Authors: Oscar Martinez
There are no city officers in sight today. Instead, nine military officers armed with AR-15 assault riffles watch over Juárez Avenue, which ends at the bridge. At least seven businesses in the area have shut down this month. Pharmacy owners, bar owners,
and restaurant owners have chosen to leave the area rather than pay the monthly 20,000-peso tax that some of the drug cartels currently fighting over the area demand. The Juárez Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, two of the largest organized crime groups in Mexico, are battling for control of the border zone, all in order to win more for their side: more people, more streets, more authorities.
They’re not gangs and they’re not corner hoodlums. They’re organizations that cross hundreds of tons of South American cocaine and Mexican marijuana and methamphetamine to the United States. The Juárez Cartel was the largest in Mexico during the 1990s. Back then it was led by Amado Carrillo, known as El Señor de los Cielos, The Lord of the Skies. Carrillo was something like the Mexican version of Colombia’s Pablo Escobar. He earned his nickname because he used his Boeing 727 to cross loads of cocaine every week, sold at 200 million US dollars. The Mexican government alleged that an unrecognizable body, found in 1997 in a clinic specializing in plastic surgery, was Carrillo’s. Since his death or disappearance his relatives have led the Juárez Cartel, but it has been weakened by the Sinaloa and Gulf Cartels’ power surge.
The Sinaloa Cartel has its hands in both Central and South America. This cartel is led by the most famous Mexican narco-trafficker, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, who wants to strip the Juárez Cartel of its last bit of armor in the city that gives it its name. El Chapo became a household name in 2001, when he escaped from a maximum security prison by supposedly hiding in a crate of dirty laundry. Now he wants to snatch the throne that the Lord of the Skies left empty.
Ciudad Juárez is now considered the most violent city in the world. According to many newspapers, Mexican cartel warfare has left some 4,550 people dead, 4,000 in Juárez in 2008 alone. Since late 2008, there’s been a self-imposed curfew in town. At five in the afternoon, as soon as dusk sweeps over the city, everyone recommends doing one thing: “Lock yourself in.” Already today, four people have told us to do the same.
Under the bridge, the lights hung along the six-foot metal wall dividing Mexico from the United States give a glow to the borderline. On the US side, two Border Patrol SUVs are making their rounds. The recently deported crowd into the shelter or into Grupo Beta vans. They stare sidelong at Juárez Avenue. The military is on the alert, and people walk hurriedly to leave the area or make their way to customs to cross over into the United States. Where they feel safer, I imagine.
This is how night falls over the Santa Fe Bridge in Juárez, the city that went from receiving thousands of departing northbound migrants to receiving thousands of southbound deported migrants; the city where everyone watches their back. The militarized city. The war in Juárez provoked increased border militarization, to prevent the violence spilling over to neighboring US cities. Yet, despite the heavy military and Border Patrol presence, the outskirts of Juárez is still a major drug crossing zone.
This is one of the many faces of Mexico’s northern border. This is Juárez, a frontier hot spot and, at the same time, a city that little by little has been vanishing from the migrant map.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1
A body lying on the Juárez pavement can be one of two things: it can be an execution or it can be a murder. The stabbed body of a man found in the suburbs, briefly mentioned in yesterday’s papers, represents a murder. The body of the man found downtown in his white truck, punctured by forty-nine high-caliber rounds, represents an execution. That is, if a man dies in a bar fight or is stabbed in the street, he was murdered. It’s very different to what happens when a cartel, or the mafia, executes somebody. When a cartel kills, you know it.
In recent years Ciudad Juárez has developed its own whispered vocabulary, words that carry meaning from the streets:
muro
(wall),
rafagueo
(machine-gunned),
malandro
(bad guys),
ejecución
,
mafia
, among others. As night falls, everything shuts
down and the words come streaming in, telling stories, giving warnings.
“Here’s where they executed the owner of the funeral parlor. Twelve shots. He was involved,” a taxi driver tells us on the way to our hotel. The driver adds: “He was a friend.”
When in a city of 1.3 million there are thirty-seven police murdered in the last year, twenty-two stores torched for not paying narco-taxes, thirty-eight businessmen kidnapped, 10,000 cars stolen, and fifty-two bank robberies; when 5,000 families move out of the city for their own safety, 2,500 soldiers move in, and 521 small gangs are active, all allied to various cartels, then we need to emphasize a few words in particular that may help describe the situation.
Fear
. A worker at the migrant shelter (whose name I won’t reveal) tells me that he is scared to use a public restroom, in case he finds a decapitated head. It sounds at first like he’s paranoid, or crazy, but it’s happened to him twice.
Lockdown
. The woman who sells us lunch on the street says she’s been living in lockdown for the last six months. She’s been in Juárez for twenty-two years, and says that ever since “the war” (as people call it) started at the end of 2007, “you can’t go out for a beer, you can’t go to a movie, and you can’t go out dancing,” because you don’t know when things are going to explode, if they’re going to light a place up with machine-guns, or drop off another human head. “From home to work and back, that’s it,” she says. Just a month ago she witnessed her most recent execution. She points to the pink house opposite her shop: “Over there a truck pulled up and someone blasted some guy with bullets. It was in plain light of day, around eleven in the morning.”
Get out of town
. This is what the only Central American staying at the migrant hostel told us he wants to do. He’s a twenty-six-year-old Honduran who came to Juárez with intention to cross. He had
tried in Ojinaga, about 200 miles southeast of the city, but it was flooded by the Rio Grande. That’s when he came to Juárez, “
a lo burro
,” unthinking as a donkey, without knowing what he was getting into. And now he just wants to get out of town. “What with the wall and the crime, it’s not even worth trying to cross here,” he says. Nor does he have a chance to “work a little to make a bit of cash, because everybody says how dangerous it is to even step outside the door.”
Tax
. According to the owner of a bar nearby the Santa Fe Bridge, taxes have put an end to Juárez night life. Hardly any clients come anymore. When we met him at about ten at night, he was sitting completely alone at his own bar, bored and drinking a glass of wine. “As owners we wanted to close because even though nobody was coming to drink anymore, we still had to pay the tax or fear for our lives,” he explains. The bar was very popular, he tells us, just a year and a half ago. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen the city.” He received a notice saying that he’d have to pay $500 a month if he didn’t want the place burned down. The last bar to go up in flames, four months ago, was just down the street. Five masked men showed up one night, armed and carrying drums of gasoline.
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2
“Let us ask God to forgive the politicians who created these walls,” Armando Ochoa, a bishop from El Paso, says in prayer. We watch him—through the wall—from the Mexican side. To his left is the fence that divides the two countries. To his right, the desert. In front and in back are thirty-eight double reflector posts, six motion-detecting towers, and five chunky Border Patrol vehicles.
Some 200 faithful from the United States and 500 from Mexico are attending this binational Mass in Anapra, the last crossing zone left in the Juárez area. This is the last haven people have, and
yet it is nothing but desert, thirty-eight double reflector posts, six motion-detecting towers, etc.
It’s not a very good idea to cross here. Those who do try must not know any better. The Border Patrol divides the 1,500-plus miles of border into nine sectors. The sector that has the most agents is Tucson, followed by this area close to El Paso, which includes parts of New Mexico and Texas. 2,206 patrol agents looking for drugs and undocumented migrants over 267 linear miles. The numbers might be different now: this data was taken from the last stock of official information written in October 2007, before Operation Jump Start (with its 2,000 agents stationed along the border) came to an end. Also, more cameras and motion detectors have been set up. And out of the nine sectors, this is one of the six fortified with a wall, or fence, or whatever you want to call it.
The Border Patrol doesn’t build walls or install reflectors to stop migration. Right now, the top priority is drugs. And El Paso is the second-most-guarded sector.
“They come at dawn,” explains a man whose house faces the wall, “but not very often these days. Since the beginning of last year, this zone has been heavily patrolled because so many drugs were coming through.” His house is in a low-income residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, where every dwelling is made of aluminum, cement blocks, thatch, or car parts. It’s really more of a gaggle of houses than a neighborhood—a makeshift settlement on land where only thorny shrubs can withstand the blistering sun and cold nights.
Narco-trafficking warrants surveillance. That’s the logic that reigns in these parts. The Border Patrol informs us that they’ll continue to build up the wall until the end of the year. It’ll be ready by next year, depending on whether or not US legislators slash the funds for those operations that have already been approved.
When surveillance increases, migrants leave for increasingly remote areas. Such as Anapra, the settlement out in the desert, far away from Juárez’s urban shell. From here one has to walk for
four nights, skirting highways, to get to Las Cruces or El Paso, the closest cities where one can find water, bread, transportation, or a telephone booth.
“We’d have a row that reached to the sea if we wanted to put up a cross for every death in the desert,” says Bishop Renato León in his sermon.
There are no absolute numbers here. Each institution or expert has their own estimate. No one tallies by area, nationality, gender, or age. The dead are dead. Dead in the desert, the rivers, the hills. Dead migrants. The number that US humanitarian rights groups use when counting the deaths of migrants in the desert is 4,500 since 1994, when the first border operation began. Most bodies found are reported as “Dead Unidentified Migrant.” The organizations that compile this information refer to it as “limited calculations,” “conservative numbers,” or “incomplete data.”
Two tables are spread with consecrated bread and wine. They stand flush against the border wall, one on each side. The friars give communion by sticking their fingers through the holes of the wall.
Mass is over, and so is our sense of peace. Five migrants, either Mexicans or Central Americans, wait for the Mexican-side table to empty so they can scramble on top of it and over the wall. A futile attempt.
One after another they jump, only to be scooped up by a couple of Border Patrol agents who promptly stuff them in their cars and take them away. Edu Ponces runs with his camera rolling, but the scene is short-lived. From this side of the wall the faithful sing their chorus: “Let them go! Let them go! Let them go!”
If this was their first attempt, they’ll be back in their country of origin within a week, whatever country that may be. If one of them is a repeat offender, he just got himself five to seven months in prison.
This crazy jump seems to be one of the few ways left to cross from Juárez. Last year, two people at this same Mass tried and
were met with the same poor luck. The US authorities have promised to put a stop to it. But I can almost see how, what with the wall and the 2,206 patrol agents screening this zone, that cat-jump off the Eucharist table can seem like a reasonable option. The other option is to pay $8,000 at one of the currency exchange houses along the Santa Fe Bridge, for a fake visa, and hope not to get caught by customs, or be prepared to pay the consequences—up to two years in jail for falsifying government documents.
The congregation continues with Mass until the soldiers tell everyone on the US side that it’s time to pack up.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3
Three more Hondurans showed up last night at the migrant shelter here in Juárez. The rest of the folks—there are forty in total, all spread out on cots—are deported Mexicans. This is the most well-furnished shelter of the twelve I’ve seen across the country. The male and female areas, for example, are separate, each with bathrooms and showers. The eating room is large and well-lit, and the whole shelter is contained within a large concrete-block building behind the priests’ quarters. In the sleeping rooms the bunks are tidy, each equipped with a thick blanket for the cold nights. There’s a projection room with a large screen where you can watch TV in the afternoons, and every night there are volunteers who make the food, which, we discover, is hot and delicious. It’s not uncommon for them to serve meat.
One of the Hondurans who showed up last night came for the same reason as the man I met a few days previously: the crossing points of Nuevo Laredo were unpassable. The heavy rains had swelled the Rio Grande, making the currents even stronger than usual. The man decided to follow the river upstream to see if he could find a spot to cross. The only place he kept hearing about was Juárez. Certainly, though, he must have heard it from people who don’t know the city.
Smoking with me out on the patio, he says he realizes he made a mistake. “There’s no work here, and it’s just too dangerous to be around town. Plus, there’s nowhere good to cross over.”. But then a forty-one-year-old Mexican, who’s been at the shelter for three nights, convinces him to attempt it with him tomorrow in Anapra.