Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [95]
But the nature of life here does not seem to penetrate the minds of people in other places. They seem to think that there is treatment available here, but because of the poverty, it is just more austere than in the wealthier zones of the earth. They talk about police corruption, but seem to think in terms of a place like Chicago, and so they do not perceive this as a real problem. They read about the murders, but tell themselves that murders are high in Detroit. They know people are poor, but convince themselves that the people are slowly rising and soon things will be fine. They read that the Mexican army can be rough, but never grasp the fact that the Mexican army historically has been stationed all over the country in order to repress and terrorize the people of Mexico.
Sometimes I think I am living in a hall of mirrors like those I saw as a child in the carnival funhouse—huge mirrors that distort every form and yet retain enough of the actual form so that you think you are seeing a kind of visual riff on actual reality. And so we learn to pretend that what is happening is not really happening. Or we learn to pretend that what is happening is merely some kind of high range of normal experience, a slight exaggeration of what we already know. And so we kill both the slayers and the slain and make them go away by insisting they are part and parcel of the world we already know.
There is a body in the coffin. He is nineteen years old, small, faint moustache, proud member of Locos 23. He is in the kitchen, the sink full of dirty pots and pans. He sleeps, his face under glass, a pink-and-white striped shirt on his chest. Rosaries dangle from the coffin lid. A young mother hoists her baby up to look at the body. She stares, eyes wide.
He was one of the eight cut down in the drug center at around 7:15 P.M. as dusk slowly descended on the city by the river.
I stare into the baby’s wide, dark eyes and try to make out what is and what will be. A golden crucifix, Christ with arms outstretched in His agony, floats over the face so still now, the eyes closed. The baby stares with round eyes of wonder.
I look into two versions of myself, the body in the coffin and the babe in arms. I am possibly past due for the coffin, but I remember through the haze those early glimpses of life when I was younger than I can even recall, those blues and greens, the smell of fresh apples, the feel of the grain in the floor-boards in the old farmhouse, the cluck of the chickens, the strange sounds coming from the mouths of adults. So I am in a small room full of people, the body is against the wall in a glass-topped coffin, the baby looks down at the still, dead face, and I can smell fresh hay from some forgotten summer when I first caught the light gleaming into my eyes. And I know that my early days were somehow similar, that bodies were still displayed in the house, that wakes were home affairs, the children and babies were not sheltered from the fate of all living things, and that all of life that mattered took place in the kitchen.
The city’s fatigue seeps into my pores, the midday sun bakes my mind, and I wander between the coffin and the killing ground, and this is easy because the boy in the coffin lived next door to the rehabilitation center where he was murdered.
The gate is open to the center, and I enter. Men are tearing the place apart, and they seem frantic in their work. They are all from Sonora, and the story is very simple and clear. A week and a half earlier, armed men came to one of their three clinics in Juárez and herded fifty people into rooms, and then they took the director and a visitor out and executed them. The group, centered in Cananea, Sonora, decided to close all three facilities and leave the state of Chihuahua. They painted the word CLOSED on the center where the murders occurred. They called the police and