Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [61]
There was another killing of a man thirty-five years of age. He took six, mainly in the head. He is the same man as the former captain, only in disguise in an earlier report. That can happen here, this shedding of years, this variation in the nature of one’s death. This is the place of possibility and it has escaped the stranglehold of simple facts.
They find them in the bright light of morning in late May 2008. Five men wrapped in blankets. The blankets are made in China since global trade has wiped out the Mexican serape industry. Two of the men have been decapitated and their severed heads rest in plastic bags. Beside them is a sign indicating that they died because they are “dog fuckers.”
Killing people is fun. There is a feeling of power in slaughtering other human beings. And for many in Juárez, a feeling of power is a rare thing. The men beat their women, and that helps, but it is hardly the same rush of exhilaration that comes from killing another person. If wife beating were really a decent substitute for slaughter, then murder would be all but absent in Mexico. But this is not the case.
No one knows how many assassins live and thrive in Juárez. There are an estimated five hundred street gangs—but our knowledge of these facts is limited since the city police’s expert on gangs was executed in January 2008 at the beginning of a killing season that is humming along at more than one hundred corpses a month. Still, assume there are five hundred gangs. Assume that full membership requires murder, be conservative and say there are only ten members in each gang, and then you have five thousand young and frisky killers. To be sure, the Aztecas, one premier gang, have three thousand members, but why exaggerate the number of killers? Let’s just say five thousand. This tally ignores the world floating about the gangs, the land of police and soldiers and cartels, where many other murderers find wages and niches.
You have two choices. Either you’re going to be straight, get that job in an American factory in Juárez, work five and a half days a week for sixty or seventy bucks, going to do this even though no one can live on such a wage, going to do this even though you know the turnover in the plants is 100 to 200 percent a year, going to do this even though as you were coming up in the barrios you saw the men and women slowly devoured by the plants and then noticed that around age thirty, they were tossed away like old junk, yeah, you’re going to do this, you’re going to be straight.
Or you are going to take that ride, join a gang, learn to flash the sign, do little errands for guys with more power, get some of that money that flows through certain hands, snort some powder, and have the women eating out of your hand for a few hours in a discotheque, and you’ll wear hip-hop clothing, have a short, burr haircut, never smile, stuff a pistol in your oversized britches. A big SUV rolls down the calle, you hop in, the windows are darkly tinted, and the machine prowls the city like a shark with its fanged mouth agape, and oh, it is so sweet when you squeeze the trigger and feel the burst run free and wild into the night air, see the body crumple and fall like a rag doll, roll on into the black velvet after midnight, and there’ll be a party, fine girls and white powder, and people fear you, and the body falls, blood spraying, and you feel like God even though you secretly stopped believing in God some time ago, and they tell you that you will die, that your way of living has no future, and you see the tired men and women walking the dirt lanes after a shift in the factory, plastic bags of food dangling from their hands, and you caress the gun stuffed in your waistband, and life is so good and the killing is fun and everyone knows