Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [22]
People vanish. They leave a bar with the authorities and are never seen again. They leave their homes on an errand and never return. They go to a meeting and never come back. They are waiting at a bus stop and never arrive at their assumed destination. In the late 1990s, people began keeping lists of the disappeared. One such list hit 914 before the effort was abandoned out of fear. None of these lists covered very many years. Nor did any of the list makers ever think their work was a complete tally. No one really knows how many people vanish. It is not safe to ask, and it is not wise to place a call to the authorities.
Still, we love the hard look of numbers. So murders are tallied, and for fifteen years, until the bloodshed of 2008, Juárez reliably produced two to three hundred official murders a year. Of course, skeletons periodically turn up on the edge of town, and these do not enter the totals. And once in a great while—the FBI announcement of mass graves in Juárez in December 1999, the publicity by the the DEA over a death house in January 2004—homes are found where people are taken, murdered, and buried. Each time such a house of death is revealed, there is a great to-do, a sense of something extraordinary coming into the light of day. People always say they are shocked, the neighbors always say they noticed nothing amiss, the press always says the authorities are digging, digging, digging and will soon get to the bottom of things. Every effort is made to keep this extraordinary moment within the realm of order and to process the corpses so that numbers and structure can be felt and touched.
Forensic experts huddle in these digs at death houses. They have no names, and their bodies appear in the published images, but not their faces. There are few, if any, reports of their findings. They are the costume of order more than the substance of hard facts. For that matter, the various elements of law enforcement at these special charnel houses appear in the newspaper wearing masks. Only the cadaver dogs show up with clear faces.
And then public notices of the death house and its bodies vanish from the papers much as the dead vanished from the city itself. Memory ebbs, and the cavalcade of the vanished and of the dead disappears from sight and becomes some ghost column winding through the city streets that no one professes to see. Or the dead sit in the cafés where they had their last cup of coffee, belly up to the bar where they had that last drink, huddle in the dust and wind at bus stops where they awaited that last ride.
Sometimes, the vanished never reappear. Normally, there are killings because of the drug industry, and these executed souls are found at dawn on city streets like the litter that slaps the eye in the morning light after a boisterous fiesta. But there are periods when no such bodies appear with hands tied with duct tape and a bullet through the skull. There is no way the drug industry with its implicit contractual protocols can take a holiday from death. It is simply impossible in a multibillion-dollar industry that has no standing at law to collect debts or enforce discipline without murder. Sometimes the vanished never even become a name on a list. People fear reporting their missing kin—in one instance, twelve bodies were dug up at a death house and not a single person slumbering in that ground had been reported missing.
So, there are clearly two ghost patrols out and about in the city. Those murdered and secretly disposed of by the drug industry, and those who vanish