Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [60]
Juárez is our city,
the best of the borders,
because it was born with courage
and built its history with great faith and hope.
A city official explains, “We feel that Juárez, despite all its problems has great riches . . . We don’t always realize that Juárez is a jewel of Mexico, and has many, many positive things that we should extol.”
The violence is explained. It turns out, according to a U.S. official deep in the drug war industry, that all the dead people are turning up simply because the Zetas have hooked up with the Juárez cartel to fight the Sinaloa cartel for the crossing. The official hopes that the Mexican army will now capture the heads of these various cartels. But, he cautions, such tasks are not simple.
“You cut the head off the mother snake,” he explains, “and you deal with the babies. Are they poisonous? Sure. But they are babies.”
The police arrest a teacher in one of the city’s private high schools. He’s also a lawyer. Noe Bautista Vega is twenty-four years old, and according to the authorities, he’s been playing hooky. They have him down for seven bank robberies.
A bishop announces that the leaders in the drug industry have been kind to the church and generous to their communities. The bishop also heads the Mexican Bishops Conference. He notes that the drug folk help out with public works—things like electricity, telecommunications, highways, and roads—in rural areas, where the government seldom leaves a mark. They also build churches.
“There have been some who have approached us and asked for orientation about how to change their lives,” he notes. And he says, they come “from all levels.”
A tapestry is woven every day so that there will be no loose threads. Cartels battle in the new fabric, the army restores order, bank robbers are punished, and bishops are reprimanded if they mess up the weave. Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora explains away the surge in violence by asserting that all the newly minted dead people simply indicate the waning of the cartels “and how these structures as we knew them are collapsing.” Good Friday, clearly, indicates this collapse. Twenty-three Mexicans were executed around the country that day. A musician performing in a town south of Mexico City died when someone opened up on the entire band as they played a set. Some unnamed soul also pitched a grenade into an army convoy on the Gulf coast. All this goes into the loom and is made safe and sane.
We are experts at walling things off. At the moment, the United States is busy building a wall. There will be at least seven hundred miles thrown up along the line, with more on the way. Already, this simple chore is getting complicated. At Columbus, New Mexico, the wall stretches now for miles—fifteen-foot steel poles a few inches apart and plopped into three feet of concrete. Now the cutting begins, an almost daily assault by hacksaws and acetylene and plasma torches. Also, government video cameras have captured images of men with huge ladders who then descend on the other side using bungee cords. In sections, the fence is settling and gaps form large enough for a person to squeeze through. Of course, this is to be expected. Eighty miles to the east in El Paso, facing Juárez, a team of men must make daily repairs in the fence built there.
This is all part of the tapestry. As Juárez spins into a future that cannot be admitted by either government, the wall goes up to contain the mystery of blood and drugs and gangs and gunfire that must be explained away even as they are cordoned off by stout ramparts.
The former captain of the city police, Sergio Lagarde Felix, goes down in a barrage on May 2. He had quit the force in January, the same month comandantes began being killed on the street and the month that the lists of dead cops and soon-to-be-dead cops were posted on the police memorial monument. About noon yesterday in front of an auto mechanics shop, he took a