Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [93]
He looked up at the mountains where the giant Uffington horse spread Celtic mystery over the Chihuahuan desert. Some days the wind blew and the sand came up and hid the mountain. But there were times, wonderful times, when the stars came out at night, and the sun fell down like honey on his mission.
These were the wonder days for El Pastor. He had nothing, the hut did not even have a real roof, just canvas spread over the adobe walls. He was living the life of the early Christians, and I’m sure his soul was full of Jesus and his mind full of anxiety.
He noticed that a giant iguana had been sketched on the mountain in the same manner and scale as that of the Uffington horse. Everyone knew and whispered that the big horse was the gift of Amado Carrillo, the head of the Juárez cartel, to the mountain. And of course, El Pastor knew that the big iguana was the symbol of the Juárez cartel, a kind of trademark, and having it on the mountain told everyone that the city belonged to them.
Sometimes during the day, and also at night, El Pastor saw helicopters landing right by the iguana.
So one day, he went up there to see what was going on.
Men with guns told him he did not belong there and that he should not come back. Perhaps the fact the he was a man of God spared him more than a verbal warning.
No matter, El Pastor went back to his work and prayer and eventually built the compound that became the temporary home of Miss Sinaloa when she lost her mind through the rapture of a party with cocaine, whiskey, and rape.
The giant iguana itself became like the dust storms and hot days, something so commonplace as to be beneath notice. Just part of the natural landscape of this city of the future.
I have this kind of vision as I eat dust in the wind. All the dead since January 1 will gather in this special place. They will sit in rows of chairs just as the dead sit in rows in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. There will be a thousand or more separate tales of how they loved things and enjoyed life and how they were murdered and who murdered them. Even the forty-five corpses recently dug from death houses will be there to share their stories. Perhaps the governor and the police forces and the army officers will attend to hear the stories of the unofficial Juárez.
I have not chosen this spot for the performance, it has demanded to be the venue. It earned its place in the late afternoon of August 13, when eight people were murdered here in the largest single killing in the history of Ciudad Juárez. The event passed with as little public notice as possible. No one said out loud that this was the biggest single slaughter on record. No one said much of anything.
On that bloody day in August, at 7:15 P.M., four or eight men drive up and park their trucks, a red Chevrolet Avalanche and a Chevrolet Suburban. Down the street—about fifty yards, or in one report, just a few yards—waits a detail of seven or eight soldiers wearing the red beret of an elite unit in a white Ford Lobo pickup. The men enter CIAD No. 8, a center for the treatment of drug and alcohol problems. Prayer fills the air because a group of evangelicals—the deacon, the woman preacher, and five members of the congregation—have arrived to lead a religious service for the recovering addicts. They belong to a family worship center called Jesus Christ Blessed Works.
They are in the back sala, a room maybe fifteen feet wide and thirty-five to forty feet long, and are just at the point in the service when they make the call for people to come forward and give their lives to Christ. All the worshipers have their hands up in the air for Christ, their faces lifted up toward heaven, the woman leading them from the podium. In all, there are about thirty-five people in the facility when the men enter through the office. They have black hoods on their