The Fight to Save Juárez (11 page)

This barrio had been the heart of the Juárez drug world for decades, but these days there were
picaderos
all over the city. Some were formal, that is, in houses and buildings, others informal—vendors, for example, who otherwise sold burritos or fruit or juices from small stands and mobile carts, or pushers who hung around parks and street corners. At least in Juárez, the thesis that Patricio Patiño had presented at the Cibeles security meeting that February in 2008, in which he'd argued that retail drug markets and domestic drug consumption were the new scourges of Mexico, was plainly in evidence. The
picaderos
were booming in Juárez, and the addicts were local. Juárez now had the highest concentration of drug addicts in all of Mexico.

There
had been roughly one to two hundred
picaderos
in the city until 1994, when the U.S. government launched Operation Hold the Line in El Paso in an effort to more aggressively intercept undocumented workers attempting to enter the United States. Whether by design or not, the operation had a direct impact on drug smuggling; it became more difficult for the cartels to move product across the river. In the span of just a few months, the number of
picaderos
in Juárez doubled to four hundred. There was a clear-cut cause and effect: in response to Operation Hold the Line, the cartel had begun paying its lieutenants partially in product, which in turn had to be converted into cash. That was the force behind the sudden explosion of retail drug markets all over the city (indeed, the country). By 2007, there were approximately two thousand
picaderos
in Juárez, depending on what authority you asked. It was anyone's guess what the true number was, but they were everywhere. Juárez, a city that historically had catered to visiting customers from across the river, was now swimming in cocaine, heroin, and local addicts.

There were essentially four tiers to the Juárez cartel's operations. At the top were the capos and the lieutenants and their immediate people. A significant part of their work centered on the logistics of getting Colombian cocaine as well as Mexican-origin drugs across the border. Then there was La Línea, comprising the state ministerial police and the Juárez municipal police, who were the enforcement wing of the cartel. Beneath them were Los Aztecas, Juárez's most powerful street gang. And, finally, below Los Aztecas were the scores of lesser gangs that Los Aztecas controlled. The cartel outsourced the local distribution and retail sales to Los Aztecas. The people selling drugs on the streets were not cartel members, they were mostly poor, unemployed neighborhood people who occupied the very bottom of the hierarchy; they were utterly expendable.

Los Aztecas had their origins in American, especially Texan, prisons, where incarcerated Mexican and Mexican-ancestry inmates banded together to run prison rackets. Many gang members were from the Barrio Azteca in El Paso. Others were from Juárez and other parts of Mexico. The U.S. government had begun deporting many of the Mexican prisoners to Juárez, where they maintained their ties to their Barrio Azteca allies in El Paso. As Los Aztecas were again imprisoned in the enormous Juárez city prison (the Centro de Rehabilitación Social, or CERESO), they eventually took control of it, from which they managed a great deal of the criminal activity in the city. Mexican prisons are notoriously porous, and the Juárez CERESO was especially so. Between authorized conjugal visits and widespread corruption of guards and wardens, Los Aztecas had the run of the prison and ready access to what went on beyond it.

By early 2008 Los Aztecas had been identified as the gang that was
running
the local retail drug markets as well as bringing in a significant amount of weapons across the border from Texas. An exposé on the gang that appeared in
El Diario
at that time noted that Los Aztecas exerted such complete control in Juárez that 80 percent of the local gangs were working for them in some capacity, helping Los Aztecas manage the distribution and sale of drugs in the city.

Los Aztecas had structured their business in such a way that they could distribute thousands of doses a day, even when their workers were arrested or killed. The most important detail revealed by the
El Diario
article was that there were no longer any independent contractors in the Juárez retail drug world. Workers were paid 300 pesos a day plus commissions on sales (assembly plant workers in Juárez were making 500 pesos per week). The haphazard, incidental character of the prior independent contractor was replaced by a highly structured organizational scheme that included three eight-hour shifts per day. There were an estimated 120 distribution and retail centers in Juárez employing roughly twelve hundred people. Each of these, in turn, was in charge of several “runners,” and for every runner there were, on average, five
puchadores
(a Mexicanization of the term “pusher”). This same system serviced the more traditional
picaderos
as well. Each center had security people, who were responsible for watching over the venues where drugs were sold and monitoring to ensure that people stayed within their prescribed territories. These retail centers were all over the city now, but the area of greatest sales was the Zona Centro, downtown.
El Diario
's source noted that it was especially evident downtown that the municipal police were protecting the vendors. La Cima and the neighborhoods immediately surrounding it were also a high-volume area, notwithstanding the fact that the police had placed a substation just three blocks from La Cima.

A February 26, 2008, arrest of twenty-one Aztecas by the Mexican Army provided a snapshot into the workings of the local drug business. The Aztecas were working as operatives of La Línea and the Juárez cartel, and their duties included executions and lifting people, as well as protecting drug shipments that were distributed to the
picaderos
for retail drug sales. In other words, some of the jobs for which the cartel had traditionally used La Línea were now being subcontracted out to Los Aztecas. At the time of their arrest, gang members were found to have an arsenal that included ten AK-47s, a batch of federal police uniforms, police communications radios, twenty-three scales, thirteen thousand doses of cocaine, two kilos of cocaine base, as well as a “brick” of marijuana.

One of the universally reliable equations in drug culture is that where there is a high incidence of drug addiction, there is also a high incidence of ancillary crime. That equation held as true in Ciudad Juárez as it did in New York City or Houston or Detroit. The explosion in the number of people
addicted
to heroin and cocaine in Juárez translated into an explosion in crime, from burglaries and car thefts to assaults and holdups. By the spring of 2008, crime was beginning to reach epidemic proportions throughout the city.

Arrested Juárez gangbangers. Photo copyright © Raymundo Ruiz.

.   .   .

A vast amount of cocaine and other drugs moved through Juárez into El Paso. The city was the most important transit point for the Juárez cartel's drugs, but it was also a vital point of passage for other cartels as well. Prior to the war, the latter had typically paid the Juárez cartel a fee to transit their product through the city, sometimes even under the protection of La Línea. One of the most telling details that betrayed the extent of police involvement in the Juárez drug trade was the fact that virtually no cocaine was ever confiscated in municipal police operations. Notwithstanding that Juárez was universally known to be one of the most important transit points for cocaine into the United States, a fact that should have translated into
periodic
interdictions of significant drug shipments, over the course of 2005 the police had only confiscated a paltry seventy-two kilos of cocaine. In 2006, the quantity had dropped to a mere sixty-one kilos; and in 2007 the amount of confiscated cocaine had dropped to a laughable three kilograms. Few of the cartel's midlevel operatives, the tier that moved modest quantities of cocaine across the border, would have bothered to waste a “mule” on a paltry run of three kilos. In a city that the Mexican federal attorney general's office had designated as having the third-largest retail cocaine market in the country, just behind Tijuana and Monterrey, one would certainly have expected commensurate cocaine seizures.

The Juárez cartel had created an efficient, lean organizational structure, one that would have been the envy of any corporation managing the marketing and sale of its products. However, the Sinaloa cartel had initiated an effort to alter this convenient arrangement. In attempting to take over the city, the Sinaloa people could not leave this part of the Juárez cartel's operations intact. Although media accounts of the ensuing violence would repeatedly characterize the conflict as between two cartels for control of access to the American drug market, this was only half of the picture. The other half was about the local retail business and the addicts it serviced. While net profits from the local Juárez drug trade were far less than those derived from shipping drugs across the border (the value of a kilo of cocaine doubled when it traveled from Juárez across the Rio Grande), Sinaloa could not ignore this segment of the Juárez cartel's business because the network was now intrinsic to the very structure of the Juárez cartel's operations. There was no way for Sinaloa to take Juárez without taking control of the retail drug markets as well—Sinaloa's flank would have been left exposed and vulnerable. Out of this imperative would come the thousands of dead, the wave of executions that was about to wash over the city as rival gangs assassinated one another's members as they vied for control of the city's
picaderos
and the addicts they served.

C
HAPTER 8

The Mistress

Elena (a pseudonym) knew full well the extent to which the Juárez cartel owned the state and local police, controlling them and treating them like rank employees who did their bidding—from the mundane to the horrific. She came to know this world through Hernán, her lover and would-be common law husband (were it not for the fact that he was already married, with a family). Hernán had close dealings with many different police officers, some of whom he ran like a crew. He also had an associate who owned an auto-repair shop. Hernán sent his police in their cruisers over to the shop, where the associate's people siphoned the gas tanks until they were nearly empty. The municipality's gas was then sold, and Hernán and his associate divided the profits. Hernán was inventive in this way, but these were minor schemes, side deals. Running cocaine across the river was his real business.

Elena first met Hernán in her early twenties at a bar frequented by people involved in the Juárez drug world. The narcos had a reputation. They partied hard and were always flush with cash; the Juárez girls chased them around as if they were celebrities. The night they met, Elena spotted Hernán across the room and asked one of her friends to introduce them. Elena was aggressive that way. She was also strikingly attractive and had an edgy, oppositional streak that made her utterly disinterested in stable men with careers in accounting or sales or anything else that smacked of mainstream.

Elena's wildness surprised Hernán. He was accustomed to docile women whom he used and then discarded; he tended to have his way, and he was not used to being contradicted. Elena was different. She challenged him. If he pushed her she pushed back. And she was not afraid of his violent character—it was all-too-familiar to her as a personality trait in men, from her autocratic, abusive father to the men she'd been with from early on in her adolescence, when she'd discovered her sexuality. That discovery had given her a power she'd never before experienced. She grew confident in that terrain, as if something unknown and unanticipated had opened up within her. She'd felt no fear or apprehension that night at the bar when she'd walked across the room to meet Hernán, only a sense of opportunity.

The
first time I met Elena was at a small gathering that had been organized to watch a Mexican league soccer match. The occasion was one of the first social events to which I was invited in Juárez, and I was aware of feeling a tension between the violence taking place out in the streets and the casualness of drinking beer, eating tacos, and watching a sporting event on television. I'd felt the contradiction before, say, observing a bike race at El Chamizal Park, with cyclists dressed in brightly colored garb, knowing that for a time the large park had been one of the cartels' preferred dumping sites for executed bodies. I'd also felt it at El Parque Central, where an old man ran a small Ferris wheel and laughing children flashed victory signs at me from colorful gondolas. Even in the midst of death, I thought to myself, life goes on.

We had gathered in a small, working-class home. At moments, the television's poor reception gave the match an otherworldly appearance, as distorted forms seemed to dance across the screen. Most of those who'd gathered to watch the soccer match were friends, although it was apparent that Elena did not know many of them. Like me, she was something of an outsider to the group. Elena said nothing about her past. It was only later, when one of those in attendance told me more about who Elena was, that I asked her to tell me her story, including her relationship with Hernán.