Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [51]
The giant flagpole was the creation of a Mexican president in the 1990s, a matter of national pride in the spot where his nation confronts its rich and powerful neighbor. This moment of patriotism has now been turned to other uses.
Killers seem to like this place, the linear park around the giant flagpole down by the river. Since 1997, at least fourteen bodies have been dumped here, including the former cop who ran the small store and sold drugs, and his friend who made concrete blocks and supplied him with drugs. The neighborhood facing the park is middle class, and signs ask residents to keep the park clean. At one point, a prominent lawyer who lived there posted his own sign asking people not to dump bodies or garbage. In October, he was executed in his home. A month later, one daughter was killed, and then, in the funeral procession for her, another daughter, a nurse from El Paso, was killed. The authorities blamed the murders on domestic problems.
For me, it is a piece of memory, as are other spots in the city. In the summer of 1997, when Amado Carrillo died, there was a spate of murders in Juárez as a new arrangement of power evolved. On August 3 of that year, two well-dressed men entered the Max Fim restaurant. When they left, six men were dead. Another killing happened nearby at Jeronimo’s, a popular bar and restaurant. Dozens died that month, and then the city calmed and everyone tried to return to business as usual.
I sit in a sushi parlor, the one whose owner was the former head of police and now faces serious charges in El Paso for running drugs. In 1997, another player in the drug world died two tables away from me. The restaurant is upscale, something that seems airlifted out of midtown Manhattan. The blank faces of the diners betray no awareness of the past. In a sense, it never happened.
History erases itself in Juárez. The newspapers cast out their photographs of murders, and the clippings vanish, also. Police records disappear. In the end, there is a spicy tuna roll on a small plate, some soy sauce, and the wind moving dust down the streets.
For years, people have sought a single explanation of violence in Juárez. The cartels are handy as an explanation. Serial killers also help in explaining dead women. The hundreds of street gangs also can be pulled off the shelf to retire any question. As can mass poverty, uprooted families that migrate here from the interior, corrupt cops, corrupt government, and on and on.
We insist that power must replace power, that structure replaces an earlier structure. And we insist that power exists as a hierarchy, that there is a top where the boss lives and a bottom where the prey scurry about in fear of the boss. Also, we believe the state truly owns power and violence, and that is why any nonstate violence by people earns them the name of outlaws.
Try for a moment to imagine something else, not a new structure but rather a pattern, and this pattern functionally has no top or bottom, no center or edge, no boss or obedient servant. Think of something like the ocean, a fluid thing without king and court, boss and cartel. Give up all normal ways of thinking. We live in a time where fantasies focus on omnipotent authorities. We think someone reads our mail, listens in on our conversations, watches us from spy satellites, stalks us with computers. As a mirror image of this, we imagine underground networks of power—cartels, terrorist organizations, mafias, rogue intelligence agencies, and the like. These illusions are teddy bears we clutch in the dark hours, comforts that enable us to sleep.
Two towers fall.
Fifteen to twenty million people enter the country illegally.
The drugs reach Main Street on schedule.
The largest war machine in the history of the world grinds to a halt in the sands of Mesopotamia.
Violence courses through Juárez like a ceaseless wind, and we insist it is a battle between cartels, or between the state and the