Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [8]
Elvira explains how people wind up in her care: “There are many brought here because they tried to stab a father, or they are addicts, or they have been robbed or assaulted and broken forever. Many of the women here have been raped and lost their minds forever. There is a thirty-four-year-old woman here who saw her family assaulted and then she was raped and lost her mind.”
She says this in a calm voice. It is simply life. The inmates consume twelve kilos of beans a day, she continues on, and could I bring them some frijoles?
The wind blows, the dust chokes, the white horse watches, and suddenly, Elvira starts talking about Miss Sinaloa, her exact phrase, this Miss part, yes, Miss Sinaloa she says, a beauty queen who came to Juárez.
“Once,” she says with pride, “we had a very beautiful woman, Miss Sinaloa. She was here about two years ago. The municipal police brought her here. She was twenty-four years old.”
And then Elvira takes flight about her beautiful hair that hung down to her ass, and how very, very white Miss Sinaloa’s skin was, oh, so white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and replaced by elegant tattooed arcs to echo the hair. The police had found her wandering around on the street one morning. She had been raped and she had lost her mind. Finally, Elvira explains, her family came up from Sinaloa and took her home.
The asylum facing the giant horse is not a place in Juárez where beautiful women with white skin tend to stay. Just down the road to the east is La Campana, the alleged site of a mass grave where Louis Freeh, then head of the FBI, and various Mexican officials gathered in December 1999 to excavate bodies. That story slowly went away because the source was a local comandante who had fled to the United States, a man known on the streets of Juárez as El Animal. And he could produce very few bodies, basically only a handful, and each and every one of them he had personally murdered. The burying ground itself was owned by Amado Carrillo. One of his killers, who worked there, now teaches English to rich students in a Juárez private high school. Of course, he continues to take murder contracts between classes. And then to the southeast of La Campana is the Lote Bravo, where dead girls have been dumped since the mid-1990s. All this history comes flowing back to me as I hear the story of Miss Sinaloa.
I have been coming to this city for thirteen years, and naturally, I have, like everyone here, an investment in the dead. And the living. Here is a story, and like all stories here, like Miss Sinaloa, it tantalizes and floats in the air, and then vanishes. A poor Mexican woman in El Paso wants drug treatment for her young teenaged son, but she cannot afford the facilities in the United States, so she checks him into a clinic in Juárez. A few days, later, he is back in the United States and housed in the very hospital where the Mexican comandante who survived assassination was briefly housed. The boy has been raped and has a torn rectum.
Then the tale erases itself from consciousness.
Jane Fonda cares, so does Sally Field, and so both have been to Juárez to protest the murder of women. The Vagina Monologues has been staged here, also. Over the past ten years or so, four hundred women have been found murdered, the majority of them victims of husbands and lovers and hardly mysterious cases. This number represents 10 or 12 percent of the official kill rate. Two movies have been made about the dead women. Focusing on the dead women enables Americans to ignore the dead men, and ignoring the dead men enables the United States to ignore the failure of its free-trade schemes, which in Juárez are producing poor people and dead people faster than any other product. Of course, the murders of the women in Juárez are hardly investigated or solved. Murders in Juárez are hardly