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I can still smell it here in the morning light. I have brought her

with me and now we will live together for the rest of my days.

Her lips gleam a ripe red and fragrance

floats from her white skin.

Ernesto Romero Adame is thirty-three years old on New Year’s Day, 2008. He sits in his 2005 black Jetta Volkswagen. Bullet holes mark his neck, throat, and chest as he waits stone dead at Paseo Triunfo de la Republica Avenue. He is the first official kill of the season.

It is twenty minutes after midnight on Sunday, January 20, when Julián Cháirez Hernández is found dead by gunshot. He is a lieutenant in the municipal police and thirty-seven years old. Seven hours and ten minutes later, Mirna Yesenia Muñoz Ledo Marín is found inside her own home. She is naked and has been stabbed several times. She is ten years old. On Monday, January 21, at 7:50 A.M., Francisco Ledesma Salazar is killed in his SUV. He is thirty-five years old and the coordinator of operations for the municipal police. The gunshots come from men in a minivan. At 9:30 A.M., the body of Erika Sonora Trejo is found by police in the bathroom of her home. She is thirty-eight and eight months pregnant, and officers think her father-in-law has had at her with an axe. Later that Monday, at 5 P.M., a year-old skeleton turns up in the desert. That evening around 8:40 P.M., Fernando Lozano Sandoval is cut down in his SUV by a barrage of fifty-one rounds. He is fifty-one and the commander of the Chihuahua Bureau of Investigations. Two vehicles, a red SUV and a gray car, figure in the attack. Later, Lozano is transported to an El Paso hospital since Juárez has had recent incidents of killers visiting the wounded in hospitals in order to finish their work.

A list appears on a Juárez monument to fallen police officers. Under the heading THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE are the names of five recently murdered cops. And under the heading FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE NOT BELIEVING are seventeen names.

As the killings increase in early 2008, rumors begin to spread of Mexican army troops suddenly increasing in Ciudad Juárez and northern Chihuahua. On February 13, the soldiers go to a house and find twenty-five big guns, five small arms, seven fragmentation grenades, 3,494 rounds of various calibers, a bunch of bulletproof vests, eight radios, and five cars with Sinaloa plates. On February 16, they find twenty-one men, ten AK-47s, more than 13,000 hits of cocaine, 2.1 kilos of cocaine base, various uniforms—some of the Mexican army, some of AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigación, the Mexican equivalent of the FBI), 401 cartridges, 760 grams of marijuana, and three vehicles with Sinaloa plates. On February 21, they seize a helicopter.

On the twentieth, seven men are picked up by the army. Later, they say the soldiers beat them with cables, among other gestures.

Around 8 P.M. on Wednesday night, March 5, he crawls across the white tile floor of a small bakery near central Juárez. He has been gone two days and is a member of the city’s traffic cops. Juán Rodriguez, sixty-five, looks down from his counter of bread, sweet rolls, and candies and sees that the man is barefoot and beaten and that all the insignia have been ripped from his tattered traffic-cop uniform.

Then, he hears Carlos Adrián De Anda Doncel say, “No! No police, please! Do not call the police!”

Instead, he calls his wife and says, “My love, I am well.”

Within five minutes, members of his own unit arrive and whisk him away. Two days later, he flees the city. His commander says that since he is absent from duty, he will lose his job. He has three children.

Four days after the kidnapped and beaten cop appeared in the bakery, Rodriguez offers me a roll and refuses payment. When I ask him about the frightened cop begging that he not call the police, he says softly, “I can no longer say that.”

Silence has returned again to this city of two million souls. The governor of Chihuahua has been in seclusion since January—they say his face is frozen due to some mysterious medical condition.