Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (30 page)

A real
sicario
, he notes, does not kill women or children. Well, unless the women are informants for the DEA or the FBI. And of course, anyone who informs to the Mexican police is immediately reported to the organization.

Here, he must show me. A proper execution requires planning. First, the Eyes study the target for days, usually at least a week. His schedule at home is noted, when he gets up, when he leaves for work, when he comes home, every thing about his routines in his domestic life is recorded by the Eyes. Then the Mind takes over. He studies the man’s habits in the city itself. His day at work, where he lunches, where he drinks, how often he visits his mistress, where she lives, and what her habits are. Between the Eyes and the Mind, a portrait is possible. Now there is a meeting of the crew, which entails six to eight people. There will be two police cars with officers, and two other cars with
sicarios
. A street will be selected for the hit, one that can easily be blocked off. Time will be carefully worked out, and the hit will take place within a half dozen blocks of a safe house—an easy matter since there are so many in the city.

He picks up a pen and starts drawing. The lead car will be police. Then will come a car full of
sicarios
. Then the car driven by the target. This is followed by another car of
sicarios
. And then, bringing up the rear, another police car.

During the execution, the Eyes will watch and the Mind will man the radios.

When the target enters the block selected for the murder, the lead police car will pivot and block the street, the first
sicario
car will slow, the second car of
sicarios
behind the target will pull up beside him and kill him, and the final police car will block the end of the street.

All this should take less than thirty seconds. One man will get out and give a coup de grâce to the bullet-riddled victim. Then all will disperse.

The car with the killers will go to the safe house no more than six blocks away and will pull into a garage. It will be taken to another garage owned by the organization, repainted, and then sold on one of the organization’s lots. The killers themselves will pick up a clean car at the safe house, and often they return to the scene of the murder to see that everything has gone well.

He sketches this with exactness, each rectangle neatly drawn to delineate a car, and the target’s car is filled in and blooms on the page with green ink. Arrows indicate how each vehicle will move. It is like an equation on a chalkboard.

He leans back from his toil, the look of pride in craftsmanship on his face. This is how a real sicario performs his work. No one is left behind alive. If anyone in the group should be injured, he goes to one of the organization’s hospitals—“If you can buy a governor, you can buy a hospital.”

“I never knew the names of the people I was involved with,” he continues. “There was a person who directed our group, and he knew everything. But if your job is to execute people, that is all you do. You don’t know the reasons or names. I would be in a safe house with the kidnapped for a month and never speak to them. Then, if the order came to kill them, I would. We would take them to the place where they would be killed, take off their clothes. We would kill them exactly the way we were ordered—a bullet to the neck, acid on the bodies. There were cases where you would be killing someone, strangling them, and they would stop breathing, and you would get a call—‘don’t kill them’—and so you would have to know how to resuscitate them, or you would be killed because the boss never makes a mistake.”

Everything is contained and sealed. In the 1990s, they used crazy kids to steal cars for the work, but the kids, about forty of them, got too arrogant and started bragging in the nightclubs and selling drugs. This violated an agreement with the governor of Chihuahua to keep the city quiet. So one night in 1998, fifty police and one hundred fifty guys from the organization, who were to ensure the job was done, rounded up all the kids on Avenida Juárez. They were not tortured. They were killed with a single headshot and buried in one hole.

“No,” he smiles at me, “I will not tell you where that hole is.”

He has trouble remembering everything.

“I would get up in the morning and do a line,” he explains, “then have a glass of whiskey. Then I would go to lunch. I would never sleep more than a few hours, little naps. It is hard to sleep during a time of war. Even if my eyes were closed, I was alert. I slept with a loaded AK-47 on one side, a .38 on the other. The safeties were always off.

“Do I know of the death houses?” he asks. “It would take a book to do the death houses. After all, I know where six hundred bodies are buried in safe houses in Juárez. There is one death house they have never revealed, which I know has fifty-six bodies. Just as there is a rancho where the officials say they found two bodies, but I know that rancho has thirty-two corpses buried there. If the police really investigated, they would find bodies. But obviously, you cannot trust the police.”

But he especially wants to know what I know about the two death houses uncovered this spring. I say one had nine bodies, the other thirty-six.

No, no, he insists, the second one had thirty-eight, two of them women. He carefully draws me the layout of this second death house. One of the women, he notes, was killed for speaking too much. The other was a mistake. These happen.

But he keeps returning to the death house with the thirty-eight bodies. It has memories for him.

I remember standing on the quiet dirt street as the authorities made a show of digging up the dead. Four blocks away was a hospital where some machine-gunned people were taken that spring, but the killers followed and killed them in the emergency room. Shot their kinfolk in the waiting room, also.

“The narcos,” he wants me to understand, “have informants in DEA and the FBI. They work until they are useless. Then they are killed.”

He pauses.

“Informants for the FBI and DEA die ugly.”

He explains.

“They were brought handcuffed behind the back to the death house where they found thirty-eight bodies,” he rolls on. “A T-shirt was soaked with gasoline and put on their backs, lit, and then, after a while, pulled from their backs. The skin came off with it. Both men made sounds like cattle being killed. They were injected with a drug so they would not lose consciousness. Then they put alcohol on their testicles and lit them. They jumped so high—they were handcuffed, and still I never saw people jump so high.”

We are slipping now, all the masks have fallen to the floor, the veteran, the professional
sicario
is walking me through a key assignment he completed.

“Their backs were like leather and did not bleed. They put plastic bags on their heads to smother them and then revived them with alcohol under their noses.

“All they ever said to us was ‘We will see you in hell.’

“This went on for three days. They smelled terrible because of the burns. They brought in a doctor to keep reviving them. They wanted them to live one more day. After a while, they defecated blood. They shoved broomsticks up their asses.

“The second day, a person came and told them, ‘I warned you this was going to happen.’

“They said, ‘Kill us.’

“The guys lived three days. The doctor kept injecting them to keep them alive, and he had to work hard. Eventually, they died of the torture.

“They never asked God for help. They just kept saying, ‘We will see you in hell.’

“I buried them with their faces down and poured on a whole lot of lime.”

He is excited. It is all back.

He can feel the shovel in his hand. Smell the burned flesh.

We seem to take things
for granted, to take the dust for granted, to take the drugs for granted. And to take the killing for granted. Soon we will come to expect our own murder and not even worry if it arrives on schedule.

That is the way El Pastor was years ago when he moved out into the desert and built a hut as the initial act of his decision to create an asylum for the destroyed people. He had a burro, and he gathered dead wood in the sands for a fire.

He looked up at the mountains where the giant Uffington horse spread Celtic mystery over the Chihuahuan desert. Some days the wind blew and the sand came up and hid the mountain. But there were times, wonderful times, when the stars came out at night, and the sun fell down like honey on his mission.

These were the wonder days for El Pastor. He had nothing, the hut did not even have a real roof, just canvas spread over the adobe walls. He was living the life of the early Christians, and I’m sure his soul was full of Jesus and his mind full of anxiety.

He noticed that a giant iguana had been sketched on the mountain in the same manner and scale as that of the Uffington horse. Everyone knew and whispered that the big horse was the gift of Amado Carrillo, the head of the Juárez cartel, to the mountain. And of course, El Pastor knew that the big iguana was the symbol of the Juárez cartel, a kind of trademark, and having it on the mountain told everyone that the city belonged to them.

Sometimes during the day, and also at night, El Pastor saw helicopters landing right by the iguana.

So one day, he went up there to see what was going on.

Men with guns told him he did not belong there and that he should not come back. Perhaps the fact the he was a man of God spared him more than a verbal warning.

No matter, El Pastor went back to his work and prayer and eventually built the compound that became the temporary home of Miss Sinaloa when she lost her mind through the rapture of a party with cocaine, whiskey, and rape.

The giant iguana itself became like the dust storms and hot days, something so commonplace as to be beneath notice. Just part of the natural landscape of this city of the future.

I have this kind of vision as I eat dust in the wind. All the dead since January 1 will gather in this special place. They will sit in rows of chairs just as the dead sit in rows in Thornton Wilder’s play
Our Town
. There will be a thousand or more separate tales of how they loved things and enjoyed life and how they were murdered and who murdered them. Even the forty-five corpses recently dug from death houses will be there to share their stories. Perhaps the governor and the police forces and the army officers will attend to hear the stories of the unofficial Juárez.

I have not chosen this spot for the performance, it has demanded to be the venue. It earned its place in the late afternoon of August 13, when eight people were murdered here in the largest single killing in the history of Ciudad Juárez. The event passed with as little public notice as possible. No one said out loud that this was the biggest single slaughter on record. No one said much of anything.

On that bloody day in August, at 7:15 P.M., four or eight men drive up and park their trucks, a red Chevrolet Avalanche and a Chevrolet Suburban. Down the street—about fifty yards, or in one report, just a few yards—waits a detail of seven or eight soldiers wearing the red beret of an elite unit in a white Ford Lobo pickup. The men enter CIAD No. 8, a center for the treatment of drug and alcohol problems. Prayer fills the air because a group of evangelicals—the deacon, the woman preacher, and five members of the congregation—have arrived to lead a religious service for the recovering addicts. They belong to a family worship center called Jesus Christ Blessed Works.

They are in the back
sala
, a room maybe fifteen feet wide and thirty-five to forty feet long, and are just at the point in the service when they make the call for people to come forward and give their lives to Christ. All the worshipers have their hands up in the air for Christ, their faces lifted up toward heaven, the woman leading them from the podium. In all, there are about thirty-five people in the facility when the men enter through the office. They have black hoods on their heads, wear body armor, and carry AK-47s. They remain about fifteen minutes and leave sixty spent cartridges on the ground. The preacher says, “They began to shoot, right and left in all directions, meanwhile I was crying out to God to send His angels to protect us, and I saw the young people falling injured all around me and others who managed to run for their lives.”

They take four people out of the
sala
and execute them on the ground in the patio. The director of the center jumps atop a pregnant woman—the wife of one of the visiting evangelicals—to protect her. He dies, she is wounded but lives. Some people flee to the tiny bathroom in the back of the room and pile up atop each other. Others flee to the roof, tear out a cyclone fence, and jump. The secretary is pursued down a narrow passageway, round the corner, and to the top of the stairs, where he is mowed down. When the fifteen minutes are up, there are eight dead and five wounded, among them the secretary. When the shooting begins, neighbors go out and alert the army detail parked just outside, but the soldiers ignore them. Some neighbors call the Emergency Response Center. But there is no response. Except for that barrage of bullets. The army detail leaves once the shooting starts—though the military later denies that they were present. The killers stroll out and drive away. And then comes the silence. The police do not come for a long spell, and even then, they simply cordon off the area, but do not offer any relief to the wounded. Ambulances do not come. No one comes. Finally, the survivors load up the wounded in old vans and drive them to hospitals. One boy dies en route.