Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [53]
At 5:21 P.M., the comandante of Grupo Delta dies in front of his home. His task force focuses on drug dealers and gangs. He is new to the job—the previous comandante of the unit was executed in January. A group of armed men machine-guns him. Then they leave, but soon return to rematar, to re-kill. Maybe they were worried their initial barrage was insufficient. Besides, they are in no hurry. It is broad daylight in the neighborhood, but the killers linger over the body for thirty minutes. An ambulance arrives, sees the killers, and is ordered over the radio to back off. The press arrives and also retreats. Finally, when it is safe and the assassins have left, the police arrive. That is the way it goes now in Juárez.
The day moves into night. In the dark hours near the Zaragoza Bridge, a major crossing point for trucks into the United States, five bodies are dumped. They have been tortured and strangled.
And then at the end of March 2008, the governor of Chihuahua suddenly emerges from his seclusion, thanks to some sessions with acupuncture that have unfrozen his face. He announces that every police element in the state has been infiltrated by drug people. He also says that federal experts are coming to cleanse the forces. A state legislator goes the governor one better. He says the economy of the state is completely overrun by narco-trafficking. But no matter, the governor promises that the violence will soon lessen.
The Mexican army arrives with yet more force on March 30-31, an additional two thousand men are added to those already patrolling the city. Before, the troops appeared unannounced. Now there is fanfare as the military begins the Joint Chihuahua Operation. For days, they have been noticed trickling into the city, and for days, the army has denied the presence of any new units. In addition, five or six hundred federal police agents descend. Juárez is now secure, that is the official word. The newspapers are suddenly empty of murders. The American press says order has been restored, which is odd in one way, since the slaughter in Juárez over the past three months has barely merited mention in the U.S. press. But of course, there have been quiet moments before, times when it seems Juárez wallows in a Quaker calm, and then, someone finds a death house and bodies come spewing out to make a lie of those moments of peace. Now, death goes underground in Juárez and citizens celebrate the return of normal times.
Six city cops are grabbed by the army when it discovers that the cops are broadcasting army movements. This last act is hardly strange since many cops feel the army is hunting and killing them. The six cops are tortured, pissed on, and eventually released by the army so that they can tell other officers of their lesson.
“If there are bad elements,” one cop with seventeen years on the streets tells the press, “then they should go after them, but those of us who are doing our jobs well and trying to do the best for the citizens, we do not deserve to be detained, nor arrested and accused of crimes. It is an injustice to us and our families who are filled with anxiety that they will arrest us or kill us.”
The vague “they” refers to the Mexican army sent to give Juárez peace and security. During March, forty-seven Juárez cops resign or request reassignment.
For over fifty years, Mexico has been reinventing law enforcement to pretend to fight drugs and placate the United States. Sinaloa in the 1940s was drug central and run by a former Mexican secretary of war and defense. In 1953, a flying school in Culiacan was closed to placate the United States, and yet by the late 1960s at least six hundred secret