The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “I get a free hand,” Keller says. “I work alone. No handlers, no office spies.”

  “You get only the logistical support you request,” Taylor says.

  “And if this program comes to light, I get crucified.”

  “I have the nails in my mouth.”

  Jesus, Keller thinks, he’s offering me a job as the head of an assassination program.

  Just like the old days in Vietnam.

  Operation Phoenix.

  Except this time I’m in charge.

  “Why me?” Keller asks. “You’re not exactly the president of my fan club.”

  “You’re a lonely, bitter man, Art,” Taylor says. “The only guy I have driven, angry, and good enough to do this.”

  It’s honest, Keller thinks.

  And Taylor’s right.

  He takes the job.

  Remembering what he once heard a priest say:

  Satan can only tempt you with what you already have.

  4

  The Valley

  Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter.

  —Jeremiah 7:32

  The Juárez Valley

  Spring 2009

  They drive east out of Juárez on Carretera Federal 2.

  The two-lane highway parallels I-10, just a few miles away across the American border.

  Ana insisted on driving her Toyota, not trusting Pablo behind the wheel (certainly of his old heap), and to allow Giorgio to snap all the pictures he wants. Oscar has sent them out into the Juárez Valley to get the story of the increasing violence.

  Two months ago, Calderón sent the army out there, a column of troops with armored vehicles and helicopters, to try to quell the fighting between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels that has made the rural valley a battleground.

  Pablo looks out the window at the green belt that flanks the Río Bravo. This used to be mostly cotton fields—cotton with some wheat—but the maquiladoras lured most of the labor away and the cotton plants have long since withered.

  This is bandit country and always has been, Pablo thinks, looking past the green strip to the brown sierra to the south. Long controlled by the Escajeda family who migrated down when Texas gained its independence, most of the old families in the valley were refugees, fleeing the encroaching United States.

  The Escajedas did what so many border families did—they raised and rustled cattle, participating in the time-honored tradition of two-way cross-border raiding, they fought off first the Comanches and later the Apaches, then turned to cotton when the end of slavery up north created opportunity.

  They smuggled marijuana and opium at the turn of the century, then whiskey and rum during Prohibition. The Escajedas grew rich from the bootleg trade, but far richer when Nixon’s War on Drugs made la pista secreta so profitable. You can drive or even walk to Texas from the little towns in the valley, and while the majority of drug trafficking still goes through Juárez, the value of this smuggling territory isn’t to be sneezed at.

  Until recently, two Escajeda brothers, José “El Rikin” and Oscar “La Gata,” controlled the drug trade out here and maintained a fragile peace between Sinaloa and Juárez, allowing both cartels use of the plaza for a price.

  So there was “peace in the valley,” as it were, even while Juárez tore itself apart, until two months ago, when the army arrested La Gata, and the Sinaloa cartel took it as a signal to move in. The Sinaloan invasion forced El Rikin to choose sides, and he picked his local team, the Juárez cartel.

  Now it’s a war zone.

  “I didn’t sign up to be a war correspondent,” Pablo says. “We should get extra pay.”

  Giorgio, of course, is thrilled with it. He would love to have been a war photographer, and looks like one, in a green shirt, khaki cargo pants, and a khaki vest. He quickly snaps an army convoy of three armored cars as it comes in the opposite direction.

  Pablo sees Ana’s hand gripped on the steering wheel. She’s tense, sharing the road with farm trucks and military convoys, and you never knew when a vehicle could be filled with sicarios from one side or the other and when you might drive into a full-fledged firefight, maybe a three-sided one.

  He’s relieved when they reach the army checkpoint—a thrown-together post of sandbags, barbed wire, and plywood, outside of Valverde. It’s hot out here now, sweltering really, outside the protective shade of the greenbelt, and Pablo is sweating heavily as Ana stops the car and the soldier walks over.

  Pablo knows that it’s more than the oppressive heat making the sweat come through the thin fabric of his white shirt—he’s afraid. Military of any stripe have always made him nervous, all the more so when they’re edgy. This one wears cammies, a combat helmet, and a heavy protective vest, and can’t be happy in this heat.

  Ana rolls down the window.

  “What are you doing here?” the soldier asks.

  “Press,” Ana says.

  “Tell him not to take my picture,” the soldier snaps.

  “Giorgio, for Chrissakes,” Pablo mutters.

  Giorgio lowers his camera to his lap.

  “Identification?” the soldier asks.

  They hand him their press IDs, and he scans them carefully, although Pablo doubts that the soldier can read. Most of them are rural boys who joined the army to escape hunger and drudgery, and most are illiterate.

  “Get out of the car,” the soldier commands.

  Noooo, Pablo thinks, aware of the cardinal rule when confronted by cops or soldiers—never get out of the car. Once you’re out of the car, only bad things can happen. Once you’re out of the car, you’re theirs—they can take you off into a ditch and beat you up, rob you. They can take you inside the post, they can put you into the back of a truck for a ride to the main base, and Pablo’s heard stories about what happens to people who get taken to the base.

  Now he sees two other soldiers, their interest aroused, get up and walk toward the car. One of them unslings his assault rifle and comes around to the passenger side.

  “Get out of the car!” the first soldier yells. He brings his rifle to his shoulder and points it at Ana.

  “No, no, no!” Pablo yells, throwing his hands up. “It’s all right! We’re reporters! Reporters!”

  Giorgio slips Ana an American ten-dollar bill. “Give it to him.”

  Ana’s hand shakes as she passes the soldier the bill. He lowers the rifle, stuffs the bill into his pants pocket, peruses the IDs for a few more seconds, and then hands them back. He waves his hand and a soldier lifts the barrier.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Pablo says.

  —

  The little town of Valverde has around five thousand inhabitants and consists of about twenty blocks arranged in a rectangular gridiron in the desert flat. Its houses are small, mostly cinder-block with a few adobes, many brightly painted in vivid blues, reds, and yellows.

  The Abarca family bakery is in the center of town on Avenida Valverde—a continuation of Highway 2, and the main street.

  The bakery is in the center of town in more than just the purely physical sense—for three generations the rose-painted building has been a meeting place, a social center, where people go when they have an issue or a problem.

  “Ir a ver a los panaderos,” has long been a saying in town.

  Go see the bakers.

  If the landlord is pressing you for money you don’t have, an Abarca will go talk to him. If you need a document completed and can’t write, an Abarca will fill it out for you. If your child is having trouble at school, an Abarca will visit with the teacher. If the soldiers have taken your son away, an Abarca will go to the post to inquire.

  There’s been too much of that lately.

  Jimena is waiting out in front for them.

  “Did you have any trouble getting here?” she asks as they get out of the car. She wears a yellow smock over faded jeans, both smeared wit
h flour.

  “No,” Ana lies.

  Pablo hopes that they will go inside. Hot as he is, his nerves still jangled, the aroma coming from the bakery still tantalizes. He can smell the pan dulce, the distinct ginger of the marranitos, the anise of semitas, and he thinks he detects some empanadas.

  It’s almost lunchtime, but what he really wants is an ice-cold cerveza.

  Jimena quickly dashes both hopes.

  “Marisol is waiting for us,” she says.

  They follow Jimena to the largest building in town, the two-story town offices, and meet the councilwoman upstairs.

  Marisol Salazar Cisneros, actually Dr. Marisol Salazar Cisneros, is a Valverde town councilwoman. When Jimena said they’d be meeting her, Pablo did his homework on the Internet—Cisneros was born to a middle-class family of planters outside of Valverde, went away to have a career in the capital, and then returned to open a clinic in the town.

  Impressive, Pablo thought, fully prepared to hate the overachieving do-gooder.

  What he isn’t prepared for is her beauty. Marisol Cisneros is simply beautiful, to the point that Pablo feels almost intimidated as he shakes her hand. She invites them to sit down at the table, Giorgio instantly starts taking her picture, and Pablo feels a twinge of irrational but nevertheless powerful jealousy.

  “You’re friends of Jimena’s,” Marisol says.

  “We’ve known each other since the feminicidio,” Ana says. “Pablo worked very closely with her in those days.”

  “I think I might have read your stories,” Marisol tells him.

  “Thank you,” Pablo says, feeling stupid, and wishing that he’d gotten a haircut or at least shaved.

  “And thank you for speaking to us,” Ana says. “The mayor declined.”

  “He’s a good man,” Marisol says, “but he’s…”

  “Afraid?” Ana prompts.

  “Let’s say ‘reticent,’ ” Marisol answers.

  “Has he been threatened?” Pablo asks, finding his voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you have,” Pablo says.

  A month ago, she tells them, she was driving back from Práxedis G. Guerrero, farther east in the valley, where she was doing checkups on pregnant women, and an SUV forced her car off the road. She was terrified—all the more so when three men in ski masks got out and fired AR-15 rounds over her head.

  “You’re sure they were ARs?” Pablo asks.

  “Quite sure,” Marisol says. “Unfortunately, we’ve all become experts at armaments around here.”

  The men told her that she wouldn’t be so lucky the next time, so she’d better learn to keep her “stupid bitch legs open and her mouth” shut.

  “What had you been saying?” Ana asks.

  “It’s not so much what I’d been saying,” Marisol answers, “as what I’ve been asking. When person after person comes into your clinic with bruises, skull fractures from gun butts, signs of electric shock torture, you ask questions. I demanded answers from the commanding officers.”

  “What did they tell you?” Pablo asks.

  “To mind my own business,” Marisol says. “I told them that injured people are exactly my business.”

  “To which they responded—”

  “That enforcing the law is theirs,” Marisol answers, “and that they would greatly appreciate my not interfering with their work.”

  She told them that as long as their work consisted of hurting innocent people, it was her sworn duty—both as a physician and as a town official—to interfere.

  “The army’s working theory,” Jimena says, “is that there is no such thing as an innocent person out here. They accuse us all of working with the Escajedas and the Juárez cartel.”

  They break into houses looking for narcos, drugs, weapons, money, Jimena tells them. They steal whatever they can lay their hands on, and if you object…you wind up at Marisol’s clinic.

  “If you’re lucky,” Jimena adds. “If not, they blindfold you, throw you in a truck, and take you to the base in Práxedis. There are eight young men from Valverde there now, and we can’t even find out about their status.”

  “You’ve gone before a judge?” Ana asks.

  “Of course,” Marisol answers, “but normal law doesn’t apply in a state of emergency. The valley is under martial law, so the army can do pretty much what it wants.”

  Talk about getting caught in a three-way firefight, Pablo thinks. The people in the Juárez Valley are trapped in a murderous triangle—the Juárez cartel demands their loyalty, the Sinaloa cartel demands that they change sides, and the army is a force of its own. So if the locals aren’t literally caught in a crossfire—mowed down between narcos trying to kill each other—they’re being squeezed from three sides.

  Jimena takes issue with this analysis.

  “There aren’t three sides,” she says, “there are two. The army and the Sinaloans are the same.”

  “That’s a serious allegation,” Ana says, scribbling notes.

  “Here’s how it works,” Jimena answers. “The army raids a house on the pretext that it has drugs or weapons. They smash things up, maybe arrest people, but usually not. But that night, or the next, the New People come and kill everyone in the house.”

  “So you’re saying that the soldiers are the Sinaloa cartel’s bird dogs,” Pablo says. “They sniff out the Juárez people, then the narcos come in and shoot.”

  “Sometimes the killers are wearing black masks, like the federales and the army do,” Marisol says.

  “The army is hunting down the Juárez people,” Jimena says, “Los Escajedos, the Aztecas, what’s left of La Línea. They’re exterminating them. I don’t see them hunting down Los Sinaloanos.”

  “It appears to be one-sided,” Marisol adds.

  They take a walk around the town.

  The streets, even at midday, are mostly empty. A few old people and kids sit in the shade of a gazebo, a handful of soldiers peer out from a sandbag barrier. Pablo has the eerie feeling that people are peeping at him behind closed window shades. Some of the buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes, or chipped from grenade blasts.

  Pablo sees a surprising number of empty houses. Some are empty shells, others still have all the furniture inside, as if the people are away on vacation.

  “They’re not coming back,” Jimena says. “They’ve been threatened by one or the other cartel, or more likely by the army.”

  “Why would the army threaten them?” Ana asks.

  “So they can steal their houses,” Jimena says, “steal their land.”

  She sees Pablo’s dubious look.

  “Come on,” she says.

  —

  They drive east to Práxedis.

  Jimena joins them—Marisol stayed in Valverde for her clinic’s office hours. It’s a beautiful day, the sky an almost impossible blue, set off by pure white cumulus clouds.

  Nevertheless, the drive is tense as they go farther into the desert, farther into bandit country. They pass through another army checkpoint (another ten-dollar bill, but at least no guns raised this time) before getting into the little town, even smaller than Valverde.

  The look is similar, though—soldiers on the street, shot-up buildings, some of them abandoned.

  “The narcos gunned someone down in there,” Jimena says. “The owner got frightened and closed the store.”

  “Where do people go for groceries?” Ana asks.

  “Valverde.”

  The army base is set up in what used to be a gymnasium. Now the building is surrounded by coils of barbed wire, sandbags, and a metal gate with a security shack in front.

  “Don’t pull up too close,” Jimena warns.

  They park a block away and walk to the guard shack.

  “I’m here to see Colonel Alvarado,” Jimena says.

  The guard knows her. She comes most days making the same demands. “He’s busy.”

  “We’ll wait,” Jimena says. “Tell him I’m with three reporters
from a Juárez newspaper. No, m’ijo, seriously—he’ll be mad at you if you don’t tell him.”

  The guard gets on the phone.

  A few minutes later a sergeant comes out and leads them into a makeshift office with a desk and a few folding chairs. Alvarado sets his cigarette in an ashtray, looks up from his paperwork, and gestures for them to sit. “Señora Abarca, what can I do for you today?”

  He’s a slick piece of work, Pablo thinks. Immaculately groomed and tailored, sandy hair brushed straight back, pale blue eyes that look right through you, the sort of person that Pablo has loathed—and, okay, yes, feared—his entire life.

  “You still have eight young men from my town in custody here,” Jimena says. She starts to run off the names—Velázquez, Ahumada, Blanco…

  “I have told you and told you and told you that this is army business and you have no standing whatsoever to—”

  Ana identifies herself and asks, “Have these men been charged with anything, and, if so, what?”

  Alvarado looks at Giorgio’s cameras. “Tell him not to take my picture.”

  “Don’t take his picture,” Ana says. “Have these men been charged with anything, and if so, what?”

  “These men are still being interviewed,” Alvarado says.

  “Interviewed or interrogated?” Pablo asks.

  “And who are you?”

  “Pablo Mora. Same paper.”

  “It takes three of you?”

  “Safety in numbers,” Pablo says. “We have reports that people are being tortured in this facility.”

  “There is no truth to that,” Alvarado says. “That is merely propaganda that the traffickers put out and some journalists are foolish enough to repeat.”

  “Then you won’t mind,” Ana says, “if we talk to these men?”

  “Did I say ‘foolish’?” Alvarado asks. “Perhaps I should have added ‘corrupt.’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That some journalists are on the cartels’ payrolls,” Alvarado says.

  Pablo feels a deep flush come over his face and hopes that the others don’t see it or chalk it up to the heat.

  Jimena says, “The doctor in Valverde —”