Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [96]
He stands on the roof looking down at me in the small patio of the center. He refuses to give his name. Yet he cannot stop talking. They came through the office, he says, and then entered this patio. I look around and see a row of rooms—office, infirmary, lounge, detox, kitchen, sala—all open onto this concrete slit called the patio. He points to the corner of the patio—yes, there, there is where they took four from the sala, put them on the ground and executed them. I see the bullet holes.
He is a solid man in his forties with cropped hair and quick eyes. He has worked for the centers for six years, and he refuses to give his name. This last fact is to be expected. The neighbors quoted in the newspapers about that night also remain nameless. Only the dead get to have names. Everyone else—killers and survivors—are without identity. He says, “Come here, come here,” and he leads me from his rooftop perch into a narrow defile between the concrete block center and the wall sheltering it from the street. The passageway is less than three feet wide, and down this corridor the secretary ran with AK-47s firing at him. The man on the roof makes me look at the steel casement around a window—the bullet holes through the metal are the size of a quarter. Then I turn the corner and see the staircase ahead and, on top of the building, the cyclone fence that is torn apart where desperate patients leapt from the roof to some hope of survival on the ground below. The secretary himself made it to the top of the open staircase before he was cut down by gunfire. He now is near death in a hospital. Terror lingers in the narrow passage. I climb up the stairs and enter the little rooms that line the roof and functioned as barracks for the addicts. On the walls are photographs—a pinup of a singer, a 1970 Mercedes convertible, and a velvet painting of a Mexican águila, eagle. On the floor is a book touting creationism over evolution, a workbook that teaches parenting without anger problems. It is still. No one is coming back for their things. And no one on site can really tell if these remnants belong to the quick or the dead.
Men tear apart metal beds—there is the screech of hacksaws and banging of hammers—a manic act of salvage. Other men carry out piles of blankets—the cheap Chinese ones made of synthetic fiber that have inundated Mexico. Today, two men were found wrapped in such blankets, their hands cut off and left by their sides, the bodies showing signs of torture. So the men carry out mounds of these blankets, but they do not put them in the vans. They toss them into trash barrels and say nothing. That scent of what were once people coming off the blankets they slept in every night, this fragrance of a life lost, is more than even the men salvaging materials can bear. So they stick to saving metal and trash the blankets.
I look up at the man on the roof, and he says, “They don’t want us in Chihuahua. We get the message.”
I enter the sala, the killing chamber where people were raising their hands to God when the gunmen entered. Flies buzz, and the sound sizzles in the empty room. In back is the tiny bathroom where people piled atop each other in some fantasy of escaping death. On the front wall are the twelve steps to curing addiction in Spanish. Also, the Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niehbur’s contribution to sanity in World War II when it fluttered across American life.
DIOS CONCEDEME SERENIDAD PARA ACEPTAR LAS COSAS
QUE NO PUEDO CAMBIAR
It is posted in the front of the room, where the woman stood at the podium soliciting the addicts to come forward for Christ. On the floor, the tiles are brown, red, white, gray, and beige. A