Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [21]
Everyone is a bit skittish here.
On February 18, 2008, four men were cut down and two died. On February 27, two men were cut down at the gas station on the main drag. The barrage ran three minutes, and the two men tasted the force of three to four hundred rounds. Then in the middle of March, the police chief fled to the United States and his staff deserted. Temporary cops were sent in from Ascensión. After that, two corpses were found by the road south of town. And just a day or two ago, four bodies were found burned to bone in a ranch house. But then in May 2007, four guys drove up to the U.S. border crossing here with three of them dead, including the driver. The wounded guy in the front passenger seat managed to keep a foot on the gas pedal as the rolling charnel house crept into the port of entry.
Now the police hide in the station. They are new, brought in from out of town. They don’t really patrol, in fact. They sleep in the jail, where it is safe.
They sell a brand of tequila here shaped like a cartridge. It is called Hijos de Villa, The Sons of Villa. By April 1, at least forty people have been murdered in the town of doves.
Two teenage girls in tube tops and slacks pose at the point on the bridge between Juárez and the United States where a plaque announces the border. A friend snaps a photograph. Just below, a Border Patrol chopper sweeps along the line. No one even looks over at it.
On the U.S. side of the bridge, a holding pen teems with Mexicans. They wave and laugh in their cage of cyclone fencing topped with concertina wire.
The dust blows in Juárez, the workers climb aboard white school buses for their one- to two-hour ride down bad roads to their shifts. I’m standing in a barrio searching out the whiff of another recent murder, this time of a former municipal cop. But my attention strays. The roads are dirt here, some of the tracks require punching the truck into four-wheel drive. Everyone here works in a maquiladora. I look to the north and see the blue federal building in downtown El Paso and the sweep of the American city up the slope of the Franklin Mountains. I stand on the slope of the Sierra de Juárez, over the ridge from the giant white horse and the asylum where Miss Sinaloa briefly took shelter. The border is hard-edged, but at times the sweep of the two cities makes them seem like one. But in the end, death can draw the sharpest line.
José Refugio Ruvalcalba was fifty-nine on November 27, 1994, when he turned up exactly on the line—midway on the bridge between the two cities—in his Honda Accord. He’d been a state cop for thirty-two years, and both of his sons were with him that day. All three were in the trunk, beaten, stabbed, and strangled. The father had a yellow ribbon around his head, one that flowered out of his mouth.
He knew where the line was and what happened if that line was crossed.
So do American political leaders, since they never seem to come here.
But everything else does.
The barrio where I look down from Juárez at El Paso is part of the puzzle of the violence in Juárez. These districts are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Most places are stuffed with people who work in the maquiladoras.
Later, I am with a man wearing black in a barrio across from the asylum that was once home to Miss Sinaloa. The white buses lumber past with the tired faces of the factory workers. The road is ruts. Most of the shacks lack electricity or water. The