Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [50]
Everyone has a job, according to the authorities.
Every year, some mysterious form of accounting belches forth new economic statistics, and these numbers get bigger and bigger.
The city slowly crumbles, the dead clutter the calles.
And I keep going back and I have given up explaining my task to others. Or to myself.
Like so many people in the city, I am a slave to it and no longer question my bondage.
The new death house is about a mile from the old death house, the one uncovered in January 2004 that had twelve bodies buried in the patio. And about halfway between the two death houses is another house where the Mexican authorities staged a raid and found a lot of guns and bullets. It is a lovely two-story building with nice tile forming a frieze just under the roofline. The front door is open—it’s been smashed by a battering ram, but no one is at home at the moment. They’ve been taken to a frisky interrogation by the authorities. Two cameras stare at me—and I know they are operating because the wheel on the electric meter is spinning.
I reach down and pick up a big key made out of wood with little hooks for all those household keys. It has the name of a man and a woman burned into it, plus the phrase, “Remember Durango,” and two scorpions, the famous symbol of that Mexican state.
But the wooden key is not what catches my real notice, nor do the surveillance cameras matter much. It is the red Jeep Cherokee with dark, tinted windows and two burly men that suddenly shows up, slows, and rolls on. Then it comes by again, and the men do not smile. Across the street, I see a man standing next to a fine black Audi. He is on his cell phone, staring at me. In traffic, a few moments later, the red Cherokee again appears by my side. I peel off and return to the newly discovered death house.
I have been given notice, and now I feel at home.
Eventually, thirty-six bodies come out of the second death house. The Mexican forensic pathologist at the dig begs the newspapers not to publish her name or face, though the story reveals the name of the cadaver dog, “Rocco.” The neighbors say they noticed nothing and thought the occasional gatherings at the walled compound must be for fiestas of some sort. The bodies have a curious fate. The government will not reveal where they are, or permit families with missing relatives to view them.
In late February 2008, ten or twenty men with automatic rifles and black masks descended on a poor barrio of shacks in the hills above Juárez. The area is home to men and women who work in the maquiladoras. One man, a former municipal cop in his early thirties, runs a little store that sells beans, bread, and milk. That day, the armed men tortured him until he revealed who supplied him with the drugs he also sold out of his little store. He could not have been really surprised by the visit—after all, he’d been warned in two phone calls to stop selling drugs. The armed men took him to where his supplier made concrete blocks. There they beat up some workers until finally, one man came out of a building and said, “I am the man you are looking for.” The armed men then took the two captives off a short ways and executed them—everyone in the barrio heard the shots. All this action was hard to miss since it happened around noon on a sunny day.
Now I am here at the kill site. A woman stares at me and shouts, “Who are you looking for?” and from her tone, I don’t think she is trying to be helpful. As I rolled in, I could feel the eyes of loitering cholos burn into my hide.
So I leave.
But I have a question. If the violence in Juárez is simply a battle between big cartels to control this crossing into the United States, then why are murders happening all over the city to small-time drug sellers like the man who ran the little grocery in this poverty-stricken neighborhood?
After the