Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields

by Charles Bowden

  I have been coming to this city for thirteen years, and naturally, I have, like everyone here, an investment in the dead. And the living. Here is a story, and like all stories here, like Miss Sinaloa, it tantalizes and floats in the air, and then vanishes. A poor Mexican woman in El Paso wants drug treatment for her young teenaged son, but she cannot afford the facilities in the United States, so she checks him into a clinic in Juárez. A few days, later, he is back in the United States and housed in the very hospital where the Mexican comandante who survived assassination was briefly housed. The boy has been raped and has a torn rectum.

  Then the tale erases itself from consciousness.

  Jane Fonda cares, so does Sally Field, and so both have been to Juárez to protest the murder of women. The Vagina Monologues has been staged here, also. Over the past ten years or so, four hundred women have been found murdered, the majority of them victims of husbands and lovers and hardly mysterious cases. This number represents 10 or 12 percent of the official kill rate. Two movies have been made about the dead women. Focusing on the dead women enables Americans to ignore the dead men, and ignoring the dead men enables the United States to ignore the failure of its free-trade schemes, which in Juárez are producing poor people and dead people faster than any other product. Of course, the murders of the women in Juárez are hardly investigated or solved. Murders in Juárez are hardly ever investigated, and so in death, women finally receive the same treatment as dead men. At least eight prosecutors have claimed to tackle the murders. Last year, a forensics team from Argentina showed up to straighten things out. The team was state-of-the-art, thanks to Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s that disappeared ten thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thousand people—no one really knows the tally. The Argentineans had also worked in El Salvador, another country rich with mass graves. But none of this training prepared them for Juárez. They came to solve the mystery of murdered women in Juárez. They found the reality of the city.

  They found heads sitting on the floor of the morgue, bodies without heads, bodies tossed willy-nilly into mass graves. DNA also failed them at times because the local forensic talent had boiled some of the bodies of the girls, a cooking technique that destroys DNA. At least three families, they discovered, had gotten the bodies of their loved ones back, had buried them, and now had to be told they’d been given the bodies of strangers.

  But then, the local authorities can be a bit of a problem. The former police chief was busted in January 2008 for setting up a dope deal in El Paso. Two cops disappeared a week ago. Four days later, a vagrant discovered a shopping bag downtown with the uniform of one of the cops—it had his name, blood stains, and bits of duct tape, this latter being a favored shackling device of locals when they execute people. So apparently, there is a naked policeman wandering the city.

  And then, there is the tale of Miss Sinaloa. She goes to a party with police, and then after the fun, the police bring her to the crazy place. A fair-skinned woman is a treat for street cops. When the girls began vanishing from Juárez in 1993 and then reappearing at times as raped corpses or simply bones, the local cops referred to them as las morenitas—the little dark ones—because the favored prey came from the poor barrios where young women who slave in American-owned factories for next to nothing live. Miss Sinaloa hails from a different world.

  But there is always one enduring fact in Juárez: There are no facts. The memories keep shifting. Miss Sinaloa is a beauty who comes to party in Juárez and is raped. Miss Sinaloa is a beauty who comes to party in Juárez and consumes enormous amounts of cocaine and whiskey and becomes crazy, so loca, that the people call the police and the cops come and take Miss Sinaloa away and they rape her for days and then dump her at the crazy place in the desert. She has long hair and is beautiful, and a doctor examines her and there is no question about the rapes. She has bruises on her arms and legs and ribs.

  She is now almost a native of the city.

  Dead Reporter Driving

  There is a man driving fast down the dirt road leading to the border. A rooster tail of dust marks his passage. He is very frightened, and his fourteen-year-old son sits beside him in silence. The boy is that way—very bright, yet very quiet. They are unusually close. The father has raised him as a single parent since he was four after the relationship with the mother did not work out.

  Now, father and son are fleeing to the United States. Back in their hometown of Ascensión, Chihuahua, men with automatic rifles are searching for them. These men are soldiers in the Mexican army and intend to kill the father, and perhaps the son, too. As the man drives toward the U.S. port of entry, they are ransacking his house. No one in the town will dare to lift a hand. The newspaper will not cover this event.

  The man knows these facts absolutely.

  His name is Emilio Gutierrez Soto, and he is the reporter covering this part of Mexico and that is why he is a dead man driving. He passes an ejido, one of the collective villages created by the Mexican revolution as the answer to the land hunger of the poor. Once, the army came here, beat up a bunch of peasants, and terrorized the community under the guise of fighting a war on drugs. The peasants never filed any complaints, because they are tied to the land and could not flee if there were reprisals for their protests. They also knew that any complaints would be ignored by their government. This is the kind of thing the reporter knows but does not write and publish. Like the peasants, he knows his place in the system.

  It is June 16, 2008, and in two days, the man will have his forty-fifth birthday, should he live that long.

  The military has flooded across Mexico since President Felipe Calderón assumed office in December 2006 with a margin so razor thin that many Mexicans think he is an illegitimate president. His first act was to declare a war on the nation’s thriving drug industry and his favorite tool was the Mexican army. Now over 40,000 soldiers are marauding all over the country in this war against the nation’s drug organizations. In 2008, between 5,000 and 6,000 Mexicans died in the violence, a larger loss than what the United States has endured during the entire Iraq war. Since the year 2000, 24 reporters have been officially recorded as murdered in Mexico, 7 more have vanished, and an unknown number have fled into the United States. But all numbers in Mexico are slippery because people have a way of disappearing and not being reported. The entire police force of Palomas, Chihuahua, fled in 2008, with the police chief seeking shelter in the United States, the rest of the cops simply hiding in Mexico. Between July and October 2008, at a minimum 63 people—Mexican cops, reporters, and businesspeople—sought political asylum at crossings in West Texas and New Mexico. In all of 2008, 312 Mexicans filed credible fear claims at U.S. ports of entry, up from 179 in 2007. Many more simply blended into U.S. communities. This is the wave of blood and terror suffocating the man as he heads north.

  The reporter has tried to live his life in an effort to avoid this harsh reality. He has been careful in his work. His publisher has told him it is better to lose a story than to take a big risk. He does not look too closely into things. If someone is murdered, he prints what the police tell him and lets it go at that. If people sell drugs in his town or warehouse drugs in his town, he ignores this information. Nor does he inquire about who controls the drug industry in his town or anywhere else.

  The man driving is terrified of hitting an army checkpoint. They are random and they are everywhere. The entire Mexican north has become a killing field. In Palomas, a border town of maybe three thousand souls, forty men have already been executed this very year, and another seventeen people have vanished in kidnappings. Some of these murders are by drug cartels. Some of these murders are by state and federal police. Some of these murders are by the Mexican army. There are now many ways to die.

  The high desert is beautiful, a pan of creosote with lenses of grass in moist low spots. Here and there, volcanic remnants make black marks on the earth, and to the north and west, sierras rise. There is almost no water. Almost all the rivers flowing from the Sierra Mad
re die in the desert. But it is home, the place he has spent his life.

  The reporter may die for committing a simple error. He wrote an accurate news story. He did not know this was dangerous, because he thought the story was very small and unimportant. He was wrong and that was the beginning of all his trouble.

  This is because there are two Mexicos.

  There is the one reported by the U.S. press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war against the evil forces of the drug world and using the incorruptible Mexican army as his warriors. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, and laws and is seen by the U.S. government as a sister republic.

  It does not exist.

  There is a second Mexico, where the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed.

  The reporter lives in this second Mexico.

  Until very recently, he liked it just fine. In fact, he loved it because he loves Mexico and has never thought of leaving. Even though he lives near the border, he has not bothered to cross for almost ten years.

  But now, things have changed. He has researched the humanitarian treaties signed by the United States, and he thinks, given these commitments by the American government, he and his boy will be given asylum. He has decided to tell the authorities nothing but the truth. His research has failed to uncover one little fact: No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum by the United States of America.

  Suddenly, he sees a checkpoint ahead, and there is no way to escape it.

  Men in uniforms pull him over.

  He is frightened but discovers to his relief that this checkpoint is run by the Mexican migration service and so, maybe, they will not give him up to the army.

  “Why are you driving so fast?”

  “I am afraid. There are people trying to kill me.”

  “The narcos?”

  “No, the soldiers.”

  “Who are you?”

  He hands over his press pass.

  “Oh, you are the one, they searched your house.”

  “I have had problems.”

  “Those sons of bitches do whatever they want. Go ahead. Good luck.”

  He roars away. When he stops at the port of entry at Antelope Wells in the boot-heel of New Mexico, U.S. Customs asks, as they always do, what he is bringing from Mexico.

  He says, “We bring fear.”

  There is a phantom living in Juárez, and his name is on everyone’s lips: la gente. He is the collective unconsciousness of the city, a hoodoo conjured up out of murder, rape, poverty, corruption, and deceit. Everyone in the city—man, woman, and child, professor and street alcoholic—knows what la gente thinks. Just as I have never met or interviewed an American politician who did not know what “the little people” think, nor have I met this army of phantom dwarfs that allegedly dominate my own nation or heard so much as a whisper from another domestic band, the Silent Majority. In the same way, I must listen to drivel about la gente.

  In politer circles, la gente gives way to a different phantom, a thing called civil society. Of course, neither la gente nor civil society exists, just as in the United States there are no little people nor a Silent Majority. All these terms are useful for two reasons: They allow people to talk about things they do not know, and they allow people to pretend there is an understanding about life that does not exist. Oh, and there is a final bonus: They allow newspaper columnists to discuss people they have never met and say knowingly what the people they have never met actually think.

  In Juárez, la gente—this collective mind that is wise and knowing—is a necessary crutch because the police are corrupt, the government is corrupt, the army is corrupt, and the economy functions by paying third-world wages and charging first-world prices. The Mexican newspapers dance around truth because, one, corrupt people who are rich and powerful dominate what can be printed and, two, any reporter honest enough to publish the truth dies.

  And so we are left, those of us who actually entertain the possibility that facts exist and that facts matter, with rumor and this phantom called la gente. Of course, this means we have no one to talk to and can only console ourselves with the dead, their bodies leaking blood out those neat holes made by machine guns, because the dead are past lying and the dead know one real fact: Someone killed them. They often do not know who killed them. Nor do they know why they were killed. But at least they know they have been killed and are now dead.

  This is more than civil society and la gente know because the television news and the newspapers do not always report murders and if they report murders they do not always give the names and if they give the names, they almost never follow up on the murders.

  You live.

  You die.

  You vanish from public records.

  And you become the talk of the phantom called la gente.

  Juárez is pioneering the future again, and this is a city of achievements. It claims the invention of the margarita, it is the birthplace of the zoot suit, of velvet paintings, of the border factory era, of the most innovative and modern drug cartel, of world-class murder of women and also of men. In the short month of February alone, 1,063 cars are stolen in the city—around 36 a day. Here a vehicle is worth a hundred dollars to a junkie—the price a chop shop pays before the machine is butchered and shipped to China for the metal.

  There are explanations for all this. A favorite is that it is all because of the drug world, especially a current battle the authorities claim is going on between cartels for control of the crossing into El Paso. Some blame the massive migration of the poor to the city to work in the factories. Others, especially those who focus on the murder of the girls, sense a serial killer is prowling the lonely dark lanes. Finally, some simply see the state as waning here and the violence as a new order supplanting the fading state with criminal organizations.

  I am in a tiny minority on this matter. I see no new order emerging but rather a new way of life, one beyond our imagination and the code words we use to protect ourselves from life and violence. In this new way of life, no one is really in charge and we are all in play. The state still exists—there are police, a president, congress, agencies with names studded across the buildings. Still, something has changed, and I feel this change in my bones.

  The violence has crossed class lines. The violence is everywhere. The violence is greater. And the violence has no apparent and simple source. It is like the dust in the air, part of life itself.

  Government here and in my own country increasingly pretends to be in charge and then calls it a day. The United States beefs up the border, calls in high-tech towers, and tosses up walls, and still, all the drugs arrive on time and all the illegal people make it into the fabled heartland and work themselves into a future.

  People tell me there are murders in Detroit, women are raped in Washington, D.C., the cops are on the take in Chicago, drugs are everywhere in Dallas, the government is a flop in New Orleans. And Baghdad is not safe, mortars arc through the desert sky there into the American womb of the Green Zone. People tell me Los Angeles is a jungle of gangs, that we have our own revered mafia. And that drugs flood Mexico and Juárez because of the wicked, vice-ridden ways of the United States. All of these assertions are ways to ignore the deaths on the killing ground.

  According to the Mexican government and the DEA, the violence in Juárez results from a battle between various drug cartels. This makes perfect sense, except that the war fails to kill cartel members. With over two hundred fresh corpses in ninety days, there is hardly a body 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. The other problem with this cartel war theory is that the Mexican army in Juárez continues to seize tons of marijuana but only a few kilos of cocain
e, this in a city with thousands of retail cocaine outlets.

  There are two ways to lose your sanity in Juárez. One is to believe that the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder. The only certain thing is that various groups—gangs, the army, the city police, the state police, the federal police—are killing people in Juárez as a part of a war for drug profits. So a person never knows exactly why he or she is killed but is absolutely certain that death comes because of the enormous profits attached to drug sales.

  Every time I walk across the pay bridge from downtown El Paso to Juárez, I see a big portrait of Che Guevara on the concrete banks that channel the original flow of the Rio Grande. Sometimes the paint has faded, but when moments get very bad in Juárez, someone magically appears and touches up the portrait. There is also a statement in Spanish that my president is a terrorist and another message that no one is illegal and that Border Patrol are killers, and there are a fistful of revolutionary heroes whose faces scamper across a map of South America and Mexico. Such statements also insist on order because that is the ground where heroes flourish.