The Fight to Save Juárez (31 page)

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The
cuota
(extortion fee) was said to have begun as a strategy for replacing lost income, given the increased effectiveness of American efforts to seal the border. That effort was making it more difficult to cross product, which, in turn, meant lower profits. Extortion of businesses had become epidemic. That, in turn, had encouraged other gangs and neighborhood punks to emulate the lucrative strategy. It was impossible to know for sure, but it was assumed that the cartels were extorting higher-end businesses and perhaps professional people, while lesser gangs were extorting neighborhood shops, bus drivers, and street vendors.

Elena's shop had cameras through which they could monitor the entrance to the brothel, which had an outer door, then a hallway to the interior, and then a second door that led into the brothel itself. One night a man opened the outer door and walked calmly toward the second door. Elena watched him enter. He looked like one of their typical clients. He was well dressed, in his thirties. “Not bad looking,” had been Elena's initial assessment. There was a panic button that Elena could press when something suspicious happened, and she could have some muscle at the desk in a matter of seconds, but this man did not raise her concerns until he was through the second door and walking up to the desk, where Elena sat with another woman. It was his face, which was tight and severe, and especially his eyes, which made her feel instinctively that he was malevolent.

The two women froze. Just as he reached the desk the man's hand went into his coat pocket and he said, “Your time has come.” Elena and her companion feared they were going to be executed. Instead he pulled out a slip of paper, which he put on the desk. “Have the owner call this number in the morning,” he said, before turning around and exiting the building. The next morning the boss called the number and was told that he was to begin paying a
cuota
of one thousand dollars a week. Someone would be picking up the payments every Monday night. Failure to pay up would lead to dire consequences: the owner or a member of his family might be killed, the establishment might be burned to the ground, or the girls would be murdered one by one. He'd know soon enough which outcome it might be.

Like most of the other businesses in Juárez, the brothel owner started making his weekly
cuota
payments. He assumed it was one of the cartels, but of course they never identified themselves and at the end of the day he had no way of knowing. It was part of the Juárez terror. Even the brothels were being hit up by organized crime. Later, when I ventured the thesis that perhaps the brothel was owned by someone with links to the Juárez cartel,
Elena
assured me that if the owner was hooked up with them, he would not be paying the
cuota
.

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Across town from the Altavista neighborhood where Laurencio Barraza ran the Boys and Girls First! program, Father Mario Manríquez, a forty-one-year-old priest at the Santa Teresa de Jesús church, tended to his sprawling, impoverished parish. The church was in another hardscrabble
colonia
called Oasis Revolución. Father Manríquez was tall and lanky, with jet-black hair that matched his vestments. He was an activist whose ideological views I found to be an odd mix of liberation theology and hardcore, old-school Catholicism. His office at the church was cluttered with religious artifacts—statues of saints, busts of Jesus, rosaries. One of his parishioners had given the priest a globe of the world and it sat on his desk; each of the continents had been cut out, painted by hand, and pasted onto it.

The priest had grown up in Parral, Chihuahua, a small town of less than 100,000 famous for the fact that Pancho Villa was assassinated there. Mario Manríquez was the eleventh of twelve children in a close, religious family of modest means. One of his older brothers was severely impaired, having suffered acute oxygen deprivation at birth. That tragedy was part of the day-to-day culture of the Manríquez family, and Father Manríquez described it as formative for him.

The family moved to Juárez after his father lost his job when Mario was very young. Not long thereafter, when Manríquez was fourteen years old, a gang assaulted his cousin as he was leaving a party with his girlfriend, crushing the boy's skull with stones. Manríquez had grown up with this cousin; they'd attended elementary school together in Parral and were quite close. His murder affected the young Mario profoundly. Four years later, when Mario Manríquez was eighteen, he went to seminary, joining the Order of the Sacred Hearts. Initially he studied philosophy in Mexico City, before going to Mérida and Guadalajara to study theology. At the completion of his seminary studies he returned to Juárez.

Father Manríquez was to be ordained on February 17, 1996. His father was quite ill and he told Mario that he feared he would be unable to make his ordination. Indeed, Mario awoke to the news that his father had died on the morning of the sixteenth. Mario was given his father's Bible on the day of his ordination and discovered that a priest who was very close to the family had written the following inscription: “May God grant you the opportunity to see your son ordained as a priest.”

Thirteen years later, as we sat in his parish office at the Santa Teresa de Jesús church, Father Manríquez reflected on what was happening to Juárez. “What we're living is the end of a political, social, and economic epoch,” the priest told me. He believed that the violence in Juárez and Mexico was
a
symptom of an unraveling society. “We've had laws since 1917 [when the Constitution of Mexico was signed, signaling the end of the Mexican Revolution] that were made just to be broken time and again,” he averred. For decades the government had distributed resources with an eye toward enriching members of the ruling party and with little regard for the needs of the broader citizenry, he continued. Laws and institutions weren't transparent. “The corruption starts at the top,” he said. “When you construct an edifice with so many incoherencies, it's going to collapse.” That was his diagnosis for what was taking place not only in Juárez, but also, in myriad forms, throughout the country.

Like Laurencio Barraza at Organización Popular Independiente, Father Manríquez viewed Los NiNi both as the root of the problem and as victims of a dysfunctional society. “We've lived in a crisis for decades now,” he continued. He put out some confirmatory evidence: for every ten families, four fall apart within the first five years, and there is no support for the children, he told me. Fathers frequently abandoned families and mothers were forced to work to support their children. “The typical shift at the maquiladora starts at five thirty and ends at three thirty,” he noted, “but children enter school at eight o'clock and finish at one in the afternoon. The kids are home alone; there's a high incidence of child abuse in our homes,” he said.

Father Manríquez decried the fact that the country's educational level had been on a steady decline for decades. Moral values had all but evaporated, the priest argued, rattling off a litany of evidence: “When you tie into the electric grid to circumvent having to pay for electricity; when you pay transit cops a bribe; when the group that oversees reconciliation and mediation of disputes between workers and companies is bribed by the companies so there is no justice for workers; when you open businesses without licenses or security and safety measures because you bribe officials; when students pay teachers for grades; when judges sell themselves; when the Mexican soccer selection uses false birth certificates for its team who are over-age and they are disqualified by FIFA; when Mexican banks charge some of the highest interest rates in the world; when corruption in the legislature is at a high level; and when you have a company like TelMex, owned by Mexico's richest man, charging some of the highest service fees in the world because of government concessions . . . that's corruption!” the priest exclaimed. “The list is interminable,” he concluded after a moment's pause. “Mexico isn't free. It's a slave to corruption,” he said. “What we're living in Mexico is the death of a system that was started in 1917.”

Manríquez wasn't simply spouting ideology; he was speaking from experience. The Santa Teresa de Jesús church covered the Oasis Revolución neighborhood, a large area of seventy thousand residents in which there were few services and little infrastructure. Forty percent of the streets were unpaved and 70 percent of the area had no drainage. There was no potable
drinking
water; families had to go to public pipes with buckets for their water, which had to be boiled, although Father Manríquez maintained that despite public information campaigns many families still did not boil their water. “We have lots of intestinal problems for that reason,” he said. Forty-five percent of the parents living within the parish had only an elementary-school education and another 30 percent had only a middle-school education. In other words, three-quarters of the adults had not completed high school. “There are no jobs for these people,” Father Manríquez noted. “They have no hope.” The priest summed up that lack of hope in this way: “There are no artists, mimes, clowns, or musical groups,” he said forlornly. “There are no places where people can play sports. It's like the soul of the community is atrophying.”

Father Manríquez spent most of his time going house to house trying to visit every family in the parish. “The health needs are enormous,” he told me. There was a high incidence of diabetes, for example. “The church decided to enter at the ground floor, to start with families. We're trying to rebuild the social fabric,” he said, noting that 40 percent of the population in the parish was under fourteen years of age. “There's a great opportunity here,” he observed. The church held soccer camps with five hundred children and put on workshops to combat family violence. Father Manríquez was especially proud of the church's efforts to intervene with adult men through a “masculinity course” for fathers, which attempted to teach men to be more involved with their families and more sensitive to their wives and children.

The priest was not a fan of the maquiladora industry. On the contrary, he blamed it for some of the ills that Juárez was suffering. “They changed the family,” he lamented. “They changed the root of everything when they brought women into the workforce. And the children? You changed the model, but you didn't prepare men or women for the new model.” The officials who were so eager to institute the maquiladora system failed to factor in the social toll of having women become the breadwinners while men were left unemployed in great numbers. That fact, he theorized, had a lot to do with the explosion in domestic violence: men were simply not prepared for these profound social changes.

One of Father Mario Manríquez best-known programs had been instituted in the spring of 2007; it was called “After Ten Home Is Best.” In an effort to decrease gang membership and gang violence in the neighborhood around the parish, he had convinced then-mayor Héctor Murguía and the police chief to decree that children under the age of eighteen would not be permitted to be in the streets after ten p.m. The logic was that children should be home with their families, and that taking them off the streets would reduce their exposure to gang pressure and influence. If a minor was spotted out after ten at night the police were instructed to pick him up. He
was
not cited or detained; he was simply driven home. For multiple transgressions, parents were required to come to the police station to retrieve their child. The program was launched on May 1, 2007, and that week the streets of Colonia Oasis Revolución were unusually calm. The program was an overnight success and received considerable media coverage. Other neighborhoods in the city were soon requesting that “After Ten Home Is Best” be implemented in their communities as well.

“It all came to a stop on October 10, 2007,” Father Manríquez told me, still annoyed. He pulled a scrapbook from a nearby shelf. It contained pictures and newspaper clippings relating to the parish's different community projects. We came to a picture of the priest standing next to José Reyes Ferriz, who at the time was a candidate for mayor. “The mayor signed this pledge,” Father Manríquez said, flipping a few more pages until he arrived at a photocopy of the document. The mayoral candidate had apparently committed himself to continuing the “After Ten Home Is Best” program, but had reneged upon assuming office. “He said that it was unconstitutional and he could not continue implementing it,” the priest said with frustration.

The mayor was not the only one who did not like the “After Ten Home Is Best” program. Neighborhood gangs took to defacing the church, scrawling all manner of commentary and obscenities on its walls, like, “You fucking dick!” and “Who says ‘10'?” and “The clock strikes SHIT! Ha! Ha! Ha!” But the program had enjoyed the support of “90 percent” of the community, according to Manríquez, who claimed crime and drug consumption were reduced significantly during the period the program was in force.

By the fall of 2009 Father Manríquez had grown disillusioned with the government's efforts to quell the violence in the city. The cartels and their gangs had grown more bloodthirsty. “We have 2,200 dead so far this year, even with the New Police,” he noted. He had mixed feelings about the army. He cited the infamous case of General Gutiérrez Rebollo, who'd headed the Mexican government's National Institute for Combating Drugs (INCD) between 1996 and 1997 until he was discovered to be in the pay of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the head of the Juárez cartel. But the army also lacked the skills and training to intervene in a situation like the one in Juárez. “Their initiation rites are that they bring you into a room and beat you up,” the priest claimed, implying that sensitivities to human rights and due process were not high priorities. They were good at looking for weapons and setting up roadblocks, but the incidence of robbery and extortion was higher than ever. Manríquez was of the opinion that corruption within the army was not wholesale, but that “there are a few cells within the military that are acting outside the law.”