The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [86]
He suddenly becomes animated and imitates the burst of an AK-47. He is fumbling now, reaching out for conventional explanations—a cartel war, the army, hit men—theories that worked in the past.
He is okay, for the moment: He is convinced that no one will kill a priest.
But what if the old rules that allow him to believe this no longer apply?
A week after our conversation, a man from Palomas crawls into the U.S. port of entry at Columbus. His body is covered in burns. Someone has spent a week pouring acid on his skin and applying hot irons.
This was apparently happening as the padre and I spoke softly of the slaughter.
Alexia Moreno, 12
D. June 9, 2008
She is 12 years old and scared of the killings. She wants to go live with her mother in El Paso, but she does not get out in time. She is sitting in a park with two girlfriends when some guys in a nice new Chevy Tahoe snatch them—the guys are being trailed by killers and want the girls as human shields. The girls make a break for it; two get away. Alexia doesn’t. She is shot in the head. The killers take the guys in the Tahoe and disappear. No one has seen them since.
ONE MURAL DEPICTS A CONQUISTADOR; another wall is a collage of snapshots of the asylum’s work; a sign by the gate says GOD IS GREATER THAN MY PROBLEMS. This is the office of El Pastor, José Antonio Galvan: the man who took in the battered remains of Miss Sinaloa and gave her sanctuary. He is sitting in front of me—a mop of graying hair, a fleshy body, a ready smile—showing me a movie about his asylum: men beaten by police and dumped on the streets, addled addicts with seeping wounds, women who will never remember what happened to them and never want to remember.
El Pastor has seen a lot of violence in his city, and he tells me what is going on.
“Young people come to Juárez to have the American dream—it is so close,” he says. “They come from the south; they are hardworking, and they don’t know anything about the streets. But now the border is harder to cross, and soon they are selling their bodies and using drugs. After a year, they have gang tattoos. The capos now make enough money selling drugs here; they don’t have to transport them into the United States.
“You can’t do anything to be safe here,” he continues. “Cocaine is everywhere and cheaper than marijuana. They smoke cocaine with marijuana. We’re talking about people 18 to 25—the people who get executed. They are ghosts, human trash walking naked in the city.”
I ask El Pastor if he remembers a patient called Miss Sinaloa.
“Oh yes,” he says. “She was at an orgy. At the Casablanca.”
The Casablanca is a hotel where men bring women for sex and love and joy and whatever other terms they prefer. There are many such places in Juárez, a city where few can afford privacy in their homes and so must rent it at the moment of desire. In front of the hotel stands a large nightclub with red-tiled domes, a playground for cops and narcos alike—anyone who wants booze, dope, and women. This, El Pastor says, was where the cops took hold of Miss Sinaloa.
When the city police brought her out and dumped her with El Pastor, she had lost her mind. The asylum was her home for at least two months, but no one could reach her. She raved; she was very angry. And she was bald. The staff had to cut off her long beautiful hair because it was an occupational risk here: Some patients have shown a tendency to take another patient’s long hair and strangle her with it. In part she was locked up to protect her from the other patients, who crave her fair skin and beauty. And in part she was locked up because otherwise she would go berserk.
El Pastor shows me her cell. It is maybe nine feet by five feet, and it is in here that, after two months, Miss Sinaloa seems to recover some of her mind. El Pastor locates her relatives, and they drive up from Sinaloa. They must be surprised that she is alive. I certainly am. After such a frolic, death would not be unusual,