Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [37]
El Pastor now houses and feeds one hundred. He walks me around and shows his expansion dream that will give him the capacity for two hundred fifty souls. He will have the patients making bricks—those who can still function well enough to mix up mud. He will sell these blocks and so give people a kind of dignity and himself some cash flow for the medicines they require in order to bottle up their rages.
A small, retarded man stands next to me clutching a children’s book. It is in English, but then, he can’t read any language. On October 11, he murdered another patient.
“You can’t do anything to be safe here,” El Pastor explains as we stand in the yard with eighty of the maimed milling about us.
“Heroin in the city,” he explains, “is twenty-five pesos.”
This means less than $2.50 a hit.
“Cocaine,” El Pastor continues, “is everywhere here and cheaper than marijuana. And now they smoke cocaine with marijuana. We’re talking about people eighteen to twenty-five now, the people who get executed. They are ghosts, human trash walking naked in the city.”
In Nuevo Laredo, the sister city to Laredo, Texas, people notice a huge banner floating over one of the major thoroughfares. The message is simple: “Operative group ‘The Zetas’ wants you, soldier or ex-soldier. We offer a good salary, food and benefits for your family. Don’t suffer any more mistreatment and don’t go hungry.” The banner also advises, “We don’t feed you Maruchan soups [a brand of ramen noodles].” It lists a cell phone number. In Tampico, another banner appears that says, “Join the ranks of the Gulf Cartel. We offer benefits, life insurance, a house for your family and children. Stop living in the slums and riding the bus. A new car or truck, your choice. What more could you ask for? Tamaulipas, Mexico, the USA and the entire world is Gulf Cartel territory.” The authorities in Mexico City say they think the advertisement is authentic.
The Zetas, besides maintaining training camps for new employees, also equip their people with automatic weapons, grenades, dynamite, and rocket launchers. Presumably they also get machetes since the group sometimes decapitates its adversaries. One of the Zetas’ leaders is said to have elite Guatemalan soldiers as bodyguards. On March 17, Mexican authorities in the state of Tamaulipas seize a Jeep Cherokee with special features: a smoke-screen generator, bulletproofing, and, attached in the rear, a device to throw spikes on the road.
The Mexicans slaughtered in this killing season get to die twice. First, at the hands of their murderers, and then later, they are killed again by the explanations of their deaths. They are said to die from a cartel war, or from a war between the president of Mexico and the cartels, or a war between the Mexican army and the cartels or possibly as a result of drug consumers in the United States financing evil people with their habits and thus creating the slaughter every time they roll a joint.
These explanations are efforts to streamline a messy torrent of events. But what is happening in Juárez and increasingly throughout Mexico is the breakdown of a system. There are no jobs, the young face blank futures, the poor are crushed by sinking fortunes. The state has always violated human rights, and now, in the general mayhem, this fact becomes more and more obvious.
Killing is not deviance, it is a logical career decision for thousands floundering in a failing economy and a failing state.
There are certain economic incentives in becoming a murderer. Not only is the pay good, but it is an actual job with actual skills. The other choice of decent wages entails illegally migrating to the United States. Thirty