Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [110]
On January 6, the day of the three wise men, a huge holiday sweet bread that is over a mile long feeds fifteen thousand people in a park in Ciudad Juárez. Late that afternoon, Mario Escobedo Salazar and his son Edgar Escobedo Anaya have visitors to their law office. The elder Escobedo Salazar, fifty-nine, is killed at his desk. The son runs and is slaughtered just down the block. His own brother, Mario Escobedo Anaya, was executed by the Chihuahuan state police in 2002 after representing a defendant accused of the murder of a group of women found buried in a cotton field. His law partner, Sergio Dante Almaraz, also represented one of the accused in that case. He was executed in January 2005 in downtown Juárez. Almaraz had publicly predicted his murder and said he would be killed by the Chihuahuan state government. Some message has been delivered, some circle closed, but the only part of the statement fully understood by everyone is death.
There is supposed to be an answer to such a number of killings. Some kind of explanation and then, following this explanation, a solution achieved through an orderly series of steps. I go to see El Pastor, and he prays for me, a thankless task for which I thank him.
The year has not been easy for El Pastor. He watches his city die around him. He has men come with guns demanding money. He is at a stoplight one afternoon and sees a man executed three cars ahead of him.
I ask him, “Tell me what the slaughter of the year 2008 means.”
He says, “Not even in the Mexican revolution did they kill so many in Juárez. This year of death shows the brutality inside the Mexican government—death comes from inside the government. Not from the people. The only way to end the violence is to let organized crime be the government.
“The crime groups are fighting for power. If the toughest guy wins, he will get everything under control.
“Now there is no respect for the president.
“People now say to the president, ‘Fuck you, man.’
“I am a miracle, but I am not a martyr. I don’t want to be killed.”
We sit outside his house. His red car stares at us with a front plate that says, WITH GOD, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE.
As we enjoy the blue sky and the warmth falling from heaven, more die in the city.
That is the answer.
Both the sun.
And the blood.
Miss Sinaloa goes on and on. Her name changes as does her face. Every day, week, month, she shows up in the city with a new identity with her face made up, her high-heeled shoes, tight skirt, and fragrance. And each time she comes to the city, she is adored, raped, thrown in the trash, and lives on with a maimed mind. She never forgets, and the city always forgets her.
She has those lush lips, that long hair and fair skin. She can never be important. She is not the drug industry, she is not free trade, she is not national security.
She is the blood and dreams of a people.
I will never forget her.
Just as she will never be remembered.
Afterword
At one point, I was hanging around Palomas, a border town an hour or so west of Juárez, and near Palomas is Ascensión, where an ice chest arrives at police headquarters.
The chest was shipped as freight (properly encased in shrink-wrap) via a bus company and addressed to a local clinic. But one by one, the clinics checked their records and realized they had not ordered any drugs or other vital materials that must be shipped on ice and shrink-wrapped. The chest winds up at the police station by a kind of default mechanism. The cops open it and find four severed human heads.
The newspaper says an investigation has been launched.
At the same time, two laborers on a local ranch stumble into some armed men and are promptly cut down.
I read the World War II memoir of Eric Severeid, a son of Velva, North Dakota. At that time, he was a CBS radio correspondent. Later, he was part of television news and for years read brooding and vague commentaries each evening,