The Fight to Save Juárez (17 page)

Hernán met these young women at bars and nightclubs where, after chatting them up with a few drinks, he proposed his deal: $200 (“In other words, almost nothing,” is how Elena characterized it) to cross a small load of five to seven kilos. He promised to take care of them if they encountered problems, and he assured them that first-time busts of relatively small amounts of drugs would just get them bounced back to Juárez after a short interval in American detention, during which they'd be photographed and fingerprinted, which was true.

Hernán was persuasive and seductive. He had a way with words and he was charismatic. More often than not, he was successful in enlisting their collaboration. The typical run involved strapping the kilo packets of cocaine to the mule: one kilo on each of the inner thighs, one on the small of the back, two around the stomach and one in the crotch area. The size of the mules sometimes dictated the quantities they could carry and how easily loose-fitting clothing could cover the packets. SENTRI passes helped but they were not a prerequisite: sometimes a single mule hit all three bridges in a single day. These young women were the bread and butter of Hernán's operation, but he used others as well, and, in a pinch, he ran loads himself. “He'd get crazed about it,” Elena said, likening it to a game of Russian roulette. He'd strap himself up with a load (although he never carried more than three kilos) and hit a bridge, make his drop, and head back to Juárez, where he'd strap on another load and hit another bridge, until he'd hit all three bridges. He never got stopped, but it wasn't because he'd paid off an ICE agent, it was because he was lucky, according to Elena.

The mules were unreliable. They flaked out on him; they got cold feet. Some moved away. Some got boyfriends who didn't like their girlfriends working for Hernán, risking themselves for him. It threatened them. For any number of reasons, Hernán was constantly on the mule search. It was the lifeblood of his business; if he couldn't get product across he was dead in the water. More than once in her description of this process Elena likened him to a pimp. “He was a narco-pimp,” she said derisively.

Hernán never kept anything related to his business in Elena's house. He
had
safe houses for that. But there were ways in which he allowed Elena into his world. At times he shared his escapades with her and periodically he asked her to come to a safe house to help clean and repackage cocaine freshly arrived from Colombia. The kilo packets were often greasy and soiled and Hernán was extremely meticulous about how he managed his merchandise. He claimed it was for security reasons so that the ICE dogs could not pick up the scent, but no doubt it was also his way of assuring that no one had tried to pull something over on him by slipping a dud or two into the stack. Hernán paid Elena $400 for that service. He could get it done for less, but there was the bonus that he could trust Elena.

The narco-business kept Hernán flush with cash. When he walked in the door after a good run, he had a gleam in his eye. “What do you want to do?” he'd say. They'd have carne asada barbecues in the back yard and invite family and friends over for what sometimes turned into a running, multiday party. He'd take Elena and her brothers and their families to the movies. “We'd fill up two entire rows,” she remembered. He loved to be the big spender. At times he took her family on vacation, as well, driving down to Parral, or over to Monterrey for the weekend, or even as far as Mazatlán. Her family liked him, and every one of them knew exactly what he did. This was simply life in Juárez's narco-world, where for many the comings and goings of the Juárez cartel members were just part of the accepted order of things. If there was any opprobrium, they kept it to themselves.

This was also the life of the Juárez cartel away from Club Campestre and Saulo Reyes's Subway franchises. It was full of people like Hernán and Elena, people who had grown up with nothing in Juárez's desolate neighborhoods, which often lacked even basic utilities and resources. In these neighborhoods the buses ran irregularly, the streets were unlit at night, and the desert dust covered everything with a fine coat, despite the occasional rain that turned it all to mud. The people in these neighborhoods rarely had more than an elementary school or middle school education, and they lived in areas full of despair even as, paradoxically, they were also full of life and neighborhood conviviality. Most of all these were people with few prospects who could not imagine themselves locked into the life of assembly plant work (and, in any event, the maquiladoras mostly hired women). The Juárez cartel gave people like Hernán and Elena access to what felt like real money. The Juárez assembly plants were paying full-time employees $200 to $300 a month. Twelve-year-old kids were making close to that just sitting on the rooftops of La Cima and calling an alert every time the army or the police came into view. Elena made more than that every time she unpacked, washed, and carefully repacked the shipments of cocaine that had made it all the way from Colombia to Mexico's Pacific Coast and overland to Juárez in anticipation of their passage into the United States.

C
HAPTER 12

The Human Rights Activist

Gustavo de la Rosa was one of those who were not amused by the Mexican Army's tactics in Juárez. De la Rosa was the Ciudad Juárez representative for the Human Rights Commission of the State of Chihuahua. He took his job seriously. A corpulent man in his midsixties with a striking white beard and a matching mane of long hair, Gustavo de la Rosa was long accustomed to being called Santa Claus. His wire-rimmed glasses completed the portrait. However, de la Rosa's kind face and velvety voice belied a harder core. A veteran of the region's 1960s leftist movements, de la Rosa was an attorney with a long history as a defender of human rights, labor unions, and other causes that many would characterize as left of center. From the start of Operación Conjunto Chihuahua, as the federal government's campaign in the state was called, de la Rosa became a thorn in the side of the army as well as of Mayor José Reyes Ferriz. “He likes to stir things up,” Reyes Ferriz told me at one point. “He panders to the rabble.” De la Rosa was no more complimentary of the mayor, whom he did not view as corrupt but as someone whose privilege and class position translated into interests and a worldview that differed radically from his own in almost every respect. De la Rosa saw Reyes Ferriz as a man who catered to the city's elite business interests, one more attuned to the moneyed classes than to the city's working men and women.

From the start, the army's tactics produced accusations of human rights violations, all of which eventually ended up on Gustavo de la Rosa's desk. This set de la Rosa on a collision course with the mayor, the federal forces in the city, and the apparatus of Operación Conjunto Chihuahua itself. One evening, on his way home from a meeting, de la Rosa was idling at a stoplight when a red Honda carrying two men pulled up next to him. “A man got out and came over to my car,” de la Rosa would later tell me. The man had a sinister look as he stood outside de la Rosa's window. De la Rosa feared that he was about to be assassinated. “You need to tone things down or we're going to kill you,” the man said, making his hand into the shape of a gun and pointing it at the activist's head. The exchange was unnerving; de la Rosa knew that he was on someone's hit list. Before long, in addition to
receiving
a steady flow of human-rights complaints against federal forces, de la Rosa was also receiving constant death threats.

.   .   .

Gustavo de la Rosa and Teto Murguía, the former mayor, had attended high school together at the Federal #1 College Preparatory School in Juárez. At the time, the two had been school chums of a man named Rafael Aguilar, who would subsequently become one of the founders of the Juárez cartel. In small-town Juárez, those early relationships often became lifelong acquaintances, if not friendships. Aguilar's father had brought his family to Juárez from Mexico City when he'd obtained a customs position at the international port of entry—a lucrative post given the enviable opportunities it offered for collecting bribes. According to de la Rosa, fellow students had nicknamed Rafael Aguilar “El Chilango,” typically a term of derision for people from the nation's capital, though de la Rosa insisted that, in Aguilar's case, “it wasn't with malice.” The family had subsequently returned to Mexico City after Aguilar graduated from high school; Gustavo de la Rosa went off to Chihuahua City to study law at the Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua.

Gustavo de la Rosa was nostalgic about the 1960s; the era had been life-defining for him. Like the United States, Mexico during the sixties was awash in revolutionary fervor and the emerging counterculture. De la Rosa found himself immersed in it, listening to the Sonora Matancera, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, and engaging the work of Andy Warhol. De la Rosa and his fellow students periodically drove up to Juárez to protest the Vietnam War at the international bridge. “There was a storm of change,” he remembered.

For many in Mexico's youth movement there was a single moment that defined the emergence of their political consciousness: the October 2, 1968, massacre of student protesters in Mexico City's La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, in which hundreds were killed and many more wounded. That event became seared in the consciousness of the entire country, and the Mexican Army and the Mexican secret police—an organization known as the Federal Directorate for Security, or the DFS by its Spanish acronym—each played a central role in the massacre. It would take decades for the army to regain a reputation as a disciplined force worthy of respect.

“Sixty-eight surprised us in Chihuahua,” de la Rosa recalled one afternoon as we sat across from one another at an Italian restaurant. The dead and wounded in Tlatelolco became martyrs, and their memory radicalized de la Rosa along with tens of thousands of other Mexicans. The student movement was strong in Chihuahua and it shaped de la Rosa's imagination. “As student activists we read Marx, Engels, and a few of us even read Bakunin,” de la Rosa recalled. He became an avowed Marxist. “My
inspiration
was Che Guevara. It was very strong for all of us. He'd only been dead eighteen months,” de la Rosa told me.

At the time, guerrilla movements intent on revolution were sprouting all over Mexico, and the state of Chihuahua became particularly fertile soil. By 1969 there were two major factions within the leftist movements, with different strategies for pressuring the government. One group was urging armed struggle, starting in rural areas and then converging on cities, much like Mao in China and Fidel Castro in Cuba. The other group wanted to organize workers and
campesinos
as a long-term strategy toward revolutionizing workers. The factions split, and the groups advocating armed guerrilla actions became known as La Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (September 23rd Communist League), taking its name from an unsuccessful assault on the army garrison at Ciudad Madera in Chihuahua on September 23, 1965. The Liga was in fact a national collective of revolutionary organizations across all of Mexico, not only in Chihuahua. In addition to other guerrilla activity, by 1970–1971 La Liga had begun robbing banks in what it termed “expropriations” and kidnapping the wealthy in order to underwrite its efforts to rid the Mexican state of corrupt politicians who it argued were enriching themselves unfairly while keeping the poor from participating in the political system. La Liga sought to eradicate the existent Mexican state.

De la Rosa allied himself with the group that sought to organize workers, which brought him into conflict with La Liga, who came to view him as a counterrevolutionary who was working within the system. That status earned de la Rosa his first death threat, which appeared in the official La Liga organ, called
Madera
.

At the apex of the guerrilla movements, Luis Echeverría, Mexico's president between 1970 and 1976, authorized the formation of what came to be called the White Brigades. The White Brigades, under the direction of the DFS, set out to find and exterminate the leftist revolutionary groups throughout Mexico. Over the ensuing six years, government agents would abduct, torture, and murder hundreds if not thousands of citizens in what became known as Mexico's “Dirty War.”

Rafael Aguilar had been gone for ten years when he reappeared in the streets of Juárez as head of the DFS efforts in Chihuahua. The DFS was deeply feared throughout Mexico. It had a reputation for acting ruthlessly, and it was essentially above the law; it had no one to answer to except for the country's top leadership. The DFS lifted people who were considered enemies of the state or who were simply inconvenient to some of its powerful functionaries. Many of these hapless individuals simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. The DFS was also adept at the dark art of torture, which was its preferred investigative tool. Juárez had an especially active nucleus of leftist activity at the time, and Rafael Aguilar's people
began
torturing and assassinating leftist sympathizers. Others whom they considered “high value” targets were shipped to Mexico City, where they met similar fates.

Gustavo de la Rosa considered himself to be a Marxist activist, with strong political convictions. However, his life may have been spared because he'd decided to use his legal skills to represent workers, students, leftists, and people whom he considered victims of the system's powerful elite, rather than throwing his lot in with the armed factions that were advocating the overthrow of the Mexican state. He set up his “People's Law Office,” where he represented dissidents who were being arrested, including members of La Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre. De la Rosa had not seen Aguilar since high school, but after his return to Juárez there were times when he personally interceded with Rafael Aguilar in an effort to secure the release of people who had been picked up by the DFS—people, that is, who otherwise were quite likely never to see the light of day again.