The Fight to Save Juárez (24 page)

Almost a year earlier, the governor had voiced his opposition to what he'd called the “militarization” of the police. That comment, and the fact that the governor had chosen not to be present for the meeting, left Reyes Ferriz on his own, but just as in the spring of 2008, he now saw no other alternative. The cartels had succeeded in thwarting every initiative that had been tried with the Juárez municipal police. The security cabinet had not failed to see the obvious: there was little to show for the Confidence Tests and the firings of hundreds of Juárez's police officers and commanders. They were going to have to start from scratch with the police force, and the added military presence would buy them time.

Before the meeting broke up Gómez Mont looked at the mayor and added something unexpected: “We need you to be the face, the front man for Operación Conjunto Chihuahua,” he said. Reyes Ferriz argued for appointing a spokesperson, but the federal people would not have it. In the end, the mayor agreed, knowing that in doing so he was increasing his personal risk exponentially. He'd been cast in the role of savior.

José Reyes Ferriz left the meeting at the Secretaría de Gobernación and
headed
back up the historic Paseo de la Reforma to his hotel. He knew he'd made a fateful decision, a decision from which there could be no turning back. There was a Starbucks across the street from the Marriott, and he ordered himself a cappuccino (a creature of habit, Reyes Ferriz always ordered the same). He called his two most trusted advisors, Sergio Belmonte, his director of communications, and Guillermo Dowell, his chief of staff, and laid it all out for them. The consensus was that his options were to try to keep a low profile, as he'd done with prior death threats, or, as the mayor put it, “enter the threat terrain.” In the past, the first strategy had lowered the level of threats against him, but those threats had not been public. They decided on the second course of action, to speak to the threats publicly. It was a calculation aimed at pressuring the federal forces into keeping his back. “Our thinking was that if I increased my public profile, it increased the costs to the federal government should something happen to me. They would have to make sure that I was protected,” Reyes Ferriz recalled.

In the aftermath of the death threats, Belmonte had been receiving many requests from national and international media for interviews with the mayor, but had not granted a single one. Now he opened the floodgates. From his table at the Starbucks, while sipping his cappuccino, Reyes Ferriz spent the afternoon giving interviews to the best-known nationally syndicated journalists in Mexico, including Denise Maerker, Joaquín López Dórgia, Carmen Aristegui, and CNN (Spanish), among others. “I sat in that Starbucks alone, without any bodyguards, wondering about every car that drove by,” he later told me. The mayor tried to position himself carefully in these and other interviews. “I did not personally go on the attack against the cartels, but I said I would collaborate fully with the federal government and that it was their responsibility to take care of this threat in Ciudad Juárez.”

Following the Mexico City meeting it became evident that something had changed in the relationship between the mayor and the federal officials. It was unspoken, unacknowledged, but the federal people henceforth moved closer to José Reyes Ferriz, treating him more as a partner. In equal measure, they appeared to distance themselves from the governor, who was clearly lukewarm to the whole enterprise for reasons that no one could know with certainty but which lent themselves to innuendo and suspicion. After all, he'd made the decision not to appear in Mexico City.

Note

1
. In apparent retaliation for his campaigns against the drug cartels, General Jorge Juárez Loera was assassinated near his home in Mexico City on May 22, 2011, just weeks after he'd retired from the Mexican Army. He was sixty-five years old.

C
HAPTER 17

Martial Law Undeclared

A few days after the Mexico City summit, the key members of President Felipe Calderón's security cabinet arrived at the Camino Real hotel in Juárez under tight security. The team included the head of the Secretariat for Public Security, Genaro García Luna; the federal attorney general, Eduardo Medina-Mora; the interior minister, Fernando Gómez Mont; and the national defense minister, Guillermo Galván Galván, among others. Two dozen armored assault vehicles with 50-caliber machine guns were in position around the perimeter of the hotel as military Black Hawk helicopters hovered above. The Juárez airport received bomb threats and was temporarily shut down. There was no mistaking the fact that Juárez was a war zone.

The president had sent his emissaries to present his plan to save Juárez before an increasingly skeptical national public. Though the country had responded favorably to Calderón's declaration of war against the cartels a year earlier, the president's poll numbers were now falling precipitously. Calderón's policies were being assailed as shortsighted, overly militarized, and failing to reduce the violence that was spiraling out of control not only in Juárez but also in many of the country's narco-zones.

In Juárez, February 2009 ended with a record tally of 230 executions. Just a year earlier, the city had been shocked at the 301 assassinations registered for the entire year of 2007. Now, the city had almost reached that mark in a single month. On any given day an average of seven or eight bodies were turning up all over the city. José Reyes Ferriz had the additional twenty-five hundred army and a few hundred federal police personnel to manage the city, but that support was not having an appreciable impact on the violence. The police, those who had not been fired or resigned, were still on the payroll, but they were essentially useless. The mayor counted the days until the ides of March when the five thousand additional federal forces were due to arrive en masse.

.   .   .

On the morning of March 14, 2009, the anonymous tip line for the Juárez municipal police received a call reporting that there were bodies at a location
southeast
of the city. The area is open desert where sparse clusters of creosote, acacia, ocotillo, and mesquite dot a landscape populated by giant centipedes, scorpions, snakes, and the occasional Mexican prairie dog.

Protected by police escort, a forensic team arrived at the site, clad in white protective suits, rubber gloves, and surgical masks (the latter a futile attempt to dilute the stench of decomposing bodies). The team immediately went to work and soon found the first of the remains. In a smooth drift of sand that rose like a gentle swell in a grainy ocean, a single, tennis-shoe-clad foot protruded from the ground, its untied shoelace dangling gently in the wind. Not far away another body lay half out of the sand. Before their work was finished the forensic team would find five shallow graves, or
narcofosas
, as they were called in Mexico, containing nine bodies, some with telltale signs of torture (burn marks, cuts, limbs whose unnatural orientation indicated broken bones). At least one of the victims was handcuffed, his arms behind his back. Two appeared to be women, and one a child. Like archeologists searching for rare artifacts, the forensic team used a screen to carefully sift the sand around the remains. One shovelful yielded a telling piece of evidence: a police badge.

There was something haunting about the Fraccionamiento Villa de Alcalá, the terrain where the
narcofosas
had been discovered. The area was a well-known dumping ground for those whose lives had been extinguished by one criminal element or another. Over the course of the last decade, hundreds of young women were murdered in Juárez (most of them maquiladora employees), their remains left in the desert, many near this very spot. The femicides brought ill fame to Ciudad Juárez, attracting news organizations and human-rights groups from all over the world. There had been countless newspaper accounts, documentary films, books, and television programs covering the femicide story, from
Geraldo
to CNN. Every major American newspaper, including the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and the
Washington Post
had been down here as well. There had even been scholarly articles written about the femicides, in which the authors expounded about the complexities of gender, class, and power. What there hadn't been were answers. Few if any of the more than four hundred cases had been solved. But then, that didn't surprise anyone in Juárez, where arrests were the exception and impunity the norm, no matter if the crime was a street corner holdup or a brutal murder. Most crimes went unsolved and therefore unpunished in Mexico. That was the defining characteristic of the Mexican judiciary system.

Now that the cartels were also dumping many of their victims out here in the desert, there was no expectation that the authorities would solve these crimes, either, although that didn't stop people from engaging in the sport of speculation, assembling a picture, no matter how flawed, from the available
puzzle
pieces. In fact, Juárez was abuzz with theories as to the identities of the bodies discovered in the
narcofosas
. The police badge lent itself to the view that among the victims were one or more of the municipal police officers who'd been lifted and disappeared without a trace over the last year. Jesús Enrique Solís Luévano, an agent assigned to the Babícora district, had never arrived home after completing his tour the morning of February 3, 2008. There was also Juan Hernández Sánchez, who'd been with the force over ten years before three vehicles intercepted him in Barrio Alto, a well-known narco stronghold. Hernández's bloodstained uniform had been found in the street days later, but there was no other trace of the officer. There were also other officers who had similarly disappeared over the last year.

The day after the discovery of the shallow graves, I met with a news director in Juárez, a man of strong opinions who told me right off that this was one of those crimes that would never be solved. The city morgue was overrun with bodies, he told me: “They don't even know where to put them.” In addition, the victims' bodies were going unclaimed because families feared that the authorities would link them to the activities of the deceased. “It creates problems for them,” the news director noted. Many of the victims were also found without identification. Finally, with a knowing look, the news director added this detail: “And then there's the problem of the police,” he said quietly, fearing that someone in an adjacent office might be listening.

Opinions were easily had in Juárez as to the fate of the officers who'd been lifted, and the motives that lay behind their disappearances. There were countless interweaved scenarios. Unless you were on the inside, however, there was only speculation, guesswork, and talk. The only thing that
was
known, concretely, indisputably, was that police had disappeared and a police badge had been found at the site of the
narcofosas
. One rumor had it that the badge had not belonged to one of the disappeared municipal police officers at all but rather that it had fallen off a cop as he was
digging
the graves. No information had been disclosed thus far as to the identity of the person who went with the badge, but one of the contacts within the forensics unit had suggested that the badge was found close to the surface rather than having been buried with the bodies. An alternate theory floating around was that the badge had been slipped in by the federal police to discredit the municipal police, specifically one of three municipal police agents who had been recently arrested and accused of handing people over to the Juárez cartel for execution.

No one really knew where reality lay in Juárez. It clustered around indisputable fragments and artifacts, like a police badge, a weapon, or a cadaver, from which the truth had to be constructed, but those constructions almost always contained as much fiction as they did fact. Life in Juárez was full
of
such fusions: fact and imagination dovetailed and interpenetrated such that one could not be teased out from the other. Conspiracy theories, big and small, abounded, even among the most sensible people. Every incident carried within itself endless possibilities for speculation and freewheeling conjecture. Hard evidence constantly toyed with perception and understanding. Not uncommonly, for example, when some cartel operation was interdicted (a car stopped on the street, a cocaine lab raided, a cartel safe house uncovered) uniforms belonging to one or another law enforcement agency or the army were found among the drugs, weapons, cell phones, and police scanners. The ready availability of official uniforms (they were easy to purchase, if not steal) often made it difficult to know actors' identities. Criminals wearing law enforcement uniforms of one sort or another routinely abducted people or held up businesses. Then there were the actual abuses committed by the authorities. The circumstance lent itself to confusions and accusations that could never be resolved and that were fodder for endless spin. In Juárez, identities, like motives, were never certain. Over time this circumstance tended to erode people's faith in the manifest. If things were never what they seemed to be, then nothing could be trusted, no matter how obvious.

Conspiracy theories quickly formed themselves in tightly woven clusters that then just as quickly dissipated into nothingness as if never before conceived or uttered. It was said that the governor of Chihuahua, José Reyes Baeza, was owned by the Juárez cartel, for example, and that he was paid two million dollars a year for the Juárez
plaza
. The state prosecutorial people came “bundled” with that, given that they were appointed by the governor and served at his pleasure, although the key people in those slots were being paid for their services separately (these “facts” could be readily found on narco websites, for example). Rumor had it that José Reyes Ferriz was on the outs with the governor, who'd sealed off the mayor's designs on the state governorship (the mayor's job was a historic stepping stone for the politically ambitious). That placed the mayor at odds with the Juárez cartel and was the purported reason behind the mayor's recently announced decision to turn over the municipal police duties, wholesale, to the army. There were rumors that the top tiers of the federal government were in the pay of El Chapo Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. According to this line of speculation, the Sinaloa people were losing the fight against the Juárez cartel as they had earlier in Nuevo Laredo against the Gulf cartel. Buying the military, so this reasoning went, allowed Sinaloa to have the military serve as its proxy and wipe out the Juárez cartel, thereby clearing the way for them to take over the
plaza
. This conspiracy theory thus placed the mayor in the hands of the Sinaloa cartel.