To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (16 page)

Julio César—having received a call from a friend who heard the gunshots while driving—asked why the commander would ask such a question, saying that the cops never ask things like that. The commander, without raising his voice and maintaining a faint smile with every word, told us that we were part of a crime scene, not that we had arrived to a crime scene, but were part of one. “This is a crime scene,” he said, pointing at us.

“Sure,” Julio César responded, unfazed, “what seems strange to me is that the police never ask us such questions.”

“Well,” the commander said, “maybe you have never come across a commander like this,” and he pointed at his own chest.

Julio César laughed and said, “Maybe you are the first one who does his job,” and then after a pause identified himself, “Julio Aguilar, from
El Diario
.”

The commander took down the names of the other two photographers. Not eager to have my name scribbled in that notebook, I took out my cell phone, pretended to take a call, and walked off a few steps.

The distraught man and his two companions watched us with open hostility, the kind of look that in Ciudad Juárez could immediately precede a blaze of gunfire. The photographers took a few quick shots and then we left. After crossing to the far eastern side of the city to photograph a
narcopinta
left by the Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez Cartel, known locally as La Línea, against El Chapo, we crossed to the far western edge to photograph an executed man left slouched on a park bench. Nearby, kids peered out of doorways; a few small groups ventured out and walked down the middle of the streets. Julio César received another call, a body on the street. On the drive he told me about the time he arrived at the scene of a reported execution and started taking pictures of a body splayed out in the street when the man raised his hand. Julio César froze in terror, and then realized that the man had fallen to the street not in a barrage of bullets but from booze. In Ciudad Juárez, encounters with discarded bodies of the executed have become more common than the sight of passed-out drunks.

When we arrived out at the next scene—a body left in front of a house in what appeared to be a modest middle-class neighborhood—a group of women watching us approach openly chided, “You’re just now getting here? This one’s been dead for more than an hour.” After a few minutes of taking notes on the scene, I walked back up to the women to see if I could start up a conversation, not an easy thing to do given the circumstances. As I approached one of the women again asked in a mocking tone, “Why so late?” When I responded that, unfortunately, our delay was due to the travel time from another execution on the western edge of the city, the women changed their tone and urged us to be careful. I asked if this was the first time they had seen a dead body like this on their street and they all laughed. “No,” one woman said, “just half a block from here they killed one.” They told me that they had heard an argument, gunshots, and then the sound of the killers walking—not running—down the block, where a car was waiting for them.

I went to the offices of
El Diario
at noon one Sunday. The parking lot in front was entirely empty; there was no one in reception, and the door was locked. A reporter came and opened the door for me, and while we walked toward the stairs through the empty desks and cubicles on the first floor, she casually pointed out the place where everyone hid the last time a gun battle broke out in front of the office.

I went to talk with one of the reporters on the local news and crime beat, a woman who does not publish her name in a byline on most of her work. In honor of another Mexican writer who refused to keep quiet, I’ll call her Rosario. Ten out of
El Diario
’s fifteen reporters are women, and they work the heaviest beats: the police and crime beat,
la nota roja
, as well as local and state politics.

Parts of Mexico are encased in silence. There are newsrooms where narcos call the shots, whether by bribe or by bullet. There are cities and entire states where publishing the name of a major drug trafficker carries an extrajudicial death sentence. Ciudad Juárez is—against all odds—no such place. Being a reporter here is a high-risk calling, and none know this better than the reporters and editors at
El Diario
, but even so, they have not bowed to silence. Rosario spoke to me in whispers at ninety miles an hour and with flawless precision.

“Here we have published the names of all the narcos on both sides of the conflict,” Rosario told me from the start. “I want people to know that we haven’t quieted down, that there’s no silence here, that this isn’t Tamaulipas.”

Tucked in her cubicle, huddled over her desk Rosario showed me a computer file with her hardest-hitting stories. “Not all of them have a byline,” she said, “but they were all published. Look, this is an article about the Aztecas. Many of the sources aren’t named, but the story of the gang is here.”

Rosario used transcripts from a court case in El Paso and went to the prison in Juárez to interview the Aztecas’ leader. The Aztecas are a Juárez gang with members on both sides of the border, inside and outside of jails and prisons. The Aztecas are widely believed to move drugs across the border and carry out contract killings and other tasks for the Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez Cartel. The U.S. government suspects that members of the Aztecas killed three people linked to the U.S. Consulate in Juárez and were responsible for more than one thousand homicides in Juárez in 2009.

When Rosario arrived at the interview, the leader had fourteen men standing guard around him; all of them, she emphasized, watching her. She told them, “I only come here as a reporter. I’m not going to get you all in any kind of a mess. What I would like to know is how the gang is doing after two years of war.” The leader said, “The thing is that the government declared war on us and many of our members have been disappeared, and we know that the soldiers took them out. They are covering for the other gang; they are protecting them.” The leader then made an unexpected suggestion, “Let the United States come in, because they’d maybe grab us and lock us up. But here no, here they’re grabbing us and they’re killing us. That is what is happening, it’s an extermination.”

Rosario scrolled to the next article, pointing to a paragraph with all the names of mid- and high-level drug traffickers in Juárez. “For example,” she said, “these are openly, the ones who are . . . in control, you know?” Using government databases and press releases she sought out the various names and realized that all of them had at one time or another been stopped or arrested. “And they let them go,” she said. “Why? Who knows?” She pointed to one of the names and said, “This one for example is very dangerous.
Very
dangerous.” She then read from the article out loud, “Another presumed leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who was in custody and then released and is now free and committing homicides is,” and here she stopped reading and exclaimed, “Ay! How could I write that? I put ‘committing homicides’ . . . Did I write that?” The article goes on as follows: “Mexican army soldiers detained Gabino Salas Valenciano, alias ‘The Engineer,’ a 32-year-old from Durango, with drugs and guns in February 2008; the following August he was freed by the court.”

“We have made a serious effort to understand the structures of the drug cartels,” she went on, “who they are and how they operate. And what explains a good deal of all this is state complicity. In fact, we feel more tension from the army.” She told me about an unfortunate experience she had had at an army press conference. She had brought a photograph of a civilian dressed all in black, wearing a black mask and hood, participating in a military operation in the city. She asked the general giving the press conference who the civilian in black was and who else accompanied the soldiers during their operations. The general responded, “No. The army goes out alone.”

“I imagined,” she told me, “that the army was using paramilitaries to identify people to, . . .” she dropped from a whisper to near soundless speech on the word “execute.” “The army needed people from the other side; that was my reading.” And so later during an interview with various officials and other journalists she asked the question again, and the general said, in front of everyone, “You know? You are beginning to strike me as a bit suspicious.”

“You son of a bitch,” she thought at the time. “It made me so angry that I couldn’t say anything to him right there in the moment, but afterward I walked up to him and grabbed his arm and said, ‘You know what, General? I think what you just said was totally unjust, because you know that I am only asking a question and asking questions is my job.” The general looked at her for a second and then said, “Hmm. You’re right.” Then he walked off.

“That is the logic of the military—if you’re not with me then you are with them,” Rosario said. “That is dangerous and it is what the federal government is doing.”

She showed me another article about the imbalance in arrests: almost all arrests involve accused members of the Juárez Cartel. At first this was only a suspicion, she said. Every time she went to a press conference where the federal police announced an arrest, the detainees stood accused of belonging to La Línea. Finally she asked a federal police commander during one of the press conferences, “It seems striking that during the last few months the federal police have only presented people from La Línea. How many have you arrested from the other group? There
are
two groups.” No answer. Another reporter from the Mexico City—based daily
La Jornada
repeated her question. The federal commissioner said, “No, no, I assure you that we are combating. . . .” Rosario interrupted him: “How many? Numbers.” He said, “Tomorrow I’ll give you the count.”

“And he didn’t give it to us,” Rosario said. “So we had to do it ourselves.”

She added up all the arrests in Juárez and shared the information with reporters from National Public Radio. NPR then conducted its own count nationally, using the Mexican federal attorney general’s press releases announcing arrests. Both studies showed that nearly 90 percent of those arrested were accused of belonging to the Sinaloa Cartel’s rival and enemy drug-trafficking organizations. (As we’ll see, the former Chihuahua State attorney general proceeded to release about 90 percent of those detained.)

I asked Rosario how she made sense of all the murder. Was it really the result of a war between two Sinaloan families? Is the federal government carrying out an extermination campaign for El Chapo? Is it pure homicidal mayhem without reason?

“It is a lot of extermination,” she said. “It is also a real war between two groups, and a lot of the murder stems from the impunity that allows anyone to just grab a gun. Part of the logic of this war is that people can collect on pending debts, or whatever, I’ve got a gun and I don’t like you.”

Luz del Carmen Sosa, 41, covers
la nota roja
for
El Diario
and has worked that beat since 1992. If Rosario speaks at 90 miles per hour, Luz del Carmen does 120. I went to speak with her at the newspaper’s office one day in early November 2010 and asked her what her job was like.

“A crime scene is usually the same,” she said, “the body, the ballistics. But each family’s pain is distinct. I can tell you that together with my photographer, we have seen a thousand different kinds of death. All of them have been painful, especially for the families. That is the hardest thing. When you arrive before the police sometimes, or the family asks you for help, or you have to run and catch a relative so they don’t faint and fall to the ground—those are hard moments. First, because that is not our purpose, our purpose is to provide information. But you are there, you are at the scene, and you can’t just turn your back. That is the most difficult thing: to see how the families get destroyed; to watch how a mother screams, desperate; or to see how a child cries because they killed her parents. Recently a child . . . I had to give a child a soda and hold him because he was wounded. The baby was about one-year-and-a-half old, and his body was covered in glass. He urinated. A fireman had taken him out and handed him to a woman who then handed him to me. The boy was covered in blood and then peed all over me. I had a soda and an apple and I gave the child the soda while we waited for the ambulance. These are the things that happen and you say, ‘Man, how long can this go on?’ This hurts, you know? Me, as a mother—I am a mother; I have two children—this has been what impacts me the most. In all this war, this is what sticks with me: not the dead victims, but the living victims who are destroyed and whose lives are thrown up in the air. But sadly, our government has not learned anything, because they have not created institutions to deal with these types of cases. Our society is ill; it is a wounded society, a scared society that is more and more distant from this pain. And this it what makes me look for other things, other angles for information.”

And she has found many. She was the first reporter to cover the collapse of Juárez’s forensic medical services. She was the first reporter to write about the young female sheriff of Práxedis G. Guerrero, a story that then became a huge news boom across the world with headlines like “The Bravest Woman in the World.” She is the one who updates the daily death count in Juárez—the government either does not do it or does not share its figures—which she says is “the closest thing to the reality that there is.” And she keeps track of violence against women. October 2010, for example, was the worst month on record for violence against women in Juárez: forty-seven women were murdered. A total of 446 women were slain in Juárez in 2010, nearly the same number as during the entire ten-year span of 1993–2003. And yet all the nongovernmental organizations that clamored for years to end feminicide in Juárez, she said, are nowhere to be found now.

“Everyone talked and everyone stated their opinion,” she said. “But now we are seeing a very active women’s participation in criminal groups.” She mentioned the case of a Eunice Ramírez Contreras, a 19-year-old model who moonlighted with a gang of kidnappers. Eunice would help select and then seduce the gang’s victims. While I was interviewing reporters at
El Diario
that day, one of the reporters was flipping through Eunice’s Facebook page and discovered photographs of her posing with automatic rifles in a bedroom and posing with another woman in front of a federal police car. Antonio Montana, a man who identified himself on his own Facebook page as a federal police officer, commented on a photo of Eunice in a swimsuit lying by a hotel swimming pool, “How good you look, my love.”
El Diario
’s front-page headline the next day read: “Kidnapper model appears in Facebook armed and with federal police.”