Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (19 page)

Miss Sinaloa knows a different future. There will be cocaine and whiskey and it will help, but it will never prove sufficient to the need. And the need will not be denied. She knows these things but will not tell me the answers. What is violence? What does it mean for violence to be out of control? And where, within this thing called violence, do we fit this thing called murder? Maybe it is the coke, she loves that coke. Or the whiskey. And maybe it is neither. Maybe the problem with my understanding her is that I already know and refuse to see what is before me and to face what is in me.

I want to explain the violence as if it were a flat tire and I am searching the surface for a nail. But what if the violence is not a kind of breakdown, but more like a flower springing from the rot on a forest floor? The families, the crosses on the wall, the uniforms of the police, the street signs advising safe speeds, all these things are the nails in a tire long dead and flat, the chants of a vanished religion. The
cholos
with cold eyes, short lives, and the itch to put a bullet through the head are the function. The drugs dusting everyone’s life are the way. The hydra-headed monster we seek, the creature killing all over the city, is like sunshine in fact, and this new light falls equally on one and all.

The factories are now the house of death, offering no future, poisoning the body with chemicals, destroying the spirit faster than cocaine or meth.

Juárez is not behind the times. It is the sharp edge slashing into a time called the future. We have made careers out of studying the Juárezes of the world, given them the name Third World. We have fashioned schemes to bring them into our place beside the sacred fire and called these schemes development. Each new building with a wall of glass stands as a temple to our ambitions to pour the mash of human life on this planet into one mold. But always, a place like Juárez is seen over the shoulder, some city glimmering in our own past, a place we have moved beyond, and now, with a few magical tugs of our economic ropes, we intend to bring Juárez and its sister cities around the world promptly into our orbit of power and largess. We count the employment, we tally the exports, we rummage in the till, and we comfort ourselves with these numbers because that is our safe place. We do not wander the
calles
—in Juárez, there is a actually a private bridge so that the masters of American capital can visit their holdings here without squandering precious time in the long lines of machines that are the crossing for the rest of humanity. All our understanding of such places is based on the new buildings and the calming numbers. And we are careful what we count. Every story on Juárez says it has 1.2 million people or 1.4 million even though for at least a decade it has had more than 2 million people. But if it really has 2 million people, then all the numbers treasured by business and two governments are diminished. More taxes must be repatriated from Mexico City, and suddenly a huge shortfall in paved roads, sewers, water, electricity, police, and public transport must be admitted. A simple shift in total population takes Juárez from the column called developing to the column called failure. So we are careful in what we see and what we count and what we admit.

But what if Juárez is not a failure? What if it is closer to the future that beckons all of us from our safe streets and Internet cocoons? Here, boys stand on corners with pistols because there is no work, or if there is work, it pays little or nothing. Here, the girls walk by in their summer clothes, but they do not believe in the seasons or in harvest time. Here, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter come and go without much fanfare save a drunken spree to memorialize a dead belief system. This is the way of bullet-street with graffiti on the walls, steel bars on the windows, faces peering out with caution, and corpses on the shattered sidewalks.

After decades of this thing called development, Juárez has in sheer numbers more poor people than ever, has in real purchasing power lower wages than ever, has more pollution than ever, and more untreated sewage and less water than ever. Every claim of a gain is overwhelmed by a tidal wave of failure. And yet this failure, I have come to realize, is not failure. The gangs are not failure. The corrupt police are not failure. The drugs, ever cheaper and more potent and more widespread, are not failure. The media is increasingly tame here, just as it is in that place that once proudly called itself the first world, a place now where wars go on with barely a mention and the dead are counted but not photographed.

Everything in Juárez will soon be state-of-the-art. For years, the prosperous here have bundled themselves into gated communities, and now these strongholds are not sufficient, and security has vanished from the life of the city. After all, this is a city where the publisher of the newspaper and the mayor and his family live across the line in the United States in order to feel safe. There is no job retraining in Juárez because there are no new jobs to be trained for. The future here is now, the moment is immediate, and the message is the crack of automatic weapons. All the other things happening in the world—the shattering of currencies, the depletion of resources, the skyrocketing costs of food, energy, and materials—are old hat here. Years ago, hope moved beyond reach, and so a new life was fashioned and now it crowds out all other notions of life.

Please be advised that there will be no apocalypse. The very idea of a Götterdämmerung assumes meaning and progress. You cannot fall off a mountain unless you are climbing. No one here is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. We shall not meet next year in Jerusalem. For years, I thought I was watching the city go from bad to worse, a kind of terrible backsliding from its imagined destiny as an America with different food. I was blind to what was slapping me in the face: the future. A place where conversation is a gun and reality is a drug and time is immediate and tomorrow, well, tomorrow is today because there is no destination beyond this very second.

Things can be fixed now if I can just find a clean needle. After all, heroin is cheap, and the purity is very high. Imagine a world with an absence of work that will pay your bills, a place where gasoline and electricity cost more than a simple fix for your soul. You don’t even dream about a room of your own. You don’t worry about retirement, either, or how you can pay that dental bill. You don’t fret about things like overpopulation. You don’t fret, for that matter. Nor do you accept things. You finally live, and life is about what is and what is stares up at you with orphan eyes.

The mayor announces a plan to put three thousand cameras in the banks and schools and businesses of Juárez. The police threaten to go on strike because of abuse from federal officers and from the army. They hold a vigil for two days with family members, and all of them wear masks for security reasons. Want ads in the newspaper recruit students—“We are looking for students with valid passports and visas to work during spring break. We offer well-paying jobs.” The authorities advise that these solicitations are placed by people in the drug industry who are seeking drivers to ferry drugs into the United States. The army seizes twenty-two employees of the Chihuahua state attorney’s office. They wish to ask them questions. This is in a news release. No report of the answers to these questions has surfaced. The city of Juárez announces a new urban anthem for the populace. The song is titled “Ciudad Juárez, Valor de Mexico,” which roughly means “Juárez, Jewel of Mexico.” The opening lines go,

Juárez is our city,
the best of the borders,
because it was born with courage
and built its history with great faith and hope.

A city official explains, “We feel that Juárez, despite all its problems has great riches . . . We don’t always realize that Juárez is a jewel of Mexico, and has many, many positive things that we should extol.”

The violence is explained. It turns out, according to a U.S. official deep in the drug war industry, that all the dead people are turning up simply because the Zetas have hooked up with the Juárez cartel to fight the Sinaloa cartel for the crossing. The official hopes that the Mexican army will now capture the heads of these various cartels. But, he cautions, such tasks are not simple.

“You cut the head off the mother snake,” he explains, “and you deal with the babies. Are they poisonous? Sure. But they are babies.”

The police arrest a teacher in one of the city’s private high schools. He’s also a lawyer. Noe Bautista Vega is twenty-four years old, and according to the authorities, he’s been playing hooky. They have him down for seven bank robberies.

A bishop announces that the leaders in the drug industry have been kind to the church and generous to their communities. The bishop also heads the Mexican Bishops Conference. He notes that the drug folk help out with public works—things like electricity, telecommunications, highways, and roads—in rural areas, where the government seldom leaves a mark. They also build churches.

“There have been some who have approached us and asked for orientation about how to change their lives,” he notes. And he says, they come “from all levels.”

A tapestry is woven every day so that there will be no loose threads. Cartels battle in the new fabric, the army restores order, bank robbers are punished, and bishops are reprimanded if they mess up the weave. Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora explains away the surge in violence by asserting that all the newly minted dead people simply indicate the waning of the cartels “and how these structures as we knew them are collapsing.” Good Friday, clearly, indicates this collapse. Twenty-three Mexicans were executed around the country that day. A musician performing in a town south of Mexico City died when someone opened up on the entire band as they played a set. Some unnamed soul also pitched a grenade into an army convoy on the Gulf coast. All this goes into the loom and is made safe and sane.

We are experts at walling things off. At the moment, the United States is busy building a wall. There will be at least seven hundred miles thrown up along the line, with more on the way. Already, this simple chore is getting complicated. At Columbus, New Mexico, the wall stretches now for miles—fifteen-foot steel poles a few inches apart and plopped into three feet of concrete. Now the cutting begins, an almost daily assault by hacksaws and acetylene and plasma torches. Also, government video cameras have captured images of men with huge ladders who then descend on the other side using bungee cords. In sections, the fence is settling and gaps form large enough for a person to squeeze through. Of course, this is to be expected. Eighty miles to the east in El Paso, facing Juárez, a team of men must make daily repairs in the fence built there.

This is all part of the tapestry. As Juárez spins into a future that cannot be admitted by either government, the wall goes up to contain the mystery of blood and drugs and gangs and gunfire that must be explained away even as they are cordoned off by stout ramparts.

The former captain of the city police, Sergio Lagarde Felix, goes down in a barrage on May 2. He had quit the force in January, the same month comandantes began being killed on the street and the month that the lists of dead cops and soon-to-be-dead cops were posted on the police memorial monument. About noon yesterday in front of an auto mechanics shop, he took a round through the chest and one through the head. Five .40-caliber shells were found around his corpse and two more inside the business. He was forty-four. Formerly, he assisted the chief of police, but now his former chief is in jail in El Paso for setting up a drug deal in the United States.

There was another killing of a man thirty-five years of age. He took six, mainly in the head. He is the same man as the former captain, only in disguise in an earlier report. That can happen here, this shedding of years, this variation in the nature of one’s death. This is the place of possibility and it has escaped the stranglehold of simple facts.

They find them in the bright light of morning in late May 2008. Five men wrapped in blankets. The blankets are made in China since global trade has wiped out the Mexican serape industry. Two of the men have been decapitated and their severed heads rest in plastic bags. Beside them is a sign indicating that they died because they are “dog fuckers.”

Killing people is fun. There is a feeling of power in slaughtering other human beings. And for many in Juárez, a feeling of power is a rare thing. The men beat their women, and that helps, but it is hardly the same rush of exhilaration that comes from killing another person. If wife beating were really a decent substitute for slaughter, then murder would be all but absent in Mexico. But this is not the case.

No one knows how many assassins live and thrive in Juárez. There are an estimated five hundred street gangs—but our knowledge of these facts is limited since the city police’s expert on gangs was executed in January 2008 at the beginning of a killing season that is humming along at more than one hundred corpses a month. Still, assume there are five hundred gangs. Assume that full membership requires murder, be conservative and say there are only ten members in each gang, and then you have five thousand young and frisky killers. To be sure, the Aztecas, one premier gang, have three thousand members, but why exaggerate the number of killers? Let’s just say five thousand. This tally ignores the world floating about the gangs, the land of police and soldiers and cartels, where many other murderers find wages and niches.

You have two choices. Either you’re going to be straight, get that job in an American factory in Juárez, work five and a half days a week for sixty or seventy bucks, going to do this even though no one can live on such a wage, going to do this even though you know the turnover in the plants is 100 to 200 percent a year, going to do this even though as you were coming up in the barrios you saw the men and women slowly devoured by the plants and then noticed that around age thirty, they were tossed away like old junk, yeah, you’re going to do this, you’re going to be straight.