Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [75]
That is how we survive.
If we could truly remember, we would not be able to go on. And if we truly forget, we will have a small patch of bliss until that bullet, and it is possibly already arcing through the air, slams into our skull.
But the city itself goes on murdering with or without our memory.
We can only endure the place that kills by pretending the place will not kill us.
She goes into the room, her skin fragrant, and men’s eyes light up and their lips say Miss Sinaloa. She is offered a drink, there is a line of white powder on the table top.
Dead Reporter Driving
I am sitting in the Hotel San Francisco in Palomas almost four years to the day since the moment Emilio Gutiérrez destroyed his life. The small restaurant has eight tables, the walls host an explosion of plastic flowers screaming yellow, red, and pink. Carved wooden mallard heads spike out as hat racks for Stetsons. In the lobby is a large statue of San Francisco, and in his hands and at his feet illegal immigrants have left handwritten messages and offerings. The tile floor is the color of flesh. Just five blocks away, the poor plunged through the line and headed into El Norte—none of the notes are very recent. The river of misery has changed course for the moment. Music floats through the air, Bob Dylan singing “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”
The notes whisper of people in flight: “Father, help us all who pass as wet-backs. Help us Our Father. Bless us all who think of You, who trust in You.
“And I ask You to bless and help my mother, my father and me and my brothers and sisters and all of my family. In Your hands we place our good luck to pass ALIVE. Adios Our Father.”
Or a note says: “Please I ask You with all my heart look after and protect my husband that he pass safely. Amen.”
A Bible lies open, and someone has dropped this plea on the page:
God bless us and protect us
along the way
Yonathan
Manuel
Tomaz
Yumbo
Graciela
Norma
Olinda
Guide us on a good road
and protect us.
There are no customers here, just these prayers from the height of the migration two years ago and the dust outside in the street.
The walls in the lobby are murals of an imaginary Sierra Madre in an imaginary Mexico. A huge buck deer stands in an alpine meadow, an eagle swoops down on a lake, a caballero in a sequined suit stares with love at the beautiful senorita. In the kitchen, short, dark women chop vegetables for salsa. Their movements are very slow and their faces blank.
Across the street, in a rundown hotel for migrants going north, is where Emilio’s life began to end. No one here remembers. Within an hour or two of a killing, there is no one left to describe the murder but the flies buzzing over the drying blood on the ground. This loss of memory is not because of cowardice. It is wisdom that comes with survival. When some townspeople witnessed a night of kidnappings in 2008, familiar faces were recognized. But no one would name these faces. As I leave the hotel and restaurant, Johnny Cash is singing:
You can run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Run on for a long time
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
Sooner or later God’ll cut you down
On January 29, 2005, six soldiers came to the hotel across the street, took food off people’s plates, and robbed the customers of their money and jewelry. Emilio got calls in Ascensión, and so he phoned the local police chief and the manager of the hotel. He called the army also, but as is its custom, the army refused to answer any questions from the press. Then he filed a brief article about the incident, one of three he wrote in that period noting similar actions by the army in the area.
That is how he destroyed his life.
Late at night on February 8 of that same year, Colonel Idelfonso Martinez Piedra calls Gutiérrez at home, explains that he is “the boss,” and orders him to come