Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [35]
We talk for almost three hours. She says the violence is because of discrimination against women, it is because of the poverty, because of ignorance, because of the culture, because women have so little self-esteem here, because of a lack of faith in the authorities, because of social isolation since so many women come to the city for work without any family around them, because the maquiladoras are about making money, not about the well-being of people.
She calls a cab and then we go outside.
Across the street, a massive new home is going up, and it is topped with a huge dome done up in golden tiles. Two-story windows sketch the face, and big columns frame the portico.
I glance at her and say, “Narco.”
She smiles, and then points to the other homes on the cul-de-sac and says, “Narco, narco, narco, narco, narco, five of my neighbors are narcos.”
But she contests my statement about the new house going up across the street.
“No,” she explains, “ he says he is a professor. A very strange professor.”
Two years ago, I was at another house a block or so from the home of Esther Chávez. It also was a fine residence. It was a place men in the city came to party and celebrate after performing executions. There would be food and drink, cocaine and women. In that case, they had maintained a death house a few miles away, one in which they committed twelve murders and then buried the bodies in the patio. The state police were paid to be executioners.
I mention this to Esther and she nods without expression.
She says, “I am going to put all the bad stories in my book.”
But she is pressed for time, what with the cancer, the chemotherapy, the work at Casa Amiga. She is seventy-two, she notes, and is running out of time.
But her book will be the real history of the city because the real history of the city is violence against the people of the city and the most powerless people in the city are the women. The real history of the city is written on the bodies of women, and this is not a history men are likely to sanction, even as they record it in the day and the night on bleeding flesh.
Sometimes the bodies have tattoos that say Juárez. Or sometimes there is a marijuana leaf etched into the brown skin and the message: I Always Consume.
The army’s work in Juárez is barely reported because writing or saying what the military is up to could result in serious injury or death. So, at best, the newspapers will report some execution and say that the neighbors described the killers as dressed like commandos. The exact meaning lurking in the word commando is never spelled out. On other parts of the border, where the army has descended in order to reinstall peace and tranquility, locals mention a sudden bloom of robberies by men wearing military-type clothing and masks. But this also is never elaborated upon. When, in a few instances, there have been demonstrations protesting the violence and heavy-handedness of the army, this has been dismissed by both the generals and the federal government because they insist these demonstrations are really shams sponsored by various drug cartels.
The army has been operating in the Mexican state of Michoacan for at least a year before it arrives in force in Juárez. Norberto Ramírez says that in his village in Michoacan, the soldiers seized him, put a plastic bag over his head, cinched it tight, and spent all night taking turns suffocating him to the edge of death. They also beat him with rifle butts and shocked him with electric cattle prods. Of course, he did better than the seventeen-year-old boy shot dead. Ramírez, though lucky, can no longer work, because his frolic that night with the military damaged his