The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [82]
MARK ARAX is the author of three books, including In My Father’s Name, about his twenty-year search to find the men who murdered his father, and the upcoming West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State. During his twenty-year career at the Los Angeles Times, Mark won many national awards for both his investigative reporting and feature writing. He now teaches literary nonfiction at Claremont McKenna College.
Coda
The story ends where it ends. No epilogue, other than Rita and her four sons still trying to come to terms with Mardiros’s final act. If the piece feels as if the writer had something extra invested in the telling, something deep down but never expressed, it may be because I saw so much of my own story in their story. My father was murdered when I was fifteen, and the mystery of that crime bent my entire life, for good and bad. I saw my mother in Rita, a woman who knew nothing about her husband’s business yet had no choice but to take it over. I saw myself in Steve, a son trying to honor his father and yet so confused about the choices his father had made at the end of his life. I wanted to use my Armenian heritage to inform the story, to get close to the family and give the reader the most intimate portrait I could. But I had to be careful not to rely on my heritage so much that I was conning the family or pulling punches with the reader. It was not an easy balancing act and I think now that I may have failed. Rita, for one, will no longer speak to me. Not because of some factual error or even a contextual one but because, her friends tell me, the story was too personal, too intimate.
Charles Bowden
MEXICO’S RED DAYS
FROM GQ magazine
THERE WAS A TIME when death made sense in Juárez. You died because you had a drug load or because you lost a drug load. You died because you tried to do a deal or because you were a snitch, or because you were a poor woman and it was dark and someone thought it might be fun to rape and kill you. There was a pleasant order to death, a ritual of cartel thugs or corrupt police or the army taking you, then tying your hands and feet with duct tape, torturing you, and finally killing you and tossing your body into a hole with a dose of “milk”—the friendly term for lime. Your death would be called carne asada, a barbecue. Life made sense then, even in death. But those were, of course, the good old days, when murders averaged two or three hundred per year.
Now the world has changed. Since January, El Paso, the sister city of Juárez, just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, has had just five murders. In the first 160-odd days of 2008, Juárez has had nearly 500—no one knows the exact number, except that it just goes up and up and up. The killings have the cold feeling of butchery in a slaughterhouse, and they are everywhere: done in broad daylight, on streets, in markets, at homes, and even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Women, children, guilty, innocent-no one is safe.
These are red, endless days.
SHE CAME TO JUÁREZ FROM SINALOA, the state on the Pacific that is the mother of almost all the major players in the Mexican drug industry, probably to visit her sister who works in the city. She was very beautiful—her hair hung down to her ass and her skin was oh so white. They called her Miss Sinaloa. I know this because when Elvira, who works at an asylum on the outskirts of Juárez, starts talking about her, she includes this Miss part. Yes, Miss Sinaloa, a beauty queen who came to Juárez. “Once,” Elvira says with pride, “we had a very beautiful woman—Miss Sinaloa. The police brought her here; she was 24 years old.”
The city cops claimed they had found her wandering on the street one morning, but Miss Sinaloa had actually been at a party. No one knows how she left the party—in Juárez there are many versions of every event—but everyone agrees on what happened after: The police took her and then raped her for three days. Eight policemen, in turn, over and over. In the mid-1990s, when girls from Juárez first began vanishing and