by John Gibler
We ran into Beni, and the warden introduced me to him and excused himself. He had to attend to other matters. While I was at the prison that day Sinaloa Governor Jesús Aguilar Padilla and the warden announced that they would be firing the prison’s two highest-ranking guards Pablo Ursúa Vásquez, chief of guards, and Guadalupe Nevárez Silva, chief of security. Four bodies in the trash and two people fired.
Beni is a tall, imposing figure. His presence commands respect. He was also extremely affable and easygoing when we spoke, a congenial fellow who had managed to turn his life around in the most heinous of situations. He is 40 years old and has been in prison for the past seventeen years. He was born in the tiny ranch of Los Lobitos in Badiraguato; by the age of 16 he was a trafficker and gunman for the Sinaloa Cartel. By age 18 he commanded a unit of fifteen people. Once, in 1991, U.S. undercover informants posing as buyers in the United States tried to bust him on a deal. He shot his way out, killing one of the informants, and fled over the border. Due to political pressure from the United States, the Mexican army and police were looking for him and finally caught him in 1993 at a highway roadblock. When he arrived in prison, he said, he had been using drugs socially—sniffing cocaine at parties, but not frequently. Inside prison, however, he became a heavy addict and a brawler. “I got to a very intense, deteriorated state,” he said. “I was a bully, and I was always in the punishment cells.” Once he spent a three-year-and-two-month stretch in solitary confinement—where, of course, drugs were still readily available through the guards. When he came out, he wanted a change.
In 2000, the Sinaloa state prison started the rehab program You Can Do It! Beni voluntarily entered as part of the first group of inmates to try the method. After making it through the detoxification process he applied himself diligently to the tasks, exercise routines, and classes that comprise the second phase. He showed exemplary discipline and requested to stay in the program. Ten years later, and still a prisoner, he now directs it. He has earned obvious privileges. He wears stylish blue jeans, cowboy boots, a leather belt with a large metal belt buckle, and a freshly pressed white button-down shirt with the You Can Do It! logo stitched on the chest pocket. Those who make it through the detoxification phase can chose to stay in the program, living in an isolated area from the rest of the prison population. Little by little, those who stay with the program and comply with its strict rules earn privileges like Beni’s and can get time knocked off their sentences. Though they will need to keep on top of their own case files.
We went out to the courtyard for the “burning of the past” ceremony. Thirty-nine men and four women stood in four rows facing a large wood pyre. The warden returned and made a quick speech. “We don’t care about the past anymore,” he said, “leave it all behind, start afresh, you can do it.” Then, to my surprise, he said, “We are joined today by a reporter from Los Angeles who is writing down everything we do.” I looked up from my notebook and saw forty-three faces staring at me, some hard, some hostile, some curious, some empty, and one smiling.
Beni gave the order and they took off their T-shirts revealing You Can Do It! T-shirts beneath. They walked up to the pyre and threw their old shirts in; the flames dipped and then rose.
“Look!” Beni shouted out. “See how it stays behind, the past. From today forward we are new. We will turn our backs on the past. Half turn, hut!”
Beni then marched them into the small room where the thirty-nine men would spend the next month. The four women would be taken to a separate facility. Inside the room Beni read out the rules and marching orders of the program, most emphatically: no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no fighting, and no stealing. Any infraction whatsoever—no explanations—earns immediate expulsion. As Beni went through the rules I scanned the inmates’ faces. Most appeared to be between 18 and 25 years old; no one in the crowd could have been older than 30. Many of their faces looked hardened and worn; some looked childlike and fresh. Most looked at me with only mild curiosity, a few with open hostility, and one with that strange grin. When the time came for the inmates to say good-bye to family who had come for the ceremony and would not be able to visit for the next ten days, I noticed that the grinning man was alone, so I went up to him and said hello. The man, Gabriel, was smiling because the warden had incorrectly introduced me as a reporter from Los Angeles. Gabriel grew up in Los Angeles. We then spoke in English, in my hope that the state PR guy clinging to me like a shadow would not understand and would start talking to someone else, which he did.
Gabriel was born in Culiacán but moved to LA at age 12 when his parents migrated there for work. He spent seven years in prison in California, both LA County and Folsom. I asked him why and he said “transportation.” I asked again and he replied, “I was taking a thirty-five-pound load of crystal across the border.” He had made many such trips before getting busted, he said. When he finished his sentence in California he was deported. I asked him why he had volunteered for the rehab program. “I don’t have the vice of cocaine, but I do have the vice of smoking cigarettes,” he said, “so I thought I’d quit.” I asked him if the prison was rough. He shrugged his shoulders: “If you walk around like a badass then it can get pretty rough.” Like Folsom, I asked? “No!” he said with a widening of his eyes, “over there it is hard time.”
Later that day I dropped by the offices of the Sinaloa Civic Front to see what Meché Murillo had to say about the recent killings in the prison and the drug rehabilitation program.
“Well sure, they’re showing you the pretty stuff,” she said, “and what’s more they don’t let you walk around freely. Why would you want to see the You Can Do It! program? It’s a bunch of lies. For every twenty young men who go through that program, either all of them will go back to drugs, or maybe one will be saved. The young men go into the You Can Do It! program with the hope that they will have their sentences cut, not to cure themselves of the disease, because drug addiction is a disease. But even so, if four or five of them get off of drugs a year that justifies the program. Also, for the time they are there they detoxify, and that is good, maybe it will stretch out their lives a little.
“The security that they have there in the prison,” she continued, “is among the worst in the world. They have cameras everywhere, but the cameras do not work. There are cameras all over that prison. How is it possible that they can kill people, slit their throats, and no one notices? Today the newspapers are saying that two guards are responsible. How did the weapons get in there? How did the knives get in there? The penitentiary system in Mexico will be the last thing to be reformed, because that is where the poorest people are. So they show you something that has a 5 percent success rate.”
Murillo and her colleagues at the Civic Front spent several years working on a program to stop torture in Mexico’s prisons, she told me. She has been inside every state prison in Sinaloa and spoken at length with prison officials, guards, and inmates. She said that prison wardens always struggle to keep their jobs because it is such good business.
“This I can guarantee you,” she said, “the drugs get in through the front door. They do not get in through tubes or over fences or anything like that. They enter through the door. Weapons enter through the door, whether knives or pistols, they enter through the door.”
Sinaloa recently changed the names of the state prisons from “Centers for Social Re-adaptation” to “Centers for the Implementation of Prison Sentences.” In Spanish, the word for implementation, in this case, is ejecución, which also means, of course, execution. Meché said that the name change is accurate.
“There is no death penalty in Mexico, but inside the prisons the death penalty does exist,” she said. “It is an execution center, but execute as in murder, not execute as in fulfill.”
IN THE BATTLE ZONES of the drug war, where the soldiers sent into the streets to “keep drugs from reaching your children” shoot kids dead, where the cruelest of hired killers is called The Barbie, where the police will tell you that they do not
investigate murder cases because they are afraid, the ambulances will not take people with bullet wounds to the hospital for fear that the killers will return to finish their victims off en route, in a place where such incongruity is the norm, perhaps it should not come as a surprise to find, here, a rare sign of hope in the actions of a woman who says she has lost all of hers.
Alma Trinidad Herrera has every reason to give up. She has every reason to go home, shut her windows, lock her door, and grieve. She knows that her quest is more than quixotic; she knows that it is, by every measure of reason, futile. She knows that the entire weight of a global war—the full momentum of a multibillion-dollar industry, the entire architecture of the state, every government office from the local homicide detective to the governor, from the senate to the president, every last one of them—is against her. She knows that her request is impossible, and still she demands it.
This is what hope looks like here: a woman who will not go home and accept impunity as just the way things are; a woman who two years after her son was killed in a daylight massacre of eleven people still goes every two weeks to City Hall to demand progress in her son’s murder investigation. There is no such investigation, of course, and there never will be, and that is what makes Alma Trinidad a lonely foot soldier of hope in a hopeless, desperate war.
The emergency brake on her Ford EcoSport failed when she went to park in the hilly neighborhood of Cañadas in Culiacán, Sinaloa. A few days later, on July 10, 2008, Alma Trinidad was at her office with her two sons when she asked her then 28-year-old son César if he would take her car to the shop.
“Sure thing,” he said. “Let me call Chuy.”
Jesús Alfonso López Félix, or Chuy, was César’s friend from school and also a trained mechanic. Chuy would often do side repair jobs for his classmates and teachers. César and Chuy studied accounting together at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, or UAS, in Culiacán. César and his 16-year-old brother, Cristóbal, both worked in their mother’s small accounting office. Alma Trinidad also received her accounting degree from the UAS.
César called Chuy and told him that his mother had a problem with the emergency brake.
“Okay,” he said, “bring it over and I can fix it right now, real quick.”
“Mom, if you want I can take it over to Jesús,” César said to his mother. “The shop where he works is pretty close, and it’s an easy thing to fix. It should be fast.”
“Okay, sounds good,” Alma said.
“Hey, wait up,” said Cristóbal, who had been listening, “I’ll go with you.”
They left. It was approximately 10:50 a.m.
César had never been to the shop where Chuy worked; when Chuy had helped him with car problems before, he would get under the hood right there in the university parking lot. After driving in circles for a few minutes he called Chuy again on his mobile phone to ask for directions.
“Head to Río Meca Street,” Chuy told him, “and it’s about a block after the gas station. When you get close, call back and I’ll come outside.”
And so he did. A few minutes later César called back, saw Chuy waving from down the street, drove up and then pulled the car into the driveway and parked. The place was a simple rectangular, concrete warehouse converted into the Mega 2000 mechanic shop, specializing in bodywork and paint jobs. Nine cars and trucks, including five federal police trucks, were parked inside. Several more were in the driveway and parked in front. Jesús lifted the car up with a jack. And went under to take a look.
At that point two professors from the accounting and business school at the UAS, José Alfonso Ochoa Casillas, 61, and José Alfonso Ochoa Quintero, 37, father and son, pulled up. César and Cristóbal went up to say hello and talk for a bit. The manager of the shop joined the conversation. After a bit Cristóbal noticed the federal police trucks in the back of the workshop. The trucks were riddled with bullets from a shoot-out months earlier in which eight federal officers were killed. César and Cristóbal went back to check out the trucks when they heard what seemed like bottle rockets. César spun around, worried that perhaps his mother’s car had fallen on Chuy. Then he saw the men, about six of them, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles loaded with two drum magazines, los huevos del toro (bull’s balls), walking toward the shop, firing.
“Hide!” César said to his brother. “There’s a gunfight outside.” It seemed to César at first that the gun battle was out in the street. As he ran farther into the back of the shop, in between the cars, he did not feel afraid and was collected enough to think about the best place to hide from stray bullets; beneath one of the trucks, with his body aligned with the axle, his head behind one of the tire’s rims, most likely too thick for a bullet to penetrate. As he jumped over the hood of a car to get over to the truck, a bullet tore into his leg just beneath the knee.
He crawled under the truck and watched as pairs of military boots entered the body shop. Only one of the gunmen wore white tennis shoes. A loud voice shouted out, “Kill every last fucking one!”
With each burst of gunfire César thought, “I hope Cristóbal is hiding; I hope Cristóbal is hiding.” With each agonizing yell, he thought, “That’s not Cristóbal, please let that not be Cristóbal.”
A man came running back into the shop; shots rang out and the man fell. But he was not dead. He was looking straight into César’s eyes, César lying on the floor under the truck. Perhaps so as not to be tempted to speak or make a gesture, the man turned his head to face the other way. The gunman must have seen it for he immediately unleashed a burst of gunfire and killed him. The gunman then walked further back into the shop, standing only feet away from César. Shots were ringing out from every direction.
“I hope my mobile phone does not ring, please,” thought César. From where he was lying, he could see almost up to the mouth of one gunman across the shop. The ones he could see all looked thin, white-skinned, and young. Then the gunman took out a new clip to load into his assault rifle. But he dropped it. “If this asshole bends down to pick it up,” thought César, “I’m dead.”
At that moment, the same voice that issued the order to kill everyone shouted again, “All right, let’s go! Everyone out!”
The gunman turned and started walking out, loading his rifle with another clip pulled from his vest.
“I saw that everyone was dead,” César told me when we spoke two years after the massacre. “I didn’t see my brother, and I thought that he might have been able to hide. I waited a bit before getting out from under the truck, just in case one of them had stayed behind, or who knows. When I got up I called my mom. I told her what had happened, that there had been a shooting and I couldn’t see my brother. I went up to Jesús. He was still alive. He had a bullet wound in his head and his arm. His arm and stomach were completely destroyed. He was able to speak and he asked me about his little daughter, and then if I could fan his face or give him mouth-to-mouth respiration. And I couldn’t do it, because I was dying of nausea from all I saw. His arm was torn off, left just hanging. I told him, ‘I’m going to look for my brother.’ I went back to the back to see if he was still alive. And I saw that his eyes were open. And I couldn’t see any bullet wounds. I said to him, ‘Get up man! Let’s get out of here!’ But he didn’t react. I slapped his face and when I went to lift him his jaw came loose and blood began to run everywhere. When I knew he was dead I started screaming with rage. I went back to Jesús and with another person we tried to fan him with a piece of cardboard. I was talking with him when he also died.”
Jesús died asking César to help talk care of his daughter. Jesús was 24.
Everyone at the Mega 2000 body shop, except César, was dead: the two professors, father and son; the manager; four employees; Cristóbal and Jesús. And not just dead, but their bodies mutilated with gunfire. Blood everywhere. Spent bullet casings, some 300 rounds, everywhere. The smell of gunfire and ripped-open intestines.
After a bit the municipal polic
e arrived, then the federal police, and then the army and Red Cross ambulances. The Red Cross would not let César, with a bullet wound in his leg bleeding profusely, into the ambulance. It was too dangerous, they said. The victim of drug war violence who survives becomes a threat to anyone near him or her by the very fact of survival.
Down the street, the gunmen had fired upon state and local police officers that happened by as they were leaving the scene of the massacre. One officer was dead and another barely holding on. The army and federal police had secured the area with scores of heavily armed troops standing guard on every corner.
“I felt protected,” César said even though the Red Cross wouldn’t take him to the hospital, “because the army was there, because all the police were there. I thought they were protecting me. Hah! As soon as the police officer died they all left.”
What makes Alma Trinidad different is that, in this realm of dizzying contradictions, she demands that public officials simply do what they say they are there to do—and indeed, as she is quick to remind everyone, what they get paid to do. What makes her strange is that she too steps into the terrain of contradiction usually reserved for those in positions of power within the state. The politicians and police seem to assume that the victims and the disempowered will somehow accustom themselves to accepting impunity in fact while still believing in the rule of law in the abstract. Alma Trinidad knows the officials will do nothing, and yet she constantly, publicly demands that they do.
Two years after the massacre, the police have not made a single arrest in the case. On the day of the killings, the police called the man whose name was registered as the owner of the Mega 2000 body shop in to the station to testify. The man’s testimony consists of his name, address, and how he learned of the massacre. The man has since disappeared. Mega 2000 never opened again; the building remains abandoned. The officials now say that they “do not know” who really owned Mega 2000. And yet that same day, as news of the shooting was posted on local newspaper websites, anonymous commentators wrote that the shop belonged to Gonzalo Inzunza Inzunza, alias El Macho Prieto, a notorious hired gun in the employ of El Chapo Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel.
