Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [10]
It is June 16, 2008, and in two days, the man will have his forty-fifth birthday, should he live that long.
The military has flooded across Mexico since President Felipe Calderón assumed office in December 2006 with a margin so razor thin that many Mexicans think he is an illegitimate president. His first act was to declare a war on the nation’s thriving drug industry and his favorite tool was the Mexican army. Now over 40,000 soldiers are marauding all over the country in this war against the nation’s drug organizations. In 2008, between 5,000 and 6,000 Mexicans died in the violence, a larger loss than what the United States has endured during the entire Iraq war. Since the year 2000, 24 reporters have been officially recorded as murdered in Mexico, 7 more have vanished, and an unknown number have fled into the United States. But all numbers in Mexico are slippery because people have a way of disappearing and not being reported. The entire police force of Palomas, Chihuahua, fled in 2008, with the police chief seeking shelter in the United States, the rest of the cops simply hiding in Mexico. Between July and October 2008, at a minimum 63 people—Mexican cops, reporters, and businesspeople—sought political asylum at crossings in West Texas and New Mexico. In all of 2008, 312 Mexicans filed credible fear claims at U.S. ports of entry, up from 179 in 2007. Many more simply blended into U.S. communities. This is the wave of blood and terror suffocating the man as he heads north.
The reporter has tried to live his life in an effort to avoid this harsh reality. He has been careful in his work. His publisher has told him it is better to lose a story than to take a big risk. He does not look too closely into things. If someone is murdered, he prints what the police tell him and lets it go at that. If people sell drugs in his town or warehouse drugs in his town, he ignores this information. Nor does he inquire about who controls the drug industry in his town or anywhere else.
The man driving is terrified of hitting an army checkpoint. They are random and they are everywhere. The entire Mexican north has become a killing field. In Palomas, a border town of maybe three thousand souls, forty men have already been executed this very year, and another seventeen people have vanished in kidnappings. Some of these murders are by drug cartels. Some of these murders are by state and federal police. Some of these murders are by the Mexican army. There are now many ways to die.
The high desert is beautiful, a pan of creosote with lenses of grass in moist low spots. Here and there, volcanic remnants make black marks on the earth, and to the north and west, sierras rise. There is almost no water. Almost all the rivers flowing from the Sierra Madre die in the desert. But it is home, the place he has spent his life.
The reporter may die for committing a simple error. He wrote an accurate news story. He did not know this was dangerous, because he thought the story was very small and unimportant. He was wrong and that was the beginning of all his trouble.
This is because there are two Mexicos.
There is the one reported by the U.S. press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war against the evil forces of the drug world and using the incorruptible Mexican army as his warriors. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, and laws and is seen by the U.S. government as a sister republic.
It does not exist.
There is a second Mexico, where the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed.
The reporter lives in this