behind his back
and he was thrown face down on the ground.
Personnel
from the Forensic Medical Service
arrived at the scene
to take away
the body
and collect evidence
that might have been left
around him.
There is a beauty in this killing, music, a sonata perhaps, but an extremely loud sonata.
Yet people here listen to El Pastor’s message in the safe city in the safe valley where harm is outlawed—everyone says so—by the flag, by God and the local police. When they see images of the people living in the crazy place, they feel bad, and they give him money. When they see the video of him in the yard at the crazy place calming people with his embrace, they give him money. And when he goes into one of the rebar cells and tells an enraged toothless woman to be calm “in the name of Jesus,” and she slowly stops screaming and yelling and follows him out into the yard as he chants the name of Jesus—when the people at the fund-raiser see that footage, they don’t know what to say, but still they give him money—a hundred here, a hundred there.
And no one here is threatening to murder him, or calling on the phone with scary messages.
El Pastor is reconciled to death and being reunited with his Savior. After all, he has it all planned—the huge barbeque, lots of meat, music, and song.
He can handle death because it means he will be with Jesus.
It’s just that when the car comes, and they take him away to be murdered, he hopes they do not torture him.
He hopes they will not apply fire to parts of his body or stick in an ice pick and run it along the bone in a local ritual called bone tickling. And should they desire to cut off his head, as some do, he hopes that at this point, he is dead. He also hopes he is dead when they decide to cut off his hands or feet.
He can handle being murdered.
He will then be with the Lord.
But the torture part, that makes him very upset.
We have the numbers. Since January 1994, there have been 3,955 murders in Juárez. Since January 2008, there have been 540 murders. It is the last day of June, and there is still time. The numbers that give us comfort, those dates and tallies, these numbers are still tumbling in. We can write them in columns on white paper and install order in our minds.
But still, that door must be opened.
On the last day of June, bees attack seven people. On the last day of June, a fifty-four-year-old woman pulls into the parking lot of a convenience store after withdrawing eleven thousand pesos from a bank (found on the body) and is shot dead with ten rounds. On the last day of June, a man says his wife and children are missing. On the last day of June, the total number of murders for the month hits 139, and the total for the year reaches 541. Or 543, depending on which paper one reads. The numbers blur now. No one knows how many people have been snatched, nor what became of them. Just as no one knows where to file the corpses from the two houses of death.
On the last day of June, I see and taste and feel the fully mature culture of death. Death from low wages, death from drug deals, death from unknowable wars, death from going to the bank, death from riding down the street, death from every direction. Death is blamed on all the factories that have brought the poor to the city where they now live in a carpet of slums. Death is blamed on the drug industry that has brought violence to the city as heavily armed men move white powder and billions of dollars. Death is blamed on the Americans who want cheap goods and so create warrens of slaves, who want strong drugs and so create cartels of machine guns. It has taken decades to transform a sleepy border town into a city of death, but now the work is done and the thing has a life of its own and that life is murder. Death has aged and is now the bony hand on the shoulder, the culture when the sun rises and when the sun sets.
The city is fiestas, dust, cantinas, discos, and people savoring the weekends and dreaming of the nights when love will find them. There is song in the air. The culture of death becomes a life. The slaughtered die fast, the rest grind out time in dust, poverty, and bouts of terror. Only six months ago, everyone was horrified when forty people were slaughtered in one month. Now a hundred a month seems acceptable because in the culture of death . . . life goes on.
In March, according to a poll, 90 percent of the people of Juárez supported the army. By the end of June, 30 percent of the local people, according to a poll, said the military occupation of the city was of little or no consequence. The general in charge said that those who questioned the army’s success were either narcos or worked for narcos. Besides, he thought narcos probably paid for the poll.
Life goes on.
The family comes with the body, and they are a half hour late for the funeral. They do not come into the church but have a benediction said in the parking lot. They are afraid more people will be killed if they linger with the corpse of their murdered family member.
She sits on the piano bench, her black hair clean and shining as she bends over the keys. The moon is full and rides the sky hunting for more bodies. Two days ago, they killed seven. Yesterday, in the afternoon sometime in October, six went down. Or was it seven? It is getting very hard to keep track of the daily or monthly count. Even the grand total for the year seems like a smear of blood on a wall. No matter how hard I work at my tally, I fall behind. I write down numbers in my black notebook, and then take a sip of coffee in the dawn light, and before I return the cup to the immaculate white saucer, the number is gone. Juárez, even now as I sit in the room, wine in hand, moonlight playing off the walls, yes, at this very moment Juárez marauds through my mind: corpses, ghosts, bullets, knives, severed heads, all manner of carnival moments, a parade from a lively hell, shapeless, formless, and often meaningless. She leans forward flicking her fingers on the white keys as the rhapsody pumps so much energy and hope into the room.
So I sit, glass of wine in hand, as she strokes the keyboard and plays “Rhapsody in Blue.” The opening is bold, the bellowing of a young century and a cocksure country. She stumbles on parts and apologizes, but there is no need for such comments. Her playing is beautiful, as her black hair and fair skin glow in the moonlight washing over the dark room. The moon walks through the window and plays on the white wall. Branches and leaves dance as shadows.
It was like this. Three cars arrive and empty out. Six human beings are lined up against the wall of a gymnasium in the bright light of the afternoon. Or the dimming light of early evening. Facts are slippery here, perhaps, because of the blood. The men were taken from Colonia Azteca and brought to this location. One of them is said to be a former policeman, but we cannot be certain of this. Here is what we can be certain of: Six men line up against a wall, their faces turned to the blocks. Children are playing in the street. There is a settling of accounts about to take place. The men are in their twenties or thirties, they wear jeans of various colors and T-shirts. Except for one guy in gym shorts. Then, the guns fire and now the men lie side by side on the ground. Spent cartridges, at least a hundred spent cartridges from AK-47s and AR-15 rifles and .40-caliber and 9 mm pistols litter the ground around the bodies.
The locals later remember a few things. They said the shooting lasted ten minutes, but my God, they insist, it seemed like ten hours. The police are called, but it takes them a very long time to arrive.
Later, one local says, “We don’t understand how it is that the police did not catch them, because the bullets sounded very loud, and it went on for a long time.”
What fills the air is not sirens but this: cries of pain, voices begging for mercy, the roar of guns. Then silence. But this pure and sacred silence is broken by moans and screams. And so more shooting is required. Finally, it is finished.
The shooters have thoughtfully brought a sign that they leave by the bodies.
MESSAGE FOR RATS: THIS WILL CONTINUE.
About the same time, in another part of the city, a carpenter sits outside his house. Neighbors later repor
t that the carpenter was a peaceful and hard-working man. This could be true. It hardly matters. Reasons are for people who seek to avoid the killing. The rest of us, those truly committed to death and slaughter, we need no reasons.
So a man has lived forty-three years and he is a carpenter. A car comes down the street and moves very slowly.
When the police finally do bother to come, they find eleven cartridges.
And the body.
But, I am remiss in my counting. I need the wine, the music pouring from her fingers as she strokes the keys and fills the room with that famous rhapsody in blue.
Because then I forget what I see and smell and feel. I forget that it is cold in the night now, and the woman is twenty-two and she has four small children and one is six months old and another one died last year at birth and, ah, tell me if the lovers are losers in the shacks and rough lanes, go ask the twenty-two-year-old who was raped as a child and now has doomed children to fill her hours and she lives in a city where the rapist is free, more free than she will ever be, since he was never charged and he has never carried a child and feeds no young and hungry mouths, and the woman has no man and all of this loving family goes hungry and the floor is dirt, there is no heat, and I must listen to my rhapsody, the one called blue, maybe code blue, and enjoy the wine and refuse all explanations of the violence as the city storms into my mind with the hunger that will never be filled by anything but screams.
I see the fourteen-year-old who is pregnant, the forty-year-old woman with six children, a shack, a baby in her arms, no food, no doctors, nothing but the cold in the night, and the men who come and go and leave the litter of young lives in their wake. And I must say it is their fault, they breed too often, they have careless ways, they should read more and improve their minds.
I have found the place where theories die, where explanations are stabbed with sharp knives and flutter down the calles like litter created by the world that will not come here and will not listen to ignorant cries of people busy dying and calling it fate or God’s will or the way things are and have long been and the only way they know.
The cars with tinted windows prowl the streets, the guns go off, the authorities hide, and death without end, amen.
The counting, I will get to later.
Yes, I will.
The man found incinerated in a car, that burned corpse with a sign saying he was a thief, well, I will get to him in a while and return to tabulating things. But in passing we should note that the remnants of a dragon tattoo still glow from his charred chest. Just as I will acknowledge that three or four hundred local cops had to be let go because they failed various tests, and it turns out they were actually criminals and drug addicts. But they have been replaced by yet more cops, and so life will continue in the approved fashion.
But now, right now, I need this red wine, I need her dark form leaning over the piano in the moonlight, I need the music flowing through my heart.
I imagine a city as a living organism with electricity, gasoline, and propane firing through its arteries along with heroin, alcohol, cocaine, and meth. The humans, the creatures such as myself, think we are the city, but we are merely servants of the organism, and we can be dispatched without any warning by bullets, and yet the city will continue because it functions for our pleasure and our safety. Where the energy we have unleashed plays out like a tidal wave and levels everything in its path, levels the army, levels the police, levels the cartels, levels the gangs, levels the woman walking home from work, levels the man careening out of the midnight saloon. The general and the thief face the same giant wave. One thinks power safeguards him from the wave, and one thinks the delirious visions of the drug shelters him from all storms, and all learn that something they never imagined has come to pass.
Once, their worst nightmare was that they were not in control.
Now, their real nightmare is that no one is in control.
There is an afternoon and six men are put against a wall and executed in broad daylight. There is a morning and three prison guards at the bus stop are machine-gunned on their way to work. There is the man burning in the car.
There is a midday when two men fall dead in a hail of bullets.
The moon streams in, the fingers fly, I become “Rhapsody in Blue,” and ignore the killing ground until the notes fade away.
The black boots came with Miss Sinaloa. She arrived that December afternoon with shiny black boots reaching almost to her knees, the heels thick, the surface acrylic as it threw light back up toward the heavens. The rest of her was skin, skin with bite marks all over her breasts, skin with handprints all over her ass. There were marks of beatings, also.
That was some weeks ago, when she had hair flowing down to her ass but had lost all of her wardrobe, save those boots. And lost her mind.
I sit here looking at a photograph taken in the yard of the crazy place. She has now been in her cage for some weeks, and her hair has been shorn. She is calming down and can be let out into the yard at times, a safe-conduct moment in which she struggles to rejoin the human race.
So she stands in the bright sunlight, boots gleaming, and she wears a satiny green dress and a black leather jacket. She holds a microphone in her right hand, and she is singing love songs. Behind her is the black amplifier and behind the equipment are her neighbors in the crazy place, and they look here and there and pay no attention to Miss Sinaloa singing of the heartaches that women must endure as they seek love in the world of men.
Her face is round and perfectly made up. Her cheeks shine, lips underscored with liner, eyebrows narrow and finely stated. Her body is solid and, to foreign eyes, might even look fat, but here in her native country, she looks good, a woman with some flesh, a woman a man can get a hold of as the night passes on sweat-soaked sheets. She is battered, she is still healing, she is half crazy, but it is clear to even my ignorant eyes that Miss Sinaloa is back, and men are simply creatures God created to worship her.
One member of her audience sits with head bowed and hands clasped between his knees. Another man wears a huge peaked hat such as the kind favored by Merlin in the ancient tales. A short man in a beige sport coat looks out with an idiot grin.
She sings because to fall silent is to die.
Even here, the world is about love or the world is about nothing at all.
I have learned many things from her, and because of this, I love her and her songs.
I think at times I need her music even more than she does.
Those red lips mean so much in a world of dust and blood.
They must pretend to have a monopoly on violence. So in the autumn of the killing season, six hundred military police and two hundred state and local cops converge on the prison that sits on the southern edge of Juárez. They come for their prey at 6 A.M. The prison is controlled by three local gangs: the Aztecas, the Mexicles, and the Artistas Asesinos—the Murder Artists. Some leaders are shipped away to another facility. There is a show of force until the veil drops again and the prison falls back into itself.
The entire raid is like a laboratory experiment that mirrors the city itself. The state parades as the real power. Inmates briefly cower and then return to violence and gangs and a world without a center. The newspapers note the assertion of order, then fall silent again as killing walks every pathway in the city.
It is a careless time.
Nothing you do can make you safe, and nothing you do can put you in danger. So, relax. You are in play, and all the neighborhoods are the wrong neighborhood, and all the bars are the wrong bar, and every minute of the day and night offers slaughter. This is not some breakdown of the social order. This is the new order. And we will adjust to it and it will be fine.
We are in a forever war, only it is not a war. It is not a crime wave. It just is. And we are. And this is it.
A kind of poetry falls out of the mouths of people as this new reality sinks in. The head of a local citizen’s group says,
We are living the consequen
ces
of the war that has come to the city
and unfortunately
we are also realizing
that the presence of the
police
and the military
has not managed to lessen the number of
homicides at all.
The head of the local bar association says,
To what the people already know,
the fight against narco-trafficking
that has generated a war
between groups
and is a factor in the
incidence of criminality.
Another factor
is that we have not been able to have a structure
for
the efficient procurement of justice
demanded
by the size and quantity
of the crimes.
The state attorney general’s office offers,
For the Prosecutor’s office,
the most important thing
is to carry out
the greatest effort to lower these statistics.
I feel the dust blowing across Juárez, sip a beer, hear the humming of the gears in the murder factory, watch the police prowl and hunt. Serenity comes once you relax and accept the product. There is so much work to be done and so many willing hands. Those hundreds of gangs, also the gangs that wear police uniforms or military uniforms, the polished professionals of the fabled cartels, as well as volunteers from the bars and sad marriages—all are willing to help with the slaughter. And all of those failed gods line up like tired whores to give whatever support they can.
Black velvet, yes, that is the feel of the sky, the feeling of the darkness coming down as I spiral into the embrace of death on high heels wobbling through the bullet-shredded night. The lipstick bright red, the scent a bouquet snatched from a fresh grave.
Feel the rush of fresh air as people vanish, and space becomes available.
Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields Page 19
