The Fight to Save Juárez (30 page)

The images were hung in various locations throughout the city—at the Camino Real hotel, at the main city library, at the historic Presidencia Municipal—and the media had covered the events. The contest's wining image,
Liberty
, had been exhibited in Mexico City.

Laurencio Barraza was a man with a calling. He was an energetic activist in his late forties, on the corpulent side, with a dark complexion and graying hair made starker by his thick, black-framed glasses. Barraza had been a child advocate most of his life. He and his organization were rabidly independent; he refused support from the usual government sources because, in his view, “there are too many strings attached.”

Barraza leaned back in his chair and described the world within which most of his charges lived: the poverty, the abandonment, the absence of schools and social services. He was extremely concerned about the impact of the violence on Juárez's youth. “How can they process all of it?” he asked. “How do the daily images of violence affect their values? . . . You can't imagine how saturated their lives are with fear,” Barraza continued. During Holy Week a year earlier rumors that the cartels were going to make the week the bloodiest ever had gone viral on the Internet, and everyone had been afraid to leave their homes.

In the Altavista neighborhood most parents either worked in the assembly plants or in the “informal” economy, which meant vendors in the streets. Barraza summarized the explosion of
picaderos
in the city. He told me that in 1997 there were seven hundred, but by 2005 there were almost 3,200. “It has to have happened with the consent of the authorities,” Barraza told me. (As he spoke I was reminded that the estimates I'd been given for the number of
picaderos
varied depending on the source; what didn't change was the universal understanding that drugs had taken over the city, especially its poor and working-class neighborhoods.)

In 2000 there were six hundred elementary schools in Juárez, three hundred middle schools, and ten high schools. Norponiente, where 40 percent of the city lived, had but one public high school. “There's been a systematic policy of exclusion for this population,” Barraza argued. “They push them toward the
maquiladoras
, at $70 pesos a day. They leave elementary school when they're twelve or thirteen but by law they're not permitted to work until they are fifteen. What do they do?” The question hung there. “There are few parks, no public institutions that address their needs, no
tools
. What these kids have is what the streets offer them—criminal activity.” He was describing what in Mexico had emerged as a new social phenomenon: “Los NiNi,”
¹
a term used to describe the growing number of youth who are neither in school nor working. Los NiNi had become synonymous
with
a lost generation, a generation whose lives were increasingly defined by gang affiliations and existence outside of the conventional social structures.

Barraza stood up and walked over to the blackboard. He sketched out a rough map of the city's neighborhoods. The areas of dense poverty formed an arc, like a sliver of moon, curving from top-left (Norponiente) to a tip at the southeast corner of the city. “What you have in this corridor are the least amount of city resources: single mothers, no childcare centers, no infrastructure, no parks. And you've got a proliferation of gangs throughout this entire area,” he said.

The city was caught in a vise grip, he told me. There were seven hundred gangs, according to one study conducted by a local university. “That's why 90 percent of the people are in favor of the military being here,” Barraza said, adding that he wasn't particularly taken with them. “They're from the south; they are burning up in this heat yet they don't bathe.” But the real critique was what he perceived as inaction: “There haven't been that many skirmishes between the army and the narcos. It's more the narcos killing each other off,” he told me, adding that the gangs were extorting everyone: pharmacies, hardware stores, stationary stores. “They're all hit with the ‘
mochate o te va ir mal
' [pay up or it's going to go poorly for you].”

Barraza added that the army had lost its moment of opportunity as far as public opinion was concerned. “The first time the army entered the city en masse there was a sense of hope and possibility, even a sense of respect,” Barraza recalled. But those hopes had been dashed with time: “The ever-present road blocks have produced very little other than being a major hassle for us.”

.   .   .

Growing up, Elena never had the benefit of Boys and Girls First! or any other such program. She was a NiNi who'd been fortunate enough to have the looks to hook up with a narco. But in the aftermath of Hernán's execution, Elena was left alone. For all the conflict between them, her life had revolved around Hernán. Now he was gone. There was both relief and sadness in it. She felt that Hernán's executioners had done her a favor; she felt unburdened even as she felt deeply mournful. Life is always so full of contradiction, she thought. She missed him and she knew Pedro missed him. Her cell phone was all but mute, as his insistent, stalking calls had ceased. The enormity of his emotional baggage was no longer upon her. Hernán, the father of her son, was dead.

But that absence had consequences. He had purchased the house outright, so she owned it free and clear, but suddenly she was broke. He had always been clear with her: “I don't want you to have money because I want the guy who has you after I'm dead to have to work for you like I've worked for you.” At the time it seemed like something theoretical, a “what
if”
scenario. But the “what if” was now a reality. She had no money and an elementary school–aged son. In fact, Pedro was in a private school. For the last eight years Hernán had typically arrived at the house with a wad of cash in his pocket that she tapped to pay the bills, shop for groceries, or go to the mall. That was gone.

“I was alone and had nowhere to turn,” Elena told me at one of our meetings. Her family was impoverished; her brothers had their own families to feed, clothe, and otherwise support, and all of them lived hand-to-mouth lives as it was. Elena's first strategy was to sell her things. The house had nice furnishings, artwork, three computers, several televisions, and appliances and knickknacks. Elena organized a series of garage sales and started selling off what she had. A close friend, another narco-widow whose man had also been executed and who was now prostituting herself at an expensive brothel to pay her bills, offered a proposition: “Don't sell your stuff, come work with me. I'll set you up,” she told Elena. But Elena couldn't bring herself to do it. “My pride got in the way,” she told me. Over the first few months she sold everything she had in the house except for worn-out modular couches, the beds, and one of the televisions. She pulled her son out of private school and put him in the neighborhood public school.

For a year, Elena cobbled together a month-to-month subsistence, borrowing what she could from family members and selling everything she could. In the end she could not stay afloat. A year later, broke and in debt, Elena swallowed her pride, called her narco-widow friend, and asked her what she needed to do. Her friend's response was not heartening: “You should have called me a year ago; you wouldn't have had to sell all your shit.” Elena started prostituting herself.

It was not an easy transition. Elena had been fast and loose for years, but always in control. Sex had been her terrain and a source of power. This was different. She was forced to relinquish that sense of agency. She had to make herself desired rather than dictating the terms of engagement. She had to acquiesce to other's desires and play a game she had never wanted or needed to play. The very essence, the thing that made prostitution what it was, ran counter to the way in which Elena had used sex. She felt defeated and depressed.

The man who ran the shop stopped her one night and told her to cut out the moping. “This is just a job,” he told her. “What you do here is not your identity, it
'
s just what you do to earn money. When you leave here and go home, leave this behind; separate yourself out from it.” It was simple advice, proffered with a mix of sympathy and this-is-the-school-of-hard-knocks straightforwardness. It was advice she tried to take to heart. Somehow it relieved her. She stopped feeling sorry for herself and worked.

The bordello where Elena worked catered to Juárez's professional class:
dentists
, veterinarians, accountants, lawyers, and plant managers. She says she made six hundred to seven hundred pesos (roughly fifty to sixty dollars) an hour, although that didn't include the house “cut.” Still, it was far more than she could make in a week at any of the local assembly plants. Her only costs were wardrobe—buying the outfits that made her alluring and desirable to the clientele. Between her family and friends she tried to find people to take care of Pedro, but he also spent nights alone sometimes.

After a year of turning tricks Elena talked the owner into letting her be part of the management team. She started recruiting girls for the brothel. “I just returned from a recruitment trip to Parral,” she told me once. She had discovered that she had a talent for talking girls into prostitution. She would enter a bar, scan the place, and target girls that she intuited were vulnerable or amenable to her pitch. She offered them base salaries that were far and above what they made in regular jobs, and she brought them to Juárez and trained them. Most had to be taught how to dress for this clientele, how to act, how to make themselves interesting to the men of Juárez's professional class. They were unsophisticated; most had never traveled anywhere beyond Chihuahua. Elena claimed she was straight with them about the job and what it entailed. They came willingly, she said, and she described herself as a kind of sponsor or protector who made sure the owners lived up to their promises. Of course, I had no way of confirming her representations of this world or her role within it.

One evening Elena and I met at a Chinese restaurant for an interview. The place was dimly lit, with ersatz Chinese decorations of gold tassels and gold, red, and black trim. At the buffet line the warmers appeared to have kept the same food hot since the lunch rush. The Chinese are more plentiful in Juárez than many would expect. They'd come in the nineteenth century after the California Gold Rush; some opened opium dens that became the nucleus of the local drug world. Eventually, the other netherworld types like La Nacha, the infamous drug queen who ran La Cima for many years beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, decided to wipe out the Chinese, and they did it in a most brutal way. In the 1930s there was a massacre of Chinese involved in the drug business that has not been forgotten. The descendants of these immigrants went on to do what immigrants do: some became university professors, others doctors, others ranchers, and still others policemen. More than a few opened restaurants like this one, although there were also upscale Chinese restaurants with excellent food.

We sat at a corner table, our backs to the rest of the restaurant in an instinctive attempt at discretion. Elena placed her cell phone on the table, as she had been receiving a steady flow of calls from the girls working or scheduled to work at the brothel that night. The calls covered a range of pressing needs; two of the girls called for a wardrobe consultation (“I think
the
striped blouse looks good on you!”; “No, that's not sexy enough”). Elena was like a mother hen to them. One of the girls called to ask whether there would be sufficient clients that night to make it worthwhile to show up for work (it was a Tuesday, typically a slow night). Elena responded like a harsh schoolmarm. “You're damn right you have to show up,” she told her. “And if you don't show, you know I'll have someone behind you who really wants the work.”

She gave the girls no quarter. She told me these conversations were frustrating because she'd made it clear over and over: the schedule is the schedule. You don't always get the prime-time nights; you have to take your turn on the slow nights, just like everyone else, and so on. No matter how many times she reiterated the message, she still got the calls, often just before someone was expected to report for work. She had to threaten them with firing or else she'd have anarchy on her hands, she said. Elena also was convinced that if she took a more lenient, soft approach, if she placated or indulged the girls, they would take advantage of her. Elena's greatest fear was that one of them would “jump” her, as she put it, meaning try to take over her job. Being a manager was far preferable to having to turn tricks.

In the midst of these reflections Elena surprised me with an insight about herself. She'd been describing her knack for recruiting girls, for going into bars and knowing, intuitively, which girls might be amenable to this work and just how to sweet talk them into signing up. “I really learned this from him,” she offered at one point, referring to Hernán. It was then that she described Hernán as a narco-pimp because of his skill at seducing and recruiting young women to be his mules. He ran those women like a pimp runs his whores, she observed, aware that this was exactly how she now recruited and ran her girls at the brothel.

Within the chaos, Elena had somehow found the turns her life had taken to be oddly empowering. She dreamed of starting her own brothel. Maybe she'd send Pedro off to the nuns and turn the house into a members-only, exclusive “club.” She could pilfer the membership list from her current workplace and bribe the cops from her precinct so that she wouldn't have any problems. She was convinced that the girls would come with her rather than stay with the current brothel owner. “He's got his head up his ass,” she said. “And he's always trying to renege on the base pay he promised them.” She was brainstorming ideas. For the first time in her life, she told me, she felt she had a skill, she knew she could run a business, manage employees, keep track of money. She was already doing it at the brothel, where as time went on she had less and less respect for the owner and where she increasingly felt that he needed her to run a successful business, given that he relied on her for everything. It gave her a measure of control over him. The only thing that intruded upon and ruptured this feeling of agency was
the
ever-present anxiety of being “jumped.” She feared that if she pushed too hard, one of the other girls would take her place and the owner would drop her.