The Fight to Save Juárez (14 page)

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Everything in Mexico closes down for Holy Week. Next to Christmas, it's the biggest national holiday. José Reyes Ferriz took his family
¹
to the El Conquistador hotel in Tuscon, Arizona, a five-star resort with world-class tennis courts, a golf course, and an expensive spa, among other amenities, nestled up against the Santa Catalina Mountains. Notwithstanding the sumptuous surroundings, Reyes Ferriz was completely distracted and preoccupied with his predicament. “I was trying to figure out what we were going to do,” the mayor recalled. That Saturday morning the mayor received his customary call from his chief of police to report on the state of the city. “How are you,
mi Presidente
?” Prieto said, using the honorific for the mayor. “If you give me a number that's fewer than five, I'm fine,” was the mayor's response (meaning that he hoped there had been less than five executions in the city over the prior twenty-four hours). There was something different in the police chief 's tone. After a moment, the mayor asked the chief how he was doing. “Me, I'm fine,” Prieto responded before dropping his bomb: “I'm here watching my ranch and feeding my pigs,” he said. “I'm not coming back.”

Prieto's
words hit Reyes Ferriz hard. The burden of his position weighed heavily on him; he'd been worrying about saving the city from itself for months now. Even as he clicked off his cell phone, the chief of police's statement continued to reverberate in his head. “I was alone,” the mayor noted. “There was no one who could fix this for me.” The mayor returned home on Easter Sunday, immersed in worry.

At 10 a.m. on Monday morning, as he was meeting with his chief of staff, his personal secretary buzzed. “You have a call from General Juárez Loera,” he said. Loera was the commander of the 11th Military Zone, a vast area of northern Mexico that included the important border states of Chihuahua and Coahuila. The general had a reputation as a tough, no-nonsense commander not given to niceties or trivial conversation. He also had a penchant for raising the hackles of civil libertarians by making such pronouncements as, “My search warrant is the sledgehammer.” Loera was constantly at odds with human-rights activists seeking to make him accountable for army violations spawned by his iron-fist, tough-on-crime philosophy. At an opening ceremony to mark the initiation of a guns-for-food-vouchers exchange program that spring of 2008, the general had chided journalists who questioned him about army abuses in Juárez: “I'd prefer it if when journalists write of ‘one more dead' they'd say ‘one less delinquent,' instead,” he suggested. The general was criticized for implying that the lives of narcos were worthless.

The mayor had already decided that he would ask the general to recommend someone to replace Guillermo Prieto. “
Señor Presidente
,” the general said, “Clear your agenda. I'll see you at 2 p.m. at the army garrison.”

The mayor's calendar was already full. He was expected at an important meeting in El Paso at that same time. The Mexican foreign secretary, Patricia Espinosa (Mexico's counterpart to the American secretary of state), was coming to negotiate a new rail bridge across the Rio Grande west of Juárez so that trains would no longer have to come through the center of the city. The mayor of El Paso, the Mexican consul in El Paso, and the American consul in Juárez were all to be in attendance. “
Mi general
,” Reyes Ferriz responded, “I have something at 1 p.m. in El Paso with the
secretaría de relaciones exteriores
.” But the general was intransigent: “Clear your agenda,” he repeated. “What I have to tell you will be of greater importance to you than anything madam secretary has to say.”

Reyes Ferriz called the Mexican consul in El Paso and arranged to greet Patricia Espinosa prior to the scheduled lunch, and then headed across the river for the meeting, which took place in an elegant, Spanish colonial revival–style building from the 1920s called the Cortez Building. The Cortez, where a series of conquistador heads stared out from roundels above the first floor, had once been a hotel but was now an upscale office building.
During
a break, the mayor stepped out into the hall and called governor Reyes Baeza to let him know that he was going to ask General Juárez Loera to give him a military person to serve as chief of police. An incredulous voice on the other end of the line simply said, “You're militarizing the police if you do that.” Both men were attorneys who'd been steeped in the concept of the separation of civilian and military rule. “I did not see any other way out,” the mayor would later tell me. He conveyed that sentiment to the governor, who ultimately endorsed the mayor's direction, albeit with considerable reluctance.

Following his meeting with the Mexican foreign secretary, Reyes Ferriz raced back across the river via the so-called Dedicated Commuter Lane, or the Express Line, which required drivers to be certified on the Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI). This bridge obviated the lines that made crossing any of the other Juárez–El Paso bridges a time-consuming and tedious affair. The army garrison was a forty-minute drive from downtown Juárez to the south.

General Loera held his meetings in a spartan conference room with white tablecloth–covered tables arranged in a square. When the mayor arrived he left his bodyguards outside and entered the meeting room alone, taking a seat at the table toward which the general had gestured. General Juárez Loera was an old-school military man. He had an oval, jowly face and he combed his thinning hair straight back, a hairstyle that along with a moderately receding hairline gave his forehead prominence. The general wore bifocals and had the weathered look of a man who spent a great deal of time outdoors. Loera was gruff, direct, and spoke with a gravelly voice, but there was something reassuring about his solid, commanding style. His troops respected him. At sixty-two, he was nearing the end of his career but he was coming to the finish line at full stride: the 11th Military Zone was one of the most important of the army's sectors, given that the states within this territory, Chihuahua, Durango, and Coahuila, were key routes for the drug trade, where many cities and towns were controlled by one cartel or another—the entire region was awash in cartel operatives.

“We're coming to help, Señor Presidente,” the general said. He told the mayor that president Calderón would shortly announce that he was sending twenty-five hundred troops to Juárez to help stabilize the situation in the city. It was big news indeed. For the beleaguered Reyes Ferriz the general might as well have been the Savior. The mayor's back was to the wall, and this news exceeded the mayor's expectations by a significant measure. It certainly lived up to the general's statement that what he had to say was more important than anything that might have happened in El Paso. But there was more; over the course of the meeting General Loera agreed to help the mayor find a current or former army officer to take over as chief of the Juárez municipal police.

On
his way back into town, José Reyes Ferriz felt tremendous relief. For days his situation had seemed utterly hopeless, without remedy, and he'd felt a tremendous isolation in the face of his predicament. He was certain that the infusion of army troops would change the dynamics of what was taking place in Juárez. With some of his fifteen hundred officers refusing to leave their stations and the police department teetering on the brink of chaos, twenty-five hundred soldiers patrolling the streets seemed like a game changer. The fact that the general was disposed to help him find a replacement for Prieto was an added bonus. These were very promising developments in Reyes Ferriz's view. His immediate priority was to find a way of forestalling the mass resignations that Prieto had told him were imminent, a development that for all intents and purposes would leave the city without a police force. The mayor called Prieto in transit and asked to meet him at city hall. Reyes Ferriz hoped he could convince Prieto to stay on until his replacement was on board.

“It was a very candid and open conversation,” the mayor recalled. The two men had known one another for many years; they liked and trusted each other. They spoke using the more personal “
tu
” rather than the more formal “
usted
.” “We stood at the big window,” Reyes Ferriz remembered. “I explained to Guillermo what the army was going to do and how they were going to intervene. And I asked him to stay on until they could find a replacement.” The conversation had that look-you-in-the-eye character that comes to the fore in moments when the subject matter involves great risk and the stakes are absolute: life and death. Both men knew that the threats were real. It was no small thing what the mayor was asking when he urged Guillermo Prieto to stay on. In the end, out of a sense of loyalty and professional obligation, Prieto agreed.

At their meeting at the army command center, the general and the mayor had mapped out a course of action for the immediate days to come. Guillermo Prieto, assuming the mayor could convince him to stay on temporarily, would begin the long-planned cleanup of the police department while General Loera searched for his replacement and the identified army units were mobilized for their deployment to Juárez. The offer that Patiño had made at the Cibeles meeting to have the federal police oversee the administration of Confidence Tests to the entire police force had been more than an offer, it had been a precondition for the federal support that was now on its way to Juárez. The analysis remained the same: without a reliable police force overseeing the city, there could be no security in Juárez.

Note

1
. The mayor is married and has two children. He was adamant that they not be portrayed in this book for fear that they might become victims of a reprisal against him.

C
HAPTER 10

Twenty-Five Hundred Soldiers

The Juárez municipal police continued to be rife with tension. There had been more assassination attempts on the officers whose names had appeared on the “unbelievers” list. One of these, Casimiro Meléndez Ortega, a thirty-three-year-old officer who had been a close friend of the recently executed Francisco Ledesma, had spotted two suspicious cars as he was leaving for work one morning. Meléndez Ortega had drawn his service revolver just as
sicarios
jumped from one of the vehicles, spraying AK-47 fire as they ran toward him. The officer had returned fire and managed to repel the attack. Miraculously, he survived the attempt, shaken but otherwise unscathed, although the entrance to his house was pocked with bullet holes. Panicked neighbors had tried to call the city's emergency response number to no avail: despite repeated attempts, no one answered the line. Following the attempt on Meléndez Ortega, Guillermo Prieto placed the force on red alert, which meant that the police patrolled in teams of three and wore bulletproof vests, but it did little good: by the end of February the Sinaloa cartel had executed two more police commanders from the “unbelievers” list, and another had been lifted. The latter's whereabouts were still unknown, although part of his uniform had been found with blood stains in an empty lot, evidence that militated against a positive outcome to his abduction.

In addition to the violence directed against the municipal police, the announcement of the coming federal Confidence Tests, which would presumably ferret out those who were colluding with one or the other cartels or were otherwise engaged in criminal activity, was stirring unease. There was almost daily press coverage of the coming effort to clean up the department, and officers had begun deserting the force like rats jumping from a sinking ship. In the month of February alone forty-one police officers had tendered their resignations. “It's unprecedented in my years in law enforcement,” Guillermo Prieto told
Proceso
magazine in reference to the resignations. Asked if the resignations were a symptom of police complicity with the cartels, Prieto would only venture to say that some had perhaps resigned for fear that their criminal activities would be revealed, while others had
resigned
because their families were pressing them to do so out of fear that they would be killed. The chief proffered an estimate of the number of corrupt officers on the force at 10 percent. It was an absurdly low figure; virtually everyone in Juárez would have scoffed at it.

For mayor Reyes Ferriz, the world seemed to be closing in. His police department was being decimated by assassinations, resignations, and work stoppages. The state police were hardly present in the city and the governor's responses to the mayor's petitions for additional support continued to fall on deaf ears. Reyes Ferriz increasingly found himself besieged from all sides and with few alternatives as the city descended into darkness and anarchy. The circumstance pointed toward a single, inevitable conclusion: the mayor had to put himself, and the fate of Juárez, into the hands of the federal government. Yet the costs to him of such a move were painfully clear. For one thing, it increased his personal risk significantly. There were also sure to be political costs, given that the decision to bring in the federal forces had already created tensions between himself and governor Reyes Baeza. There were many ways in which Juárez was at the mercy of the governor and the state legislature (which the governor controlled). The legislature was the source of funding that the city required to sustain services and projects whose budgets were already strained to the limit.

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During the month of February 2008, while the mayor negotiated strategies for reinforcing local law enforcement and cleaning up his police, General Juárez Loera, whose 20th Militarized Cavalry Division was already garrisoned in the city, instructed his army units to take off the gloves. The five thousand troops in Juárez were part of the country's border defense, given that Mexico does not have either a Border Patrol or state National Guard–style militias. Officially, their primary duties involved the interdiction of smugglers moving people and drugs in the border zone, and, historically, the army's style had been low-key operations that did not receive a great deal of media attention. The military preferred it that way.