Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [46]
A car rolls past with the heavy boom coming off the speakers.
A black column of smoke rises off some burning shack in the barrio and the fire engine screams past.
Here and there around the city, pink bands with black crosses are painted on the utility polls to memorialize the dead and missing girls—a row of such poles lines the highway near the crazy place where Miss Sinaloa healed her wounds.
But nothing really registers in this place, the city erases not simply lives, but also memory. And those who remember are the most likely of all to be erased.
Back in May 1993, back when violence was more focused in the city and everyone sensed a gray sky of power hanging over their lives and directing their fates, Javier Lardizabal was thirty-three years old. He worked as an investigator for the attorney general’s office of Chihuahua. He noticed things and turned in a report of links between the police and the drug dealers, even noticing that one major capo moved around Juárez with police bodyguards. Then, he disappeared—until November 16, 1994, when a bulldozer loading sand in the nearby dunes dug up his body. The driver was hardly surprised—already in his sand-loading toils, he’d discovered the former head of the national security office in Juárez.
Of course, that was then and now it is not even a memory as I sit on the curb by the warehouse of death, listening to dry leaves flutter down the pavement, and waiting for a new crop of corpses to come back into the light.
It goes like this at the new death house. On the first day, they announce one body. On the second day, three bodies. On the third day, one more body. Now it is a week in, the digging continues, and the tally seems to be nine bodies. But since heads are severed from bodies, the exact count may take a while. Besides, there is more of the patio to dig up.
No one really knows what is going on. The editor of one local daily estimates that his publication reports maybe 15 percent of the action. For example, fake cops have been setting up checkpoints in the city and seizing guns. In a forty-eight-hour period toward the end of February, a top cop is mowed down, four other residents are murdered, three banks are robbed, and, by a fluke, $1.8 million is seized by U.S. Customs because a driver from Kansas got turned back by Mexican Customs and reentered the United States. Also, the Mexican army bagged 4.5 tons of marijuana. All this is in the 15 percent that gets reported.
The street is always rutted and claws up the hillside. The girls are always clean, their hair shines, their clothes shout colors. And they walk with little plastic bags in their hands, small items bought at the local tienda. Their eyes stare straight ahead, and so the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old goddesses state their indifference to the world that chokes in the dust around them.
There is a way out, and to those who do not understand the world, this way seems like an appetite for fantasy. The cholos on the corner with their hard, empty eyes, close-cropped hair, baggy pants, and sullen faces have a dream. It is of exercising power through killing, having women because of money, wearing tattoos as billboards of their ambitions. And of dying, and dying young and without warning, and for reasons they can barely say or comprehend, something about honor, or turf, or something, just something that they really can’t say. There is no point is discussing an alternative future because this is a thing they cannot dream or feel or crave, so an alternative future is beyond words or meaning. All the nostrums of our governments—education, jobs, and sound diet—mean little here because