Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (23 page)

That is why I can finally relax. There is no way to be safe. So there is no reason to worry. And, once the mega-cartel arrives, calm returns. And the army can declare victory.

It is all in the papers.

Besides, it is 106 degrees in the shade and in a few days, we will embrace the solstice and summer will begin. We have planted well in this city, and we can expect a very good harvest.

On the third day of June, a twenty-four-year-old woman is washing cars on the street in Juárez. She has been fired from her job in a maquiladora as punishment for getting pregnant. Besides the child she is carrying as she scrubs down the cars, there are three more at home. She is from Veracruz and is the sole support for the family. A shoot-out with machine guns catches her, and so she and her three-month-old fetus die with water and suds and blood.

Moisés Villeda takes a walk around 2 A.M. after a night working as a reporter. A car pulls up, a guy asks him where a main avenue is, which happens to be three feet away. Then the guy says, get in, and Villeda declines. That is when another guy gets out of the car with a machine gun.

Once the reporter is in the car, they beat his head with the butt of the gun and break his arm. Around 2:35 A.M., the boys dump him out on the street. But first, they call the cell phones of all the other press and tell them where to find their colleague. Also, they fire a burst in the air, so that the federal police standing about a block away will know where to look.

The reporter is taken to the hospital. The morning paper notes the facility is under security now because the killers have made a habit of coming to the hospital to kill survivors.

In the morning edition of the paper, the local businessmen announce that contrary to a video on the Internet, they are not going to take law and order into their own hands, but rather will count on the authorities to maintain peace in the city.

She is forty years old and probably worries about the coming years’ taxing her face and her body. Maybe she thinks of Botox treatments. No matter, now. She has full red lips, hair to her shoulders, a white blouse, and a dark coat, and a necklace gleams at her throat. She is the administrative director of the Juárez police department. She had worked in the department from 2002 to 2005, left and then returned in October 2007. Technically, her job put her in charge of human resources.

She lives in a very nice neighborhood, and at about 10:23 P.M. on Monday, June 16, she is murdered in front of her home. A sign thoughtfully left with her corpse explains that she had hired too many people associated with El Chapo Guzman. Her name is Silvia Guzman Molina.

Now she becomes a new woman. Before her murder, she was law enforcement and by the standard of the city, an innocent. But having been assassinated, she now becomes dirty, someone who must have been connected to bad people doing bad things. The police department says she was doing an adequate job, and that is why they are surprised she has been slaughtered. Juárez has these little mysteries about the dead.

Given the standard—that the dead are dirty and the living are innocents—clearly the heads of the major cartels in Mexico are innocents. Since this massive drug war began at the behest of the president of Mexico, they have not had a hair on their heads touched. Also, the killers moving around Juárez with machine guns and big SUVs have also suffered few, if any, deaths. So clearly, they also are innocents.

There is a room no one has filed a report on, and I am not allowed in this room. But I am certain it exists. The walls are turquoise blue and brilliant, the tiles cool Saltillo, the light is soft and caresses the skin. The dead come here, not all of the dead—the innocents, that tiny handful, they go someplace else. The dirty come to this room I know of, the one where I am always denied entrance. I try, but I suspect I am not ready. I still have some patina of stupidity and willful denial and basic fraud about me. I still try to make sense out of things and believe in patterns and rational behavior. I still—and I think this is my unforgivable flaw—not only believe in the system but much worse, I believe there is a system.