In Desperation

2

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

A n anguished cry rose from the morgue’s viewing room.

“Mi hijo! Mi hijo!”

Paula Chavez bent over the corpse of a young man in his late teens, her son, Ramon. Her face creased with pain. She stared into his open eyes then at the bullet holes in his tattooed chest. Helpless against the horror, she caressed his face and pressed one of his cold hands to her cheek.

It was evocative of Michelangelo’s Pieta, Jack Gannon thought, watching from across the room.

He turned to Isabel Luna, who had raised her camera to shoot several frames of Paula Chavez. At times, the priest and morgue workers had to steady the grieving mother, who was now childless.

Ramon was sixteen. He’d been Paula Chavez’s last living son.

She’d already lost two others to the violence this year.

The sorrow in the air was as biting as the smell of chlorine and the reek of death.

For much of the day, Gannon and Luna had been riding along with forensic experts and coroner’s staff, pinballing from homicide to homicide, when they had come to the fringe of a squatters’ village. Paula Chavez was in a ditch on her knees weeping at the crime scene tape near her son. A priest prayed alongside her while windswept garbage and desert dust enshrouded them.

The priest brought Paula to the morgue. A coroner’s van brought her son. Gannon and Luna had followed them here, where workers had set Ramon’s corpse on a table next to the bodies of six other people murdered across the city so far that day.

Now, after taking half a dozen pictures, Luna lowered her camera and indicated to the pathologist who’d granted access that they were finished.

Gannon and Luna stepped outside into baking heat as another coroner’s van delivered two more white body bags strapped to gurneys.

Another corpse, another coffin, another grave. Another day in Juarez, a battlefield in Mexico’s drug wars.

Welcome to Murder City.

Gannon slid on his dark glasses, and as he and Luna walked to his rented Ford he reflected on Paula Chavez. She lived in a shack and earned less than ten dollars a day running a tiny hamburger stand. She’d lost her husband and sons to the violence. Gannon thought of the pain carved into her weatherworn face, the agony of her cries, how she embodied the toll exacted by the carnage. These images burned into his memory. The impact of random cruelty. Throughout his years on the crime beat he hammered the heartache he bore for people like Paula Chavez into a quiet rage that he used to fuel his work.

Gannon was a journalist with the World Press Alliance, the global wire service headquartered in New York City. He’d been dispatched to Mexico to file features in the WPA’s ongoing series on the drug wars. Correspondents from the WPA’s Mexican, Central and South American bureaus had provided exceptional coverage, but his editor, Melody Lyon, wanted more for a new series.

“The cartel wars have been spilling into U.S., Canadian and European cities with increasing violence. We need to understand why this is happening,” Lyon had told him. “We need you to take WPA readers beyond the statistics, the corruption and the bloodbaths. Take us deeper. Find the human faces on all sides. Take us into the inferno.”

As part of his research before leaving Manhattan, Gannon had contacted Isabel Luna, a crime reporter with El Heraldo, a small family-run newspaper in Juarez known for its courageous reporting.

Few knew more about crime in the region than Luna.

Her father, the paper’s editor, had been murdered several months ago for exposing cartel ties to corrupt officials. His death left Isabel defiant and forged her determination to continue his crusade. She did not hesitate to respond when Gannon called in advance of his arrival.

“I propose we work exclusively together while I’m in Juarez,” he said. “Your English is better than my Spanish and I admit I’ll need help. In exchange, I’ll share the resources of the WPA. We could buy your photos or pay for joint work on exclusives.”

“Call me when you arrive,” she said.

During their first meeting in El Heraldo ’s hectic and cluttered newsroom, which had reminded Gannon of his campus paper in Buffalo, he told Luna of the stories he had in mind.

“I’d like to profile you.”

She blushed and a crooked smile nearly blossomed on her face. It waned when he told her of the other story he wanted to do.

“I want to write about cartel assassins, the young ones they train to be killers. I’d like to interview one. Do you think that’s possible?”

A somber look flitted across Luna’s eyes as she scanned the newsroom, focusing on nothing before inhaling slowly.

“It’s possible,” she said.

“Will you help me?”

She looked at him for a long moment before she said, “Yes.”

In the back of his mind Gannon suspected Luna had her own reasons for pursuing a story on cartel assassins. As with most murders in Juarez, her father’s killer had not been found.

Now, as they left the morgue, Gannon glanced at Luna, in the passenger seat studying her camera, reviewing the crime scene photos she’d taken that day.

“You got some nice stuff there,” he said. “You see anything that looks like an organized cartel hit?”

“No. Just everyday murders, low-level barrio gang members and Juarez drug dealers. It’s terrible to say, but it’s true.”

Luna called her paper to ensure her desk alerted her to any breaking stories as she and Gannon continued roaming the city.

He took in the sprawling metropolis. Juarez was a factory town with a population over one and a half million. It stood on the Rio Grande, across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, where close to eight hundred thousand people lived in relative safety and peace.

Gannon figured he had seen most of Juarez since he’d arrived three days ago. Or was it four? He’d filed news features but had yet to go beyond what had already been reported on the tragedy of the region.

Juarez’s despair had first greeted him with the panhandlers dotting the Santa Fe Street Bridge from El Paso. The city’s beauty was lost in a cloak of desperation and in the dust from sandstorms that laced the low-rise stores and office buildings along the streets.

The downtown bled into bars, cantinas, neon and the never-ending come-on from the hookers in the red-light district. Beyond were endless strip malls, roadside taco stands, pizza shops and neighborhoods of concrete houses and apartment complexes.

Farther out was the bullring.

Then there were the hundreds of huge factories, the maquiladoras, where the women of Juarez earned a few dollars a day working in shifts assembling appliances, electronics and a range of exported goods.

At the city’s edge, beyond the simple wooden crosses of the cemeteries, along a jumble of paved and unpaved sandy roads, among the cacti, tumbleweed and scrubland, were the clusters of shantytowns. Here, Gannon thought, amid the shacks, lived the enduring human virtue: hope.

No matter the odds, one must never abandon hope.

As Juarez rolled by, Gannon, a thirty-five-year-old loner, who grew up in blue-collar Buffalo, was visited by a cold hard fact: he had no one in his life. All he had was his job.

Stop, he chided himself, and turned to Luna.

“If you’d like to knock off, I’ll take you home. Or we can eat first.”

“There’s a good restaurant near my paper,” she said.

It was after sunset when they’d finished dinner. Their conversation was centered on recent history of the drug wars.

Luna said that Juarez was a marshaling point for those yearning to escape poverty by fleeing to the U.S. It was also a major transit point for drugs, and cartels battled for control of the smuggling networks that gave them access to the U.S. market. This was how Juarez came to be one of the world’s most violent cities-with a homicide rate greater than any other city on earth. To battle the violence the Mexican government had deployed thousands of troops and federal police across Mexico.

But the cartels had infiltrated all levels of police.

“Imagine,” Luna said. “You’re a Mexican police officer and the cartel offers to triple your monthly pay for your cooperation. You’ve seen the conditions most people live under.”

Gannon agreed.

“And,” Luna added, “if you refuse to cooperate, the cartels threaten your family. This is how they’ve grown, and they operate with military precision and firepower. The cartels have unimaginable reach and domination everywhere.”

Luna caught herself. Embarrassed, she cupped her hands to her face. She’d never spoken so much to Gannon.

“I apologize for boring you.”

“Don’t,” Gannon said. “It must mean you’re comfortable with me. I still want to profile you, but you’ve been so quiet. I know very little about you.”

Luna told him about her life.

She was thirty-one. Her mother died from cancer when Luna was young. Her father remarried. She had a stepbrother, Esteban. She’d lived in Los Angeles when she attended UCLA. After graduating she’d returned to help with the paper. She was married to a human rights lawyer and they had a four-year-old son. They were guarded about their lives.

“Because of the cartels and what happened to your father?”

Several long moments passed before Luna answered. “You must never tell anyone this, but I was there when my father was murdered. I saw his killer.”

“Did you tell police?”

“No. We told them there were no witnesses. My husband and stepbrother urged me to trust no police. My father’s death was an orchestrated cartel hit because of his editorials about the cartels corrupting police. The killer came to my father’s house as a courier, very nonthreatening. He didn’t see me, but I was there and I saw him. One day we will find him.”

Luna stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about it. My father was a respected man. I don’t have the influence he had. No one among the Juarez press does. He was incorruptible. Please, Jack, you must never reveal what I told you. If the cartel knew that I was a witness, they’d kill me. Swear you will not tell anyone, please.”

Gannon gave Luna his word, then drove her home to her family.

That night he stepped out onto his hotel balcony.

He gazed upon the twinkling lights of the city. He could hear sirens and see a helicopter’s searchlight sweep over the latest killing, and a creeping sense of looming failure came over him.

How would he make sense out of this chaos?

He was tired and his thoughts shifted back to himself, the price of being alone. Unlike the teen gangster in the morgue, Ramon Chavez, no one would mourn Gannon. His parents were dead. He’d been estranged from his older sister since she’d run away from home some twenty years ago.

Shut up, he told himself. Quit wallowing.

He got into bed.

But before sleep came, Gannon fell into his usual pattern of wondering what had happened to his sister.

Is she still alive?