The Fight to Save Juárez Read online

  This is a war by anyone’s standards. By the spring of 2012 the PGR estimated that between December 2006 (the beginning of the Calderón administration) and the end of 2011, 47,515 Mexicans had been killed in the course of the drug war, a figure close to the casualties the United States suffered over the course of ten years of war in Vietnam. However, pundits and government critics assert that the actual number easily exceeds fifty thousand and may be closer to sixty thousand, given that government figures do not include people who have been “lifted” and thus have simply disappeared. Every month or so mass graves are discovered in the states bearing the brunt of the narco-war.

  Almost none of the executions in Mexico have been adequately investigated or documented, making the specific circumstances surrounding the deaths all but impossible to tease out in many instances. Most of the victims have been executed as part of the schisms between cartels and attempts to take over rival territory in order to control smuggling routes. The bulk of the dead are young men between sixteen and twenty-five years of age, many of them members of the street-level gangs that the cartels increasingly employ to manage their retail drug markets. A smaller number of victims are civilians who have been killed because they have not paid extortions or because they have been caught in cross fires. Some of the victims have been killed in the course of firefights with the authorities, and at least a thousand Mexican Army and federal police members have been killed in the course of the war. But the tally of the dead also includes an unknown number of individuals who died while in police or military custody. Official accounts minimize these deaths because Mexican officials are sensitive to accusations of human rights violations, while opposition groups are eager to inflate the figures. We may never know their actual number.

  The cartels have expanded their “business model” in recent years to include other criminal acts, especially extortion, kidnapping, theft of gasoline and petroleum products, and human trafficking, among other activities. Thus, while the majority of the tally of the dead reflects drug war casualties, it is sometimes difficult to separate those executions from criminal activity that is not specifically about the drug business. In addition, non–drug cartel criminal enterprises often emulate the cartels’ criminal activities (extorting neighborhood businesses, for example). All of this makes it difficult to nail down exactly what is taking place in Mexico and who is doing what.

  The bloodshed in Mexico occurs primarily in nine states. Four of these are border states (Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Tamaulipas); two are on the coast and have important ports (Guerrero and Veracruz); and two states form part of the “golden triangle”—the ancestral home of the Mexican drug trade and the families that created it (Sinaloa and Durango, with Chihuahua forming the third leg). Finally, Michoacán has also been a site of considerable violence. Eighty percent of the killings have taken place in but 162 of Mexico’s 2,441 municipalities, according to the PGR’s statistics.

  . . .

  There are many truths to be told about what is taking place in Mexico. This book braids together the lives of a Mexican mayor caught in the vortex of his city’s unraveling; a midlevel cartel player’s paramour who lived the narcolife on the inside; a human rights activist caught between the abuses of the authorities and the stories of their victims; and a journalist caught between the ideals of his profession and the police, the cartels, and the gangs who don’t want stories told.

  I spent three years exploring the tragedy that has befallen Mexico through the lens of its darkest place: Ciudad Juárez. I’ve seen many dead in Juárez, their bodies splayed out on the pavement midstreet or on sidewalks or caught as they desperately attempted to reach the sanctuary of their homes. I have been to cemeteries and to wakes where mourners are praying the rosary. I’ve interviewed the frightened neighbors of cartel victims (frightened that they might be next, frightened that someone might see them talking to me, frightened that the future no longer holds promise for them or for their children). I’ve spoken to the relatives of the executed at their kitchen tables and under their carports and I have driven around with them in hobbled cars, down trash-strewn, rut-filled streets that have never known pavement. I know the neighborhoods where the night belongs to the gangs. I have gone to these and other neighborhoods trying to understand, trying to comprehend the nightmare that has enveloped the life of every person in this city.

  I have seen the many faces of Juárez. In researching this book I have gone to the site of mass narco-graves and I have gone to the police stations. I have interviewed Catholic priests whose lives are threatened because they care for the sick and impoverished in neighborhoods controlled by the cartels and their gangs. I know the efforts of leftist community organizers as well as people working for non-profit organizations, all trying to help young people from poor communities avoid becoming the rank and file of the cartel hit squads and the worker bees of the cartel business. I have interviewed Mexican journalists, many of whom have been personally threatened (and all of whom know colleagues who have been assassinated for covering the cartels’ work). I have interviewed elementary-school teachers who describe the ways in which the ever-present deaths have shaped the worlds of their charges. I have also witnessed terror in the eyes of high-school students in their school uniforms, toting book bags as they walk around crime-scene tape a few feet from the bullet-ridden body of a man who has just been executed at the entrance to their school. I have talked to rich people and to poor people, I have talked to right-wingers who favor death squads if the government can’t do its job, and I have talked to leftist neighborhood organizers who want the army and the federal police out of their city.

  It is not only brute violence that signals to the people of Juárez that theirs is a city bordering on anarchy. Anarchy has many faces. In Juárez I have spoken to people who have been extorted by the gangs and I have seen their businesses burning in the night when they do not comply. I have spoken to assembly plant workers who are forced to pay neighborhood thugs a third of their weekly pay just to have safe access to and from their homes. I have interviewed professionals who lock their office doors with deadbolts during work hours and who monitor the entrances to their businesses with security cameras; they live under constant threat that they or their families will fall victim to kidnappings, extortions, or assassinations. In the course of my work I have come to know the fear that is lived in Juárez on a daily basis.

  I have also seen the resilience of life: the teenagers playing their trumpets as they rehearse for a party and children playing in the parks and families having barbecues. I have driven the streets of the poorest neighborhoods as sunset falls on another scorching day in the desert and heard the music pouring out of the windows as people sit along graffiti-tagged walls in white plastic chairs escaping the heat trapped in their homes.

  The city of Juárez is ground zero for the Mexican government’s strategy against the drug cartels. Almost a quarter of the federal forces that Felipe Calderón has deployed in this war have at some point been sent to Juárez, and almost 20 percent of the country’s drug-related executions have taken place in the city, a city that can be as unforgiving as the hardest places on earth. It is here that the Mexican government came to turn the tide, and the outcome of what happens in Juárez will have lasting repercussions for both Mexico and the United States.

  CHAPTER 1

  Christmas in Juárez

  On a late December night in 2007, between Christmas and New Year’s, the recently elected mayor of Juárez stood alone in his office staring out the window. The usual vibrant chaos of the border city’s streets below had yielded to an almost ghostly absence of activity; in addition to the holidays, the violence was beginning to have a dampening effect upon Juárez life. With executions perpetrated by the drug cartels averaging one and sometimes two people a day that year, the weight of the dead upon the city was palpable. City hall was empty save for the bodyguard posted outside the mayor’s door. Earlier that evening, José Reyes Ferriz had received an urgent call fr
om the federal government’s security representative in Juárez to say that it was imperative that they meet, which is why the mayor had come to city hall during the holidays and at such an unusual hour. The need for a face-to-face meeting only added to the sense of urgency, but it was also the case that no one in Juárez trusted their cell phones—it was too easy for someone to monitor them.

  The window at which the mayor stood faced south and spanned nearly the entire length of the wall. Outside and below lay the city of Juárez. The more proximate buildings were readily discernible, but beyond them, in the desert night, the city was aglitter with twinkling lights, like so many diamonds cast upon a sheet of black velvet. Upon assuming office a few months earlier, Reyes Ferriz had instructed his people to remove the blinds and the wood panels that divided the window into sections. He wanted to optimize the view, and the vantage from this particular window was already the mayor’s favorite. He loved the view, but it was also the light; he loved natural light.

  The federal government’s intelligence operative arrived shortly, escorted into the office by the mayor’s bodyguard, who left them to talk in private. Reyes Ferriz greeted him at the door, next to the larger-than-life print of Benito Juárez, Mexico’s revered first president (following the reign of Maximilian in 1867). The two men sat down in the chairs and couch that formed a small seating area at this end of the office, under Juárez’s watchful eye. (During Mexico’s war against French intervention, Benito Juárez had taken refuge from the French forces in what was then a remote hamlet called El Paso del Norte; Juárez’s stay during that turbulent time eventually gave the city its name).

  “What’s going on?” Reyes Ferriz asked. It was evident that the intelligence officer had something pressing on his mind.

  “Mayor,” the federal officer said, “I have some disconcerting news.” The agent proceeded to describe new intelligence indicating that in all likelihood a bloody war was about to erupt in Ciudad Juárez between the Sinaloa cartel and the Juárez cartel. “It will happen sometime this coming month,” he said. He couldn’t be more specific.

  A corporate attorney by training with a master’s degree from Notre Dame in international law with a specialization in international business, José Reyes Ferriz had only been in office since October. There was little in the mayor’s curriculum vitae or in his appearance that would suggest him as a likely candidate to face off with the most violent cartels in the history of Mexico or cast him in the role of the would-be savior of Juárez. In addition to his law practice, he also held a part-time appointment teaching law at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, arguably the best university in the city, something he’d done for years (he had decided to keep his classes notwithstanding his new responsibilities). A man of modest stature with a mild-mannered style and a jowly, rather cherubic face framed by wire-rimmed glasses, the forty-six-year-old mayor did not look the part of a border city politician, certainly not in the old-school Mexican sense of the role. His speeches were rarely strident, and some might even have described him as soft-spoken. The affable mayor dressed conventionally—blue or charcoal-gray suits, pressed white shirts with cufflinks, and muted primary-colored ties, his feet typically ensconced in loafers. None of it added up to the challenges that lay in store for José Reyes Ferriz and his city. Had he known, Reyes Ferriz might well have passed on the opportunity to run for mayor of Juárez. State and local politics were flush with intrigue, and there was no shortage of cutthroats and backstabbers, but being at the epicenter of his country’s war against the drug cartels was another matter.

  The intelligence officer’s report pointed to something ominous looming on the horizon, adding a new dimension to the mayor’s worries. Reyes Ferriz was not one given to overreaction, but alone again in his office, staring out upon the flickering lights of his city, the mayor felt a sense of foreboding.

  . . .

  José Reyes Ferriz had been elected on a platform that included cleaning up the city through a program he called the Municipal Accord of Order and Respect (AMOR, or “love” by its Spanish acronym). Reyes Ferriz planned to put an end to the proliferation of cars without registrations and license plates and address criminal impunity by shoring up the district attorney’s procedures, among other things. One could safely say that the program’s vision fell short of the earth shattering. In addition, however, the mayor had ambitious economic goals for the city. He wanted to increase its importance as a financial hub for business between the United States and Mexico. Mexico was already the United States’ third-most important trading partner, but most of that trade centered on the maquiladora assembly plants along the border or the big Mexican companies like Bimbo and the Moctezuma Brewery. “Midlevel and smaller companies didn’t know how to interact with U.S. markets,” the mayor told me. He felt that the Juárez business community’s expertise could make the city a key player in helping these midlevel companies find a home for their products in the U.S. Another initiative of interest to the newly elected mayor was medical tourism. “We have great hospitals in Juárez,” he told me. “And the U.S. has a medical crisis.”

  Whatever its merit, the mayor soon discovered that his agenda for the city was easily derailed by unforeseen events. For example, a wave of car thefts in Juárez had produced this odd fact: the cars were turning up again, abandoned on the street, days or sometimes only hours after they had been stolen. The mayor and his police chief concluded that the cartels were using the stolen cars to ferry drugs across the river before driving them back and abandoning them. To disrupt these operations, the mayor decided that he would provide American customs officials with car descriptions and VIN numbers of stolen vehicles as soon as these were reported. Reyes Ferriz announced the new program one morning at 11 a.m.; that afternoon, while the mayor was at his private law office, one of his bodyguards rushed in to tell him that armed men had surrounded the building. When Reyes Ferriz peeled the curtain back to peer out he saw two Suburbans and a dozen or so men with assault rifles forming a perimeter around the office. With only four bodyguards, the mayor’s security team was no match in either number or firepower: the mayor’s men were armed only with pistols. “It was a clear threat,” the mayor would later tell me. The Juárez cartel was letting the novice mayor know that there was a cost to interfering with their operations. He’d only been in office a month. “It was my initiation,” Reyes Ferriz noted. The mayor increased his personal security team to six and arranged for them to be trained in the use of automatic weapons.

  Not long thereafter, a series of mutinies occurred at the Juárez city prison, known as the CERESO (the Spanish acronym for Social Rehabilitation Center, as Mexican prisons are called). A local gang called Los Aztecas took over the prison and systematically killed rival gang members. Video footage from security cameras caught the bloodletting on tape and order was difficult to restore at the prison, where Los Aztecas were armed with automatic weapons that someone had smuggled in to them. The authorities conducted a systematic search after regaining control of the prison, but the weapons were never found. The incident underscored the extent to which gangs held sway in the Juárez prison.

  While José Reyes Ferriz may have had plans for his city, others clearly had their own agendas. There were powerful forces at work in Juárez, and Reyes Ferriz’s “initiation” was but the sparest of gestures intimating what lay ahead.

  . . .

  From his bunker at the Secretariat for Public Security on Avenida Constituyentes in Mexico City, Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s top law enforcement official, had a vantage that was different from that of Reyes Ferriz. Since Felipe Calderón had assumed the presidency and declared war on the drug cartels in December 2006, García Luna had been a busy man. He was a key player in the president’s security cabinet, and his federal police1 were second in importance only to the Mexican Army in the now-declared war. Over the course of that first year other regions in Mexico had occupied García Luna’s attention. For example, there was open warfare between the Gulf and Sinaloa
cartels for control of Nuevo Laredo, across the river from Laredo, Texas. The violence in Nuevo Laredo had included many deaths, an ambush by municipal police on a column of federal police as it was arriving in the city, the execution of the Nuevo Laredo police chief within hours of his installation, and an assault on the offices of the city’s main newspaper in which cartel hit men had thrown hand grenades and sprayed the newsroom with AK-47 fire. Nuevo Laredo was a major commercial hub between Mexico and the United States and thousands of commercial trucks crossed the border there every day. The Mexican government had been attempting to tamp down the violence in Nuevo Laredo, but the battle between the two cartels was raging full force.

  And there were other hotspots in Mexico that were demanding García Luna’s attention. In Michoacán, an important transit point for Colombian cocaine into Mexico, a new cartel had formed and was now at war with the Gulf cartel and its military wing, a group of former elite military troops who had defected over to the dark side and were known as Los Zetas. Michoacán was producing almost daily headlines in the national press because La Familia, as the new cartel was called, had taken to severing the heads of its victims and putting them on display. In the highlands town of Tepalcatepec, in August 2007, a note was pinned to one such head with the following message: “See. Hear. Shut up. If you want to stay alive.” In another incident, in Uruapan, they had rolled the heads of five victims onto the dance floor at a nightclub. Such tactics had a kind of shock-and-awe effect and were spreading fear throughout the country. Similarly, a rift between the Sinaloa cartel and the Tijuana cartel was leaving a trail of blood and horrific acts of violence in Baja California, where hundreds had died. And there were other states in Mexico where grisly executions were taking place on a daily basis.