Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [79]
I think if I ran into some local criminologists, say, on my way to a bar, I would kill them with my bare hands in order not to hear their explanations. I have dreamed of burning the newspapers in both Juárez and El Paso to the ground so that they could write no more stories about mysterious armed commandos or drug cartels that are having a big dust-up in the city, cartels that have not made a single public utterance but somehow are apparently well known to the press and whose motives and members and actions are transparent to those toiling in newsrooms. I have also considered torching the nearest DEA office since it offers battlefield reports on the killings in the city without visiting the battlefield.
Imagine a city with five hundred corpses and not a single shred of evidence explaining their slaughter. No one even knows where those people from the death houses have gone. This last thing gnaws on me. It seems reasonable to me that someone—say, a newspaper reporter or maybe one of the local intellectuals who coat the op-ed pages of the paper—might ask the powers that be just what they have done with forty-five stiffs that came out of the soil of the city.
But I am not bitter. I like heat. And I am focused, like a monk in a Zen garden, on the sheer physical feel of things. I take my bodies one at a time. I do not question why they have been killed. I do not wonder who the killers are.
It is the twenty-fourth day of June, the clock is running out on the first six months of death, and so far 518 have died, 16 of them women. Now I wait for an arbitrary time span, the first half of the year, to end, and an arbitrary measure of life—murders in Juárez—to be tallied.
Like the murdered, I have stopped learning. Yesterday afternoon, in the dull heat two guys entered an insurance office. They left an employee dead. A reporter leaves a bar and takes twelve rounds. The owners of junkyards are being kidnapped for ransom. They complain to officials. The relative of a U.S. congressman is kidnapped and released when the money is paid. The press totes things up and announces that 28 percent of all the executions in Mexico happen in Juárez.
The old man is walking his dog in his neighborhood in Juárez. Thieves keep breaking into his place to steal the copper pipes. Just a week or so ago, someone blew up a car right in the front of the house. So he and the old lady seldom leave the house together. Someone must stand guard. Just down the street lives an ex-cop. The old man walking his dog sees a white van pull up full of armed guys, and they drag the ex-cop out of his home, and then one of the armed guys says, “No es él, it’s not him,” and they let him go.
On June 21, twenty-one people are murdered in drug killings in Chihuahua, thirty-eight in all of Mexico. Eighteen of the deaths are in Juárez. On June 26, the fifth top commander of the federal police to be slaughtered in thirteen months goes down while having lunch in Mexico City. The killer escapes. Witnesses notice a man videotaping the murder. Then walking calmly away. On June 28 in Juárez, four men are executed in the afternoon. Earlier in the day, a woman’s body was found—she was killed inside a burrito café. Another man also took a barrage in his home, plus two fragmentation grenades.
A city policeman explains to American radio listeners how he gets to work: Never obey a stop sign or a red light, because if you do, killers will pull up beside you and pump you full of bullets. This matter-of-fact account purrs across the airwaves on National Public Radio, a lonely message from a forgotten city.
Esther Chávez by June is looking to build a second women’s shelter near downtown. Her current facility on the edge of the city