Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (26 page)

The second story was offered by Rosalio himself. After three years, “I couldn’t keep on living with these people telling me what to do, who to kill, where to go, how to sleep, how to go about myself. I can’t live my whole life like that. I can’t live in fear of them saying people [will be] killing me. I had to stop it one way or another.” In the past, he had seen people get shot by rival gangs and then put out to pasture, allowed out of the life. So he said that in a moment of desperation, he decided, at the age of sixteen, to shoot himself.

He pulled up his trouser leg and showed me the wound. It was large and angry. Some of the nerves were destroyed: he can’t feel much there. After pulling the trigger, he said, he shot himself with Novocain and cleaned the wound up, with the skills he had learned at the training camp. “I was missing a big old chunk of meat so I had somebody help me close it and I sewed it up the best I could. I cleaned it, took some antibiotics.” On the first day, he didn’t feel much. “But the second day—” He sucked his teeth.

It didn’t work. “They made me sew my bullet wound up and nurse myself,” he said. Not long after, they sent him on another job, to the nightclub in Monterrey. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill anymore. He had had enough. “I was tired of that lifestyle,” he says. “I wanted to be left alone.” That, he says, is the reason they turned on him.

He wouldn’t say how he got away from the throat cutters. Even after he was arrested, he doesn’t seem to have boasted about that. “Nobody knows what went on,” he said. “Nobody knows. I just—I had to fight for my life. I’m not going to let anybody kill me.”

But what could he do then? He knew that in Mexico, the Zetas would find him, sooner or later, and they would do to him precisely what he had done to so many people over the preceding three years. So he called the American police in Laredo and said he had information for them. He was back in the United States within forty-eight hours.
³⁹
“I didn’t want to die, I didn’t want my family to die, for a mistake that was made when I was thirteen years old,” he says. “I didn’t get caught. I turned myself in . . . Ain’t nobody caught me, no cops went into arrest me. I turned myself in. I just wanted all this to stop . . . I don’t want to live that life anymore. I couldn’t keep on going like that.”

He made the right call. Years later, as court evidence, Rosalio would see the pictures of what Treviño’s men did to his best friend Jesse not long after Rosalio fled. “Holes everywhere. He got stabbed all over the place. Neck, head, face, chest, arms, all over his neck, face, and he had a hole right here in his head.” Rosalio looked genuinely moved when he described the images, perhaps for the first time in our conversation.

“He was still a human being,” he says. “He was still my brother.”

Rosalio is now serving two consecutive life sentences in a prison camp in rural Texas for killings he carried out on that side of the border. He will be released when he is in his eighties, if he lives that long. It is unlikely. After I passed through the barbed wire and metal detectors to see him, the prison guard told me cheerfully that “it would be nothing for them [the Zetas] to be able to reach out and put a hit on him inside prison.”

A year before I met him, two other prisoners seized Rosalio and stabbed him three times in the back and once in the head. He showed me the scars. His body, I realize now, has a complex topography, where each wound or mess of scar tissue marks a different part of his life. His ripped flesh is a history of the drug war all by itself. He believes they tried to kill him because one of his victims was a member of their prison gang, and so they are obliged to avenge him. Now, for his own safety, he lives in “administrative segregation.” The guard tells me it “is kinda like solitary, except we don’t call it solitary.” Rosalio explained: “You’re in a room twenty-four seven. Can’t go out anywhere. There’s nothing I can do . . . Just in a single cell. By yourself. I’ve been like that for a year already.” He can’t make phone calls or talk to anyone. “The way I’m treated right now—sometimes I think I shoulda let them kill me,” he said.

He will probably live like this for the rest of his life, entombed from the rest of humanity. He is convinced the cartels could kill his family now. His family, and anyone who comes into contact with him.

“What makes you think they’re not going to get you?” he said, peering at me. “You want to sit here and say [what] they can’t do—they can do anything they want. You don’t know the reach people got. You don’t know what kind of contacts they got. You don’t know who they got on their payroll. You haven’t lived that life. I have. I know what these people are capable of doing. I know how far they’ll go just to kill somebody. I lived that life. Not you.”

He thinks obsessively about that day, when he was thirteen, and made that decision to pull that trigger. He will freely admit to and discuss almost everything he did for the Zetas, but he spends more than four hours trying to convince me, in a pleading, pained voice, that his account of that moment is true, and he was forced.

I realize now I should have told him: It’s not that moment that sealed your fate. It’s the moment when the drug war was launched, long ago. I don’t know if he would have understood.

Clearly, Rosalio was a disturbed adolescent, and would have been, whatever our drug policies. But it was the war for drugs
⁴⁰
that took his adolescent disturbance and gave him huge cash incentives to cultivate it, enlarge it, and live off it. It said: Murder, and we will shower you with money and cars and women. It gave him paramilitary training to carry out those murders as efficiently as possible. And it hollowed out the Mexican police force so he could continue those murders without fear of arrest.

“Everybody around me is dead now,” Rosalio said to me, less, I think, in a tone of self-pity than of shock. “Everybody I used to hang around with—they’re all dead. There’s not even a handful of us that are alive.”

A few months after I met Rosalio, when I was back in New York, it was reported in the international press that Miguel Treviño had risen, through slaughter, to become number one
⁴¹
in the Zetas. And then, a few months after that, it was reported that Miguel Treviño had been captured by the Mexican police
⁴²
in Nuevo Laredo—almost certainly because they were paid by a rival drug gang to take him out.

Nobody doubts that another gangster now controls the routes through Mexico into the United States, and nobody doubts he has a fresh batch of expendable child soldiers to defend him.

Chapter 10

Marisela’s Long March

Rosalio’s story was so gruesome that I was sure it couldn’t possibly capture the day-to-day life of most Mexicans in the middle of the drug war. He was—as he says—a soldier. Soldiers take part in violence. I kept asking myself: What is life like for the noncombatants? What is normal life like? All these people I could see buying burgers in Wendy’s and flatscreen TVs in the mall in Juárez—clearly they weren’t working for the Zetas. I wanted to know how living in the middle of all this killing affected them.

As I talked to people all over Juárez, I slowly began to glimpse the answer, but it really became clear to me only when I began to investigate a story of a girl who fell in love, and a mother who went looking for her. I learned it—as will become clear as the story progresses—by tracking down the people
¹
who knew them, and by reading through the records from the time.

At first, this will seem like it is a story from a different book, because it focuses on people who have nothing to do with drugs or drug dealing. But in fact it is the closest I came—and the closest, I believe, that I can bring you—to understanding how the drug war has reshaped the psyche of Mexico, and the many other countries on the supply route.

Rubi Fraire was on a vacation with her big Mexican family in Jalisco. They all stopped off in a diner where the roof was made of palm leaves and a sleepy river rolled past. She was eleven years old—a sarcastic, slightly plump little girl who was always quipping. Her mother, Marisela, was on a rare break from her endless whirl of work. She was a nurse in the local hospital, and when she clocked off from that job, she sold necklaces and chains and rings. It was exhausting, but she believed in working hard for her family more than anything: she was saving up to buy a shop.

Marisela counted her kids back into the car and—in a moment the family would later remember as like a scene in
Home Alone
—she must have counted somebody else’s kid by mistake. They all clambered in and drove off. All except Rubi.

It was only two hours later that they realized she was not with them. “Where is she?” Marisela gasped. How could this happen? How could she forget her?

They drove back in a panic to the last place they had seen her. They expected Rubi to be in tears—or gone.

They pulled into the diner. Is she . . . ? Where is . . . ?

And there was Rubi. She was laughing. She had made friends with another little girl and she was eating fish.

Rubi’s older brother, Juan, asked her if she had been scared. No, she says: “I knew that my mom was coming back for me.”

Rubi knew that Marisela would always come back for her, no matter what happened. She was right. What she didn’t know was quite how far Marisela would have to go to do that.

A few years later, Rubi had a crush. A tall, skinny twenty-two-year-old with sticky-outy ears and an impressive line in hard-man talk turned up at her mother’s new carpentry store in Ciudad Juárez asking for a job.

“Please help me out, I don’t have money to buy food for my little girl,” Sergio said. “I’ll do anything that needs to be done. Give me a job at least for a couple of days.”

Marisela was feeling softhearted, so she made Sergio a carpentry assistant. Soon, her daughter was hanging around him all the time. She was fourteen, and impressed by his tall tales of being a DJ for a radio station, of being fired because he slept with the owner’s daughter, and of owning an AK-47. By now, Rubi had developed fast. She was curvy and precociously beautiful.

We don’t know when they first become involved. He got a tattoo with Rubi’s name on it, and started telling her that her mother didn’t love her. Why is she on your back for not doing well at school, if she really cares about you?

And one morning, Rubi was gone. The police refused to go get her. A few months later, Marisela found her, pregnant, and they became friends again—but Rubi ran back to Sergio each night.

Just beyond the frame of this small domestic drama, their city was starting to look like the set of the
Saw
movies. Chopped-up bodies were being found all over the streets of Juárez. Decapitated corpses hung from the traffic overpasses with signs from the cartels declaring they were in charge now. But this had nothing to do with Marisela and her family. Like most people in Juárez, they looked away and tried to get on with their lives. What else could they do?

One day, Rubi’s big brother, Juan, turned up to redecorate the flat where Rubi lived, and he was puzzled by what he found. The furniture was gone. The place was empty. There was only one thing: a note from Rubi. It said that she was having a lot of problems with Sergio because Marisela kept criticizing him, and they were going away to find a new life, free of her, far away.

Rubi had run off before. She always came back.

Christmas came. Rubi didn’t call.

New Year’s Eve came, and still Rubi didn’t call.

Marisela was puzzled. There had been no fight before she vanished, not this time. Where was she? She decided to visit Sergio’s mother to see if she knew. When she arrived, she saw something that startled her. It was Rubi’s baby. He was with Sergio. But there was no Rubi.