Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [6]
On Sunday, March 15, a violent dust storm sweeps the city. In the past thirty hours, there have been six reported murders. People fly kites all over the city.
There is a report of a woman who is beaten by her husband. And she flees for her life with her two daughters. He follows. Her Mercedes is found empty.
The daily paper reports that local citizens are complaining of traffic delays because streets get suddenly shut down as police investigate and do forensic investigations at kill sites.
Far down the road, long after the killings splattered across the city, the mayor of Juárez gives an interview. It is June and he says now that he knew in very early January that the killing season was coming—he does not explain how he came to possess this gift of prophecy. He says he was informed that the murders would begin on January 6, but actually, he learned they began January 5. No matter, because you see, the killings are really between two criminal organizations and do not actually involve the decent citizens of Juárez. He is the man in charge and he says, don’t worry.
There is a comforting system here. No one really knows who the bad people are in Juárez. Until they are murdered, and once they are murdered, then everyone knows they are bad because good people have nothing to fear. The mayor says only 5 innocents can be found among the 500 people that have been murdered so far. Which means the killers, whoever they are, have revealed to the city 495 bad people that no one really knew about until the gunfire unmasked them.
He does admit that Juárez suffers from “a lack of tranquility.”
Miss Sinaloa
She came to this place in the desert to live with the other crazy people under the giant white horse. She did not belong, but then neither did the caballo. The half-mile-long horse was sketched on the Sierra de Juárez with whitewash by a local architect in the late 1990s. He copied the design from the Uffington horse in Great Britain, a three-thousand-year-old creation deep from the dreamtime of neolithic people. He said he was doing it as an exercise in problem solving (this horse faces right, the original faces left and is three times as large) and as a way to draw attention to the beauty of the mountains. What he did not say is what some in the city whispered, that the horse was sponsored by Amado Carrillo, then head of the Juárez cartel.
The cartel begins in the mists of time, but with the flow of cocaine starting in the mid-1980s, it becomes a colossus. In the spring of 1993, the head of the cartel is murdered while on holiday in Cancún, and Amado Carrillo takes over. He has a genius for business, and soon ten to twelve billion a year is flowing into the cartel coffers. Carrillo becomes the organizational genius who brokers cocaine shipments for the other Mexican cartels, buys the Mexican government, and lands full-bodied jets full of cocaine at the Juárez airport. By the time he is murdered in 1997, he has taken the Mexican drug world from that age of the outlaw into the era of a multinational business.
But the era of Carrillo was the golden age of peace in Juárez, when murders ran two or three hundred a year and, at any one moment, fifteen tons of cocaine was warehoused in the city and waiting to go visit American noses.
There was a time when death made sense in Juárez. You died because you lost a drug load. Or you died because you had a drug load. Or you died because you tried to do a drug deal. Or you died because you were a snitch. Or you died because you were weak and a woman and it was dark and someone thought it would be fun to rape and kill you. There was a pleasant order to death, a ritual of federal police or state police or the army