The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

Charles Bowden: MEXICO’S RED DAYS

FROM GQ magazine

THERE WAS A TIME when death made sense in Juárez. You died because you had a drug load or because you lost a drug load. You died because you tried to do a deal or because you were a snitch, or because you were a poor woman and it was dark and someone thought it might be fun to rape and kill you. There was a pleasant order to death, a ritual of cartel thugs or corrupt police or the army taking you, then tying your hands and feet with duct tape, torturing you, and finally killing you and tossing your body into a hole with a dose of “milk”-the friendly term for lime. Your death would be called carne asada, a barbecue. Life made sense then, even in death. But those were, of course, the good old days, when murders averaged two or three hundred per year.

Now the world has changed. Since January, El Paso, the sister city of Juárez, just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, has had just five murders. In the first 160-odd days of 2008, Juárez has had nearly 500-no one knows the exact number, except that it just goes up and up and up. The killings have the cold feeling of butchery in a slaughterhouse, and they are everywhere: done in broad daylight, on streets, in markets, at homes, and even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Women, children, guilty, innocent-no one is safe.

These are red, endless days.

SHE CAME TO JUÁREZ FROM SINALOA, the state on the Pacific that is the mother of almost all the major players in the Mexican drug industry, probably to visit her sister who works in the city. She was very beautiful-her hair hung down to her ass and her skin was oh so white. They called her Miss Sinaloa. I know this because when Elvira, who works at an asylum on the outskirts of Juárez, starts talking about her, she includes this Miss part. Yes, Miss Sinaloa, a beauty queen who came to Juárez. “Once,” Elvira says with pride, “we had a very beautiful woman-Miss Sinaloa. The police brought her here; she was 24 years old.”

The city cops claimed they had found her wandering on the street one morning, but Miss Sinaloa had actually been at a party. No one knows how she left the party-in Juárez there are many versions of every event-but everyone agrees on what happened after: The police took her and then raped her for three days. Eight policemen, in turn, over and over. In the mid-1990s, when girls from Juárez first began vanishing and then reappearing in the desert as corpses, the cops referred to them as morenitas, the little dark ones, because they came from the darker-skinned barrios where the women who slave in American-owned factories live. But Miss Sinaloa hailed from a different world: She was fair-skinned, middle-class, a beauty queen. And a fair-skinned woman is a special treat for street cops. By the time she got to the asylum, Miss Sinaloa’s buttocks bore the handprints of many men. There were bite marks all over her breasts.

I have been coming to Juárez for thirteen years, and like everyone here, I have an investment in the dead. And the living. Miss Sinaloa is a story, and like all stories, for a moment it tantalizes. Then it vanishes-swept up into one of the many theories that attempt to account for all the violence happening in Juárez. Some blame the massive migration of the poor to the city to work in the factories; another favorite theory has it that the violence is because of the drug world. Those who focus on the murder of the girls sense a serial killer prowling the lonely dark lanes. Others simply see the state waning in border towns like Juárez, the violence a new order replacing the fading state with criminal organizations.

But I am a tiny minority on this matter. I see no new order emerging but a new way of life, one beyond our imagination and beyond the code words we use to protect ourselves from the horror of violence. In this new way of life, no one is really in charge-and no one is safe. The violence has crossed class lines. The violence is everywhere. It has no apparent and simple source. It is like the dust in the air, part of life itself.

So I sit on the sand outside the asylum and think of Miss Sinaloa. She understands what is happening in Juárez. And soon I think I will, too, if I am given enough time on the killing ground.

Victor Alejandro Gomez Marquez, 28

D. March 16, 2008

In January a list appears on a Juárez monument to fallen police officers. Under the heading THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE are the names of five recently murdered cops. And under the heading FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE NOT BELIEVING are seventeen names, including one belonging to Victor Alejandro Gomez Marquez. No one knows who is responsible for the list, but a few days later, four cops on it are killed.

In March, Marquez tells his mother he has fifteen days to live. A week later, he comes over to his mother’s house again and sits with a friend as they drink a liter of whiskey. That time he tells his mother he has eight days to live, at best. “Be positive,” she tells him. “Christ’s blood is covering you and protecting you.”

On the morning of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, Victor Marquez rides in a police convoy through the quiet of Juárez when his car is pinned at a light by a car in front. Another car pulls alongside and machine-guns his vehicle. He is now done with living.

By the end of April, ninety Juárez cops have left the force, and those who remain have announced they will no longer be leaving their station houses. In late May, another list goes up. Beneath the names of marked men and women, it reads: THANK YOU FOR WAITING

IN DECEMBER 2006, Felipe Calderón, the incoming president of Mexico, unleashed the nation’s army to attack the multibillion-dollar drug industry, which had flourished during the later years of Vicente Fox’s administration and was beginning to rival the government in scale and influence. Organized crime was close to gaining complete control of certain Mexican states, Calderón said; it had to be stopped, And besides, after having barely won his seat as president, it seemed like a smart idea to do something popular-such as hunt the cartels-so Calderón gave the army a pay raise and sent 30,000 soldiers out among the people.

At first, Calderón’s gambit was sold as a resounding success. In just four months of the operation, the government claimed to have apprehended the leader of a major drug gang and to have captured more than 1,102 drug dealers and 630 cars, fifteen boats, and two airplanes used to transport drugs. “We have managed…to calm people’s fears and let them know that government is here for them,” the president said.

For most of 2007, things remained quiet, or at least relatively so-a few murders, some disappearances, nothing unusual.

But when I arrive in Juárez in January, something is stirring. That month, the violence explodes-one, two, sometimes more people die per day, and many more go missing. Forty are killed in Juárez and hundreds across Mexico, and the numbers only go up from there. (By the time I sit down to write, in June, roughly 2,500 have died in Mexico this year.) In early May, the director of Calderón’s national drug-enforcement agency is gunned down in his own home-he dies asking, “Who sent you?” and later the government determines the hit was done by the Sinaloa cartel, with the killers reportedly led by a former agent of the director’s own force.

Suddenly, it seems Calderón’s war may be hurting the Mexican people more than it hampers the drug trade.

When it comes to explaining the causes of all this carnage, the DEA, the U.S. Border Patrol, and America’s media and government leaders claim that it stems from a battle between various drug cartels, made increasingly desperate as Calderón’s army puts on the squeeze. This is a perfectly plausible explanation, except for the fact that the violence is failing to kill cartel members. After several months, there is hardly a body in Juárez that can be connected to the cartels. Nor can the Mexican Army seem to locate any of the leaders of the cartels-men who have lived in the city for years. A rumor is everywhere in Juárez about what happened at Aroma, a café on a plush avenue next to an area of mansions and a country club. The rumor is that on May 17, fifty heavily armed men arrived here, took the cell phones of the customers, and told people they could not leave. Then Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel, swept in, dined, and left around 2 A.M. while out in the street Calderón’s army guarded the serenity of the establishment. Guzmán paid everyone’s tab. He is a man with a $5 million bounty on his head who is said to be at war with the Juárez cartel, yet everyone in the city seems to know of his visit to Aroma and to believe it.

That weekend at least ten people are murdered as El Chapo dines in peace.

The other problem with the cartel theory is that Calderón’s army has seized tons of marijuana in Juárez but only a few kilos of cocaine-the main stream of cartel revenue. The Mexican government itself has estimated that 60 percent of the killings are gang violence over street drug sales, and less than 10 percent are assigned to organized crime, meaning the cartels.

And yet it is the cartel-war story that appears on the pages of newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times and tumbles from the tight smile of Lou Dobbs. It is apparently easiest on the nerves when the main victims of the slaughter in Mexico are drug lords-bad men who get what they deserve.

Juan Carlos Rocha, 38

D. March 10, 2008

He stands on a freeway island peddling P.M., a tabloid that features murders and sells to working-class people. Two men approach and shoot him in the head. The killers walk away from the killing. No one sees anything except that they are armed, wear masks, and move like commandos.

A crowd gathers to watch the police clean up. Rocha, the people say, sold more than P.M. He also offered cocaine at $4 to $6 a packet and allegedly earned about $300 a week as his cut-about four times what the neighboring factory workers, his customers, make. He’d been warned twice by mysterious strangers to cease this activity.

He did not listen.

As he lies in a pool of blood in the bright sunlight, his brown jacket is neatly folded on the traffic island, his cap on the pavement where it tumbled from his shattered skull. The next day, the vendor is the cover story of P.M. His street name was El Cala. This man who sold newspapers and little packets of cocaine: the Skull.

PALOMAS FEELS EMPTY even though its church is full of flowers from a big expensive wedding. Padre José Abel Retana stands with his vestments as the bride and groom beam on the church steps, a mariachi band strumming them into their new lives. The padre is a short, solid man. He looks a lot like El Chapo Guzmán, who is credited with many of the murders going on in this small community about a hundred miles west of Juárez, on the border just below Columbus, New Mexico.

“Yes,” he softly smiles when I point out the likeness, “people tell me that. Let me change into my jeans so I look handsome.”

Padre Abel’s flock is now a bloody mess. So far this year, his town of 8,000 has witnessed more than forty murders. Seventeen more have vanished. During one week this spring, Padre Abel held funeral Masses for nine people. Two of the slain were a father and son slaughtered on a Friday; five more were men killed leaving the father and son’s wake on Sunday. Calderón’s army stood by at the burial ceremonies, since follow-up murders at the cemetery are a real possibility in the current climate of Mexico.

For decades an old system kept Palomas in order. The town fed off tourists and the drug trade-when Padre Abel arrived five years ago, he remembers, each week a shipment of three to five tons of marijuana would roll through and pass, without a problem, right into the United States. In the late ’90s, human smuggling boomed: The town exploded with motels, big units thrown up for storing people for shipment. But as the border tightened in recent years, the drug and people smuggling moved away. The motels emptied out; there was no way to make money, and so Palomas starved. The old order disappeared. And then the killing started.

In a town this small, killers and slain know each other, and Padre Abel tends to them all. I’ve come to visit the padre because he recently gave a sermon against the killings-naming names in the drug industry-saying, This must stop. A newspaper account of his sermon noted everything he said but did not print the names that he announced in the pulpit; such disclosures are generally fatal for reporters. But Padre Abel is not worried. He says that no one will kill a priest and insists the naming thing was overblown-that he mentioned only a few, and everyone already knew who they were.

“It started last April,” the padre says, “and then it got calm. Until this January. We are not just talking about dead people but the disappeared-a lot of people. They just take them away.”

He seems to sink into himself as he rolls through the history and nature of the drug business, how each town or city or state has a man in charge, how that man controls all the smuggling and killing, how it has always been that way-and yet this tidal wave of blood is without any precedent, so something must have changed.

“I think the government is causing more insecurity-because the army does nothing,” he says. “There is a shoot-out, and the army does not come because they say they don’t have orders to get close. I don’t know if the army is doing the killing or the hit men-but whoever it is, we think the government is behind it.”

Since the army began patrolling down the road in Juárez, dozens of city cops have been busted by soldiers-many claim to have been beaten-and two female police officers are found blindfolded and stripped to their underwear. They are rumored to have been raped. The cops fear the army, and the army is ill-equipped to police the streets, so law and order breaks down. There have always been little gangs besides the major cartels, and these little gangs now flourish because drugs are everywhere and drug use has exploded as people seek ways to endure the strife of normal life. Without the cops or the cartels to keep them in line, the gangs fight for the corner, scrambling for a cut of the small-scale action. And after a while, the killing takes on a life of its own-a final contact high for those with no future. The padre sees this chaos even in tiny Palomas.

“The plaza,” he offers, “belongs to the Juárez cartel, and it seems like Chapo Guzmán wants this area. The army drives around, but the soldiers don’t do anything. There are a few cops here, but when the hit men come, it is like 1,000 against ten…”

He suddenly becomes animated and imitates the burst of an AK-47. He is fumbling now, reaching out for conventional explanations-a cartel war, the army, hit men-theories that worked in the past.

He is okay, for the moment: He is convinced that no one will kill a priest.

But what if the old rules that allow him to believe this no longer apply?

A week after our conversation, a man from Palomas crawls into the U.S. port of entry at Columbus. His body is covered in burns. Someone has spent a week pouring acid on his skin and applying hot irons.

This was apparently happening as the padre and I spoke softly of the slaughter.

Alexia Moreno, 12

D. June 9, 2008

She is 12 years old and scared of the killings. She wants to go live with her mother in El Paso, but she does not get out in time. She is sitting in a park with two girlfriends when some guys in a nice new Chevy Tahoe snatch them-the guys are being trailed by killers and want the girls as human shields. The girls make a break for it; two get away. Alexia doesn’t. She is shot in the head. The killers take the guys in the Tahoe and disappear. No one has seen them since.

ONE MURAL DEPICTS A CONQUISTADOR; another wall is a collage of snapshots of the asylum’s work; a sign by the gate says GOD IS GREATER THAN MY PROBLEMS. This is the office of El Pastor, José Antonio Galvan: the man who took in the battered remains of Miss Sinaloa and gave her sanctuary. He is sitting in front of me-a mop of graying hair, a fleshy body, a ready smile-showing me a movie about his asylum: men beaten by police and dumped on the streets, addled addicts with seeping wounds, women who will never remember what happened to them and never want to remember.

El Pastor has seen a lot of violence in his city, and he tells me what is going on.

“Young people come to Juárez to have the American dream-it is so close,” he says. “They come from the south; they are hardworking, and they don’t know anything about the streets. But now the border is harder to cross, and soon they are selling their bodies and using drugs. After a year, they have gang tattoos. The capos now make enough money selling drugs here; they don’t have to transport them into the United States.

“You can’t do anything to be safe here,” he continues. “Cocaine is everywhere and cheaper than marijuana. They smoke cocaine with marijuana. We’re talking about people 18 to 25-the people who get executed. They are ghosts, human trash walking naked in the city.”

I ask El Pastor if he remembers a patient called Miss Sinaloa.

“Oh yes,” he says. “She was at an orgy. At the Casablanca.”

The Casablanca is a hotel where men bring women for sex and love and joy and whatever other terms they prefer. There are many such places in Juárez, a city where few can afford privacy in their homes and so must rent it at the moment of desire. In front of the hotel stands a large nightclub with red-tiled domes, a playground for cops and narcos alike-anyone who wants booze, dope, and women. This, El Pastor says, was where the cops took hold of Miss Sinaloa.

When the city police brought her out and dumped her with El Pastor, she had lost her mind. The asylum was her home for at least two months, but no one could reach her. She raved; she was very angry. And she was bald. The staff had to cut off her long beautiful hair because it was an occupational risk here: Some patients have shown a tendency to take another patient’s long hair and strangle her with it. In part she was locked up to protect her from the other patients, who crave her fair skin and beauty. And in part she was locked up because otherwise she would go berserk.

El Pastor shows me her cell. It is maybe nine feet by five feet, and it is in here that, after two months, Miss Sinaloa seems to recover some of her mind. El Pastor locates her relatives, and they drive up from Sinaloa. They must be surprised that she is alive. I certainly am. After such a frolic, death would not be unusual, and Miss Sinaloa would be just one more mysterious body in Juárez. But something saved her. Perhaps it was her madness-the way she raged against the cops-that set her apart.

When the family comes to retrieve their daughter, the father concludes that El Pastor and his patients have been having their way with her. El Pastor is horrified, and there is a terrible argument, and then Miss Sinaloa leaves with her family for home. But as we stand in the dust and wind outside the asylum walls, and El Pastor recounts his reaction to that moment (“I am a family man!”), we both understand the father’s reaction. They are middle-class people, El Pastor notes, unaccustomed to having a daughter go missing on Juárez’s streets. They had a nice car, and they paid for all the medical bills Miss Sinaloa had run up.

And in a country where the weak are always prey, where the favorite verb is chingar, to fuck over, the desire to place blame is irrepressible.

Armando Alvarado López

D. January, 2008

Ten or twenty men with automatic rifles and black masks descend on a poor barrio of shacks cut in the hills outside town, where one man, an ex-municipal cop in his early thirties, runs a little store that sells beans, bread, and milk to men and women who work in the American-owned factories known as maquiladoras. The men torture him until he reveals who supplied him with the drugs he also sold out of his little store. He cannot really be surprised by the visit: After all, he’d been warned in two phone calls to stop selling drugs. The armed men take him to his supplier and then carry the two captives off a short distance and execute them. Everyone in the barrio hears the shots. The action is hard to miss; it happens around noon on a sunny day.

Now I am here at the kill site. A woman stares at me and shouts, “Who are you looking for?” From her tone, I don’t think she is trying to be helpful. As I rolled in, I could feel the eyes of loitering cholos burn into my hide.

So I leave.

BUT HERE IS A QUESTION: Why is it that we must believe that these murders happening all over the city-like this one of a small-time grocer who sold a little coke to neighbors in his poverty-stricken neighborhood-are simply the result of a battle between big cartels and the Mexican government over who will control this crossing into the United States?

Every day in Juárez, at least 200,000 people get out of bed to pull a shift in the maquiladoras. The exact number varies: Right now roughly 20,000 jobs have vanished as a chill sweeps through world markets; just after the millennium, about 100,000 jobs left the city for mainland China, because as Forbes magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four times the wages of the Chinese. (Those greedy Mexicans were taking home $60, maybe $70 a week in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the United States.) The barrios where these maquiladora workers live are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Turnover in the grinding maquiladoras runs from 100 to 200 percent a year. The factory managers say this is because of the abundant economic opportunities of the city. And in a sense, they are right: A drug peddler, for example, makes a maquiladora worker’s monthly wage each week. And there’s even more money to be made in other trades: A few years ago, the going rate for professional murders in Juárez was $250 apiece.

But in America, we know nothing of such matters. Officially, Juárez has healthy wages and almost no unemployment. It is a beacon of the global economy that was poised to become a modern city in a Mexico that was to become a modern nation. But when Mexico instead lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was ignored by successive American administrations, since a quiet neighbor was and is the best kind of neighbor for a global economic empire. When Mexico persisted in being a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, it was the fault of American habit and addiction. Finally, when these habits could not be contained, the North American Free Trade Agreement was ballyhooed as the answer that would bring prosperity and end the violence.

What America got from NAFTA was cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration from the barrios of places like Juárez into the United States. What Juárez got was more drugs and more violence.

The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason poor people in Juárez sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason they go north is to survive.

I HAVE A VISION in which all the dead in Juárez since January will gather in the plaza before the cathedral downtown. They will sit in rows of chairs just as in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. There will be 500 separate tales of how they loved things and enjoyed life and how they were murdered and who murdered them. It is a play, of course, that will never end.

I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts but she will be bored. Her perfect face will be blank, her beautiful eyes, cocooned in makeup, will wander to the hills outside town where she stayed in the asylum. By now her hair will have grown out and the handprints on her buttocks will have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her time at the Casablanca.

But of course, nothing she knows will matter to most people-just as the dead of Juárez will vanish and this killing season will be forgotten. You can believe in the war on drugs, in battles between the cartels, in secure borders, in free trade, in official states and statesmen. You don’t have handprints on your ass and bite scars on your breasts and fragments of your mind that tell you of places that presidents never mention. I prefer the company of Miss Sinaloa, her skin so fair, her bruised thoughts more knowing than the governments that pretend to rule the chaos that now rules Juárez.

And as I watch this new Our Town in the plaza before the cathedral, one image sticks in my head-a fragment whispering of a murder. There is a barrio near here where people scavenge old televisions and bits of metal from both Juárez and El Paso and sell them. A man peddles cocaine on the street and is warned to stop, but he is in his thirties and has no other livelihood. So he persists, and then armed men come with masks and blow his brains out. He falls dead on the street near his mother’s house.

But his body is not what I imagine.

What I see is his mother. It is night now. The body has been taken away and there is a light on, the screen door is pushed open and an old woman with a blank face stares down at the street. She is there alone, and her son is not coming home. Her face is a portrait of Juárez: silent, enduring, doomed.

CHARLES BOWDEN is the author of twenty-two books, including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior; Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. Inferno, with photographer Michael Berman, was a finalist for the Orion Book of the Year for 2007. His most recent book is Exodus, with photographer Julian Cardona. Trinity and Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing will both he published in 2009.

Bowden is a correspondent for GQ magazine, and his work has appeared in Harper’s, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and Esquire. A Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, he lives in Tucson, Arizona, with a standard poodle, a desert tortoise, and a witch.

Coda

I have been going to Ciudad Juárez for fifteen years because I could sense the future was unfolding there-violence, poverty, American-owned factories with low wages, and a vast drug business. Starting around January 2008, Juárez probed further into its destiny. In 2007, there were 301 murders, in the following year 1,607, including dozens of police. The pace has continued into 2009. All this will be in a forthcoming book, Miss Sinaloa.