Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (27 page)

Sergio said Rubi had abandoned them both. To Marisela, this was inconceivable. She could leave Sergio, yes, but her own baby? She looked again at Rubi’s letter, and she had a fear: What if she hadn’t written it? What if it was faked?

When she returned shortly after to visit her grandson, she found Sergio had vanished and taken the baby with him. Marisela and her eldest son, Juan, decided to print up flyers of Sergio’s face and leaflet his neighborhood, Fronterisa Baja, asking people to come forward if they’d seen either of them.

But nothing came of it.

Then, after two weeks, there was a call. It was a teenager named Angel.

“I need to talk to you—I’m going to tell you something real hard,” he said. “I don’t want to talk because I’m scared. [But] I have a family member [who] is missing also. I know how you are feeling. I know the feeling you have when you are looking for somebody and you can’t find them.”

When Marisela met Angel, he was shaking. She had to drive him far out of the neighborhood before he was able to form the words he had to say.

Months before, he had been hanging out in his ’hood when Sergio drove up to a group of them and said he needed help. He had to remove some furniture from his house, and there was some quick money in it if they’d help him, so a posse of them—Sergio’s brother Andy, Angel, and a ten-year-old boy—went back there. And when they did, they saw Rubi. Her head had been smashed in. She was dead. The kids didn’t want to get involved in this. Sergio became furious. If you don’t help me fix this, he announced, I’ll kill you all.

So they rolled up Rubi’s body and put it in the truck. Sergio drove off with the ten-year-old boy. And Angel had had to live with what he’d seen ever since.

Marisela and Juan didn’t know what to make of this. The kid seemed plausible. But they didn’t want to believe it. She begged Angel to come to the police with her. Finally, terrified, he agreed. The police wrote it up, but still nothing happened.

She turned up at the police station every day now, demanding to know: “So what are we going to do today” to find Sergio? “What’s the next step?” She virtually moved into the police station as a one-woman pressure group. But even now, the police were shrugging. Sergio has vanished: What can we do?

At this point, Marisela made a decision. If the police wouldn’t do their job, she would do it. She would become a detective. In the middle of the killing fields of Ciudad Juárez, she was going to become a freelance police force of one.

She trawled the mountains around the city, looking hour after hour for Rubi’s corpse. Then she headed back to Sergio’s neighborhood to hand out flyers. Finally, one day, a woman told Marisela she knew where Sergio was. I can’t disclose the details of who this woman was, because it might get her killed. But she told Marisela that Sergio was in Fresnillo sixteen hours from Juárez, and gave Marisela his landline number. She took it to the police and . . . still nothing. They refused to act.

Marisela had been feeling ill for a long time. She assumed it was because of Rubi’s disappearance, but her doctors told her she was wrong. She had breast cancer, and she needed a double mastectomy urgently.

At this point, most of us would have given up. Marisela did not.

A few days after the operation, she set off for Fresnillo. She had tubes attached to each breast to drain the fluid and serum that seeped from her into a container.

And then, in Fresnillo, she found him. The local police finally seized Sergio, and he immediately confessed. Yes, he had smashed Rubi’s skull. He had set her on fire and tossed her body in the area on the outskirts of the city where the local abattoir dumps the bones and grease from the slaughtered pigs. The police started a search back in Juárez. They were only able to recover one third of her body: her arm, a few parts of her head—not even the skull. Just fragments. There were thirty-six bones in total. The investigators told Marisela that normally, when you are burned, your head explodes through your eyes and your ears, but because Rubi’s skull was broken, hers had exploded through the hole in her head.

Marisela believed there must be more of Rubi left than that. She drove with her eldest son Juan to the abattoir dump. There were thousands and thousands of pig bones, and wheelbarrows dumping more all the time. They started to scramble through the bones and the grease, a pump still attached to each of Marisela’s breasts. “There were maggots and the smell of death and all these bones—we were going through the bones trying to find one piece of her. Trying to find one piece of her,” Rubi’s brother, Juan, remembers. “Of course we didn’t find anything.”

Angel testified at the trial. He described everything he saw, and he explained that Sergio had threatened to kill him if he ever spoke out about it.

One day, Sergio turned to Marisela from the dock and said: “I know that I did a big harm that nobody will be able to repair. She already said that she will not forgive me, but I ask your forgiveness, Marisela, because I know that it was a great harm. And it is true what you said—‘Where was God at that moment?’ Unfortunately, I didn’t know God at that moment, but I had the good chance to find God in jail. I don’t have words
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 . . . that’s all.”

It was obvious he would be convicted—but then everything took a mysterious turn. The judges said they couldn’t accept Sergio’s confession, because the prosecutor has to be present for a confession to be valid. On these grounds alone, they said there was insufficient evidence, and he was acquitted.

Marisela always believed in doing things the right way. Now, Juan says, “it was like she was betrayed by her own people, because she believed in the authorities.” She announced: “These judges have killed my daughter again.” Nobody understood why this had happened, but they knew it wasn’t unusual: the murder conviction rate in Juarez is just 2 percent.
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Angel—the kid who had testified at the trial—was found dead along with his family, just as Sergio had promised.

Marisela started to walk the streets of Juárez with signs demanding justice for Rubi, holding aloft her picture. She called on all the mothers who had missing daughters to leave their homes and join her. All over the country, people who protested were being murdered, but Marisela would not be stopped. And steadily, as they saw her standing up, other mothers began to come out into the streets to join her, holding aloft their own pictures of their own daughters. They walked all day, through the deadliest city in the world, refusing to accept that this is how things would always be. She said in a speech: “It is only a few
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of us that are gathered here, but there are plenty more waiting at home, crying . . . We ask you: How many more will it be? How many victims? . . . We stand alone in this struggle. Please join and support us.” Everywhere they went, people would shout “Keep on going!” and “We’re with you!”

She was approached by rival cartel members who said they could deal with Sergio if she wanted. Some of her family were tempted—but Marisela refused. She believed in justice, not violence.

She went to interview everybody who had ever known Sergio, to beg them for information—and finally, somebody gave her an address in Fresno, a city nine hundred miles away.

Almost as soon as she arrived on the block, somebody fired bullets into the air, to scare her off. She refused to run. She rented a house nearby, and then—one day—she saw him, in the street, just as she had expected.

She was perfectly still. She didn’t want him dead; she wanted him brought to justice.

Years after this, in a shack in Juárez, I asked her best friend Bertha Alicia Garcia—weren’t you afraid? “We are always afraid,” she said, “but sometimes, the love of your children is stronger than fear itself.”

Marisela called the police and told them everything. They sent three cops, who arrived noisily at the front of the house—while Sergio escaped out the back.

They let him get away. Again.

Was this incompetence? Corruption? Fear?

Marisela tried to follow his trail, asking questions in the surrounding small towns, but this area was totally controlled by the Zetas, and they don’t like people asking questions. So Marisela decided to walk from Juárez to Mexico City—a journey of more than a thousand miles—to beg the president himself to act. In terms of distance, this is like walking from Paris to Kosovo, or from Los Angeles to Denver. It was the last option she had left.

So Marisela began her long march through the desert. In this heat, animals burrow into the ground and only come out at sunset. Marisela walked through it all, across sand dunes, and mountains, and dust storms. She had spent her life savings by now. Some days she and the other mothers marching with her went hungry; some days they ate only bread smeared with mayonnaise. They slept where they could. Sometimes people let them into their homes, or allowed them to lie down in their trucks.

The heat on these roads
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is so intense that it looks as though the tarmac in front of you has melted into shimmering black pools. The dust and the glare were so bad that her son Juan’s eyes became infected, and for two days he was blind; he walked holding his mother’s shoulder.

It was as if she thought she could outpace her grief. Everybody in the country was watching and asking—If a nurse with no resources and no money can find a murderer, how come the police can’t find him, with everything they’ve got? What is happening to our country?

When after three months of walking she made it to Mexico City, President Calderon refused to see her. In the video clips from this time, you can see her face becoming slowly misshapen by grief.

That is when Marisela heard rumors that started to make it possible to make sense of this whole story. Sergio, she was told, is a Zeta. That is why the police would not touch him. That is why he kept escaping. When Marisela got her final lead on where Sergio was, the police were finally honest with her. “If he’s with the Zetas, we’re not going to be able to do anything, because they run the state,” they told her. “If we do a bust, it’s because they allow us to do it. We don’t bust people just like that.” They were apologetic, but they explained that the Zetas give them money if they serve them and death if they don’t.

I found myself thinking back to the start of this war. Arnold Rothstein was allowed to shoot at cops and walk away a free man. The wealth that came from controlling the market in criminalized drugs bought more than fancy fur coats for Carolyn. It bought him a place above and beyond the law. At first, he bought freedom from being prosecuted for the crimes involved in running his drug business. And then it spread from there, buying him immunity for the laws surrounding theft and extortion and murder, like an oil slick that slowly covers the whole society in its goop. This oil slick, I began to see, covers Mexico today.

First the drug dealers bought immunity from the drug laws. Then they bought the law itself. By joining the Zetas somewhere along the line, Sergio had placed himself above the law. This is what the desire to repress drugs has wrought.

But Rubi always knew her mother wouldn’t abandon her.

Marisela believed she had one card left to play. Go public. Tell the world everything. She went to the state capitol in Chihuahua City and announced to the world’s press everything she had found—that the Zetas now ran the state and could do what they liked.

The governor publicly dismissed her. She had arrived in early December, and she invited the governor to Christmas dinner on the doorstep of the state capitol building, because she wasn’t leaving until Sergio was arrested. “What’s the government waiting for—that he come and finish me?” she said. “Then let him kill me,
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but here in front, to see if it makes them ashamed.”

This was one of the most tightly policed places in Mexico, guarded by the federal police, the local police, and the military.

But one night, at eight o’clock, the gates to the capitol started to close, and the area suddenly emptied of police and soldiers.

A man approached her now, right in front of the security cameras, in the shadow of the offices of the city police.

He took out a gun. He put the gun to her head. He pulled the trigger.

But the gun didn’t go off. Something had jammed. Marisela’s brother tried to throw a chair at the hit man; Marisela ran.

The hit man ran after her. As they were both running, he pulled out another gun, and this time, he shot her
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straight in the head.

On the morning of her funeral, her business was burned down, and a man who resembled Marisela’s boyfriend was kidnapped off the street nearby, suffocated to death, and dumped for everyone to see.

Those searching for the disappeared disappear; those seeking justice for the murdered are murdered, until the silence swallows everything. This is all happening in a city with a Walmart and a Pizza Hut and several KFCs.