To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (7 page)

Everything about the scene is routine. Nothing here would lead you to believe that the form on the ground around which everyone’s movements, everyone’s tasks and actions and jobs are oriented, was once a person.

I walk up to the young man who offered to give me “the name” and strike up a conversation. His name is Jonathan and he works for the Moreh funeral parlor. “I’m the one who’ll be preparing this guy’s body in a bit,” he says.

I ask about Emaus. They are also a funeral service Jonathan tells me, the competition. I ask how he found out about the body. Moreh has a police radio and monitors the frequency, just as Pepis monitors the Red Cross frequency. It turns out that the first people to arrive at the scene of an execution—a crime scene, one supposes—those who apparently have no fear of returning gunmen, are representatives of Culiacán’s multimillion-dollar funeral parlors. They hear the calls go out on the police radios and rush to the scene. Once there, they will search the body for some form of identification and call the dead person’s name back in to headquarters. The funeral parlor will then dispatch a crew to seek out the dead person’s family. This crew arrives with “the bad news,” as Jonathan puts it, but they soften it up with lies, “so that the family doesn’t get too scared.” They’ll say, “We’re really sorry, but we have information that your beloved was in an accident. We can take you to where it happened.” On the drive the crew will explain that they work for the funeral parlor and will be ready and able to take care of the family’s wake and burial needs.

“Every day there’s work,” Jonathan says. Indeed, proud of his employer, Jonathan tells me that Moreh was in charge of the funerals for such major capos and their relatives as Nacho Coronel, Arturo Beltrán, and El Chapo’s son Édgar.

But, considering that the Beltrán Leyvas and El Chapo are sworn enemies whose feud generates all these dead bodies, isn’t it dangerous to work for both sides, or either side, for that matter?

“They are very polite,” he says of his customers, “and they tip well.”

After some fifteen or twenty minutes the forensics team and the police lift the body into the forensics van and drive off. And with that, the official investigation into Juan Antonio González’s murder is done.

We drive back to the bunker. Pepis drops us off at the back door and goes to park the truck. It is raining. We walk into the office and sit down. Marco and Juan Carlos start typing; I continue to write notes in my notebook. Less than five minutes later Pepis bursts in and shouts, “Let’s go!” Another body has been dumped.

Juan Carlos writes the article about Juan Antonio González’s murder in less than ten minutes. Pepis downloads his photographs and makes a selection to send off to the editors. First, however, he goes through each selected image and digitally distorts the faces of the police, forensics workers, and anyone else. He also distorts the license plates and squad car numbers of any official vehicles that may appear in the background. He saves the altered files and sends them on.

We head out again, this time to Navolato.

“Everything has become just counting the dead,” Cruz says as we walk out. “All investigative and feature stories have been extinguished. We used to go out to villages and talk with people. Not anymore. And it’s not just here, it’s all across Mexico.”

Cruz knows what he’s talking about. He won the Mexican National Journalism Award in 2002 for an in-depth investigative feature on a massacre in the Sinaloan mountains. He knows that good reporting demands going places and talking to people, and he knows that that has become next to impossible, which is to say, potentially fatal.

“Narco has always been around,” he says, “people learned to live with it. As long as you didn’t stick your nose where it didn’t belong. . . . But not anymore. It has become a psychotic environment.”

In the truck again I ask about Navolato. Since arriving in Culiacán I had seen daily reports of executions and shoot-outs in Navolato. I had heard that the entire municipal police force had quit en masse. It turned out, however, that there were still twelve acting officers, four on duty at any given time, for the entire municipality, an area of 882 square miles with a population of more than 135,000. Of course, the four on-duty police officers never leave the station. I asked several friends and contacts about going there, and every one of them had said the same thing: do not go there alone.

“Navolato was part of the Carrillos’ territory,” Juan Carlos says. “No one could go there without their permission. It is a strategic municipality, right next to Culiacán; it also includes coastline, good roads, and several landing strips. Navolato was untouchable. As soon as you entered the municipality there were cartel spies reporting on who was driving in. Now Navolato belongs to El Chapo.”

And so, I ask, all the dead bodies discarded on roadsides in Navolato, one assumes that they were people accused of working for, or perhaps just being sympathetic or related to, the Carrillos, and their killers are El Chapo’s gunmen? Do all these executions follow some logic of extermination?

Marco and Juan Carlos look at me, and then nod. “When a dead body is found no one says anything like that,” Pepis says while driving. “We just publish that so and so was executed and that’s it.”

No one is able to protect them, they said, if they were to publish anything that disgruntles a cartel. But, I ask, what about Calderón’s War on Drugs and all the army Humvees and federal police trucks patrolling around?

“The day that the federal government launched Operation Culiacán-Navolato, Culiacán looked like a military parade,” says Juan Carlos. “More than 1,500 soldiers and federal police officers rolled into town, and within an hour cartel assassins executed some guy in front of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. That was when we knew that the Operation would be useless. The narcos assessed the efficacy of that operation instantly.”

Earlier that day Pepis and I met for lunch to talk about journalism and violence in Culiacán. Pepis’ 14-year-old son came with him. Pepis is a family man. He took his job folding the morning paper at
Noroesta
because his wife was pregnant with their first child and he wanted to get a job with a health plan. Now they have four children and Pepis works the night shift for
Primera Hora
. Even so he makes a point of driving home to eat dinner with his family every night. One night on such a drive he had just passed through a traffic light when a gun battle broke out.

“Sometimes I get sick of the life here,” he told me over a lunch of
gorditas
, northern-style thick corn tortillas that are opened up and stuffed with beef, pork, chicken mole, chilies or beans and cheese. “Sooner or later my kids or someone in my family is going to get mixed up in this, be it directly or indirectly. If we live in a violent city, one day something will happen. There are many innocent victims here. I’ve thought of moving, but it becomes a lifestyle. It becomes a way of life, coexisting with crime and violence becomes a way of life. If they kill someone right here,” and he points out to Culiacán’s central plaza, “it won’t cause a big stir, and this is a busy place. A bunch of people will crowd around the body and that’s it. It doesn’t shock that they’ve killed people right here in the city center, because they’ve committed so many high-impact atrocities worse than that.”

After a few bites he looks over to his son and says, “A kid like him growing up in all this is thinking what he needs to do to get a new car, carry a good pistol, and go around town with a girl by his side. That’s what the youth of today think. They live day to day. They’re living only for the moment; they don’t think about having a family, starting up some business, or studying.

“And the drug cartels here utilize this way of thinking to catch adolescents and use them as disposable triggermen. Why? A disposable triggerman won’t cause you any headaches. You’ll use him to kill ten or twenty people and when you know that he’s not useful anymore, you yourself kill him. And the people say he’s dead because he was up to no good. They use stolen new cars and give them a car and a pistol and a wad of cash. Ten years ago a hired gun would charge you an average of $1,500 to kill somebody, depending on the rank of the person to be killed. In some cases they’d charge almost $10,000, but the least they’d charge you would be $1,500. Do you want to know how much they charge now, or rather how much they pay them? They pay them about $300 a week. They give them weekly salaries. How much can these kids save up in the short lives they lead? How much can they save? Not even enough to pay for a funeral.”

“These are disposable assassins.”

We arrive during the very last moments of dusk in the small rural town of La Palma, Navolato municipality. Within moments it is completely dark.

The body lies on the side of the road a few feet from a high white wall that stretches into the distance, enclosing a private property. Some twenty officers of the Culiacán state police force stand guard wearing bulletproof vests and holding machine guns at the ready. Some wear black masks covering their heads and faces. There are no Navolato municipal police present. Two police trucks are parked a few feet away, one on either side of the body, and their headlights illuminate the scene. A state forensics team gets to work, noting the position of the body and the bullet casings. The same man from Emaus that I saw an hour or so ago paces back and forth, talking on his mobile phone. Pepis gets to work.

This is not just any street, but the main highway that cuts through town. There are about a hundred residents crowded across the street, watching the scene. Some push forward into the street as far as the police will let them, about twelve or fifteen feet away from the body. Men and women, young and old, all press together, watching. Some twenty adolescent boys and young men on the edge of the crowd stand over their bicycles. Girls and boys, small children and babies in their parents’ arms, also take in the spectacle. Families. Most watch in silence, some make hushed comments amongst companions; some of the teenagers and young men crack jokes and laugh.

The man’s body—no one knows his name—lies on its back. His arms have been placed over his abdomen, crossed. On the wall behind him you can see bullet holes and splattered blood over the white paint.

Pepis walks from one side to the other, around the periphery established by the state police. They do not use caution tape, but rather stand in the road with rifles poised, a presence that clearly marks a first perimeter for the crowd. A smaller group of police forms a second perimeter closer to the body, this one meant for the photographers. I walk through the first perimeter it as if I had a right to and the police eye me, but then say nothing when they see me speak to Marco. Pepis crouches down and clicks his shutter. Standing several yards away still, the body lies mostly in shadow. Something seems amiss about the shape of the body, but I don’t stare too long.

The crowd observes and comments, the police scan the crowd, shift their weight from one foot to the other. The forensics team goes through the motions of registering the central facts of the crime scene: body placement, locations of bullet casings, and distances between the two. I scrawl observations in my notebook.

And then gunfire rings out. Close. Loud. A machine-gun burst of some seven or eight shots. Quick and to the point. The entire crowd—spectators, police, reporters, everyone—lurches and then stills. Everyone looks around, scanning all sides. No one is coming. The shots came from the other side of the white wall not more than a hundred yards away. Once it seems that an armed convoy of professional killers is not careening toward us, the young men with their bicycles start to make jokes, “Here come the men with the masks!” And they laugh. But the families, the men, women, and children, start to move away. With unhurried but decisive steps, they head to their homes. Within mere moments the twenty or so boys and young men are the only spectators left. One of them says, “They left us all alone.”

The police, detectives, and forensics inspectors also make a move. One detective says, “Let’s go, pick him up already.” And with that the forensics team, a few police, and the man from Emaus lift the body onto a stretcher, take it to the forensics van, and drive off. The police pile into two trucks and follow. The crime scene investigation is done.

Total time between hearing the machine-gun fire and the exit of a hundred onlookers, twenty police, and another twenty or so inspectors, funeral parlor employees, and reporters: Five minutes.

Notice that none of the twenty heavily armed and armored state police officers thought to investigate who had fired a machine gun nearby, itself a federal crime. On the contrary, the response was
Hurry up and let’s go
. And of course it was. For the state police response perfectly illustrates a central fact of the drug war; the trade’s death squads are more heavily armed and better trained than the on-duty state and local police, and most often the police are on their payroll anyway.

The machine-gun burst was a message that the residents and police understood unequivocally: Enough theater. We still have work to do. Move on.

As we get in the truck and leave, we see an army Humvee, with a soldier gripping a mounted .50-caliber machine gun on top, pull up on the corner and park, right across the street from the wall where the man was executed and beyond which someone had fired a machine gun a few minutes before. Clueless soldiers on patrol? Or fodder for those who say that the army supports El Chapo? Impossible to say, though it did seem a striking coincidence. How could the soldiers just happen to be right around the corner and yet not hear the shots or not care to investigate who might have committed the federal crimes of possessing and firing an illegal assault rifle?

I glance back. The street is deserted, the blood still wet on the wall, the Humvee calmly parked on the side of the road.

On the drive back I ask the
Primera Hora
team why they think the blood news,
la nota roja
is so popular in Mexico. Marco says, “The
nota roja
becomes a thing to do, like going to the movies. You’re not sitting in a movie theater; instead you’re at the scene of a crime. You saw how that little girl ran up barefoot, looking all around, smiled at me and then in a hurry looked at the dead guy. So, think of it like having the cinema on a personal level.”