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

by Charles Bowden

  Everything in Juárez will soon be state-of-the-art. For years, the prosperous here have bundled themselves into gated communities, and now these strongholds are not sufficient, and security has vanished from the life of the city. After all, this is a city where the publisher of the newspaper and the mayor and his family live across the line in the United States in order to feel safe. There is no job retraining in Juárez because there are no new jobs to be trained for. The future here is now, the moment is immediate, and the message is the crack of automatic weapons. All the other things happening in the world—the shattering of currencies, the depletion of resources, the skyrocketing costs of food, energy, and materials—are old hat here. Years ago, hope moved beyond reach, and so a new life was fashioned and now it crowds out all other notions of life.

  Please be advised that there will be no apocalypse. The very idea of a Götterdämmerung assumes meaning and progress. You cannot fall off a mountain unless you are climbing. No one here is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. We shall not meet next year in Jerusalem. For years, I thought I was watching the city go from bad to worse, a kind of terrible backsliding from its imagined destiny as an America with different food. I was blind to what was slapping me in the face: the future. A place where conversation is a gun and reality is a drug and time is immediate and tomorrow, well, tomorrow is today because there is no destination beyond this very second.

  Things can be fixed now if I can just find a clean needle. After all, heroin is cheap, and the purity is very high. Imagine a world with an absence of work that will pay your bills, a place where gasoline and electricity cost more than a simple fix for your soul. You don’t even dream about a room of your own. You don’t worry about retirement, either, or how you can pay that dental bill. You don’t fret about things like overpopulation. You don’t fret, for that matter. Nor do you accept things. You finally live, and life is about what is and what is stares up at you with orphan eyes.

  The mayor announces a plan to put three thousand cameras in the banks and schools and businesses of Juárez. The police threaten to go on strike because of abuse from federal officers and from the army. They hold a vigil for two days with family members, and all of them wear masks for security reasons. Want ads in the newspaper recruit students—“We are looking for students with valid passports and visas to work during spring break. We offer well-paying jobs.” The authorities advise that these solicitations are placed by people in the drug industry who are seeking drivers to ferry drugs into the United States. The army seizes twenty-two employees of the Chihuahua state attorney’s office. They wish to ask them questions. This is in a news release. No report of the answers to these questions has surfaced. The city of Juárez announces a new urban anthem for the populace. The song is titled “Ciudad Juárez, Valor de Mexico,” which roughly means “Juárez, Jewel of Mexico.” The opening lines go,

  Juárez is our city,

  the best of the borders,

  because it was born with courage

  and built its history with great faith and hope.

  A city official explains, “We feel that Juárez, despite all its problems has great riches . . . We don’t always realize that Juárez is a jewel of Mexico, and has many, many positive things that we should extol.”

  The violence is explained. It turns out, according to a U.S. official deep in the drug war industry, that all the dead people are turning up simply because the Zetas have hooked up with the Juárez cartel to fight the Sinaloa cartel for the crossing. The official hopes that the Mexican army will now capture the heads of these various cartels. But, he cautions, such tasks are not simple.

  “You cut the head off the mother snake,” he explains, “and you deal with the babies. Are they poisonous? Sure. But they are babies.”

  The police arrest a teacher in one of the city’s private high schools. He’s also a lawyer. Noe Bautista Vega is twenty-four years old, and according to the authorities, he’s been playing hooky. They have him down for seven bank robberies.

  A bishop announces that the leaders in the drug industry have been kind to the church and generous to their communities. The bishop also heads the Mexican Bishops Conference. He notes that the drug folk help out with public works—things like electricity, telecommunications, highways, and roads—in rural areas, where the government seldom leaves a mark. They also build churches.

  “There have been some who have approached us and asked for orientation about how to change their lives,” he notes. And he says, they come “from all levels.”

  A tapestry is woven every day so that there will be no loose threads. Cartels battle in the new fabric, the army restores order, bank robbers are punished, and bishops are reprimanded if they mess up the weave. Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora explains away the surge in violence by asserting that all the newly minted dead people simply indicate the waning of the cartels “and how these structures as we knew them are collapsing.” Good Friday, clearly, indicates this collapse. Twenty-three Mexicans were executed around the country that day. A musician performing in a town south of Mexico City died when someone opened up on the entire band as they played a set. Some unnamed soul also pitched a grenade into an army convoy on the Gulf coast. All this goes into the loom and is made safe and sane.

  We are experts at walling things off. At the moment, the United States is busy building a wall. There will be at least seven hundred miles thrown up along the line, with more on the way. Already, this simple chore is getting complicated. At Columbus, New Mexico, the wall stretches now for miles—fifteen-foot steel poles a few inches apart and plopped into three feet of concrete. Now the cutting begins, an almost daily assault by hacksaws and acetylene and plasma torches. Also, government video cameras have captured images of men with huge ladders who then descend on the other side using bungee cords. In sections, the fence is settling and gaps form large enough for a person to squeeze through. Of course, this is to be expected. Eighty miles to the east in El Paso, facing Juárez, a team of men must make daily repairs in the fence built there.

  This is all part of the tapestry. As Juárez spins into a future that cannot be admitted by either government, the wall goes up to contain the mystery of blood and drugs and gangs and gunfire that must be explained away even as they are cordoned off by stout ramparts.

  The former captain of the city police, Sergio Lagarde Felix, goes down in a barrage on May 2. He had quit the force in January, the same month comandantes began being killed on the street and the month that the lists of dead cops and soon-to-be-dead cops were posted on the police memorial monument. About noon yesterday in front of an auto mechanics shop, he took a round through the chest and one through the head. Five .40-caliber shells were found around his corpse and two more inside the business. He was forty-four. Formerly, he assisted the chief of police, but now his former chief is in jail in El Paso for setting up a drug deal in the United States.

  There was another killing of a man thirty-five years of age. He took six, mainly in the head. He is the same man as the former captain, only in disguise in an earlier report. That can happen here, this shedding of years, this variation in the nature of one’s death. This is the place of possibility and it has escaped the stranglehold of simple facts.

  They find them in the bright light of morning in late May 2008. Five men wrapped in blankets. The blankets are made in China since global trade has wiped out the Mexican serape industry. Two of the men have been decapitated and their severed heads rest in plastic bags. Beside them is a sign indicating that they died because they are “dog fuckers.”

  Killing people is fun. There is a feeling of power in slaughtering other human beings. And for many in Juárez, a feeling of power is a rare thing. The men beat their women, and that helps, but it is hardly the same rush of exhilaration that comes from killing another person. If wife beating were really a decent substitute for slaughter, then murder would be all but absent in Mexico. But this is not the case.

  No one knows how many assassi
ns live and thrive in Juárez. There are an estimated five hundred street gangs—but our knowledge of these facts is limited since the city police’s expert on gangs was executed in January 2008 at the beginning of a killing season that is humming along at more than one hundred corpses a month. Still, assume there are five hundred gangs. Assume that full membership requires murder, be conservative and say there are only ten members in each gang, and then you have five thousand young and frisky killers. To be sure, the Aztecas, one premier gang, have three thousand members, but why exaggerate the number of killers? Let’s just say five thousand. This tally ignores the world floating about the gangs, the land of police and soldiers and cartels, where many other murderers find wages and niches.

  You have two choices. Either you’re going to be straight, get that job in an American factory in Juárez, work five and a half days a week for sixty or seventy bucks, going to do this even though no one can live on such a wage, going to do this even though you know the turnover in the plants is 100 to 200 percent a year, going to do this even though as you were coming up in the barrios you saw the men and women slowly devoured by the plants and then noticed that around age thirty, they were tossed away like old junk, yeah, you’re going to do this, you’re going to be straight.

  Or you are going to take that ride, join a gang, learn to flash the sign, do little errands for guys with more power, get some of that money that flows through certain hands, snort some powder, and have the women eating out of your hand for a few hours in a discotheque, and you’ll wear hip-hop clothing, have a short, burr haircut, never smile, stuff a pistol in your oversized britches. A big SUV rolls down the calle, you hop in, the windows are darkly tinted, and the machine prowls the city like a shark with its fanged mouth agape, and oh, it is so sweet when you squeeze the trigger and feel the burst run free and wild into the night air, see the body crumple and fall like a rag doll, roll on into the black velvet after midnight, and there’ll be a party, fine girls and white powder, and people fear you, and the body falls, blood spraying, and you feel like God even though you secretly stopped believing in God some time ago, and they tell you that you will die, that your way of living has no future, and you see the tired men and women walking the dirt lanes after a shift in the factory, plastic bags of food dangling from their hands, and you caress the gun stuffed in your waistband, and life is so good and the killing is fun and everyone knows who has the guts to take the ride.

  Dying is the easy part.

  Killing is the fun part.

  Taking that first ride is the hard part.

  They call him “King Midas” because he owns so many venues. Willy Moya, forty-eight, is a success as he exits his V Bar, one of his many huge nightclubs, at 4 A.M. May 18. The building is the size of a warehouse, and it is but one piece of an empire—Hooligan’s, Vaqueras y Broncos, Frida’s, Tabasco’s, Arriba Chihuahua, Willy’s Country Disco, and so forth—that he lords over in the swank part of Juárez. He is standing in the center of his bodyguards when the bullet enters his skull. His bodyguards are unharmed. He is declared dead at the hospital only a block away. Until he falls dead on the ground, he is considered untouchable because he is rich and he is connected to other men with power and money.

  I stand in front of his closed empire, and there is a huge, white bow over the door, a framed photo of him by the steps, with a candle and some wilted yellow roses.

  Carlos Camacho is a former member of the federal congress, the environmental representative for Chihuahua in Ciudad Juárez and a member of the president’s political party. He lives in a very good apartment complex, one with seven units and a parking lot full of fine cars. He is talking to his girlfriend on the phone when he tells her that the army is at the door. That is his last statement. The next day, he and two other residents of the complex are found dumped on the street, strangled, their bodies with signs of torture. No one wants to face this May killing. Camacho is the clean leader, a man widely known and liked. His family says publicly that the army is responsible. And then, they fall into silence.

  It is just drug guys killing drug guys, and if it is not, then who is safe?

  The Aroma restaurant is fine wood and mirrors and veal chops that go for forty-five dollars. I sample sushi, lobster bisque, and a forty-five-dollar bottle of Chilean red that would cost maybe six bucks in a U.S. supermarket. The café is on a plush avenue next to the rich district of Juárez, an area of mansions and guards and a country club. The rumor is that on May 17, fifty heavily armed men arrived here, took the cell phones of the customers, and told people they could not leave. Outside, the army guarded the serenity of the establishment. Then El Chapo Guzman swept in, dined, and left around 2 A.M. He paid everyone’s tab. He is a man with a $5 million reward on his head and is said to be at war with the Juárez cartel. Yet everyone in the city seems to know of this visit to Aroma and believe it. That weekend, at least twenty people were murdered in Juárez as Chapo dined and the government of Mexico waged war on drug cartels.

  The waiter brings a form for rating the dining experience. I check off everything as excellent and sign myself as El Chapo.

  He is bubbling with energy, but then El Pastor always seems as though he is about to OD on a vitamin B shot. We are sitting in the Golden Corral in El Paso—El Pastor likes a good feed.

  But the violence in Juárez is on his mind.

  “There is a terror there right now,” he says. “People are more kind. They don’t honk their horns.” Suddenly he is flapping his arms and going honk honk honk.

  Lately, he’s been going with people at shift change to the local police stations in Juárez and leading prayers with the cops.

  “They are frightened,” he explains. “I saw this woman cop get out of her car for her shift with her two little kids, and they were kissing her and crying because they were afraid she wouldn’t come back. They are sending narco-corridos on the police radios an hour or two before a cop gets killed. The sicarios, the hit men, are kids, so skinny. But they get an AK-47 and they are powerful.”

  He broods about what drives the violence, where does all the death come from?

  “They are fighting for power,” he says, and now he is entering that Mexican moment where suddenly an unexplained “they” shows up, that fog of language that protects one’s mind from what one knows. He sketches a world where the ruling party, the PRI, ran the country as a smiling dictatorship for seventy years and worked with, and yet had some control over, the drug industry. Then Vicente Fox upturned this order in 2000, when the opposition Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) took power and now, well, no one seems in control. This is a traditional view of things in Mexico, where the hard hand, the mano dura, is seen as essential to rule.

  For El Pastor it is simple: “The police, the gangs, the governor, the state, now they all want the money. If the cartels agree, all the killings will calm down. We Mexicans know what is going on, but we cannot say anything, because if you say something, they kill you.”

  He pauses and then changes tone.

  “You see birds walking on the pavement in Juárez,” he explains, “and their heads dart from side to side because they are waiting for someone to throw a rock and kill them. This is the way it is for narcos.”

  That is the way explanations of the violence always go. There is the body, or the experience, the woman cop is terrified and so are her children, the narco-corridos boom through the police radio, and death is waiting, things are out of control. And then the retreat, the belief that it is a cartel war, or that the government is behind it, no matter, someone is in control and eventually order will be restored. This is the safe place amid the killing.

  But El Pastor, the street preacher, has a nagging memory. A man who worked for a nightclub tycoon came to him and said, How much does your work with the crazy people cost? El Pastor said, ten thousand dollars a month. The man said, I can get you twenty thousand. El Pastor said, Is this money clean? The man said nothing.

  No matter. A few days later, Willy Moya was shot
in the head as he stood amid his herd of bodyguards.

  El Pastor told the man he could pray for Willy Moya, but he did not want such money.

  “Probably,” El Pastor says, “Willy Moya wanted to clean his mind. He probably could feel death tapping him on the shoulder.”

  Murder Artist

  I wait for the phone to ring. The first call came at 9:00 A.M. and said expect the next call at 10:05. So I drive fifty miles and wait. The call at 10:05 says wait until 11:30. The call at 11:30 does not come, and so I wait and wait. Next door is a game store frequented by men seeking power over a virtual world. Inside the coffee shop, it is calculated calm, and everything is clean.

  I am in the safe country. I will not name the city, but it is far from Juárez and it is down by the river and it is electric with the life and quiet as an American dream. At noon, the next call comes.

  We meet in a parking lot, our cars cooped like cops with driver next to driver. I hand over some photographs of Juárez murders. He quickly glances at them and then tells me to go to a pizza parlor. There, he says that we must find a quiet place because he talks very loudly. I rent a motel room with him. None of this can be arranged ahead of time because that would allow me to set him up.