Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [12]
There are explanations for all this. A favorite is that it is all because of the drug world, especially a current battle the authorities claim is going on between cartels for control of the crossing into El Paso. Some blame the massive migration of the poor to the city to work in the factories. Others, especially those who focus on the murder of the girls, sense a serial killer is prowling the lonely dark lanes. Finally, some simply see the state as waning here and the violence as a new order supplanting the fading state with criminal organizations.
I am in a tiny minority on this matter. I see no new order emerging but rather a new way of life, one beyond our imagination and the code words we use to protect ourselves from life and violence. In this new way of life, no one is really in charge and we are all in play. The state still exists—there are police, a president, congress, agencies with names studded across the buildings. Still, something has changed, and I feel this change in my bones.
The violence has crossed class lines. The violence is everywhere. The violence is greater. And the violence has no apparent and simple source. It is like the dust in the air, part of life itself.
Government here and in my own country increasingly pretends to be in charge and then calls it a day. The United States beefs up the border, calls in high-tech towers, and tosses up walls, and still, all the drugs arrive on time and all the illegal people make it into the fabled heartland and work themselves into a future.
People tell me there are murders in Detroit, women are raped in Washington, D.C., the cops are on the take in Chicago, drugs are everywhere in Dallas, the government is a flop in New Orleans. And Baghdad is not safe, mortars arc through the desert sky there into the American womb of the Green Zone. People tell me Los Angeles is a jungle of gangs, that we have our own revered mafia. And that drugs flood Mexico and Juárez because of the wicked, vice-ridden ways of the United States. All of these assertions are ways to ignore the deaths on the killing ground.
According to the Mexican government and the DEA, the violence in Juárez results from a battle between various drug cartels. This makes perfect sense, except that the war fails to kill cartel members. With over two hundred fresh corpses in ninety days, there is hardly a body connected to the cartels. Nor can the Mexican army seem to locate any of the leaders of the cartels, men who have lived in the city for years. The other problem with this cartel war theory is that the Mexican army in Juárez continues to seize tons of marijuana but only a few kilos of cocaine, this in a city with thousands of retail cocaine outlets.
There are two ways to lose your sanity in Juárez. One is to believe that the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder. The only certain thing is that various groups—gangs, the army, the city police, the state police, the federal police—are killing people in Juárez as a part of a war for drug profits. So a person never knows exactly why he or she is killed but is absolutely certain that death comes because of the enormous profits attached to drug sales.
Every time I walk across the pay bridge from downtown El Paso to Juárez, I see a big portrait of Che Guevara on the concrete banks that channel the original flow of the Rio Grande. Sometimes the paint has faded, but when moments get very bad in Juárez, someone magically appears and touches up the portrait. There is also a statement in Spanish that my president is a terrorist and another message