The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [88]
What America got from NAFTA was cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration from the barrios of places like Juárez into the United States. What Juárez got was more drugs and more violence.
The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason poor people in Juárez sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason they go north is to survive.
I HAVE A VISION in which all the dead in Juárez since January will gather in the plaza before the cathedral downtown. They will sit in rows of chairs just as in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. There will be 500 separate tales of how they loved things and enjoyed life and how they were murdered and who murdered them. It is a play, of course, that will never end.
I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts but she will be bored. Her perfect face will be blank, her beautiful eyes, cocooned in makeup, will wander to the hills outside town where she stayed in the asylum. By now her hair will have grown out and the handprints on her buttocks will have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her time at the Casablanca.
But of course, nothing she knows will matter to most people—just as the dead of Juárez will vanish and this killing season will be forgotten. You can believe in the war on drugs, in battles between the cartels, in secure borders, in free trade, in official states and statesmen. You don’t have handprints on your ass and bite scars on your breasts and fragments of your mind that tell you of places that presidents never mention. I prefer the company of Miss Sinaloa, her skin so fair, her bruised thoughts more knowing than the governments that pretend to rule the chaos that now rules Juárez.
And as I watch this new Our Town in the plaza before the cathedral, one image sticks in my head—a fragment whispering of a murder. There is a barrio near here where people scavenge old televisions and bits of metal from both Juárez and El Paso and sell them. A man peddles cocaine on the street and is warned to stop, but he is in his thirties and has no other livelihood. So he persists, and then armed men come with masks and blow his brains out. He falls dead on the street near his mother’s house.
But his body is not what I imagine.
What I see is his mother. It is night now. The body has been taken away and there is a light on, the screen door is pushed open and an old woman with a blank face stares down at the street. She is there alone, and her son is not coming home. Her face is a portrait of Juárez: silent, enduring, doomed.
CHARLES BOWDEN is the author of twenty-two books, including A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior; Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. Inferno, with photographer Michael Berman, was a finalist for the Orion Book of the Year for 2007. His most recent book is Exodus, with photographer Julian Cardona. Trinity and Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing will both he published in 2009.
Bowden is a correspondent for GQ magazine, and his work has appeared in Harper’s, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and Esquire. A Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, he lives in Tucson, Arizona, with a standard poodle, a desert tortoise, and a witch.
Coda
I have been going to Ciudad Juárez for fifteen years because I could sense the future was unfolding there—violence, poverty, American-owned factories with low wages, and a vast drug business. Starting around January 2008, Juárez probed further into its destiny. In 2007, there were 301 murders, in the following year 1,607, including dozens of police. The pace has continued into 2009. All this will be in a forthcoming book, Miss Sinaloa.
R. Scott