The Fight to Save Juárez (12 page)

Elena and I subsequently met clandestinely in out-of-the-way locations—Ciudad Juárez's enormous city park; a Church's Chicken in a new strip mall on the outskirts of town; on a segment of El Camino Real (a boondoggle pet project of the previous mayor, Héctor Murguía); at an unfinished and therefore not-frequented overlook on the outskirts of Juárez—because she feared for her life were it discovered that she was speaking to me. Talking to anyone can be dangerous in Juárez, where it's difficult to avoid the small-town feeling that everyone knows everyone else and everything is watched, observed, noted.

The problem was not only Juárez's small-town feeling, it was that Juárez lived by a code of silence. It was very difficult to get anyone to talk about the world of the Juárez cartel. Some people even refused to mention it by name. There were people who would talk about the history of the cartel, recognized if unofficial experts to whom visiting journalists turned for briefings, for example. But to get someone who knew firsthand about the cartel to talk about it, someone who'd lived it from the inside—that took time, trust, and luck. The penalty for violating the code of silence—and this is no hyperbole—was death. That threat was something as present and real as the desert sands that blow through every neighborhood in the city. Everyone in Juárez knows that code as a truth.

Within
the cartel culture, the code had a different configuration. Here there could be a great deal of performance. In a world where braggadocio
is
the lingua franca, and flash and pretense often mask substance, Elena figured out that Hernán was the real deal. For all his dime-a-dozen narco posturing—the abundance of cash, the ever-present gun, the gold jewelry, the western garb—there was plenty of evidence pointing to his status as a midlevel narco within the Juárez cartel. (And in the world from which Elena had come, midlevel might as well have been head capo—she was from a poor family in a poor neighborhood and, materially speaking, she'd never had a thing growing up.) As far as Elena was concerned, Hernán was a prime catch.

Elena saw one of the first signs that convinced her of Hernán's status during an encounter they had with the municipal police. One afternoon they were in his new pickup truck speeding down the Avenida de las Americas, one of Juárez's main boulevards. The windows were down and the sound system was blasting
narcocorridos
. Elena and Hernán were having a grand time. They'd been on a partying spree that had now lasted several days. Suddenly, a police patrol car was in pursuit behind them, lights flashing. Hernán cursed them, but pulled over. When the officer approached the truck and recognized Hernán behind the steering wheel, his entire demeanor changed. “I'm sorry, sir,” Elena remembered the officer saying. “Can we escort you anywhere?” This incident told her that Hernán was the real thing.

As a child in Juárez, Elena had grown up in roiling poverty, but her personality was outgoing and spunky, and for a long time there was an inner optimism that transcended the reality of her family's economic circumstances. She accounted for it on the basis of the fact that she'd been a real daddy's girl (she was the only girl in the family). In elementary school she'd even imagined herself becoming an archaeologist or an astronaut, the latter following the death of Christa McAuliffe, the American schoolteacher astronaut who'd died in NASA's Challenger explosion when Elena was ten years old. The tragedy had captured the imaginations of schoolchildren in Juárez as much as it had children in the United States.

Whatever the source, those once bright and infinite dreams had long ago evaporated. The hard knocks of a woman's life, ground down in the underbelly of Juárez's lower social rungs, had taken their toll on her. The sparkle had long since disappeared from Elena's eyes by the time I met her.

Elena's father had been gruff with the children and abusive toward their mother. He drank and partied with his friends, and they never knew if he would come home at night. He barely provided for the family; Elena's older brothers helped support the household even though they were only adolescents and had to drop out of school to do so. Elena was spared such obligations. She was her father's favorite, and that gave her leeway even as it created continuous conflicts with her mother.

Elena's
blossoming meant that she was always out and about. The boys and men who wanted her were legion. And she knew it. There were nights when Elena didn't return home, and she would walk in the door when she damned well felt like it the next day, unabashed, expecting to be fed. Her mother deemed her incorrigible and eventually resorted to the Catholic nuns in hopes that they could help tame her or put some sense into her, but after less than a month at the Catholic residential center for wayward adolescents Elena talked another girl into running away with her. For almost nine months her family did not know where she was. She slept at her girlfriends' houses or stayed with men in the cheap motel rooms where they happened to have spent the night. Elena felt no fear in this abandon; she was wild and fiery and full of that self-confidence that comes with commanding good looks.

By the time she was fifteen Elena was working as a waitress in a restaurant, visiting her family only sporadically. In her neighborhood, most kids her age were no longer in school and gangs were everywhere. Already her mind was full of the narco-culture that surrounded her. It was in the music they listened to, the way they dressed, and the social hierarchy within which they lived: the only people with power were narco-people. In Elena's world, everyone had friends and neighbors who made their living at least partly from the drug trade, helping to transport, warehouse, and package drugs, and sometimes running them across the river into El Paso. The only people with money that she knew were people with ties to the Juárez cartel.

On one of her rare visits home during this time, Elena caught her mother in a reflective mood. They sat down to drink a cup of coffee at the small, worn table in the barren room that served as both living room and kitchen in the family's cramped three-room house. The conversation turned to the family and how her brothers were doing and, eventually, to the depth of her mother's unhappiness, married to an at-times violent man whose disinterest in the family was all too evident. Elena could count on one hand the number of times she and her mother had talked like this. She'd never felt her mother's closeness; that mother-daughter bond was altogether foreign to her. As they sat at the table one of the things Elena's mother told her was that during her pregnancy she had considered aborting Elena, so spent was she by her husband's abusive treatment. The disclosure gave Elena a window into the lifelong strained feelings between them.

The conversation was a rare moment of candor between the two women, fostered by the serendipity of an unanticipated encounter in which each happened to be receptive to the other. As they sipped their coffee, Elena's mother told her that she hoped Elena would have a better life and find a better man than her father—a husband who was not a drunkard who beat his wife and children. In the atmosphere of frankness, Elena responded
with
something that she herself had not formulated before that moment but which, in the voicing, she immediately recognized as a truth: she told her mother that she had no interest in ever getting married. “I want to be an
amante
, not a wife,” she said, using the Spanish word for a lover. What she meant, she later told me, was that she wanted to be a narco's mistress. There was greater honesty in that than in a conventional marriage, she thought. Such an arrangement would also give her the comfort of knowing that no one owned her, that she could leave any time she wished. At the end of their coffee, Elena asked her mother to forgive her for the years of back talk and sarcasm, for being stubborn and contrarian, and for adding to her mother's burden of woes by not coming home at night and running away. They hugged, and Elena walked out the door and into the dust of Juárez. It would be months before she would come back, and it was one of the few times ever that she felt a sense of calm in relation to home and family.

Elena discovered that she was pregnant after she and Hernán had been together for less than a year. His response was to buy her a house and put her up in it. The house was not in an ostentatious neighborhood; the neighborhood was working-class, and most of the people around her were employed at the nearby assembly plants. But in comparison to the other homes, hers stood out. It was two stories and had a wrought-iron fence with a postage-stamp yard in front, plus a large backyard with concertina wire all along the top of the fence that surrounded it. When their child was born, a boy whom they named Pedro, Hernán attended his baptism, which cemented for Elena the notion that while she was not Hernán's wife, she was important. If he had other girlfriends, which is what she suspected (because they all did), she believed herself to be first among equals.

“You have to come by every day to see your boy,” Elena insisted to Hernán. “I don't care if it's for five minutes.” And he did, Elena reported. In fact, many nights he stayed over. “I don't know how he did it in terms of his wife, but he knew how to have his way with her,” Elena said.

.   .   .

Unbeknownst to them, Elena and Hernán were the unintended beneficiaries of the United States' anti-drug policies. In the 1970s, Colombian drug traffickers had little to fear from the U.S. Coast Guard. They were so bold that they took to stacking tons of marijuana on the decks of vessels, their loads in plain sight. These motherships would sail right up to American territorial waters, where they rendezvoused with ten to twenty go-fast boats. Still in international waters, the ships were beyond the reach of the American authorities. The illicit drugs were offloaded from the motherships onto the smaller vessels, which then made their runs to the Florida coast. Even if they were detected, the go-fast boats easily outran the coast guard vessels (the coast guard cutters had maximum speeds of twenty to twenty-five knots,
while
the go-fast could almost double that speed). At best, the coast guard might intercept one or two of the fast boats, while the rest eluded them and made successful runs to the coastline. Cocaine was even more difficult to interdict. If the coast guard caught one of the boats carrying cocaine shipments, the crews simply threw the cargo overboard.

By the 1980s, the United States was awash in Colombian cocaine and Miami was the cocaine capital of the world, followed closely by New York and Los Angeles. The cocaine was produced and controlled by the big Colombian cartels, such as the Medellín and Cali cartels, and 80 percent of it was coming into the U.S. via the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to the Eastern Seaboard, especially Florida (most of the rest was arriving aboard commercial airline flights), as the Colombians continued to use the flotillas of small, medium, and large vessels to make the relatively short run from Colombia to the American markets. Mexican drug exports servicing the American drug culture were mostly marijuana, heroin, and modest amounts of prescription drugs; the amount of cocaine coming through Mexico was negligible.

Hamstrung, the Americans changed their tactics. Beginning in 1981, the U.S. Congress “clarified” statutory restrictions on the use of the military for law enforcement purposes. By 1984 and 1985 the coast guard was launching aggressive and complex operations, such as Operation Hat Trick I and Operation Hat Trick II, which involved the Customs Service, navy, air force, army, and marines, all participating in operations to interdict mother-ships as they transited the major Caribbean lanes. Prior to 1984, the highest cocaine seizure had been forty-six pounds. In 1984, cocaine seizures jumped to 1,967 pounds, and in 1985 they jumped to 6,500 pounds. Evidence of the success of the increased pressure on the Colombian cocaine smuggling operations was irrefutable: cocaine seizures were skyrocketing.

The next obstacle to interdicting drug-running ships was international law and the American Mansfield Amendment, which prohibited the coast guard and U.S. military forces from directly assisting foreign officials in the enforcement of their laws. This meant that if the coast guard discovered a Colombian vessel loaded with cocaine while it was still in Colombian waters, there was nothing it could do but report it to Colombian authorities and hope for the best. The U.S. had to rely on the Colombians to muster their navy, to apprehend, and to convict. The same held true for any other South American country that was a point of origin for drugs headed for the United States. It wasn't until 1985 that the Mansfield Amendment was changed to allow American officials to collaborate directly with foreign law enforcement.

International maritime law posed an even thornier problem. Every vessel flies under the flag of the country to which it belongs. Under international
law
, this means that any action against a foreign vessel is considered an action against the “flag country.” As a matter of national sovereignty, most countries were not eager to have Americans boarding their ships at will in the open seas. Boarding foreign flag vessels created delicate situations with foreign governments, but the U.S. government found a way to work around this impediment. By 1986, when the coast guard boarded a foreign vessel on the high seas it could contact the flag country's government via the State Department for consent to seize the vessel. The process was exceedingly cumbersome, involving conference calls among the coast guard, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice every time the coast guard encountered a suspicious foreign vessel at sea. A request would then be made to the vessel's flag country to conduct a registry check and grant permission to board, search, and, if appropriate, seize the vessel. The coast guard's frustration with the procedures was more than evident when its commandant, Admiral Paul Yost, testified before Congress in 1986: “Response to such requests vary depending on the country and often on the day of the week or relation to a national holiday,” Yost reported with evident frustration, adding that countries often had poor record systems for their vessel registries.