifles at his head and body. Mario Ángel appeared unharmed in the video and spoke with a strangely matter-of-fact tone of voice and always with precise information. Among the many revelatory declarations in the first video was Mario Ángel’s testimony regarding the former governor, José Reyes Baeza, and his own sister, Patricia González Rodríguez, indicating their direct involvement with the Juárez Cartel, use of their offices to protect the cartel’s personnel, shipments, and, in Patricia’s case, direct involvement in the assassination of Armando Rodríguez. State prosecutors under Patricia González’s command released more than 9,500 suspects of the 10,000 detained or arrested during the federal Chihuahua Joint Operation. Mario Ángel’s body was later found in a shallow grave on the outskirts of town. (The video can hardly be taken as courtroom evidence, nor Mario Ángel’s statements as having been made freely and in the general interest of truth. That said, such narco videos have a disturbing record of disclosing accurate information, and it would be a mistake to simply disregard the accusations.)

With all this violence, impunity, and intrigue, one might half expect to see roving death squads firing on pedestrians and writhing bodies on sidewalks while riding from the airport into town. But the only constant sign to the outsider’s eye that something is terribly wrong here is the heavy, militarized police presence—federal police convoys of large pickup trucks carrying masked, battle-ready officers with machine guns poised in the back. Seeing these convoys every time you step outside, seeing them anywhere and everywhere you go at any time of day or night, leads to a haunting question: how can so many people get shot down, so many bodies get dumped, and yet so few people get caught in the act with all these cops roaming about?

One of the most striking features of Ciudad Juárez is that in the grip of so much terror it is still a “functioning” city. People still go to work and to school. City buses still make their routes. While I was there you could still take a walk in the morning to pick up the paper and sit outside with a cup of coffee and not have to duck bullets. But you couldn’t take that walk without thinking that getting shot was an actual, and not all that remote, possibility. It is a battered and terrified city, but it has not yet surrendered.

Quite the opposite: there are more mobilizations against Calderón’s drug war in Ciudad Juárez than anywhere else. And the stakes for participating in such mobilizations are much higher there. A few days after I arrived, a small march of about two hundred people was nearing the campus of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez. The march was part of the opening ceremonies of a three-day conference called “The International Forum vs. Militarization and Violence,” organized by a coalition of student, doctor, teacher, and progressive organizations. A small group of young students ran up ahead of the march to spray-paint images on the walls of a PRI office building across the street from campus. Almost immediately a federal police convoy sped around the corner and sent the students running across the street to campus. Several officers jumped out of the back of the truck and pursued the students. In Mexico, with its history of student massacres, it is against the law for police to enter an autonomous university campus—universities hire their own security. The federal police followed the students through the university entrance gate and then almost immediately opened fire on them from behind. Nineteen-year-old sociology student José Darío Álvarez took a bullet in the back and collapsed on the asphalt of the campus drive. The bullet, a 7.62 high-caliber bullet fired at close range from the police-issue G-3 assault rifle, opened a hole in José Darío’s stomach the size of his hand. Still conscious, he tried to gather up and hold his intestines in place. The police officer stood over his body, apparently stunned for a second, and then attempted to lift him up. Another officer approached to help him; both were masked.

Pavel Vásquez, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher, and Violeta Cangas, a 27-year-old general physician, were in Violeta’s car at the university gate entrance when the students and police sprinted past them. They heard the shot and flinched with fright. When Pavel looked up he saw José Darío fall to the ground. At first he thought that the police had fired tear gas or rubber bullets, but when he got out of the car and ran up to José Darío he realized the mistake.