Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [13]
Often, down below on the dry soil of the river, there is a crazy man. He shouts in English, “Welcome! Hello America!” And he holds a cup in his hand for catching tossed coins.
When I cross back, often late in the night, he is on the other side of the bridge, but now he begs in Spanish.
Behind the loony, a bunch of crosses were painted on a wall to symbolize the dead girls of Juárez. The simple message in Spanish says they were actually killed by capitalism incubating in the American-owned maquiladoras, the border factories of such renown in the parlors where wine is sipped to toast the global economy.
Every day in Juárez, at least two hundred thousand people get out of bed to pull a shift in the maquilas. The number varies—right now probably twenty thousand jobs have vanished in Juárez as a chill sweeps through the global economy. Within a year, eighty to one hundred thousand jobs will vanish. Just after the millennium, about one hundred thousand maquila jobs left the city for mainland China, because as Forbes magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four times the wages of the Chinese. A fair point. The greedy Mexicans were taking home sixty, maybe seventy dollars a week from the plants in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the United States. Turnover in these plants runs from 100 to 200 percent a year. The managers say this is because of the abundant opportunities of the city. Labor is still a bargain here—but so is death. Four years ago, the Chihuahua State Police were doing contract murders. They supplied their own guns and bullets with the full knowledge of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
But we must not talk about such matters. Juárez officially has almost no unemployment. The factories gleam in industrial parks sculpted by the local rich. The city grows. There is talk of even building a new city off to the west, where the giant white horse watches over the desert flats. That is why I like to go there.
I sit on the sand in the desert under the giant white horse by the place of the crazy people and I think of Miss Sinaloa.
She understands. And soon I think I will if I am given enough time on the killing ground.
I insist on getting out of the truck even though I know everyone in the narco neighborhood is watching me. I suck in the dusty air, feel the warmth of the sun. Across the street, a large German shepherd barks through the iron fence. He stares me down and does his work of guarding a world where only large, angry dogs go about unarmed.
There are a few basic rules about the Mexican army. If you see them, flee, because they famously disappear people. If you are part of them, desert, because they famously pay little. In the 1990s, President Ernesto Zedillo formed a new, pure force to fight drugs and had them trained by the United States. They were paid a pittance—a friend of mine in the DEA grew close to them because his agency instantly put them on the payroll and he was their pay-master. By 2000, the special antidrug force had joined the Gulf cartel and became known as the Zetas, U.S.-trained military killers with discipline and skill with weapons. The original Zetas are mainly dead, but their style—decapitations, military precision in attacks—spread and now they are the model for killers in many cartels. They are also an inspiration and a constant lure for Mexican soldiers who desert for the cartels—over a hundred thousand troops fled the army and joined criminal organizations in the first decade of the new century. The pay is better and so is the sense of power.
In 2000, the election of Vicente Fox ended the seventy-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The drug industry ceased to be controlled by the central government, many independents entered the business, domestic drug use