Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [41]
“When you are an Azteca, the police protect you. And you kill for the police.”
He explains a thing called La Linea, a consortium of the Mexican army, the mayor, gangs, the federal police, the state police, and the city police.
I ask how Aztecas move drugs into the United States.
He looks at me with mild surprise and says, “We bribe the Border Patrol and the U.S. Army.”
Who is killing all these people in Juárez?
He says, “Now the military is killing people who are no longer useful. If there is any dispute over drug money, they kill.”
He has no idea what the Juárez cartel is up to. “Such information is only available to the highest-ranking police officers.”
The meal is over.
He has one more thing to say when I ask him about the late Amado Carrillo, the fabled head of the Juárez cartel.
“He is a god.”
Daniel Escobedo, twenty-one, is driving to school in Juárez. He stops at a roadblock and hands over his ID to uniformed men. Then, he is taken away by a team in two SUVs, and for six weeks, he is blindfolded as the men deal with his lawyer father over a ransom. Eventually, he is rescued by the military during one of its sweeps on April 1. Some U.S. security firms figure Mexico is experiencing thirty to fifty kidnappings a day—of course, they only count ones where real ransom money is involved. As a rule of thumb, maybe one out of ten kidnappings is reported to the police. A study found that only 52 percent of the Mexicans surveyed thought they would “very probably” report being the victim of a crime. For example, Daniel Escobedo’s father never reported his son’s kidnapping.
Dead Reporter Driving
The priest goes to the fiesta to christen a child. The food is lavish, as is the rancho. There are many men of power there, men who have survived the life and now live large and feast on danger. One old man there is the boss and he wears a very large crucifix of gold. This gleaming treasure catches the priest’s eye. Later, when the padre has left the fiesta, he goes to the federal police and tells them of this convocation of narco-traficantes . He is a very good source for the police because he takes confessions from the men in the life and then sells this information. The police hit the fiesta and they find a lot of cocaine, which, of course, they seize for resale. And they take a million in cash from the partygoers. The priest gets the gold crucifix as his reward. He blesses it and now it links him to his God.
Emilio Gutiérrez sits and watches the video captured by the security camera. A long caravan of fine pickup trucks with darkly tinted windows takes up both lanes of the highway leading into Ascensión. There must be twenty or thirty vehicles rumbling into the isolated community of eighteen thousand in the Chihuahuan desert. The town is surrounded by dying farms, many of them abandoned because of low prices for what they produce. Now the army has seized some of these farms and squats on them. People live off a few bars, some small stores, and the drug industry. Right now, at the moment the caravan arrives, the streets are empty and no one looks out a single window. The man cannot make out any faces in the video of the big, fine trucks with dark glass. He will never know who this convoy is guarding. He will never ask. Just as the Mexican army stationed in the town will never record the arrival of this force bristling with machine guns. Rumors say it is Chapo Guzman, a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, but it could be the ghost of Jesus Christ or the ancient frame of Adolf Hitler. To investigate such matters is a fatal decision.
There is a curious disconnect between the Mexican press and the U.S. press, one where the U.S. press pretends that reporting in Mexico is pretty much the way it is in the North, where the Mexican press considers American