Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [56]
He seems to sink into himself as he rolls through the history and nature of the business, how each place has a man in charge, and how this person controls all the smuggling and killing and it has always been that way, and yet this tidal wave of blood is without any precedent and so something is new.
“The plaza,” he offers, “belongs to the Juárez cartel, and it seems like Chapo Guzman wants this area. The army drives around, but they don’t do anything. There are a few cops here, but when the hit men come, it is like a thousand against ten.” He suddenly becomes animated and imitates the burst of an AK-47. He is fumbling now, reaching out for conventional explanations—a cartel war, the army, hit men—things that worked in the past, but this is not the past.
He almost sighs and he says, “I think the government is causing more insecurity . . . because the army does nothing. There is a shoot-out and the army does not come because they say they don’t have orders to get close. I don’t know if the army is killing or the hit men, but whoever it is, we think the government is behind it.”
I leave the office and now I stand three blocks from the church in front of a big disco named Los Tres Amigos. The padre’s words ring in my head—“There was a person taken from here and he saw the faces of his kidnappers and they said, ‘We don’t care, we’re going to kill you, anyway,’ but he escaped and he knows that some of them are from here.” The Tres Amigos features a logo with a frog, crocodile, and parrot—all three animals slang terms for cocaine. The man who saw the faces and escaped owned this place, and he vanished during Carnival in early March. The doors of the business still tout a big party on the lip of Lent.
The man is okay. He was left alone for a spell, broke a glass, cut his plastic handcuffs, and fled. He now lives in Phoenix. The padre is okay for the moment. He believes no one will kill a priest.
A week after our conversation, a man crawls into the U.S. port of entry at Columbus. His body is burns. Someone had spent a week pouring acid on his skin and applying hot irons, all this while the padre and I talked about the slaughter.
The army claims it has killed fourteen in a shoot-out in early April in Parral in southern Chihuahua and one of the dead is from a town, Villa Ahumada, a little south of Juárez. At the funeral, two hundred people gather. And then the military blocks off the burying ground and helicopters hover overhead and command the mourners to hit the ground. Soldiers search the cars of the grieving; they also open the casket and search it. This goes on for three hours. Children are allowed to leave, and they stand outside the cemetery crying for their parents. The body is finally buried at 7:30 P.M. They are searching for nothing. They are delivering terror.
The mother of the dead boy cannot be found. Her house is empty, the lights are on, and the doors are open, the contents are in disarray. She is somewhere out there under the protection of the Mexican army, or at least the last time she was seen she was with them.
A block from a death house, and the city hums with its little bits of business. The faces of the people are about work and bills and Friday night and that first cup of coffee in the morning. It is the same a block from a murder. The killings are tiny tears in a huge tapestry called Juárez. When I walk across the bridge into El Paso, there are no murders and Juárez becomes a mural covered with dust that lacks events.
Success has come to Juárez. Thanks to the army’s vigilance, there are only 52 murders in the month of April, a 55 percent drop from March. Officially. Of these murders, there are zero arrests. This brings the score for the first four months of 2008 to 262 dead and compares with 101 for the same period in 2007, 70 in 2006, 71 in 2005, and