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

by Charles Bowden

  Here is one.

  He goes by a lot of names and one he really likes is Pedro Martinez. He is forty-two when American psychiatrists interview him. The agents have caught him yet again in the United States illegally and then they decide he is a crazy person and so he becomes something for American medicine to explain.

  This is not easy. He says he has been in the Kansas State Penitentiary, but a search turns up no records. He says he was evaluated in the county jail in Danville, Kentucky, but these records also cannot be found. He does say this: Five years ago, he was hit on the back of the head and lost consciousness. He had a urinary infection in Florida. He had gonorrhea and injected himself with penicillin. He has also tried things. From age seven, he smoked marijuana for ten years. He has been treated four or five times, he notes, for inhaling thinner. He tried crack cocaine but this only lasted four months. He likes beer and figures he has been an alcoholic since age eleven. Actually, he offers, he lost his license in North Carolina for drunk driving. So he’s been around and really toured these United States.

  He was born in Tabasco, Mexico, but was raised in Veracruz. His mom is dead, his dad alive somewhere, and somehow he managed to get through the sixth grade.

  Oh, and he is married to a woman from Iran, one he met in prison in Kentucky, and they had several children together. The marriage lasted two years. Here the doctors falter and find his stories from Kentucky hard to follow, something about a guy named Jim Buster and woman known as De Fannie.

  He has worked. He has done gardening and manual labor and been out in those fields. He has also worked with growing tobacco.

  There have been bumps on his road. In Kentucky, his girlfriend was difficult and so he was convicted of burning down a house. He tries to explain, but the doctors cannot follow the flow of words he spews—something about homosexuality, medical stuff, mental health stuff, small brains. He did a year in Mexico, he says, for selling marijuana. Six times he has been jailed for entering the United States of America. Also, he laughs as he answers the doctors’ questions and they find this inappropriate.

  So they decide he is suffering from a psychosis.

  But Pedro Martinez insists he is not mentally ill. He is six feet two inches tall and weighs 149 pounds and his body temperature is 96.3.

  The doctors notice that he has poor eye contact and sometimes he is hard to hear because he lowers his voice. Also, during one interview he asks the doctor, “Do you hear the voices?” He would turn to a corner of the room and talk to a woman named Peggy, but the doctors noted that they could not see Peggy. Besides that, he has poor grooming.

  When he was told he would face a hearing on his mental competency, he said, “The judge, I am the judge.”

  When he saw the doctor’s chart on him, he said, “I am not taking this shit. Give me the chart. Take your name off the chart.”

  So they douse him with pills, antipsychotic medication, and this calms him down. Now they realize he is paranoid schizophrenic. Case closed.

  And then, to solve all the problems, he is booted across the bridge, and El Pastor finds him on the street and takes him out to that crazy place. His brief fling at history—those U.S. medical evaluation records—ends and he rejoins the invisible people from whom he came. He is part of that army that has brigades all over Mexico and all over Juárez, the shock troops of poverty and drugs and booze and despair. He can negotiate the United States, he just cannot convince American experts that he knows as much as they do.

  This happens. The brain-damaged often fail to get serious notice from the authorities.

  But time is on the side of Pedro Martinez. Each day, there are more and more like him. The world now is designed to raise up huge crops of people just like him.

  Everyone here is always talking. But no one ever says a real word because that can get you dead. Some blame the language, the calculated indirection of Spanish. Some blame a lack of education. Some blame the dust that is always in the air, the endless dirt giving everyone a mild cough that they use to punctuate sentences and to accent their silence and comments. Some claim fear creates the silence. In the past few years, Mexican reporters who bother to report are sometimes murdered and so the reports are becoming rarer in this nation. A newspaper story on a killing will have an almost pornographic description of a car or a corpse—and silence on the killers. This is the sound of the growing terror, this silence.

  Guns make up for the silence that coats everyone’s lips. The city police lieutenant and his son get in his huge, new four-door Nissan Titan truck. The boy is eight, his dad thirty-two. About 250 rounds dance through the machine. The wife races out, sees the carnage, and tries to drive them to the hospital. But the cop dies, the boy’s arm is destroyed, and he dies also. The neighbors come out and stare. Numbers help. For example, 237 rounds were fired from guns of 7.62 by 30 caliber, 16 rounds came from an AK-47, and 1 round came from a 7.62 by 39 caliber. The cop was on a list of names posted January 26 on the police memorial monument. He was characterized under the heading FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE NOT BELIEVING.

  The neighbors say that it is terrible about the child because the boy was young and innocent and played in the street a lot. No one is willing to give the reporters their name. And after a while, no one wants to talk at all. That is the silence that graces the city. Things happen and no one says much. Then after a while, no one admits the thing even happened.

  Across the river in El Paso, the daily newspaper fails for days to make any mention of the dead cop or the dead eight-year-old boy. The silence can be a great comfort. Things can be frightening and yet reduced to nothingness by silence.

  At noon one day in May, I am standing in a crowd staring at a dead man on the sidewalk. He was executed twenty minutes ago. Then a call comes, there is another killing. We rumble up into the hills. The body has been taken away, and now people stroll past the blood on the dirt as if there had been no gunfire, no scream, no thud, no murder. Just the soft buzzing of flies over the puddled blood. The wind carrying dust, the cry of roosters.

  Two guys are in a Honda and it is Friday night. Two vehicles pull up and machine-gun them. No one notices. A man is walking down the street at night. He is riddled with bullets. After a while, people creep carefully from the houses. And then suddenly a pickup truck appears, and six men climb out, grab the body, toss it in back, and drive away. After that the police and soldiers arrive, but of course there is nothing for them to do. Or say.

  Silence.

  There are two ways to be safe and to stay sane. One is silence, pretending that nothing happened and refusing to say out loud what happened. The other is magical thinking, inventing various explanations for what you refuse to say and by these explanations dismiss the very thing you cannot let pass your lips. Of course, this applies only to individuals. Newspapers, politicians, and government agencies have a third method, they cite organizations—the drug cartels—and say that whatever is happening is because of “them.” This tactic is very appealing and takes one back to childhood, when the night belonged to monsters and hobgoblins. It was the tool of the cold war, when communists lurked under the bed, and is the tool of the new wars against terrorism and drugs. Like a stopped clock, it is accurate now and then. Organizations of all kinds lie, cheat, steal, and kill. But in Juárez, almost no account explaining the killings is linked to fact.

  Instead, the cars driven by killers and the cars of the dead are lovingly described. Spent cartridges found at the scene are sorted by caliber and counted. The dead are sketched—the color of the skin and hair, the size of the bodies, the estimated age. But often there are no names, nor do updates appear in future editions. Three carloads of men described as commandos hit an upscale motel for lovers, one that functions almost like a gated community. They find a man and woman in a room, kill them, leave, and then nothing. The meaning beneath the skin of the word commando is never explored. But it is carefully reported that one hundred spent cartridges littered the room. The governor, José Reyes Baeza, announces o
n March 24 after a long silence, “All of the public security agencies are infiltrated—all of them, pure and simple—and we are not going to put our hands in the fire for any bad element.”

  He also tells the populace that he has assurances from the highest government sources that the violence will decline in the next few weeks. Apparently, there is some wizard in the ministries who has access either to the future or to the forces that have been killing wholesale since New Year’s Day.

  There is nothing but silence from the police forces, and not another word is said in the press.

  Silence, like protest, is the drug of our time, the way we do something by doing nothing. We march, we wave placards, and we go mum, and all avoid touching the levers of power and all avoid stepping on the third rail of truth.

  I sit on a tree well surrounding a scraggly shrub just down the street from one of the houses of death. Directly in front of me is a federal cop—a few minutes ago, they took my passport, examined it as a mystery object, and called it in to be recorded. I am now on notice. The street is rough and dirt, and ten yards to the west is a walled compound with a camera watching the entrance. Fifty yards down the calle the boys are digging, and eventually thirty-six bodies will come belching out of the ground. No one in the neighborhood ever heard, saw, or smelled a thing.

  The bodies will not be shown to grieving relatives of missing people, nor will the location of the bodies be disclosed, nor will the press mention that the bodies have vanished.

  The dog snarls through the steel fence. He is the only person here in the moment and refuses to be silent. The federal police wear masks.

  Weeks and weeks go by, and the only mention of the bodies in the newspapers is that they have been taken off to Mexico City. Not a single sentence on who these forty-five people in the two death houses once had been, nor is the identity of their killers ever discussed in print. Nor is there any exploration of just who owned these two buildings where people were murdered and buried in gardens of bones.

  Silence.

  The sacred lines are being erased as the walls go up and towers slam light on the ground at night. The war flees into the sky, where machines enable the illusion of control. For over eighteen hundred miles the line between Mexico and the United States follows a river or crosses deserts or scampers up and down mountains or wallows in the wind softly singing against the green face of the grasslands.

  I am sitting along the line and I am far from Juárez and Miss Sinaloa, but it is all of a package. The fabled cartels have been assigned cities, and made into boxes and arrows on organizational charts created by the U.S. agencies. But they seem reluctant to stay within these lines.

  A month ago I drove a dirt road past two big work camps with piles of steel girders and rows of heavy equipment, depots where men went forth each day to weld and build car barriers to stop evil people from bringing evil things north. This is homeland security.

  Then last week a semi with a loaded trailer came through the car barrier and drove north on a dirt road. And didn’t quite make it. I stand where it slid off the road and down a steep slope. I can smell cow shit and the stench of death—it was officially hauling a load of steers. The new car barrier didn’t stop it because someone has already cut out chunks in two places and put in gates.

  No matter. Up in the sky, there are Black Hawk and A-Star helicopters, and big dirigibles looking with radar deep into the heart of Mexico, and ground sensors in the dirt and towers with magic eyes hooked to computers, and a standing army of gunmen in uniforms—more people, at least twenty thousand, under arms to police this line than the roster of the entire U.S. Army at the beginning of that long-ago Mexican War.

  This is the blanket we use to wrap our nervous dreams, and we call it security. We invent special nodes of hell, cartels, cities like Juárez. We call killers drug lords as they sell industrial compounds, torture, and murder. We scan the skies and the earth, we stare with infrared lenses in the night, we bluster and weld and build walls. And we never really face what is in front of us, never face what is inside our gutless language of cartels and drug lords and homeland security, never face that forces are unleashed on the land with names like poverty, a fix, murder, and despair, and our tools cannot master these forces.

  Miss Sinaloa knows this. And I am learning.

  I am standing on the edge of order, a place called Palomas, Chihuahua, about an hour or so west of Juárez and on the line. Census data says seventy-five hundred people live here, but due to the economic failures of farming, then of migrant smuggling, followed by the current boom in killing and kidnapping, it may now be home to three thousand. In 1916, Pancho Villa crossed here and attacked Columbus, New Mexico, an army fort and hamlet three miles north. The United States responded by sending an army south under General John Blackjack Pershing, a military venture that never even caught a glimpse of Villa. Palomas means “doves,” but today there is no cooing in town and little else except violence in the air. This morning, around 7 A.M., a man was found out at the town dump riddled with bullets—rounds that seem to indicate a military weapon. I wander past the big statue of Pancho Villa and walk up to the small police station. One officer is out front, and at my approach, he flees into the station.

  Everyone is a bit skittish here.

  On February 18, 2008, four men were cut down and two died. On February 27, two men were cut down at the gas station on the main drag. The barrage ran three minutes, and the two men tasted the force of three to four hundred rounds. Then in the middle of March, the police chief fled to the United States and his staff deserted. Temporary cops were sent in from Ascensión. After that, two corpses were found by the road south of town. And just a day or two ago, four bodies were found burned to bone in a ranch house. But then in May 2007, four guys drove up to the U.S. border crossing here with three of them dead, including the driver. The wounded guy in the front passenger seat managed to keep a foot on the gas pedal as the rolling charnel house crept into the port of entry.

  Now the police hide in the station. They are new, brought in from out of town. They don’t really patrol, in fact. They sleep in the jail, where it is safe.

  They sell a brand of tequila here shaped like a cartridge. It is called Hijos de Villa, The Sons of Villa. By April 1, at least forty people have been murdered in the town of doves.

  Two teenage girls in tube tops and slacks pose at the point on the bridge between Juárez and the United States where a plaque announces the border. A friend snaps a photograph. Just below, a Border Patrol chopper sweeps along the line. No one even looks over at it.

  On the U.S. side of the bridge, a holding pen teems with Mexicans. They wave and laugh in their cage of cyclone fencing topped with concertina wire.

  The dust blows in Juárez, the workers climb aboard white school buses for their one- to two-hour ride down bad roads to their shifts. I’m standing in a barrio searching out the whiff of another recent murder, this time of a former municipal cop. But my attention strays. The roads are dirt here, some of the tracks require punching the truck into four-wheel drive. Everyone here works in a maquiladora. I look to the north and see the blue federal building in downtown El Paso and the sweep of the American city up the slope of the Franklin Mountains. I stand on the slope of the Sierra de Juárez, over the ridge from the giant white horse and the asylum where Miss Sinaloa briefly took shelter. The border is hard-edged, but at times the sweep of the two cities makes them seem like one. But in the end, death can draw the sharpest line.

  José Refugio Ruvalcalba was fifty-nine on November 27, 1994, when he turned up exactly on the line—midway on the bridge between the two cities—in his Honda Accord. He’d been a state cop for thirty-two years, and both of his sons were with him that day. All three were in the trunk, beaten, stabbed, and strangled. The father had a yellow ribbon around his head, one that flowered out of his mouth.

  He knew where the line was and what happened if that line was crossed.

  So do American political leaders, since they
never seem to come here.

  But everything else does.

  The barrio where I look down from Juárez at El Paso is part of the puzzle of the violence in Juárez. These districts are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Most places are stuffed with people who work in the maquiladoras.

  Later, I am with a man wearing black in a barrio across from the asylum that was once home to Miss Sinaloa. The white buses lumber past with the tired faces of the factory workers. The road is ruts. Most of the shacks lack electricity or water. The wind pelts everyone with dust. The houses themselves are a chaos of boards, pallets, beams, rebar, old cable spools, tires, bed-springs, concrete blocks, posts, scrap metal, car bodies, old rusted buses, stone, rotted plywood, tarps, barrels, black water tanks for the periodic deliveries, plastic buckets, old fencing, tires, bottles, stove pipe, aluminum strips, pipe, broken chairs, tables, and sofas—all this the raw material for the construction of the shacks. Like the asylum itself, the place feeds off what the city rejects.

  People vanish. They leave a bar with the authorities and are never seen again. They leave their homes on an errand and never return. They go to a meeting and never come back. They are waiting at a bus stop and never arrive at their assumed destination. In the late 1990s, people began keeping lists of the disappeared. One such list hit 914 before the effort was abandoned out of fear. None of these lists covered very many years. Nor did any of the list makers ever think their work was a complete tally. No one really knows how many people vanish. It is not safe to ask, and it is not wise to place a call to the authorities.

  Still, we love the hard look of numbers. So murders are tallied, and for fifteen years, until the bloodshed of 2008, Juárez reliably produced two to three hundred official murders a year. Of course, skeletons periodically turn up on the edge of town, and these do not enter the totals. And once in a great while—the FBI announcement of mass graves in Juárez in December 1999, the publicity by the the DEA over a death house in January 2004—homes are found where people are taken, murdered, and buried. Each time such a house of death is revealed, there is a great to-do, a sense of something extraordinary coming into the light of day. People always say they are shocked, the neighbors always say they noticed nothing amiss, the press always says the authorities are digging, digging, digging and will soon get to the bottom of things. Every effort is made to keep this extraordinary moment within the realm of order and to process the corpses so that numbers and structure can be felt and touched.