FOR THE CHOP IN CIUDAD JUAREZ
DRUG-WAR DIARY, PART ONE
The Times, Metro, Borderline Beat, Insight Crime, 2010-2012
The British are a nation of rubberneckers: we chase ambulances as though they’re ice-cream vans, and our paramedics play to packed houses. But here, on the US-Mexico border, a curious nature will get you more than a close-up. Gawpers are in short supply where blue lights spell danger. At the first sound of a siren, people scatter or turn their backs – it’s better to face the wall, lest, seeing something you shouldn’t, you wind up sliding down it.
Welcome to Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua; population, on the slide. The city – which I first visited 20 years ago to have an abscess lanced – has settled into a dreadful groove. This year, having outgunned every free-fire zone in Brazil, Honduras and El Salvador, it was declared the “Murder Capital of the World”. There was no awards ceremony, but if its recent body count is any indicator, I’d say that Juárez has embraced its new status.
You wouldn’t know it to look at it, though, least not in the presence of daylight. A dust-globe scene of hustle and stupor, of ornament and excrement, of saguaro green and that shade of blue that must be in the gift of muralist angels because it’s not available commercially, Juárez could easily pass for Just Another Mexican Border Town.
Its neighbours over the way, in El Paso, Texas, know better, of course, and they don’t come around much any more. I couchsurfed there for a few days, and learnt in the bars that some students regard Juárez as a bogey place and going there as a rite of passage. I heard a few curiously undetailed stories involving drugs, strip clubs and outrunning gangsters – “the Juárez trip” has become its own genre of YA fiction.
The US State Department estimates that 90 per cent of the cocaine that powders American noses comes through the States’ southern border. The days of drug dumps in the Gulf – of Cessna-borne Medellín mobsters in Del Monte cotton waving hankies at speedboats – are long gone (sleeves were rolled up – Crockett and Tubbs made the interception). Some other means of distribution had to be found, which is where Mexico came in.
Mexico was ready: in fact, it rolled over with rehearsed ease. Widespread political corruption — that is, institutional failure on a Busby Berkeley scale — took the cartels by the hand: Mexico had been looking to make some proper money; marijuana, its traditional contraband, simply wasn’t cutting it. Either slow-boated from Colombia to ports east and west, or muled through Central America, the white stuff goes by ground now, all routes north.
Drugs claim lives, drug wars claim more, and the war on drugs, which is not the same thing, more still. President Felipe Calderón launched a nationwide military offensive against the cartels in 2006, the year he took office. Not out of a sense of affronted sovereignty, but in line with US national security policy (under the Mérida Initiative, the US also bankrolls it). It has achieved few of its stated aims, and the humanitarian cost has been enormous. According to official figures (which nobody quotes in good conscience), 50,000 Mexicans have died in the drug war in the past six years. Violence spikes with every arrest and seizure, as gangs pad out their accounts with armed robbery, extortion, kidnap and human trafficking. The army’s “decapitation strategy” (the targeting of high-profile drug lords) is good for headlines, but bad for innocent bystanders. It creates power vacuums that fill with blood as pretenders to the throne stage palace coups whose explosiveness makes the 4th of July look like a few tossed fag-ends under frosted glass.
Vicente Carillo Fuentes runs the local mob. In this, he is backed by Los Zetas, a phenomenally brutal band of Special Forces defectors who were hired as mercenaries by the Gulf cartel, only to take over most of their territory. In disputatious alliance, they are at war with the Sinaloa cartel, the largest – and oldest – criminal organisation in Mexico, from the west-coast “narco state” of the same name.
In many parts of the country, the army is just another player at the table, albeit one with certain advantages, such as freedom from scrutiny, and unlimited access to firepower. It runs its own criminal enterprises and often operates in cahoots with the traffickers. In strategically vital Juárez, athiests are better off turning to God than any of the forces of law and order, though the local police sit at the bottom of the table of trustworthiness, awaiting demotion to their own circle of hell.
It may come as a surprise to people who were raised to view the country as an open asylum for tooled-up bandidos, but Mexico has strict laws regarding gun ownership. As a consequence, its transformation into a shooting gallery has been a tremendous boon to the American firearms industry. The cartels spend their drug money on weapons at US guns stores, which are then shipped across the border, often in the same vehicles and by the same routes used to smuggle the narcotics in. It’s a perfect circle of death.
Presidents Bush and Obama have done their bit, too. Between 2006 and 2011, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed thousands of weapons, including heavy-calibre assault rifles and grenade launchers, to cross into Mexico in “gunwalking” stings that were intended to lead federal agents to cartel strongholds. Not only did these operations – Fast and Furious, and Wide Receiver – fail to result in significant collars, most of the arms went AWOL, then turned up at crime scenes either side of the border, including the one in Nogales, Arizona, where a US Border Patrol agent was killed in December 2010.
Carrying my bag across my shoulders like some blameless backpacker, I walk into Juárez at the beginning of August 2010, feeling doomier than is healthy. I’m no stranger to Mexico, danger or a two-for-one offer – 12 years ago, I was reporting from the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas, holed up with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and being shot at by mining company mercenaries – but this feels different. I had allies back then, and right on my side (the Zapatistas’ mission to restore the rights of self-determination to indigenous peoples was easy to support). Nothing about Juárez is easy. It’s a moral vacuum, a place where money, status and fear call the shots. No one’s got your back in this city, unless they’re manoeuvring you into position.
I need to calm down. To let life – and death, for that matter – go its own way at its own pace. My talent is for farce, not drama. It’s something I have in common with the Rio Grande. I gaze down on it fondly from the footbridge. A river whose name throws up images of appaloosa horses losing their hooves in a foaming roil, but whose reality – a shit ribbon full of fertiliser run-off, smelting residues and arsenic – is assuredly not the stuff of John Ford movies.
And I have people, sort of: a guide, Charles Bowden, whose book on Juárez, Murder City, I read a few months ago, and whose emails about my plan to visit have been exercises in Virgilian encouragement; and a fixer. Armando moved to Juárez two years ago to help his sister take care of her four kids after her husband was disappeared (here, as in Chile under Pinochet and Paraguay during the Stronato, “to disappear” is also a transitive verb). A cab driver now, he was a private detective back in Guadalajara. His self-image is essentially romantic. “I never did for it for money. I just like to know what’s going on. Maybe I read too much Raymond Chandler when I was a boy.”
A slight-shouldered border guard asks me if I need directions for the bus station, because Durango, his hometown, is “really beautiful and the bus journey’s not too long if you sleep”. I tell him that I’m stopping for a while in Juárez, which wins me a delicate shrug and an expression containing more pity than is strictly polite or comfortable. I take it Juárez has had its fill of martyrs [August, with 333 murders, will go on to be the bloodiest in the city’s history].
The day is almost done before I find a cheap hotel that doesn’t charge by the hour. The Burciaga’s vast reception area recalls a field hospital: there are stacks of towels, water drums and several motionless bodies, their bellies pressed against the dewy chill of the tiled floor. It’s fitting. The desert heat is a thug: the parks are full of prone forms – it’s like some crack troop has stolen through the city, on cushioned feet, bayonets dripping.
I am shown a room, which, with its humped bedclothes and carpet stains, suggests a poorly disguised crime scene. The woodchip is a mess of mosquito swats, their iridescence angry in the curtained light, and the headboard crawls with the legends of cherry-busting American teens from a time when My Best Friend’s Girl soundtracked their congress. The air has been walled up, unstirred, for at least a month. I glance back at the manager, who is backing out of the room, his head down, his hands hanging bonelessly. Seeing that sweat is pouring off me, he tells me there’s air-conditioning, but he flicks no switch and nothing comes on. No doubt each day, around noon, a caretaker with a crocked lung blows through the keyhole.
The federal police are making their rounds in a showroom-fresh open-back jeep. Patrol can be a fearful business – there’s a reward on the heads of the men who haven’t already taken a mordida (a bribe; literally, a “bite”) – but this lot look unfazed. One of them is rocking his assault rifle like a baby, and I can hear laughter through the balaclavas. I raise my camera. In the time it takes me to assess my effort, the vehicle stops and I’m beckoned over. I jump to it, with what I hope comes off as teenage indolence. My summoner raises wraparound shades, and extends a hand. I can read my misfortune in it – it wants my camera.
Words, specifically the Spanish for “I am a lowly tourist with an eye for unexpected moments”, fail me. But I have reckoned without my genius for photography. It doesn’t take long for the comandante’s face to soften, for shallow creases of amusement to deepen, for teeth to be revealed. He has clicked through 25 studies of peeling stucco and rusting ironwork. He hands back the camera, shaking his head, his eyes conceding, “I could take you in, but you’d never break, you devise your own tortures.” (My Nikon is confiscated again a couple of days later. A picture of a Boston terrier in Mardi Gras beads clinched its return that time, and with a decided twinkle.)
I recount this adventure over a coffee. Biting his top lip, Armando, though slow to anger, is picking up speed: “This won’t sound kind, Joe, but it is: you’re a fucking arsehole. Do not pretend to be a tourist. Tourists have money and word of money gets around fast. Plus, if you’re a tourist here, in the murder capital of the world, you are in a category of one. Be honest. If they doubt you, they will run your details and see that you’re a journalist, and because you lied they’ll think that maybe you’re some sort of hotshot journalist, a TV guy or something.”
I don’t take it to heart. Journalistically, I’m small change at best – an IOU on a bad day – and he’s right, I stick out like a sore thumb: 6’3” when I slouch, and I burn seven times for every lick of tan that goes on. And the wrong people have started paying attention. I have been followed several times – on foot and, at comic-cortège pace, by a thuddingly soundtracked, ostentatiously modified black SUV. It’s time to come clean about the business I have here.
And that business is everywhere I look: on all the posters stuck to lampposts, hoardings and trees, hanging in strips or freshly pasted, that bear the images of las desaparecidas, the missing. The park facing the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe looks as though it’s been papered with a torn-up yearbook. If you’re from a deprived neighbourhood and aged between 10 and 25, you’re the girl most likely to… end up on one of these posters. Accompanied by loving descriptions of their looks, personalities and little quirks (one 13-year-old, Sofia, was last seen wearing “black patent leather shoes, her favourites, though they pinched”), their photographs stare out helplessly, enjoining those fixed in their tractor beam to “find us”, like sirens with their throats cut. It’s enough to empty churches and turn God to drink. That the posters read more like eulogies than calls for help is no surprise: no one expects a desaparaceida to be found alive.
Up to 3,000 young women are thought to have been abducted, raped, tortured and murdered in Juárez since 1993, when the prospect of a job in the maquiladoras, the vast assembly-for-export plants established in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), started to draw them from the country’s impoverished interior. Many of those femicides are still out there, in abandoned lots, drainage ditches, the desert; their remains, relics of a civilisation gone to shit. Pink crosses memorialise the victims who have been found and identified, marking the location where their bodies were found, or their graves, or simply their passing.
The success of NAFTA was built on such women, muchachas del sur, who are prized for their manual dexterity as well as their unblinking docility in the face of miserable wages and hazardous working conditions. Whatever is driving the murders – and my friend the Reforma newspaper columnist Sergio Gonzáles Rodríguez describes the unique weave of big business, underworld activity, male-chauvinist culture and rising drug consumption in Juárez as a “femicide machine” – the companies still enjoying the cheap labour and minimal tariffs enshrined in NAFTA seem unexercised by them. In fact, the sector, which currently employs some 500,000 people, is expanding. The likes of Blackberry, Electrolux and Generals Motors and Electric, plants that laid off staff in 2008 and 2009, are now swelling their ranks and offering overtime.
Built on the city’s first rubbish dump, Anapra is the poorest district in Juárez. Unfinished roads run between cinder-block shacks with chickenwire porticoes. The residents here, many of them maquiladora workers, speak of running water as if it has magical properties. One of them, Maria Beatriz, invites me into her sturdily – and brilliantly – improvised home for a plate of tamales. At 26, having left her home town 20 years ago and given ten years to the factories, “Eme Be” calls herself a crone. I wince at the word, but she won’t have any of it. She wants me to mirror her expressions, which can be uncomfortable, because the harder I imagine it is for her to tell me something, the broader she smiles. She explains: “If I can smile, you can. Your frown only makes me think my life is horrible and that isn’t fair because you can do nothing about it.”
She says the work [making auto parts for Delphi Technologies] has got easier: she’s putting in fewer hours for more money, and the canteen is now subsidised. But the day before the rotas are announced is a tense one. “It’s like a lottery, but the winning ticket is also the losing ticket. The long shifts, which end in the middle of the night, pay better but no one wants to be going home at that time. Colleagues sleep in the changing rooms or toilets till it’s light. I have seen girls dragged into cars, not let off buses, heard them screaming, pounding on the windows with their fists, and people look at their shoes. A dear friend didn’t show up for work one day – no explanation, no goodbye.”
Her smile is at its sunniest, and I beam back, but we’re not fooling each other. “It is very frightening, even for me, and I am not what they are looking for. I had a boyfriend for a while, the son of one of my bosses. I didn’t really like him – very skinny, cruel eyes – but he had a car. I tell you, in Juarez, any time you see a beautiful woman holding the hand of an ugly man, it’s like they are holding a gun – it’s for protection.”
The full story here is one of systemic perfidy, as much as pure horror. The violation of the victims merely begins with their death. Their memories are desecrated by the complicity, venality, cowardice and incompetence, which, though common to all levels of government and law enforcement in Mexico, have become specialties of the house of Juárez. Despite interventions from the United Nations and the International Committee on Human Rights, impunity from prosecution is still considered a birthright by most criminals.
In The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, her 2006 book about a seven-year investigation into the murders, the El Paso reporter Diana Washington Valdez argues that the Juárense authorities knowingly shielded the guilty, many of whom were narcos, and extracted confessions from scapegoats by torture, a version of events that has, for want of refutation, become fact. An Egyptian national was fingered as a serial killer, but neither his mysterious death in prison, nor the incarceration of his “accomplices” (including several bus drivers), did anything to stem the flow of corpses. Patricio Martínez García, the governor of Chihuahua from 1998 to 2004, claimed that he had put a end to the femicides, disregarding Amnesty International’s 2003 “damn report” on the state’s decade-long “failure to exercise due diligence in preventing, investigating and punishing the crimes in question”.
Justice may be an appalling joke here — a supervillain packing a throwdown sword and digital gram scales — but she still has her champions. Regardless of the mortal danger posed by doing so, devastated mothers continue to trawl the moral morass of the border to build cases against the men who have butchered their children and, unable to secure a conviction, they take to the streets to present them. In December 2010, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, a vigorous campaigner for the retrial of her 16-year-old daughter’s confessed murderer, was gunned down outside the governor’s office in Chihuahua city. In January 2011, Susana Chávez, a poet who coined the phrase “Ni una mas” (“Not one more”), which was adopted as the rallying cry of the advocacy group Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home), was dumped – dead – in her own neighbourhood, with a black bag cinched around her neck and her left hand sawn off.
The sky, high-fired for days to a hysterical blue, crumples and splits. An ocean falls out of it in the time it takes to get wet. There are good-humoured squeals as roads become rivers and prim blouses achieve transparency. Herded beneath awnings, people talk, mostly of the rain and their forced intimacy. I take shelter in the corner store where I buy my daily four-pack of Tecate, my minimum requirement for sleep, and ease my way into conversation with five middle-aged men sat on a circle of stools there.
The chat is intermittent, broken by the rain’s drumming, or it comes in snarls about departing customers (“He had to spend some money, his trousers were too tight”). Laughter is pursued, not for the relief it brings, but the pain it causes. Doubled over like debased geishas, the men clutch their ribs or rub at their heartburn. A girl of 15 or so, in school uniform, text books held over her bosom, smiles indulgently at her incorrigible uncles. She draws innuendo all the same, as does her mother and her mother’s mother, and I turn, outraged, to her ctitics. The man I take to be the proprietor, because he is sat closest to the counter and grabs drinks from the cooler without glancing at the till, cautions: “Don’t be fooled. She drops those books in the trash as soon as she changes out of her uniform. Girls, they smile shy, innocent, good daughters, good students, but they lead double lives. Only some are prostitutes, but they all have a price.”
The atmosphere now sour enough to pucker a fat lip, I duck out into the torrent, abuse flung at my back. I have a date at the morgue, in any case. I was encouraged to pop by with my press card – “no appointment necessary” because “people don’t hang around for long enough to require supervising”. The registrar, Yolanda, receives me with a smile, as though I’m about to be shown round an apartment. And it is an open viewing of a kind. She’s got a house full. Death’s latest delivery is stacked everywhere. You can’t move for the unmoving. It’s the Grand Guignol on ice. My nose can handle the formaldehyde, and my stomach stays put, but my pupils shrink to positions of safety.
The drug-war dead, they’re a heterogeneous crew. Yolanda lists the ways they met their maker as though she’s reading meat-preparation methods from a menu: bullet, machete, car bomb, heavy beating, torture. Most were cartel members, a handful in the wrong place at the wrong time: drive-by extras, accidental witnesses. Yolanda apologises for her oddly even tone but, waving her arms around as she turns full circle, she tells me “you get used to it”. The horrors are so particular – spare heads, jointed carcasses, flitches of scored and scorched flesh – that I wonder what she means by “it”, but I soon realise that finding a single category for all the gruesomeness on display here is essential to its assimilation. Professionally engaged is as human as Yolanda dares to be: “We’re not undertakers, our job isn’t to bring the dead back to life, to put them in a suit, to arrange the flowers, to bring families peace. We bring only bad news. Parents don’t want to know what we know, to hear what horrific fate befell their children, to feel their pain, to learn how it was inflicted.”
Of the bodies that are identified, few are claimed. Generally, families of cartel members aren’t keen to put their hands up to their underworld connections, especially when they’re spent. The unclaimed are buried in common graves in San Rafael municipal cemetery. These personae non gratae are sent off with zero ceremony, in a flash of white overalls, their memorials serial numbers scratched on a metal plate. The message is clear: there’s no greeter at the door to Hell – it’s on the latch; let yourselves in.
On my way out, I pass a stall selling gimcracks, items which, in their prime, might have gladdened this boot hill: bleached wreaths, foil windmills that turn lazily, if at all, in the loaded air and stuffed toys holding grimly wizened hearts. For the sake of the melodramatic morbidity for which I’ve always nursed a talent, I buy one for myself, a glittery star on a stick, to put in my breast pocket, and start to compose the note I will pin to it in case I turn up weeks hence with a scream full of sand.
Dusk rolls in like a dirt storm, and I decide my upper lip could do with a stiffener. I meet Armando on Avenida Juárez, the main tourist drag of yesteryear, and we head to the Kentucky Club. The Kentucky opened in 1920, just in time to water Prohibition-parched Texans, and its “French-carved” oak and portraits of matadors and Thirties beisbolistas offer sanctuary from the modern world as well as sobriety. Armando settles a Montejo with a whiskey back in front of me and takes a call – my cue to put my feet up, and let alcohol do what we pay it to do: lower the lids, extract a sigh. The night wraps me in a blanket.
That blanket is soon whipped from my shoulders. Armando returns with the grin of champions. He’s been promising to introduce me to a mobbed-up associate for two weeks, and tonight, he tells me, is the night, but we have to go now. I’m dragged through the Mariscal that begins a block west of Juárez. The former red-light district barely twinkles these days; vacant lots now outnumber the flophouses, brothels and stripclubs whose weather-beaten facades recall the portals of bygone fairground rides. We stop at a packed hole in the wall. Armando speaks to a fiddle-player on the door who’s dressed, in a tie-dyed loincloth and bat-wing shirt, like a psychedelic Tarahumara. He raises a palm for me to stay where I am and joins the drinkers inside. Five minutes later, he reappears, jerking his head back for me to follow him.
Introductions are made, and Armando’s gone before I can check his face for clues. Heriberto –“Bert” – is thicker than thick-set; his neck, a tyre; his chest, a tyre… centre. But he’s friendly enough, with a leery smile that looks about to take over his face. We establish our bona fides over shots of cooking mezcal. I tell him the august organs I’ve written for, and who I’m working for now, and he unbuttons his shirt to reveal a crude tattoo of an Aztec head on his left tit. I swallow hard and confess its significance isn’t lost on me: the Barrio Azteca gang do dirty work for the Juárez cartel. Bert takes this as his cue to catalogue said dirt, lending eye-widening definition to each and every speck of it.
But there are many pairs of eyes on him, so we repair to a back room used by prostitutes and drug dealers, who make space for us, and to store potted plants and cleaning products, which Bert swipes from a table. Sat opposite Bert, I learn that Bert’s good mood is chemically assisted. Tapping cocaine from a glass vial onto his knuckle and, as though he’s been practising in front of a mirror, he begins: “It all comes down to this. Everyone’s on it, or in on it. Americans, Mexicans, police, army, government, office workers. Whoever you are. I started out as a spotter, then handled small deliveries. Next, I collected debts, bigger and bigger sums, first with a baseball bat – I love baseball, my cousin tried out for the [Monterrey] Sultans – then with a gun. I was good at it, very calm, serious features, you know, and I never took what wasn’t mine, not even on this.” He holds up the vial. “Want a bump?”
Our conversation threatens to come off the rails after two girls join our table, apparently at my insistence. Their faces merge as sweat vaults off my nose. Bert’s mood has darkened. He’s still having fun, but with the space people make for him and the gag his reputation stuffs in their mouths. I feel I should be doing more than nodding along like his idiot consort. I excuse myself to freshen up, and reach the bathroom by some unrecorded means. I flick water at my face, and imagine my heartbeat slowing to a fierce gallop. The sounds of insufflation fill my ears. It’s as though I’m standing inside a rolled note. I hang out by the sinks, looking less casual by the second, but I manage to drop down a couple of gears.
Returning to my seat, I see the girls have gone and hear Bert has taken his desertion badly: “Do you want me to tell you about my life, or do you want me to show you?” I do not want him to show me. Bert is a sicario, an enforcer for the cartel, with special responsibility for hostage-taking and -detention, blackmail and extortion, and all the nastiness pertaining to those activities. He has stopped collecting debts – he collects people now, though few of them survive their time in his specimen cabinet intact.
“We take all sorts of people. But they need to have something we want. That can be money, influence or information. My responsibilities don’t cover people who are just a pain in the ass – junkies, loud mouths, guys who can’t keep their dick in their pants, girls who can’t keep their pussy dry – they can be shot or stabbed in the street, and left like trash for someone else to clear up. Our dealings are with important people, businessmen, cops, prosecutors, judges, politicians and, naturally, our enemies [the Sinoloa cartel].
“We take them to a safe house. We have many. Some are isolated, rural; others in industrial areas – busy, loud places. Because sound carries. In the country, we tell the police to take a holiday – a week, a month, the rest of their lives – and promise to sort them out with drinks and girls when they come to town. Then we get down to business. The hostages, we have to fuck them up a bit, show them we’re not messing around, then we photograph or film them and call their families, friends or business partners to make our demands. With luck, in about a week, we come to an agreement that suits us.”
Luck isn’t always around when you need him, though. Bert admits that he’s grabbed the wrong person before, or the “right person” who turned out not to be. “Mistakes have been made. Intelligence has been faulty. And when people are in a position to help us, it can take a lot of time for their associates to find the right papers – deeds, enough money, you know. Time isn’t something they have. My bosses are impatient. And the more time we wait, the more likely it is that we’ll get careless. We get drunk, we get high, we let our guards down, our masks slip. The party has to end for anyone who can identify us.”
Whether they have anything to say or not, the less co-operative the abductee, the uglier it gets for them. Torture is standard, and medieval methods of it – such as the Judas cradle (a “pyramid” seat that people, bound and weighted, are lowered onto) and strappado (suspension by the wrists tied behind the back) – not uncommon. Doctors are kept on hand to ensure the burnings, floggings and water-boardings come in non-fatal doses.
“If there’s a chance that someone will talk, we have to keep them alive. It is unfortunate for those who have nothing to tell us. We prefer not to kill, unless it’s to protect ourselves, because getting rid of the bodies is hard work. There is a rough record of who is buried where, but it seems wherever we dig, we strike bone. We are not the only ones dumping bodies, of course. The desert is full up! Like a popular hotel: no vacancies.”
Murder, merely a laborious encore to a month’s rollicking entertainment. The casualness with which Bert’s words tumble out of his mouth, his fishing for sympathy – it chills my heart still. But his smile has fallen, and I can’t help wondering what I have got coming. I watch the doors, ears twitching for cars pulling up, all the while trying to read the body language of Bert’s entourage of wired goons who filter in and out of the room, miming usefulness, bumping into drinkers to make their presence felt and flashing the hardware tucked in their waistbands. Running on coke and speed, fear and mutual distrust, and inured beyond boredom to their own inhumanity to man, theirs is a different category of evil. Quick to anger, and too late to apologise, they follow impulse, not orders. At last I am frightened.
Eyeing me steadily through crusted slits, Bert almost switches subject, from the disposal of bodies to their display. “Sometimes we have to make an example of someone. It could be one of theirs, one of ours, and not just one, either. Depending on what they have done, we might dismember them, cut off their head, tongue, hands, feet or cock, make a feature of them, mount them on a fountain or hang them from a bridge. We once filled a giant ice box with heads! And if passers-by wonder what they have done to deserve such fates, we leave a sign spelling it all out. A warning to any wannabe thieves. Or traitors.”
That last word got me thinking about loyalty. Friends quickly turn into traitors here, and vice versa (it just takes a different lie to do the rounds), except you don’t get to come back from being a traitor – no, you end up spreadeagled and mutilated, the centrepiece of some diabolical tableau mourant. My anger breaks out of where I stashed it with my other emotions. I raise my voice, and may arms join in: “Tell me, Bert, what value do you place on life; not a life, his life, her life, even your life – just life?”
I wait a couple of beats to be plucked from my chair, but Bert’s head is hanging, and no orders come from him, no nod, no grunt. He asks me if the name Hugo Hernandez means anything to me. It doesn’t. “He was a very old friend. Murdered by Sinaloa pigs. He was cut into seven pieces. They sliced off his face and stitched it to a football. Left it for children to find. Animals. We wouldn’t do that.”
Bert looks a conflicted man, one who either knows he’s lying, or that the truth has forsaken him. His shoulders, so easily convulsed by bilious humour earlier on, are still. The worry that I will make my end tonight starts to break up. With infinite care, like I’m preparing a blowfish, I stand up, and no one moves. I say “Thank you for talking to me” and there is no noise. And I take my leave with half-massaging hands on Bert’s neck and right shoulder.
I’m three blocks away by the time I realise I’ve left the bar, and I am alone. I don’t know whether to cry or laugh, so I do both. Hysteria is mine. I do not feel safe in the knowledge that Bert’s confession – for that is what it was – will colour my nightmares for years to come, but I’m thinking of the future, and for a while back there I thought it had been cancelled.
Not trusting the staff at the Burciaga – my door has been tried several times, without a knock or a word – I give sleep a miss, but there’s not much left of the night anyway. I buy a coffee for company and sit in the Plaza de Armas. An hour later, relieved to see I am unaccompanied, Armando is bounding towards me. He hugs me close, and keeps me there for… any longer and we would have to kiss.
He tells me that he hasn’t slept either, and had been waiting nervously for my call with his ear pressed to a police scanner he had retrieved from a toy-piled corner at his sister’s place. “I was confident I wasn’t walking you into a trap. But Bert is unpredictable. He loves to show off, but he isn’t stupid. He knows he’s not invincible, and that what he’s describing to you is going to happen to him. Especially if he keeps talking to journalists! I lied that you were pretty important, and that your employers were watching out for you. That it would be a big hassle to kill you!” We laugh. Armando could read me a grisly-detailed death threat and I’d laugh. This, I realise, is friendship.
Armando leads me to his car, waving his scanner, excited to take me to the scene of a shooting in Colonia Aldama, a poor, half-built, low-rise neighbourhood in the southwest of the city. The emergency services have beaten us to it and taped the area off, but there is no mistaking the collapsed forms of two men inside a Dodge Ram with a shattered windscreen and , their heads abut and their mouths open, as though trying to rescue an awkward first date.
A small group gathers, casting bold shadows in the picnic sunshine, a few reluctant onlookers fleshed out with local reporters. The latter are reticent, even off the record. It is understandable: journalists are in the cross-hairs, too. Virgilio, an agency photographer in his middle forties, says: “The papers get death threats. Don’t run this, do run that. Police beat us up and take our equipment. This is my fifth camera in two years, my eighth cell phone.” So why do you do it? Again, the rueful smirk tucked deep inside the cheek — the default expression of Juárez. “I have high blood pressure and a weak heart. They will get me before any assassin. Until that happens it pays pretty good.”
I give it a week before I search online for details of a double homicide in Hidalgo, but there is nothing. The stories that do appear lack a byline, and the text takes a back seat to grisly images that serve more as a cautionary tale — like a doom mural in a Saxon church — than as hard news. But the narcos want more from their press, which is to say even less, and the industry has been forced to plead for guidance. Appalled by the murder of a rookie photographer, 21-year-old Luis Carlos Santiago, at a busy shopping mall on September 16, El Diario, the newspaper with the biggest circulation in Juárez, ran an editorial — an open letter to the cartels — with the headline: “What do you want from us?” In gagging the press, the cartels have denied the people their last crumb of comfort: the knowledge of how bad things really are.
Postscript: six weeks after my visit, Armando moved his family to Zacatecas state. He had received threatening phone calls at home and on his mobile. He offered no details except to say that his encouragement of an “Irish” journalist had not been welcome. Armando was philosophical —“It was time; we had fun; luck isn’t for life, it’s for moments and horses” — but the episode brought home to me the dangers to which journalists routinely expose those who help them.