The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [87]
When the family comes to retrieve their daughter, the father concludes that El Pastor and his patients have been having their way with her. El Pastor is horrified, and there is a terrible argument, and then Miss Sinaloa leaves with her family for home. But as we stand in the dust and wind outside the asylum walls, and El Pastor recounts his reaction to that moment (“I am a family man!”), we both understand the father’s reaction. They are middle-class people, El Pastor notes, unaccustomed to having a daughter go missing on Juárez’s streets. They had a nice car, and they paid for all the medical bills Miss Sinaloa had run up.
And in a country where the weak are always prey, where the favorite verb is chingar, to fuck over, the desire to place blame is irrepressible.
Armando Alvarado López
D. January, 2008
Ten or twenty men with automatic rifles and black masks descend on a poor barrio of shacks cut in the hills outside town, where one man, an ex-municipal cop in his early thirties, runs a little store that sells beans, bread, and milk to men and women who work in the American-owned factories known as maquiladoras. The men torture him until he reveals who supplied him with the drugs he also sold out of his little store. He cannot really be surprised by the visit: After all, he’d been warned in two phone calls to stop selling drugs. The armed men take him to his supplier and then carry the two captives off a short distance and execute them. Everyone in the barrio hears the shots. The action is hard to miss; it happens around noon on a sunny day.
Now I am here at the kill site. A woman stares at me and shouts, “Who are you looking for?” From her tone, I don’t think she is trying to be helpful. As I rolled in, I could feel the eyes of loitering cholos burn into my hide.
So I leave.
BUT HERE IS A QUESTION: Why is it that we must believe that these murders happening all over the city—like this one of a small-time grocer who sold a little coke to neighbors in his poverty-stricken neighborhood—are simply the result of a battle between big cartels and the Mexican government over who will control this crossing into the United States?
Every day in Juárez, at least 200,000 people get out of bed to pull a shift in the maquiladoras. The exact number varies: Right now roughly 20,000 jobs have vanished as a chill sweeps through world markets; just after the millennium, about 100,000 jobs left the city for mainland China, because as Forbes magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four times the wages of the Chinese. (Those greedy Mexicans were taking home $60, maybe $70 a week in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the United States.) The barrios where these maquiladora workers live are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Turnover in the grinding maquiladoras runs from 100 to 200 percent a year. The factory managers say this is because of the abundant economic opportunities of the city. And in a sense, they are right: A drug peddler, for example, makes a maquiladora worker’s monthly wage each week. And there’s even more money to be made in other trades: A few years ago, the going rate for professional murders in Juárez was $250 apiece.
But in America, we know nothing of such matters. Officially, Juárez has healthy wages and almost no unemployment. It is a beacon of the global economy that was poised to become a modern city in a Mexico that was to become a modern nation. But when Mexico instead lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was ignored by successive American administrations, since a quiet neighbor was and is the best kind of neighbor for a global economic empire. When Mexico persisted in being a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, it was the fault of American habit and addiction. Finally, when these habits could