Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [42]
We are sitting in the sun somewhere in the United States of America as he tosses out the tale of the priest and the story of the strange caravan of fine pickup trucks. He is hiding now with the family of a man who has connections in northern Chihuahua. But if this fact were known, the man’s relatives in Chihuahua would be kidnapped and possibly killed, his businesses seized. As we soak up the sun at this fine moment, Ascensión is in a state of siege. Four women have vanished and are probably murdered. The head of the bank there and his wife have been kidnapped and then returned in bad shape. Also, the bank has just been strafed by machine gun fire. In Palomas, a border town in the same county as Ascensión, two dead women have just been found in the dump—one of them pregnant.
The Mexican army is everywhere and can be ill tempered. Six months ago, I was with a friend who took a photograph of them in downtown Palomas, a block from the port of entry, and they came racing at us with machine guns. The town is dying. Few people cross from the United States to shop because of the violence. In the streets, children beg, their skin a gray cast that suggests malnutrition. Work has fled—the people-smuggling business has moved because of U.S. pressure in the sector, and so the town is studded with half-built or abandoned cheap lodgings for migrants heading north. Also there is an array of narco-mansions whose occupants have moved on to duck the current violence. And there are eyes everywhere. I walk down the dirt streets tailed by pickups with very darkly tinted windows. The biggest restaurant in town for tourists closes every day at 6 P.M.—get home before dark. Last year, the U.S. port of entry was accidentally strafed during a shoot-out in Palomas. There is more dust than life in the air of the town.
The Mexican army arrived in new numbers in April 2008 in northern Chihuahua, and the general in command held a meeting with the press to lay down some ground rules. He said there would almost certainly be a spate of robberies and rapes, but these were to be explained by the press as the evil deeds of poor Mexicans who came from the far south and who were migrating through the zone to reach the United States. Any questions?
As I sit in the sun with Emilio he tells of the current violence in the towns he once covered, and none of these incidents have been reported in the U.S. press or the Mexican press. Nor will they be.
He knows what is happening because he has retained his sources. And he knows that it will not be reported because to publish is to invite death.
He is one of eight children and was raised in Nuevo Casas Grandes, a small Chihuahuan town against the Sierra Madre. His father was a master bricklayer, his mother a housewife. His childhood was poverty. He always wanted to be a writer and worked on the high school paper, a weekly printed on a mimeograph machine.
The army has a post in his town. One day, a very pretty classmate named Rosa Saenz shows up, her hair and skin coated with mud. Her breasts have been sliced with blades and she has been stabbed fifty times. She has been raped. Her body is found in an abandoned chicken farm on the edge of town. Emilio sees her body in the back of a car in front of the police station, a vehicle dragged in as a monument to a quest for evidence. Two of her classmates are blamed for the murder. The police smash the testicles of one. The other flees, and when he returns much later, he is kind of crazy and never recovers. In the end, no one is charged with the crime. But everyone in the town knows the girl was raped and murdered by the army. And no one in the town says anything about it.
Emilio is thirteen years old.
This is part of basic Mexican schooling: submission. I remember once being in a small town