Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [82]
And no one here is threatening to murder him, or calling on the phone with scary messages.
El Pastor is reconciled to death and being reunited with his Savior. After all, he has it all planned—the huge barbeque, lots of meat, music, and song.
He can handle death because it means he will be with Jesus.
It’s just that when the car comes, and they take him away to be murdered, he hopes they do not torture him.
He hopes they will not apply fire to parts of his body or stick in an ice pick and run it along the bone in a local ritual called bone tickling. And should they desire to cut off his head, as some do, he hopes that at this point, he is dead. He also hopes he is dead when they decide to cut off his hands or feet.
He can handle being murdered.
He will then be with the Lord.
But the torture part, that makes him very upset.
We have the numbers. Since January 1994, there have been 3,955 murders in Juárez. Since January 2008, there have been 540 murders. It is the last day of June, and there is still time. The numbers that give us comfort, those dates and tallies, these numbers are still tumbling in. We can write them in columns on white paper and install order in our minds.
But still, that door must be opened.
On the last day of June, bees attack seven people. On the last day of June, a fifty-four-year-old woman pulls into the parking lot of a convenience store after withdrawing eleven thousand pesos from a bank (found on the body) and is shot dead with ten rounds. On the last day of June, a man says his wife and children are missing. On the last day of June, the total number of murders for the month hits 139, and the total for the year reaches 541. Or 543, depending on which paper one reads. The numbers blur now. No one knows how many people have been snatched, nor what became of them. Just as no one knows where to file the corpses from the two houses of death.
On the last day of June, I see and taste and feel the fully mature culture of death. Death from low wages, death from drug deals, death from unknowable wars, death from going to the bank, death from riding down the street, death from every direction. Death is blamed on all the factories that have brought the poor to the city where they now live in a carpet of slums. Death is blamed on the drug industry that has brought violence to the city as heavily armed men move white powder and billions of dollars. Death is blamed on the Americans who want cheap goods and so create warrens of slaves, who want strong drugs and so create cartels of machine guns. It has taken decades to transform a sleepy border town into a city of death, but now the work is done and the thing has a life of its own and that life is murder. Death has aged and is now the bony hand on the shoulder, the culture when the sun rises and when the sun sets.
The city is fiestas, dust, cantinas, discos, and people savoring the weekends and dreaming of the nights when love will find them. There is song in the air. The culture of death becomes a life. The slaughtered die fast, the rest grind out time in dust, poverty, and bouts of terror. Only six months ago, everyone was horrified when forty people were slaughtered in one month. Now a hundred a month seems acceptable because in the culture of death . . . life goes on.
In March, according to a poll, 90 percent of the people of Juárez supported the army. By the end of June, 30 percent of the local people, according to a poll, said the military occupation of the city was of little or no consequence. The general in charge said that those who questioned the army’s success were either