Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [69]
Something has changed and yet nothing has changed. His life has spilled out beyond his body and now has become the life of the city.
“I will tell you horrible things.”
I am in Shadowland, where things come briefly into view and then disappear again, and even the memory of what has been glimpsed is shaky and indistinct. By May 2008, over four hundred people have died. In five and a half months, the murders in the city exceed the number of the entire previous year.
One weekend in the middle of May, three men are taken from a nice apartment complex and turn up dead a few hours later. They are bound and gagged and show signs of torture. The family of one man, Carlos Camacho, says the army took the men. The wife of another man says the army took the men. And this is the first time the newspaper prints what has been on many lips.
Also, there is a story that says reporters track police radio in order to cover the murders, but that now, for the first time, voices are coming over these police channels and over their cell phones, warning them to slow down, to not arrive at the killing scene just yet. Because it is not finished.
The problem is that information only comes in fragments. You learn someone is breaking into police channels and issuing warnings to the press. And then you sit back and you think, Yes, but the report does not say who is breaking into these bursts of police communications. And then you sit back and you say, “But wait a minute, how do I know any of this is happening since the press in Mexico is always cowed and often prints deliberate fables?” And then, you realize how much of what you know is barely on the edge of fact.
When the three men (or more—one report says that the apartment complex has seven units and all the men were taken from each unit) vanish into the hands of what the surviving family members insist is an army unit, the newspaper carefully gives the make and color and year of every car in the parking lot. Why? Because in Juárez, it is a code for narcos, and this code is believed because in Juárez, good cars mean illegal income. But does it? And if it does, is the code accurate in this instance? You don’t get to know. The papers famously drop stories after a single mention, and the follow-up on foot can be difficult because survivors have a way of falling silent once the lethal air of the city again fills their lungs.
A long time ago, maybe two months or so before the boys vanished from the apartment complex, two women went to the police and reported that their boyfriends had disappeared. The women and their guys were all from Sinaloa. Then the mystery was solved. The three guys were in the tender care of the Mexican army—suddenly the paper contained a photo of them standing in the sun, looking a little worse for wear, and bracketed by soldiers. Turns out one of the boys allowed that he’d done about sixty executions in Juárez, and the other fessed up to twenty or twenty-five. And then the story vanished. Nothing more is heard of the girls or the boys or their frisky talent for killing.
For a brief moment over the weekend when Willy Moya takes a round in the skull at 4 A.M. in the parking lot of one of his establishments, the silence lifts. Moya, it turns out, lived in El Paso. His ex-wife talks to the newspaper on the record and says her ex-husband was alarmed by the level of violence in Juárez. And then the next day, at the funeral, a family member said, “Perhaps the family needs to know what happened in order to have a little peace and to see those responsible for this disgrace and grief punished by the authorities, but we know that this is not going to happen.”
But no name is given. The family has reentered Shadowland.
And we go back to Shadowland, the place where only fragments of fact surface and those fragments are always suspect. Just where