Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [102]
Spector says, “The concept of revenge is part of the Mexican political system. Emilio has insulted the institution, and it has an incredible memory. The only thing worse he could do, he has done also—to leave the country and denounce it.”
So Emilio Gutiérrez has an immutable characteristic: He wrote the truth about the Mexican army, and now they will kill him, even if it takes forever. He just told the truth about the Mexican army to the U.S. press, and they will ignore him forever.
Surely, such a man cannot be allowed to live in my country.
After all, a man whose high school classmate was raped, tortured, and murdered by the Mexican army, who has taken note as people were murdered in his town and disappeared by the Mexican army, and who has been sentenced to death by the Mexican army cannot be trusted to tell the truth.
But what lingers in my mind is not that he cannot live in Mexico but that he cannot live within any American understanding of Mexico. He is the unacceptable face of the border. He can be championed by U.S. organizations devoted to defending the rights of reporters, but what he says about corruption in Mexico—corruption in the government, corruption in the military, and corruption in the press—this remains out of bounds and falls on deaf ears.
On Tuesday, March 3, four Mexican army officers visit a friend of Carlos’s in Juárez. At that instant, Spector moves from knowing Mexico to feeling its breath on the back of his neck. In the photograph that the Mexican army officers show to his friend, Carlos is wearing a blue suit and entering the El Paso county courthouse. The photograph was taken the previous Thursday, when he appeared for a hearing.
The officers say, “Your friend is a criminal, and we are looking for him. Tell him to get a hold of us.”
Outside the house, more men wait in a Hummer.
Carlos takes the call from his friend and falls through space into his new life. He is a knowing player, he spent half his childhood living in Juárez. He is the man who moves freely and easily in two worlds. And now this seamless web is slashed in half.
He must think, he decides. So he drives to a Starbucks and has a cup of coffee. He looks out the window and notices two Ford Expeditions full of men, and then he remembers them behind him in traffic as he drove here. He leaves, and suddenly they are in his rearview mirror and the men in the vehicles are on their cell phones. He turns sharply and then executes a U-turn, and suddenly, he is behind the Fords. They bolt, but he notes the Chihuahuan license plates.
He is learning new facts.
His problem is all connected to representing Emilio Gutiérrez.
This problem is real—his friend in Juárez flees with his family to a distant part of Mexico.
And he can no longer have the life he once enjoyed.
“It feels like an out-of-body experience,” he says.
He has joined his client, and they live in a place beyond courts and laws and the illusions of the United States of America.
He has become a Mexican, body and soul.
Emilio says, “Carlos is now an exile, also.”
Yes, we will have the performance here at the abandoned rehab center. Surely, ghosts can’t take up that much space, and if we run short of space, we can use the kitchen next door since the boy will be in his grave in a few short hours. It will be a quiet performance—the voices soft, the audience will not applaud, and music will not be played this time. The street noises will also fall away—the backfires from old cars, the rumble of buses, the random gunshots, the shouts, and, especially, the suffocating sound of all the silence that cloaks the city after the killings begin.
We will not allow anyone with answers to be present. Explanations will be killed on sight. Theories strangled by my own hands. No one can speak of cartels if he is not a member of a cartel or, at the very least, has not spoken on the record