Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [34]
We have eggs, chilis, squash, tortillas. And death.
As she speaks, her thin hands with long fingers come together almost in prayer, but her voice, soft and low, has the force of authority. In Mexico, only women with a fierce will accomplish things. The rest go under the wheels of life.
Her white hair is cropped short because of the chemotherapy, and her body has withered and is birdlike.
At first she offers that the growing violence is a battle between cartels—this explanation is always a comfort to the civilized. She tells how the women who come to her shelter now say they are afraid to even go to the market because stray bullets may be flying anywhere. The city is rife with kidnappings, and they seem to observe no rules of class or neighborhood.
But then, she continues, there are always these little gangs besides the major cartels, and these little gangs are everywhere and they are armed and they flourish now because drugs are everywhere and consumption in the city has exploded as people seek syringes and powders as a way to endure the strife of normal life.
“I am trying to get a meeting with the mayor,” she explains. “Now things are different. In the nineties, women were being taken off the streets. Now they are killed in their own homes. There have been, as of this moment in February, ten women murdered this year and they were not victims of domestic violence, they were not killed by members of their own families.”
The tales tumble out. The young woman from Guerrero who lived with her aunt, a student. She had no life, she studied, she did not go out. And she was killed. That ten-year-old child, her mother was in the hospital, she was left alone in the home—and here Esther clasps her hands together as her eyes burn into me—and the police now say it was men who came to rob the house, found a ten-year-old girl alone, and so raped and killed her. One of the arrested had been detained last year in the case of a raped child, his name is in Esther’s files, but of course, nothing had been done then. In both cases, he strangled. In the earlier case, the police said there was not enough evidence, but Esther Chávez knows better. She says that they simply did not believe that the child in the earlier case had been raped. Besides, she notes, the police are afraid to even leave their stations now. There is in Juárez a backlog of twenty-four thousand cases of all kinds, and women are now required to seek counseling with their attackers in order to clean up these files. The man is required to repent of his act and sign some papers and then he is released.
Her eyes stare out from almost square glasses. She is very frail and yet on fire. She explains that her doctor has recommended she avoid movies with violence, lest they upset her.
She laughs at the thought.
“I have ten years in this,” she sighs. “The problem is that the violence will only increase because nothing has been done to treat the roots of the problem: corrupt police, the growing population of the city, poverty, drugs, and of course, people get frustrated and they sell drugs, and beat women. The men tell their women that if they go to Casa Amiga, they will kill them. And here the police never catch the murderer.”
There is an old wood-cased pendulum clock on the wall in the corner. It has stopped.
She passes a plate of cookies, pours coffee.
“There is now a collective hysteria,” she continues. “I am a woman who is never afraid and now I’m afraid. I change my route to work. Two of the police were killed a few blocks