Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [7]
Now, the world has changed. Since the first of January 2008, El Paso, the sister city of Juárez and just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, has had one murder in two months. In the first two months of the year, Juárez has officially had ninety-five, and there is likely some slippage in these numbers. Two of the dead were Juárez police commanders, the one shot twenty-two times—a third commander somehow survived and was taken to the bridge (according to rumor, in a tank, but actually in a Humvee—every fact in this city soon succumbs to magical fraud) and transferred to an ambulance and then to an El Paso hospital, where he was guarded by local and federal agents. Now he has vanished and left no forwarding address. As of February 2008, besides the people murdered in the Juárez area, another three hundred have died in Mexico, also mainly in drug killings. Thirty thousand Mexican soldiers are said to be fighting the drug world. By 2009, there will also be twenty thousand U.S. Border Patrol agents on the line facing down Mexico. Just two governments taking care of business.
Just yesterday, a friend came upon the body of a cholo who had been executed and left on the street. This killing did not even merit the attention of the newspapers. But then, outside of a few mentions, the U.S. media paid little notice of the slaughter until early 2009, when it became clear that neither the change of the calendar year nor the presence of the Mexican army had done anything to decrease the death toll as the months passed. True, the commanders at Fort Bliss in El Paso declared Juárez off limits to soldiers because they might get hurt. But like almost everything else that happens in this city, the response has been silence. Amado Carrillo had a thorough-bred racehorse he named Silencio, Silence. It is a good trait to have in this place.
She was beautiful and they called her “Miss Sinaloa.” She was a teenager when the white horse was created in the late 1990s. At that time, Miss Sinaloa knew nothing of giant horses painted on mountains, nor of the cartels or of the crazy place here in the desert. She came here very recently to visit her sister, sometime in December 2005. She stayed some months and then went home to Sinaloa, the Mexican state on the Pacific coast that is the mother of almost all the major players in the drug industry in Mexico. She was very beautiful. I know this because Elvira is telling me everything as I stand in the wind with the sand whipping around me.
Elvira is heavy with a coarse sweater, pink slacks, dark skin, and cropped hair with a blonde tint dancing through it. She is one of fifteen caretakers at the crazy place—the asylum in the desert—and receives fifty dollars a week for cooking three meals a day, six days a week. A man straddles a bicycle by her side, a boy in red overalls carrying a pink purse stares, and sitting on the ground is the lean and hungry dog of the campo. Smoke fills the air from a trash fire behind the asylum where they all work. The facility—a concrete block wall with various rooms inside—hosts a hundred inmates. A doctor drops by on Sunday to check on the health of the crazy people, and the whole operation is sponsored by a radio evangelist in Juárez, a man all the inmates call El Pastor.
Every five days, the staff takes the blankets from the inmates, washes them, and then comes out beyond the walls and clumps them on creosote or yucca plants for drying. They now huddle in the wind like a herd of beasts—green, red, blue, violet, and one is gray with a tiger and her kitten on it. My mind spins back to the mid-1990s, when Amado Carrillo ran Juárez and for a spell was leaving bodies wrapped in tiger blankets. He was rumored to have a private zoo with a tiger, one he fed with informants, but