Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (15 page)

This is the reality of Mexican reporting, where a person is inside but outside, where a person knows more than the public but can only say what is known in a code and this code had better not be too clear. A world where submission is essential and independence is eventually fatal.

He is stressed because, even though he plays by the rules, he cannot know all the rules and he cannot be certain when the rules change. He can understand certain things. When a general comes to Chihuahua in April 2008 with an army and says if there are any rapes and robberies, they are to be assigned to Mexican migrants, well, that is the way it will be reported.

He will obey his instructions for a very simple reason.

For three years, he has been afraid he will be murdered by the Mexican army. He has, to his horror, committed an error. And nothing he has done in the past three years has made up for this mistake. He has ceased reporting on the army completely. He has focused on safe things such as fighting the creation of a toxic waste facility in the town. He has apologized to various military officers and endured their tongue lashings. Still, this cloud hangs over him.

He can remember the day he blundered into this dangerous country.

Miss Sinaloa

After two months or more,
Miss Sinaloa seems to recover some of her mind. El Pastor estimates that she eventually regained 90 percent of her sanity. He locates her relatives, and her family comes up from Sinaloa. They must be surprised that she is alive. I am. After such a frolic, death would not be unusual, and Miss Sinaloa would be just one more mysterious dead woman in the desert on the outskirts of Juárez.

But something saved her—perhaps her madness set her apart.

And so she came here and lived with people considered beneath even the dirt flooring the city of Juárez, people from the streets, people rejected by the mental institutions of the state, people beyond the help of families, people who slept on sidewalks and ate out of garbage cans.

She said she knew many languages, but she never spoke them. She would sing all the time, but she sang badly. Her favorite songs were very romantic. She moved around the crazy place like a queen. She read the Bible a lot. She remains a myth even standing in the yard at the crazy place. El Pastor decided that 5 percent of what she says is true and the other 95 percent is her imagination.

That is the world of Miss Sinaloa, a place of dreams and songs, a place for a beauty queen to rule. She sits and draws, mainly lines and spirals. And lips, lots of kissing lips.

She dresses well, always a blue dress that shows her legs to advantage. Also, high heels—she navigates the asylum in stilettos.

To El Pastor’s horror, she says a lot of bad words. He thinks maybe the rapes made her talk this way.

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.

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.