In Desperation

38

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

D eath was never far from Rosalina.

The sound of power tools and the smell of fresh-cut wood when she passed by the coffin maker’s shop was a chorus to her grief as she hurried through the barrio market to her meeting.

Today, Rosalina was taking a stand against the narcos.

No mas, she promised her dead child, no more blood.

Rosalina’s world had ended six months ago with the murder of Ivette, her twenty-two-year-old daughter.

Ivette was an aid worker killed in a drug gang’s attack at the clinic where she had worked with her younger sister, Claudia. Rosalina and her husband, Ruben, believed Ivette was targeted because she and Claudia were outspoken against the narcotraficantes.

After her death, Rosalina and Ruben sent Claudia to live with a cousin in the country. The gangs had sent Ruben a message: they would spare pursuing Claudia through their network, if Rosalina and Ruben stole documents for them from the U.S. Consulate where they worked at night as cleaners.

Ruben agreed to comply- “we need to be free of them” -but Rosalina wanted to refuse. The gangsters were cowards. Thugs. She hated them and was proud that her daughters had inherited her moral backbone.

“Look at what they’ve taken from us, Ruben,” she told him. “We will never be free of them unless we fight back. And I will fight back, even if it kills me.”

For Rosalina, the tipping point was not stealing the documents but being forced to harbor a sicario-in her home -so he could go off and kill. The final outrage: he’d slept in Ivette’s bed.

Now, she was taking a stand in Ivette’s memory.

She was fighting back.

Not long after the sicario had left, Rosalina gathered her things, rushed to the local grocery and used the public phone to make a call. Then she caught a crosstown bus. Now, walking through the market, Rosalina tightened her grip on her bag. It held documents she would pass to the one person who could help.

Isabel Luna was almost trotting through the crowded market when she was stopped by the voice at her back.

“Hold on.”

She turned to Arturo Castillo, the chief photographer with El Heraldo, who was failing to keep up with her.

“Come on, Arturo, we’re late. I don’t want to lose this one.”

Solid leads to El Heraldo ’s newsroom were rare these days, so when Isabel received one from a female caller claiming to have documented information on “something big” involving a cartel, she took action. She took the usual precautions in not going by herself to meet the source, in case the cartels were attempting to lure her. While traveling in pairs or small groups was no guarantee against any attack, the practice was to never travel alone and always leave details with your news desk.

In Juarez, many people went about their daily lives in trepidation, never knowing if that person staring at them was part of something suspicious, or if they should fear that car behind them.

Journalists tried not to be conspicuous. Arturo kept his cameras out of sight using a small bag, not the obvious bulging camera bag and certainly nothing around his neck.

Not for this assignment, anyway.

“Where are we going, exactly?” he asked Isabel. “There, ahead.”

She pointed with her chin, then led him past the stands and overturned wooden crates tilted to display tomatoes, bananas, potatoes, carrots, zucchini, cabbage, corn. Isabel searched the crowd and the vendors-farmers in jeans wearing straw hats or ball caps, women wearing aprons over print dresses-until she came to the vendor selling large baskets, stacked in columns reaching to the green awning.

Standing alone near it was a woman in her forties. She was wearing a white shirt over jeans, a brown-and-white sweater, and was holding a large canvas bag with a blue-and-white square pattern.

Isabel approached her and used the identifying phrase.

“Are you waiting for Isabel?”

“Si.”

“I am Isabel. We spoke,” she said, discreetly showing her ID. “And this is my friend Arturo. He works with me.”

Arturo gave her a small smile.

The woman assessed them. She read and trusted the work of the people at El Heraldo. “I am Rosalina.” She glanced around, comfortable in the noise and activity of the busy market. “I will talk to you right here, and quickly.”

Isabel nodded and listened as Arturo kept an eye on their area.

Because of the din, there was no risk of anyone overhearing Rosalina as she related her family’s tragedy and current situation. Isabel listened without taking notes, nodding, saying little, asking an occasional question.

Rosalina explained how her daughter’s killers threatened her surviving daughter in an extortion bid to force her and her husband to steal U.S. government documents and harbor a sicario “for something large.”

“We overheard the gang members talking when they dropped off a school backpack at our home with items and the completed documents for the sicario. We know this young man was posing as a student when he entered.”

“Which school?”

“Azure, in El Paso. I think this sicario is being sent on a very big and very bad job in the U.S.” Rosalina opened her bag and pulled out a smaller bag with a large brown envelope. “The cartel does not know but I made copies of everything and I made notes. It is all in here for you. We know El Heraldo is the most courageous newspaper in all Juarez, and I am counting on you, in the memory of my beautiful daughter Ivette, to do the right thing through your connections and stop him and his cartel.”

Isabel did not look at the documents in the market.

It was not the appropriate place.

Luna had to trust her instincts about Rosalina, had to trust what she heard in her voice. She saw the pain etched in her face, and her hands, scarred from solvents and nearly arthritic now from years of scrubbing toilets in office buildings.

Isabel looked into Rosalina’s eyes that were brimming with anguish and burning with the same fire that burned in her own heart-the righteous fire that raged to cleanse Juarez of the poison that flowed through its streets, carrying the evil that was destroying a generation.

United by death, the two women hugged.

“I give you my word, I will do all I can,” Isabel said.