The Fight to Save Juárez (26 page)

The ambassador had been reluctant to criticize American domestic policies, but it was evident that he viewed the procurement of assault weapons as a critical problem. “I see no contradiction between some regulation of these weapons and their Second Amendment,” he noted, referencing the U.S. Constitution. “They don't even keep a database; there is no record of who is buying these weapons in the United States.”
¹

To underscore his point, the ambassador handed me a document labeled “Not for public release: Mexico/UK—SENSITIVE.” The document included the following statistic: “About 90% of all the weapons seized in Mexico come from the United States.”
²
The document also noted that between December 1, 2006, and July 2010 the Mexican government had seized more than 85,551 weapons. Almost 60 percent of these were high-caliber automatic weapons. Indeed, according to an August 2008 article in the
Los Angeles Times
that cited the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, there are 6,700 licensed gun dealers between Brownsville, Texas, and San Diego, California, all within a short drive of the two thousand–mile U.S.-Mexico border. As violence reached an intense pitch all over Mexico, ready access to automatic weapons was playing a key role. Genaro García Luna described these weapons as the gas that was fueling the engine of violence.

In the midst of the ambassador's description of Juárez's intractability, he was interrupted by a call on his cell phone. I asked if he wished for me to step out, but he indicated that there was no need. Standing up and walking to the bank of windows facing the street that ran along the back of the embassy, he had a brief, amiable conversation before returning to the couch. “That was Carlos Fuentes,” the ambassador said, adding, “He spends a great deal of time in London. He loves it here.”

Without missing a beat, he picked up where he'd left off. “In Tijuana, which was an enormous problem just two years ago, far greater than Juárez
at
the time, we were able to retake the city from the criminal groups by disarticulating the Tijuana police that had been in the cartel's hands. Juárez was different,” he said. “The problem with Juárez is the culture of local gangs, the power of gang identities, and their territorial disputes. They also seem to have a penchant for engaging in violence for violence's sake,” he concluded.

Mexican Army in Ciudad Juárez. Photo copyright © Ricardo Ainslie.

.   .   .

In Juárez, the government's lack of success in quelling the violence was beginning to erode the initial enthusiasm for the federal forces. One afternoon I arrived at a crime scene where several men had been executed near the intersection of two streets in a ramshackle neighborhood. The yellow tape that marked the perimeter fluttered in the wind, and the usual players were presiding over the scene: municipal police “guides,” federal police, Mexican Army personnel, and forensics people, who had laid out black-numbered yellow markers next to each shell casing that they'd encountered. From my vantage across the way I could see at least thirty such markers, but there were many more: the execution had taken place inside a small auto repair shop so most of the crime scene was out of view. The yellow markers made their way from the street into the darkened space where I was told three men lay dead.

The
yellow crime scene tape ran across the street on all four sides of the intersection, creating an interior space, and most of the officials were standing in groups within that space. Federal police and army soldiers stood guard to keep onlookers at a distance. The entire neighborhood was out: children of every age, teenagers on bicycles, adults—all standing along or near the yellow tape, looking. Some were anxious and grim, others chatted as if at a carnival. The only other people inside the perimeter appeared to be relatives of the victims and a few neighbors whose homes were inside the taped-off area.

“They were good people,” one of the neighbors said, standing next to me at the tapeline. “They were mechanics, and for a while now they'd been hitting them up for the
cuota
,” she said, referring to the extortion fee cartels and local gangs were charging merchants and shopkeepers. Another neighbor chimed in and explained his understanding of what had taken place. He told me that the man who owned the repair shop also employed his son and his two sons-in-law. The
sicarios
had entered the shop and started shooting. Only the man's son had managed to get away, having jumped the wall at the rear of the building.

The son was pointed out to me. He appeared to be in his midtwenties and was tall and thickly built; he was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt that still had what looked like garage grime on it. The survivor was standing inside the sealed-off area where two friends consoled him. The man appeared to be in shock; he was distraught, his face flush with tears.

“They need to take him inside somewhere,” one of the neighbors said. “If they see him they'll come back to get him.” The group of neighbors standing around me murmured their agreement. Just then, three soldiers walked past the man, and in that moment he lost control of himself and started shouting at the soldiers, insulting them. “You people are worthless,” he screamed in a mix of rage and tears. “You claim you are here to protect but you do nothing! You aren't worth shit!” The son lunged toward the three soldiers, who stood their ground facing him, but before he could spring loose his two friends caught hold of him and restrained him. After a moment, the soldiers walked away and the man and his two companions made their way to the man's house, which was on the same block. He was not present when the forensics people loaded up the three cadavers for their trip to the morgue.

The scene was tense and hard to digest. The neighbors and other onlookers seemed to take on an angry mood, especially toward the soldiers and federal police. They'd seen too much of this. Whatever promise they may have felt, whatever hope there may have been when the federal forces first arrived in Ciudad Juárez, that optimism appeared to be dissipating rapidly, replaced by a sea of frustration. It was the first time I saw clearly that the federal forces were losing the battle for hearts and minds in Juárez. The city
seemed
to be losing faith in the possibility that things would get better. And civics lessons, it occurred to me, were as much about such hope and the belief that good and right would prevail, as they were about anything else that a society might offer.

.   .   .

“My aim is to have 3,000 new police elements by December,” José Reyes Ferriz told me one afternoon in his office at Juárez's Presidencia Municipal in the summer of 2009, after the arrival of the new wave of federal forces. The paradigm had not changed: the army and federal police were buying him time—they were a stopgap measure, placeholders, until the city of Juárez could create a new, reliable force. “We need the army to help contain crime until the police can be cleaned up and begin working,” he added.

With the arrival of the latest contingent of federal forces, March and April had seen a reduction in the number of executions in the city. In January and February executions had been running at about eight or nine per day, but in April and May they dipped to three or four per day. The cartels appeared to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the presence of ten thousand federal forces patrolling the city. But by the end of May the tally of the dead was back up and the problem with the federal strategy remained the same: the army was not trained to do police work, and even as it succeeded in arresting narcos and other criminals, the interface between the army and the civilian judiciary system was so deficient that for a variety of reasons most of the criminals simply walked once they were turned over to civilian authorities. An added complication was that their bread-and-butter tactic was bare-fisted engagements, and these were beginning to create a backlash of protest and accusations of human rights violations.

.   .   .

The mayor and the police chief, General Bretón, had set out to reach their goal of almost doubling the size of the police to three thousand. This time, they focused their recruitment efforts in Juárez. In order to induce men and women to sign up, the city launched campaigns that promised recruits higher pay, a $7,500 peso (about $700) bonus, scholarships for their children's schooling, and credits that would help them purchase a house. By September of 2009, they had succeeded in bringing in the 2,250 or so recruits for what they were now officially calling the “New Police.” In addition to having passed the Confidence Tests, these recruits had been subjected to rigorous, boot camp–style training similar to what an earlier wave had received at a Mexican Army training camp in nearby Santa Gertrudis, but this time the recruits were trained in Juárez. They also received extensive instruction in the use of automatic weapons. In collaboration with the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, the city also developed a four-month-long law enforcement curriculum that was incorporated into the police academy
instruction.
Between the weeding out of the questionable officers, the creation of a new training scheme, and the recruitment and training of new officers, the yearlong process had represented a massive undertaking, but the New Police were now ready to be launched.

Mayor José Reyes Ferriz inaugurated the New Police with great fanfare at an event in the auditorium at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez on September 14, 2009. The entire force was mustered, in their new, starched, silver-gray uniforms, specifically designed to be easily distinguishable from the uniforms used by the earlier incarnation of the discredited and infamous Juárez municipal police. At the outset of the ceremony, the new officers stood at attention and saluted sharply. In his introduction, the mayor spoke about Juárez's historic reputation as an industrious and progressive center, a reputation that was recognized worldwide, he said. The mayor acknowledged that over the course of the last decade the city had undergone a steady deterioration, increasingly becoming a place that was at the mercy of criminals. The city's reputation was now on a par with that of some of the most violent places on the globe, the mayor continued. “We had to act,” he told the newly minted police officers. There was pride in the mayor's voice as he summarized the accomplishments of the preceding year; it had taken an enormous effort to rebuild the police, a force that had been under the control of the Juárez cartel for at least a decade and that had then been decimated by the Sinaloa cartel's efforts to take it over. In little more than a year, scores of officers had been assassinated, including three of the force's top commanders. Two chiefs had resigned, ultimately eventuating in the army's takeover of policing functions. For these reasons, in addition to a sense accomplishment, that September 14 ceremony brought enormous relief to the mayor, who dared once again to entertain the notion that the city could be saved, that it was on the cusp of a change, a change that would deliver it from the grips of the ungovernability it had endured for so long.

Notes

1
. In Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, there are few restrictions for gun dealers selling assault weapons. As long as a purchaser has a valid driver's license and does not have a criminal record, these dealers can sell an unlimited number of assault weapons without reporting the sales to the government.

2
. This figure has been a source of controversy. A sample of the total weapons seized was submitted to U.S. authorities, and 90 percent of these were found to have U.S. origins. On this basis, William Hoover, assistant director for ATF field operations, testified before the House of Representatives on February 7, 2008, that “there is more than enough evidence to indicate that over 90 percent of the firearms that have either been recovered in or interdicted in transport to Mexico originated from various sources within the United States.” More recently, in July 2011, an ATF report indicated that authorities in Mexico recovered 29,284 firearms in 2009 and 2010. Of these, 20,504 came from the United States (that is, approximately 70 percent).

C
HAPTER 19

The Other War

The Juárez mayor had another war to contend with: politics. The July 2010 elections, only a year away, were beginning to loom large. The city would be voting for a new mayor and the state for a new governor (by law, neither Reyes Ferriz nor Reyes Baeza could be reelected). There was already intense jockeying for these and other positions. Reyes Ferriz's party, the PRI, was divided into two factions. One faction was derisively known as “The Dinosaurs.” Composed of remnants of the party that had ruled Mexico with an iron fist for over seventy years, it had a well-earned reputation for corruption and prepotency. The other faction within the party was made up of younger, college-educated, professional people with more of a democratic vision. Reyes Ferriz belonged to the latter faction.