by John Gibler
“It is a domestic fight,” Javier said. “They were business partners, friends, godparents to each other’s children, family. The people from the different groups knew each other, worked together, and some were lovers. They knew each other personally, intimately. Hence the scale of the feud, and why I say it is a domestic fight, a fight in the home. From one bedroom they shoot into another. Some seek refuge in the bathroom and others in the kitchen. And that got extended throughout the entire country. And the government let it happen. The Beltrán Leyvas formed an alliance with Chapo’s enemies, and that extended the war to other regions of the country and made it crueler. I’m convinced that the Sinaloa Cartel has been less attacked, that it has been privileged. They do it because the Sinaloa Cartel doesn’t use extortion, makes less noise, and is less bloody.”
A third question: what can be done?
“I am an activist of pessimism,” Valdez said. “The fire is going to spread. And the worst of it is not only the dead, but also the lifestyle that narco imposes on us all. I am speaking of the fear. We have already ceded the public parks and the park benches to the narcos, to fear. And I think that is the worst loss. This society is ill. There is no place for optimism in this scenario. And I say this with a great deal of sadness. I have children. And I tell them that there are other ways of life, other countries.
“How can you change all this? Well, by enforcing the law, the rule of law. I don’t think there is any drug war. All they do is respond to violence with violence. A real drug war would spend resources on education and health and combating poverty. That would be a war against drugs, because it would take away the narco’s most fertile terrain, youth.”
At the end of the conversation I asked Javier Valdez, “Taking into consideration that it is impossible to cover the drug war well as a reporter, still what advice would you give to those coming here to give it a try?”
“Don’t come here and count the dead,” he said. “Anyone can do that. Tell the stories of life. Profile the fear, which is another death that no one covers; it is an encroaching death, and it is the worst.”
I went to Ríodoce’s offices to speak with Ismael Bojórquez, the paper’s director and main editor, who continues to report and write as well. If Javier Valdez is the poet-storyteller of the drug beat, Ismael Bojórquez is the senior analyst. When I told Diego Osorno, the Mexico City-based reporter and author of the book El Cartel de Sinaloa, that I had interviewed Bojórquez at length, Diego nodded gravely and said, “He is one of the people who knows the most about narco in this country.”
Ríodoce rents a small office space with four rooms on the second floor of a nondescript two-story, concrete building in central Culiacán, above a print shop. The inside is spare: two desktop computers, three simple wooden desks, a small conference table, and a bookshelf.
Ismael Bojórquez’s desk holds a laptop and a stack of documents, newspapers, and magazines. I began with the same question I asked Valdez, phrased a bit differently: How can one cover the drug war well?
“The thing is you can’t cover it well. We’ve understood that pretty much since we started this newspaper,” Bojórquez said. “We realized that we couldn’t cover it well, and it makes sense: the narcos will screw you, the narcos will kill you. You can write about politics, but narco is another thing altogether.
“There are lines you can’t cross. For example, the narcos don’t like you to get involved with their families. You can’t say that narco so-and-so lives in that house; they’ll kill you the following day. You can’t say that they own ranches or that one just bought such-and-such a shopping center. We don’t just take a lot of precaution with this issue, but a shitload of precaution. There is absolutely no protection from the state for those who work as journalists. They can’t even protect themselves, much less us.
“There are no clear rules in this shit. You develop a nose for it as you go along. There are lines, but they are very thin. What we have got clear is that you can’t do your job in such a way that it could be confused at some point with a police officer’s job. Your work has to be that of a journalist. If the narcos clearly see that your work is journalistic and not in anyway confused with what the police do, that might help you somewhere down the line.”
Two days later I went back to Ríodoce to speak again with Ismael Bojórquez. I asked him, “How would you define this war?”
“I don’t think it is a war,” he said. “It is Calderón’s war; it is his war. It is not a traditional war, there aren’t two armies confronting each other. It is a biased war waged by Calderón. It is a bellicose struggle of shoot-outs and raids. But it is a totally incomplete struggle. Since it started we’ve seen that it is a war with too much circus. They called the journalists and took them off to a village in the mountains where all of a sudden planes flew overhead ejecting paratroopers. A lot of show, few results.
“Calderón did not attack the narcopolítica [politicians collaborating with drug mafias]; he never attacked them. There is another aspect that Calderón has never attacked, and this is much more serious; he never went against the financial and economic structure of the drug mafias. There has not been any intelligence work done on the financial channels of the narcos. So, as I say, there are two things Calderón never attacked: the economy of the drug mafias and their political connections.
“We live here. We’re from Sinaloa. We know how the iguana chews its food. We know how drug money moves here. In fact, we know which businesses the drug mafias own, and there are many more we don’t know about. And we know which politicians are in on this shit, too. And so you have to ask yourself, Well, if there is a war against drug trafficking, why doesn’t Calderón combat all this? Why doesn’t he investigate those people? And why doesn’t he investigate these businesses?”
There is one case, mentioned briefly above, where some might be tempted to argue that Calderón’s administration did in fact go after what Bojórquez calls the narcopolítica. One should avoid the temptation. Consider this, on May 26, 2009, federal police and soldiers detained ten mayors, seventeen officials ranging from the governor’s aides to police officers, and also one judge in the state of Michoacán. In the following days they detained another mayor and six more officials, for a total of thirty-five arrested officials, an unprecedented sting operation in Mexico’s drug war. The television cameras were on the scene to capture the images of disgraced mayors and cops leaving their offices with their jackets pulled up over their faces, escorted by heavily armed, masked soldiers and federal police. Reports of the arrests dominated the nighttime news broadcasts and the next day’s headlines. The federal Attorney General’s office accused them all of participating in organized crime. All of those arrested were members of the opposition PRD party. The PRD controls the state government and most municipalities in Calderón’s home state of Michoacán. The arrests took place six weeks before the 2009 federal midterm elections in Mexico. A year and a half later, by late September 2010, thirty-four of the thirty-five Michoacán officials and police arrested back in May 2009 had been released for lack of evidence. The one mayor still being held had not yet been convicted of any crime. The national daily Milenio ran this front-page headline on September 29, 2010, “The Michoacán sting operation ended in ridicule” (“Acabó en ridículo el michoacanazo”). The story began thus: “The Attorney General’s office appeared ridiculous [yesterday when] the most important investigation of this presidential term, the michoacanazo, came tumbling down.”
Bojórquez’s point stands. By fall of 2010 Calderón’s billion-dollar drug war had resulted in no high-level politicians or money launderers being arrested, no major businesses or banks closed down, no large accounts frozen. The army killed people daily, but no serious combat against the drug mafias’ political or economic structures had been waged.
And what can be done?
“The mafia is not going to disappear,” Bojórquez said. “Drug trafficking is not going to disappear. But the intelligent objective I think would be to
reduce it to a more or less tolerable level. Reducing the levels of violence, but also reducing the levels of contamination in the state. Now the state is totally contaminated by the drug mafias. All the institutions of the damn state, even the departments of social development that support the narcos through livestock programs, agricultural equipment, subsidies, fertilizers and through the treasury, through the communications departments that give them flight permits for their small planes. Everything is contaminated, man, and that’s not to mention the army.”
I asked if when he said “reduce it to a tolerable level” he meant negotiate.
“I’m not talking about negotiating,” he said. “I don’t think that the government should negotiate with the narcos; I don’t believe in that strategy. In the short term it might solve problems with the violence, but I see it as an illusion. I think negotiations with the drug mafias will give them oxygen, will give them more strength to grow larger. I say such strategies should be discarded. I think that is what the government is doing and that it is going about it all wrong. I think the government is negotiating with a fraction of the drug traffickers, those from Sinaloa. But I think it is mistaken and that in the end it will not bring peace, because the organizations they are fighting like the Gulf Cartel, Carrillo Fuentes, Beltrán Leyva, are too big, too strong. They won’t eliminate them. They won’t bring peace to the country; on the contrary, they are letting the Sinaloa Cartel do their business.
“The government is making a mistake in that I think they are making agreements with the Sinaloa Cartel. And that is because we see signals, like how El Chapo goes off to conquer Juárez and receives support there. So I think the government’s strategy is to ally itself with the Sinaloa Cartel to strike against the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, the Carrillos, and the Beltráns. And the government is doing this not only by providing protection through the army, but in joint operations. Indeed, I can confirm that there have been joint operations in the sense that soldiers and police officers together with cartel gunmen carry out some operations against the other cartels; we have detected that here. I think the government is wrong in this strategy because they work from the idea that the Sinaloans are pure narcos, that they are narcos that only traffic in drugs without getting involved in the other areas like extortion, charging protection money, and so on. And I think they are mistaken, because they are giving greater strength to what is perhaps the strongest drug-trafficking group in Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel.”
IT IS SIX O’CLOCK in the morning on August 31, 2009, when Salomón Monárrez hears the first shot. Sinaloa is a hot place to be in late August, and a shirtless Salomón Monárrez had opened the front door of his house to let in the morning breeze and walked back inside when the shot rang out. He turns back to the doorway, feeling the burn in his ear and drops of blood falling over his collarbone. He faces his killer, a dark, thick man of average height wearing camouflage pants, a black baseball cap, and black sunglasses. Salomón Monárrez looks from the gun barrel to his killer’s dark glasses and thinks, “Coward.”
The killer grips the pistol in both of his hands, chest high, and walks forward as he fires. Salomón Monárrez jumps back and to the side, back and to the other side, like a football player evading tackle. With each step a bullet catches him in midair and throws him back—one in his left arm, one in his right arm, and then two in his left side. He repeats this three times and each time is hit in the air until a bullet slams into his abdomen and knocks him straight to the ground. Four more shots ring out, but somehow none of them hit. His killer stands over him. Salomón Monárrez looks at him and thinks, “What a coward you are. How can you come attack someone defenseless, someone without so much as a nail clipper in hand, and you with a pistol? What a coward.” This he thinks with rage as he waits for the bullet that will enter his head and end his fifty-nine years of life. His killer pulls the trigger and no shot fires. The killer’s gun jams; he looks down at Salomón Monárrez already drenched in blood, turns, and walks away.
Salomón Monárrez has six bullet wounds in his body. He thinks, “By nightfall I will be mourned.” His arms burn. His left ear feels like someone has just extinguished a cigarette against it. His stomach burns. He takes this inventory of burning without moving, without trying to sit or stand. He lifts his head just a bit and sees his body covered in blood and feels life slip from him, as if someone were unplugging his life and then plugging it back in. His vision pulses from blurred to clear in time with this slipping of life. He moves his feet to see if they still work and they do. He cannot see his legs. “How many bullets hit my legs?” he thinks. But not one had. He breathes and thinks, “Let’s see if I can fight. Let’s see if they can save my life, if the doctors can save my life.” An ambulance arrives. The paramedics rush Salomón Monárrez to the hospital.
Soon after army soldiers arrive at his house—before the municipal homicide detectives and state forensics team—pick up all the bullet casings, move things around, and leave.
In the ambulance Salomón Monárrez does not lose consciousness, but keeps feeling this unplugging and plugging back in of his life. At the hospital he feels the needle pierce his skin to administer the anesthetic and he thinks, “I won’t be coming back. I’ll be one more in the body count.”
But no, six hours later, around noon, Salomón Monárrez comes back.
I met Salomón Monárrez nearly a year after he took six bullets and lived. He was sitting in the offices of the Frente Cívico Sinaloense (Sinaloa Civic Front), a Culiacán-based human rights organization that he and several colleagues founded in 1993. I dropped by one afternoon and introduced myself as a journalist from the United States. The first thing Monárrez asked me was “What impression do people there have of us here with all this death?” As I fumbled to avoid the most truthful response—most people in the United States do not even notice and many do not care—he continued: “Last year they tried to kill me. They shot me six times and I had to leave Sinaloa. It is an ugly feeling to see death up close like that. After someone tries to kill you everything changes, everything. One is left practically disabled. This arm doesn’t really work anymore. They shot me in the abdomen. It is a miracle that I’m here talking to you. They left me for dead.
“The hit on me was undoubtedly for our work here,” he went on, “because we have been very strong, very harsh in documenting atrocities, assassinations, and kidnappings. We have been relentless.”
What did Salomón Monárrez do to attract the attention of a professional killer? He did not mention local drug traffickers or gunmen by name. He did not publish information about properties owned by drug lords. He did not investigate drug money in local political campaigns. What brought an assassin to his doorstep was different. He and his colleagues at the Sinaloa Civic Front demanded justice in the cases of two massacres committed by soldiers of the Mexican army. They took a lawsuit to the Supreme Court arguing that military personnel who commit crimes against civilians should be judged in civilian courts. That is not a popular idea with the top brass in the military.
On June 1, 2007, a little before 9:00 p.m., some twenty soldiers opened fire on a pickup truck approaching a roadblock on a narrow, unpaved mountain road in Sinaloa, near the small community of La Joya de los Martínez in the municipality of Badiraguato, Sinaloa. The eight people packed into the pickup truck were on their way back from a day trip to Ocorahui, some fifteen miles away. Once a month, rural teachers in the region travel to Ocorahui for continuation courses and to collect their salary of about $120.
Three young teachers—Griselda Galavíz Barraza, 24, Alicia Esparza Parra, 19, and Teresa de Jesús Flores Sánchez, 19—were in the truck. Griselda Galavíz Barraza’s husband, also Alicia Esparza Parra’s brother, Adán Abel Esparza Parra, 29, was driving. Their three children were with them: Juana Diosminey, 2, Grisel Adonai, 4, and Edwin Leonel Esparza Galaviz, 7. Their nephew Josué Duvah Carrillo Esparza, 5, was also with them. Adán Abel Esparza Parra had taken his children, and their cousin Josué Duvah, to visit th
eir grandparents in Ocorahui while the three women were in class.
The truck came slowly around a bend—it is impossible to drive very fast on those roads—and was met with gunfire before they could even see who was shooting at them. Bullets pierced the windshield. Adán Esparza was shot in the hand. He stopped, got out of the truck, and stood with his arms in the air shouting out, “Stop shooting! My family is in the truck!” The soldiers opened fire again, shooting Esparza’s other hand and knocking him to the ground. At that point the truck began slipping backward, toward the edge of the road and the edge of a steep cliff. Esparza ran back to the truck to try and stop it, but his hands, destroyed by gunfire, would not respond to his commands. The truck fell back and over the cliff, rolling until stopped by trees. But Esparza’s sister, wife and three children had already been killed by gunfire. His nephew Josué Duvah and Teresa de Jesús Flores Sánchez were wounded but survived.
The army roadblock was there to detect and detain drug traffickers. Seven of the soldiers who massacred Adán Esparza’s entire family tested positive for marijuana, and one of the seven also tested positive for cocaine.
On the night of March 26, 2008, ten men were traveling in a Ford Lobo and a Hummer H2 in the municipality of Badiraguato, near the community of Santiago de los Caballeros. They were on their way home from a barbecue. The four men in the Lobo noticed that they no longer could see the Hummer’s headlights behind them. After a few minutes they stopped to wait. After another few minutes they turned back. About half a mile down the road an army convoy stopped them and would not let them through.
The white Hummer H2 had over seventy bullet holes in the roof, side doors, and front windshield. Soldiers had fired upon the vehicle from an ambush position in the hillside on either side of the road. Six men were traveling in the vehicle; five died. There were no drugs or guns in the vehicle. When the soldiers approached the Hummer and realized that the men were unarmed they began to fight amongst themselves: “What did you do?” “Who shot first?” “Idiots, what did you do?” Wilfredo Madrid Medina, 22, was still alive. Only one bullet had grazed his head. When the soldiers realized he was alive they cursed him and began to beat, punch, and kick him and took him off to an empty nearby clinic. He thought they were going to kill him. Local residents soon crowded around, saving his life. After six hours an ambulance took him to the hospital, but federal officials then took him out of the hospital and detained him for questioning.
