Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [28]
So I wait.
The man I wait for insists, “You don’t know me. No one can forgive me for what I have done.”
He cannot watch the news on television. He says he can see behind the news and hear the screams.
He has pride in his hard work. The good killers make a very tight pattern through the driver’s door. They do not spray rounds everywhere in the vehicle, no, they make a tight pattern right through the door and into the driver’s chest and head. The reporter who died this morning received just such a pattern, ten rounds from a 9 mm and not a single bullet came near his eight-year-old daughter.
I wait.
I admire craftsmanship.
People talk of those who are innocent and they talk of those who are sucio, dirty, people who live and prosper because of illegal lines of work such as the drug industry. This is a comfort, these categories, and of course, these categories are lies. Let us dance through some numbers. In 2004, the budget of the Mexican army was $4 billion. In 1995, by DEA estimates, the Juárez cartel, at that time a wholesale organization moving heroin, marijuana, and principally cocaine from South America and Mexico into the retail markets of the United States, was earning about $12 billion a year. No one on earth thinks its income has declined.
In Juárez, the payroll for the employees in the drug industry exceeds the payroll for all the factories in the city, and Juárez has the most factories and is said to boast the lowest unemployment in Mexico. There is not a family in the city that does not have a family member in the drug industry, nor is there anyone in the city who cannot point out narcos and their fine houses, or who has any difficulty taking you to fine new churches built of narco-dollars. The entire fabric of Juárez society rests on drug money. It is the only possible hope for the poor, the valiant, and the doomed.
As an added factor, the declining cost of drugs has made it possible to create a vast domestic market in Juárez, and this market teems with employees and customers. Who in their right mind would turn down a chance to consume drugs in a city of poverty, filth, violence, and despair?
Look at what people do to survive. Measure their words, and you will find that in Juárez, as in every other place in the world, some people are truthful and some are liars. But don’t ask who is innocent and who is dirty, because everyone here tries to eat and drink and we have no pure food or water.
We are the future. We watch governments erode and bluster. We watch cops strut and steal. We watch dealers operate in broad daylight. We work hard and get little.
And we survive.
And don’t ask how.
I watch two guys pretend to work on a car and watch me. I watch a man stand in front of his house and talk on a cell phone and watch me. I notice traffic, and if a car keeps coming by with two men staring out, I think they are also watching me.
I continually search for birds but seem to find few and they are mainly grackles and pigeons. I am in front of a known drug house and it is clear I am not welcome here.
I watch Juárez watch me and wonder if anyone is watching at all. That is the sense of things: being on camera in a city where no one ever really sees a murder or remembers the faces of the killers.
I am with a man who worked in the business. Years ago, when the sicario—the murder artist—was just starting out, he was a mentor to him. That was before he found Christ and found the Bible’s hard judgment that must be faced. He says this is the second revolution. The first came in the 1970s, when the government of Mexico started pushing condoms and the birth rate sank from 6.8 children per woman to a little over 2. He feels this was very good. The killings now—these, also, are a great benefit. He speaks from experience.
He is a large man, with fair skin, a moustache and very serious eyes.