Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [106]
My name is David Miranda Ramirez, I’m thirty-six, and I was driving patrol in an industrial park at 10:30 A.M. when at least twenty rounds ripped through my car and my body.
I have no name now. They found my body in a kettle used for frying pork.
December’s children arise. First, four cops killed in their stations and cars in a coordinated attack during the night. They say they were merely doing their duty. They sit with over sixty dead cops slaughtered during the year.
Four guys sit near them, also machine-gunned during the same day as the four cops. One holds his head in his lap, the severed skull wearing a Santa Claus hat. It is nearing Christmas, and everyone has the spirit. The kills have streaked past 1,500 for the year.
This program will take some time.
Miss Sinaloa tosses her hair and takes in the show.
God brought her to this city, you know, so that she would suffer and lose her mind, go to the crazy place and meet her true love, who slipped food into her cell and talked sweetly to her. It was meant to be. She knows this. And may know other things.
Did I tell you about her eyes? They see through you to the other side. Scent wafts off her as we sit and listen and yet do not listen. We are being told what we already know and, in my case, refuse to understand.
Of course, Miss Sinaloa is different.
Her skin is so white, her hair long and glossy, the lips red as ripe fruit.
Murder Artist
He is calm now. The kidnappings, the tortures, the killings, brought back a sense of self he could not control, the workman’s pride that fills a man when he sees the wall, the house, or perhaps even the church he has built. True, he would express regret, tell me such things give him nightmares, and he tries as a rule to put them out of his mind. He would indicate that he is revisiting this evil time simply for my benefit.
He takes his various drawings—how to do a hit, where some people were buried in a death house—looks at the green schematics he has created and then slowly tears them into little squares until the torn heap can never be reconstructed.
His life is relatively peaceful until late 2006. He worked all over Mexico for different groups, and the various organizations generally got along. There were small moments such as when others tried to take over Juárez, and it was necessary to burn their heads with tires. But his life in the main was peaceful.
So peaceful, he did not need to know certain things.
Such as who he really worked for. Such knowledge could be fatal.
“I received orders from two people. They ran me. I never knew which cartel I worked for. Now there is Vicente Carrillo against Chapo Guzman. But I never met any bosses, so when the war started around 2006, I did not know which one I did the killing for. And orders could cross from one group to another. I am living in a cell, and I simply take orders. In thirty minutes in Juárez, sixty well-trained and heavily armed men can assemble in thirty cars and circulate as a show of force.
“Then at my level, we began to get orders to kill each other.”
He is kidnapped but let go after an hour. This unsettles him, and he begins to think about escaping his life. But that is not a simple matter, since if you leave, you are murdered. As the war quickens, he begins to distance himself from people he knows and works with. He tries to fade away. By this time, a third of the people he knows have been disappeared—“they were seen as useless and then killed.”
He doesn’t know the boss, he is still not even sure who his boss is. He drinks at home. The streets are too dangerous. New people arrive, and he does not know them. He is not safe.
So he flees.
He confides in a friend. Who betrays him.
He pauses at this point. He knows he is guilty of a fatal error. He has violated a fundamental rule: You can only be betrayed by someone you trust. So you survive by trusting no one.