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There are more than twenty thousand such retail outlets in this city, many employing vendors working three shifts a day. Now there is a battle going on for these small ventures in cutthroat capitalism.

A friend of mine can barely leave anything in his house, because local addicts rob it the moment he exits. He is on his third large dog. The previous two were poisoned. He has hopes for the third guard dog.

The day after the killing, the vendor is the cover story in P.M., the tabloid he peddled on his traffic island. His street name was El Cala, The Skull.

On March 27, 2008, the army admits it is taking Juárez by force. In front of the hotel downtown, a soldier stands with a .50-caliber machine gun. Over 180 armed and armored vehicles hunt evil on the streets, plus an air wing that includes a helicopter gunship. Two thousand troops arrive, or more. Or so the government says, the press repeats, but no one is ever allowed to make a real count. The soldiers wear black masks and are short and dark. The officers have lighter skin that loses pigment steadily as the rank gets higher until there is the rarefied air of the generals who look like Europeans dropped in some colonial outpost.

Roadblocks go up everywhere, especially at night, when events are difficult to see and impossible to monitor. The authorities say this is necessary because two hundred people have been murdered since the first of year. There will be ten patrol bases and forty-six roving units. Night life in Juárez collapses because the local citizens dread hitting a military checkpoint in the dark.

It is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Semana Santa, Holy Week, a time for families to reunite and for men to gather and drink themselves senseless as they bask in the grace of God. Two police cars convoy through the quiet of Juárez, one with a city comandante, the other with bodyguards. Suddenly, they are pinned at a traffic light by a car in front and then another car pulls alongside and machine-guns the vehicles. Customers at the nearby gas station duck as bullets plunge through metal.

The comandante’s bodyguard dies and others are wounded. This bodyguard has a curious past. In January, the comandante’s name—Victor Alejandro Gomez Marquez—was posted on the list that appeared on the monument to the fallen policemen as a person scheduled to die. But the bodyguard is the man who truly hears death whispering in his ear. He recently told his mother he had fifteen days to live. Then, he came over to his mother’s house again and sat with a friend as they drank a liter of whisky. This time, he told his mother he had at best eight days to live.

She told him, “Be positive. Christ’s blood is covering you and protecting you.”

Now, he is done with living.

The mural depicts a conquistador, another wall is a collage of snapshots from the work. A sign says, “God is greater than my problems.” In the corner rests a metal statue of a man in armor. This is the office of El Pastor, José Antonio Galvan, the radio evangelist who took in the battered remains of Miss Sinaloa and gave her succor in the crazy place. He is sitting right in front of me, a mop of graying hair, a fleshy body, a ready smile. He is showing me a movie of the asylum—men beaten by police and dumped half crazy on the streets, addled addicts with seeping ulcerated wounds, women who will never remember what happened to them and never want to remember.

I stare at the ruined faces in the video and ask, “Does your congregation support this work?”

He smiles, points to the crazy people on the screen, and says, “This is my congregation.”

There was a bad storm in the winter of 1998, and El Pastor was driving in Juárez when he saw a mound on the street and swerved just as a man emerged from the pile of snow where he slept. God spoke to him at that moment and so El Pastor rounded up friends and for a day gathered the wounded off the streets—brain-damaged addicts, ruined gang members—everyone left at the mercy of the snows