Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [9]
They found heads sitting on the floor of the morgue, bodies without heads, bodies tossed willy-nilly into mass graves. DNA also failed them at times because the local forensic talent had boiled some of the bodies of the girls, a cooking technique that destroys DNA. At least three families, they discovered, had gotten the bodies of their loved ones back, had buried them, and now had to be told they’d been given the bodies of strangers.
But then, the local authorities can be a bit of a problem. The former police chief was busted in January 2008 for setting up a dope deal in El Paso. Two cops disappeared a week ago. Four days later, a vagrant discovered a shopping bag downtown with the uniform of one of the cops—it had his name, blood stains, and bits of duct tape, this latter being a favored shackling device of locals when they execute people. So apparently, there is a naked policeman wandering the city.
And then, there is the tale of Miss Sinaloa. She goes to a party with police, and then after the fun, the police bring her to the crazy place. A fair-skinned woman is a treat for street cops. When the girls began vanishing from Juárez in 1993 and then reappearing at times as raped corpses or simply bones, the local cops referred to them as las morenitas—the little dark ones—because the favored prey came from the poor barrios where young women who slave in American-owned factories for next to nothing live. Miss Sinaloa hails from a different world.
But there is always one enduring fact in Juárez: There are no facts. The memories keep shifting. Miss Sinaloa is a beauty who comes to party in Juárez and is raped. Miss Sinaloa is a beauty who comes to party in Juárez and consumes enormous amounts of cocaine and whiskey and becomes crazy, so loca, that the people call the police and the cops come and take Miss Sinaloa away and they rape her for days and then dump her at the crazy place in the desert. She has long hair and is beautiful, and a doctor examines her and there is no question about the rapes. She has bruises on her arms and legs and ribs.
She is now almost a native of the city.
Dead Reporter Driving
There is a man driving fast down the dirt road leading to the border. A rooster tail of dust marks his passage. He is very frightened, and his fourteen-year-old son sits beside him in silence. The boy is that way—very bright, yet very quiet. They are unusually close. The father has raised him as a single parent since he was four after the relationship with the mother did not work out.
Now, father and son are fleeing to the United States. Back in their hometown of Ascensión, Chihuahua, men with automatic rifles are searching for them. These men are soldiers in the Mexican army and intend to kill the father, and perhaps the son, too. As the man drives toward the U.S. port of entry, they are ransacking his house. No one in the town will dare to lift a hand. The newspaper will not cover this event.
The man knows these facts absolutely.
His name is Emilio Gutierrez Soto, and he is the reporter covering this part of Mexico and that is why he is a dead man driving. He passes an ejido, one of the collective villages created by the Mexican revolution as the answer to the land hunger of the poor. Once, the army came here, beat up a bunch of peasants, and terrorized the community under the guise of fighting a war on drugs. The peasants never filed any complaints, because they are tied