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

by Charles Bowden

  He prays with her and she closes her beautiful brown eyes.

  She never mentions her family.

  She only talks about her beauty. Nothing else really, just her beauty.

  She is Miss Sinaloa, after all.

  So when the family comes to retrieve their daughter, the father draws an obvious conclusion—that El Pastor and his patients have been having their way with her.

  El Pastor is horrified and there is a terrible argument and then, Miss Sinaloa leaves for home with her family.

  But as we stand in the dust and wind outside the asylum walls and he recounts that moment—“I am a family man!”—we both understand the reaction of the family. They are middle-class people, El Pastor notes. They had a nice car and they paid for all the medical bills Miss Sinaloa had run up. But in a country where the weak are always prey, where the favorite verb is chingar, to fuck over, such a conclusion is inevitable. Just as the gang rape for days of Miss Sinaloa in the Casablanca is the normal course of business.

  The warehouse waits on the side street off a fashionable avenue in a middle-class neighborhood. The army has blocked the streets, and the men wear black uniforms, flack jackets, and blue trousers and clutch automatic rifles. Their faces are covered with black masks lest someone make their identity. A few weeks ago, they hit this very warehouse and found 1.8 tons of marijuana and two men. The two men were taken away.

  And now the military is back at the warehouse in an operation sponsored out of Mexico City. Inside, a backhoe digs and two cadaver dogs help in the work. The story floating among the Mexican television, radio, and print people outside is that the informants said there were twelve bodies buried in the warehouse. The work began at 8 A.M., and now it is almost noon and nothing has been found.

  Pigeons coo on the roof of the three-story concrete block and window-less building. The street is lined with two-story houses, trees, big iron walls, and gates to protect cars, people, and appliances. Here and there, large dogs stare out through bars. A cluster of cops stands around down the street, but mainly nothing goes on but the slow rhythm of life in a middle-class neighborhood. The press tries to snare the locals in a conversation, but they are not anxious to speak. This is the normal neighborhood with the normal death house—no one saw anything, no one heard anything. And of course, no one smelled anything. A slight woman of about twenty with light skin, tight jeans, and maybe ninety pounds of flesh does a standup for television. Then the torpor returns as everyone waits for the shot they want—bodies coming out.

  There is a sound that is everywhere in Juárez, and it is not of sirens or gunshots or the cries of the dead and dying. It is the skittering of litter down a street by a warehouse of death, the flapping of plastic bags caught on the barbed wire, on fence posts, on iron bars. The city has this skittering and flapping, and all is wrapped in endless waves of dust and plumes of exhaust pouring out the tailpipes of dying buses carrying workers to endless toil. Also, the scraping of shoes on the ground as tired people, usually very dark and dressed in cheap clothing and big shoes that do not really fit their feet, trudge by carrying plastic bags of groceries as they go to their shacks and think of preparing something to eat. The other sound is of the better-off, the young women in tight jeans who clatter past on high heels with the confidence of mountain goats scampering up a cliff, the young women who wear the faces of femme fatales as they navigate a city that eventually consumes them.

  A car rolls past with the heavy boom coming off the speakers.

  A black column of smoke rises off some burning shack in the barrio and the fire engine screams past.

  Here and there around the city, pink bands with black crosses are painted on the utility polls to memorialize the dead and missing girls—a row of such poles lines the highway near the crazy place where Miss Sinaloa healed her wounds.

  But nothing really registers in this place, the city erases not simply lives, but also memory. And those who remember are the most likely of all to be erased.

  Back in May 1993, back when violence was more focused in the city and everyone sensed a gray sky of power hanging over their lives and directing their fates, Javier Lardizabal was thirty-three years old. He worked as an investigator for the attorney general’s office of Chihuahua. He noticed things and turned in a report of links between the police and the drug dealers, even noticing that one major capo moved around Juárez with police bodyguards. Then, he disappeared—until November 16, 1994, when a bulldozer loading sand in the nearby dunes dug up his body. The driver was hardly surprised—already in his sand-loading toils, he’d discovered the former head of the national security office in Juárez.

  Of course, that was then and now it is not even a memory as I sit on the curb by the warehouse of death, listening to dry leaves flutter down the pavement, and waiting for a new crop of corpses to come back into the light.

  It goes like this at the new death house. On the first day, they announce one body. On the second day, three bodies. On the third day, one more body. Now it is a week in, the digging continues, and the tally seems to be nine bodies. But since heads are severed from bodies, the exact count may take a while. Besides, there is more of the patio to dig up.

  No one really knows what is going on. The editor of one local daily estimates that his publication reports maybe 15 percent of the action. For example, fake cops have been setting up checkpoints in the city and seizing guns. In a forty-eight-hour period toward the end of February, a top cop is mowed down, four other residents are murdered, three banks are robbed, and, by a fluke, $1.8 million is seized by U.S. Customs because a driver from Kansas got turned back by Mexican Customs and reentered the United States. Also, the Mexican army bagged 4.5 tons of marijuana. All this is in the 15 percent that gets reported.

  The street is always rutted and claws up the hillside. The girls are always clean, their hair shines, their clothes shout colors. And they walk with little plastic bags in their hands, small items bought at the local tienda. Their eyes stare straight ahead, and so the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old goddesses state their indifference to the world that chokes in the dust around them.

  There is a way out, and to those who do not understand the world, this way seems like an appetite for fantasy. The cholos on the corner with their hard, empty eyes, close-cropped hair, baggy pants, and sullen faces have a dream. It is of exercising power through killing, having women because of money, wearing tattoos as billboards of their ambitions. And of dying, and dying young and without warning, and for reasons they can barely say or comprehend, something about honor, or turf, or something, just something that they really can’t say. There is no point is discussing an alternative future because this is a thing they cannot dream or feel or crave, so an alternative future is beyond words or meaning. All the nostrums of our governments—education, jobs, and sound diet—mean little here because they never happen to anyone. At best, the way out is a lottery ticket. Or the fame and savor of a violent death.

  I am sitting with a gang member—one in his dotage now, his late thirties. He straightened up for a spell, became a trucker in the United States, married, had children. To keep his long-haul schedule, he started using amphetamines, and then the pills took over, he became surly, beat the wife, went to jail, got out and beat the wife again, was back in court. And leapt up at his hearing and attacked the judge. After prison, he was still angry and still busy with the pills. The United States shipped him to Juárez, and there he tried to kill his mother and father and siblings. And so they cast him out.

  Now he has been clean for nine months and still he is not really anywhere. He is not in the present, except in a blank way, and living on thirty dollars a week. He cannot see the future. He can remember being a leader and killing, and this is as close to a dream as he is likely to get. His eyes glimmer with intelligence and yet look as empty as a tomb. This is the place those with safe, fat lives call a fantasy. But here, fantasy seems like a sound decision because what people like myself call fantasy throbs with reality.
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  I meet these people with dreams who paint rocks outside towns, who take old cars and make them mosaics with steer horns sprouting off the hood, and that wa-wa horn shouting out, the driver with glazed eyes and a leather hat roaring with laughter as he cuts through the fiesta. Sometimes they create sculptures, sometimes drunken poems in the cantina, sometimes murals of cheap pigments and distorted beings, but always they dream and drift into a place called fantasy.

  Listen to the sensible people, the governments that have told you since before you were born that everything is getting better. Skip those failures—they are bumps on the road, and the road leads to Shangri-la, to the bright, light-skinned children, good jobs, fine schools, public health, and women who lick your toes and men who respect your body and safe streets and nights where the darkness holds no dread.

  Or consider the market forces, the magical pulse of an economy now global, and hitch a ride on an information highway or bask in the glow of market forces, become part of a giant apparatus that is towing us all toward the golden shore. And you’ll have a bathroom and the toilet will flush every single time. Lady, you will be beautiful and your hands will be smooth and soft and never will a single wrinkle touch your face, nor will your breasts drop a single degree. And they will be full—we have our ways.

  So I am sitting with the gang guy who is violent and will die, or I am sitting with the man full of art dreams who has no schooling but explodes with paint on cliff sides, or I am sitting with the young woman who banks it all on cosmetics, thong panties, and a sullen face protecting a heart full of hopes.

  Here’s the deal: Given the choices, what would you do? I’d kill to get in the gang, I’d put on the high heels and the perfume, I’d pick up the guitar, I’d go through the wire, I’d open the bottle, I’d sniff the glue, I’d say tell me the lovers are losers and I’d certainly piss on the winners anointed by the authorities. And I’d maybe kill in Juárez, but far more certainly, I would die in Juárez. With a shout and a scream and a head full of dreams.

  And I imagine sitting with Miss Sinaloa, who should have known better. I can hear the voices of reprimand in my ears that announce with certainty that sensible women of good features do not go to private parties in Juárez, where many men will gather whom they do not know—yes, I can hear these wise voices telling me the facts of life. I say dream, I say fantasize, I say escape, I say kill, I say do not accept the offerings of the cops and the government and the guns that have slaughtered hopes for generations and generations.

  I say fantasy.

  I say go to Juárez.

  I say, Miss Sinaloa, will you take my hand?

  The nights grow more difficult. The Mexican newspaper photographers learn to avoid the military roadblocks, to swing down side streets and chart a new city of alleys and detours. This is the only sensible thing to do.

  One night in early April, just days after the full military presence swarmed into the streets of the city, two photographers respond to a police call and find two municipal squad cars. One of the cops is a woman. They are to transport a sick man, but when the squad tries to leave, the army blocks them. They let one squad car go on, but keep the other vehicle carrying the policewoman. When finally rescued from the custody of the army, she is not in good shape and so her fellow cops take her to the police station. Her panties and bra are torn and she goes into shock, her face paralyzed. She cannot speak of what happened, because she says they would kill her if she talked. Three policewomen have been raped in recent days, but the department will not say if she is one of them.

  Her adventure occurs on a city street at night and takes up a lot of time—and during her adventure, no one comes out of a house to see what is going on. When a photographer for the paper raises his camera to photograph her, she covers her face.

  Later, he tells me that if he had not happened on the scene, he is not sure she would have come back from the embrace of the Mexican army.

  Jaime Murrieta always has a smile and, with luck, a bottle of beer. When I first met him in 1995, he had already photographed hundreds of murders for the Juárez newspapers. On September 9, 2006, he was out cruising in the night, looking for his dream photograph. In this ultimate image, he will be holding his camera, the killer will come toward his lens, and Jaime Murrieta will faithfully record his own murder. I remember him telling me in the 1990s of this dream shot with a smile on his face and passion in his eyes.

  But on that September night in 2006, he comes very close to his dream. He and two other members of the press stumble upon a street party of Aztecas and a herd of Chihuahuan state police, including three comandantes. They are drinking and having an impromptu fiesta. He raises his camera.

  They beat him close to death. He winds up in a hospital with a police guard—and of course, given the circumstances, such a guard is hardly reassuring. He loses the sight in one eye—but luckily, not his shooting eye. He refuses to leave town even when I send him money for such a flight.

  After all, he did not get the photograph of his dreams, although he came close to that ultimate image.

  Of course, none of this can be really happening. Mexico was to become a modern nation, and then when Mexico did not become a modern state but lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was papered over by successive American governments since a quiet neighbor was, and is, the best neighbor for a global empire. When Mexico became a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, then it was the fault of American habits and addicts. Finally, when even this rhetoric of deceit failed to paper the wounds, NAFTA was ballyhooed by the administration of President Bill Clinton and President Carlos Salinas (a man reputed to have stolen ten to twenty billion dollars for six years of service) as the answer that would bring prosperity and end illegal immigration.

  The trade agreement crushed peasant agriculture in Mexico and sent millions of campesinos fleeing north into the United States in an effort to survive. The treaty failed to increase Mexican wages—the average wage in Juárez, for example, went from $4.50 a day to $3.70. The increased shipment of goods from Mexico to the United States created a perfect cover for the movement of drugs in the endless stream of semi trucks heading north.

  American factories went to Mexico (and Asia) because they could pay slave wages, ignore environmental regulations, and say fuck you to unions. What Americans got in return were cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration into the United States. This result is global, but its most obvious consequence is the destruction of a nation with which we share a long border.

  The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason people sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason people go north, aside from the legendary beaches of Kansas, Chicago, and other illegal destinations, is to survive. This is not simply an economic exchange. Unless you are one of those people who own a factory, this is a deal with death and money. Juárez, the pioneer city of Mexico in foreign factories, is full of death, poverty, and violence after decades of this busy notion of the future.

  Let me ask you one question: Just what is it you don’t understand that every dead girl here understands, that every dead cholo understands, that everyone ending a shift at the plant understands, and that every corpse coming out of the death warehouse understands?

  To sit on the curb by a death house in Juárez is to smell all things that cannot be said out loud in American political life.

  And as El Pastor said, “Dementia smells.”

  The clothes hang on barbed wire, on old loading-dock pallets that now serve as fences, on bushes and shrubs. Water in many of the new colonias comes by truck and is stored in containers also pilfered from the factories and still rich with toxic chemical residues. The street will be dirt or sand, the electricity stolen off power lines, the wires snake on the ground to the individual shacks. The air feels like a solid because dust and fumes wrap Juárez in an atmosphere that can be chewed.<
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  The city trails along an ebbing river and is cradled by dunes, and when the wind rises, the air goes brown and the dirt is everywhere. This is where the women come into a miracle: Almost every morning, Juárez teems with poor people in clean clothes, and these clean clothes come from the labor of women who lack running water or even conventional clotheslines. They are the secret engine of the city, the cooks and bottle washers, the laborers in the factories where women have been supplanting males for decades, the beasts of burden carrying groceries, the mothers of children, and always the dirt police who turn out family members each and every morning in clean clothes. Their hair pulled back, their lips red, their eyes weary, the women are the washing machines in a city of dust.

  Every time I come to Juárez, I swear it is for the last time. And then, I come again and again. I seldom write about these visits, so that is not why I come. I seldom enjoy these visits, so that also fails to explain my returns.

  I think it is about tasting the future. Juárez is the page where all the proposed solutions to poverty and migration and crime are erased by waves of blood.

  I feel at one with El Pastor.

  He keeps telling me of his mission, how back in 1998, when the bad snow came, and “I was driving that day and singing to the Lord and it was snowing. I said, ‘Lord I’m working with you,’ and the Lord pulled my hair.”

  That is the moment when he began scooping the crazy people off the streets and creating his asylum in the desert.

  Now El Pastor is jubilant because he is talking about Juárez.

  “I love Juárez,” he says, “I know it is dirty and very violent but I love it! I grew up in Juárez. I love it. It is a needy city and I can help my city. I can make a little difference.”