Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [54]
More recently, a series of agencies have tackled drugs. Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), trained by the CIA, was supposed to eliminate drug merchants and radicals in the early 1970s. By the 1980s, its staff either worked for or led cartels, including the one in Juárez. In the mid-1990s, a new force under a Mexican drug czar flourished, until it was discovered that the czar worked for the Juárez cartel and so did many of his agents. It was dissolved.
Under President Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), a new incorruptible force, Fiscalía Especializada en Atención de Delitos contra la Salud (FEADS), was created. One part deserted, became the Zetas, and functionally took over the Gulf cartel in the early days of the new century. In 1997, an organized crime unit was formed to tackle the cartels, and at the same moment in Mexico City, the agents of yet an earlier squad assigned to fight drugs were found dead in a car trunk. FEADS was finally dissolved in 2003 when it was found to be hopelessly corrupt. Under President Felipe Calderón, yet a new federal mutation emerged—AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigación). Its head was murdered in the spring of 2008. His dying words to his killer were, “Who sent you?” The government later determined the hit was done by the Sinaloa cartel, with the killers led by a former officer in the agency.
Now all hopes rest in the Mexican army. In over a half century of fighting drugs, Mexico has never created a police unit that did not join the traffickers. Or die.
A teenage girl from Juárez crosses into El Paso with six large cans of hominy and jalapeño peppers. U.S. Customs finds that the containers hold twenty-five pounds of marijuana.
Jonathan Lopez Gutierrez heads a forty-year-old charity, Emmanuel Ministries, that runs a shelter for one hundred children in Juárez. He crosses from El Paso on March 19 with a van full of roofing shingles. U.S. Customs finds six .223-caliber high-powered rifles and a .50-caliber semiautomatic under the roofing material. He confesses that since June 2007, he’s brought at least fifty weapons into Mexico.
There is punishment for police failure in Juárez. The cop assigned to guarding the monument of fallen officers, the man on duty when hooded men came in a pickup truck and left a funeral wreath with the names of recently murdered cops and of the seventeen cops they planned to murder, well, he is arrested for thirty-six hours. And then charged with negligence. Of course, he is probably simply grateful to be alive. Also, the city police go before a local judge and ask him to stop the army from torturing them. The final kill tally for March hits 117, with the government figuring 60 percent of killings as gang violence over retail drugs.
The government offers up a scorecard on murder so the hometown fans can keep track. It goes like this and insists on a drumbeat: For the year 2008, there are 211 killings through March 31, for all of 2007 there were 301 killings, 2006 had 253, 2005 had 227, 2004 had 204, 2003 had 186, 1995 had 294, the year I first find my Juárez, as everyone will in good time, and baby won’t ya follow me down?
The forty-five bodies found in the two death houses are difficult to assign since no one knows the exact year of their murders. So are the twenty people, according to official reports, who have been snatched from the streets and who have not returned. The dead and missing linger like bitter wine on the tongue of the city. Besides, no one knows where these remains have been moved—the authorities remain silent about the secret new bone yard—so fuck ’em, the dead, and the officials that won’t let us embrace our dead.
But now that the military patrols the city, all is well. On March 31, the Juárez paper captures the new calm: The police fear the army, two dead bodies are found, tortured, strangled, with bags covering their heads, the military arrests five and confiscates drugs, there is an assault on a perfume