The Fight to Save Juárez (32 page)

What the government was not seeing, the activist priest noted, was that any efforts to engage this problem must be accompanied and supported by social investment that ensures social and economic development. “Without
that
we have a perversion,” he said. There were three fronts to this war, he asserted: the war against the cartels and the gangs; the war against the municipal, state, and federal authorities who for various reasons were not doing what they needed to do; and the war against the poverty that was an incubator for the violence.

.   .   .

The crush of poverty was obvious in many of the city's neighborhoods, where a lost generation, Los NiNi, was growing up without direction or hope, caught in a social fragmentation that was devouring them. They comprised the bulk of the killed and they comprised the bulk of the killers, and it was their desperate, convulsive violence that had brought the once-proud and glorious Ciudad Juárez to its knees and perhaps to the verge of extinction. From within these neighborhoods it was increasingly easy to see the obvious: Juárez's problem transcended the issues of crime and law enforcement. It ran much deeper and was more interlaced with the particulars, like the fact that fathers were absent and mothers left home before their children awoke and worked until three thirty or four in the afternoon. Their children came home from school at one p.m., and day after day, week after week, the prevailing reality for the kids was the friendships and alliances formed on the streets, which took on their own meanings, meanings that eclipsed the dreams that mothers and fathers held for their children, dreams that, in any event, families could not support and which thus became hollow, inert, and unreal. Father Manríquez and Laurencio Barraza were men whose calling seemed to be to try to reinvigorate those dreams, to give them plausibility in the eyes of the children and teenagers who were being ground up by a fraying society that seemed to have no place for them.

Mayor José Reyes Ferriz was a man with a different calling, but a calling nonetheless. In the span of two years his life had been thrust into a register that he could have never anticipated or imagined. He was presiding over a city that was unraveling, and he was grasping at everything he could think of to try to alter the course of the nightmare. Increasingly, out of the unrelenting violence, he had begun to understand something that the priest and the city's social activists had known all along, namely that military and police operations alone were never going to save Juárez. Around the time of my first visit to Father Manríquez's parish, the mayor flew to Costa Rica to meet for the first time with representatives from the Inter-American Development Bank in hopes of securing funds to help address the social catastrophe that was Juárez. It was a new approach, and the mayor had begun to believe that it might just offer the missing piece to solve the Juárez conundrum.

Note

1
. From “
Ni estudian ni trabajan
(they neither study nor work).”

C
HAPTER 22

The Eagle's Hill

Gustavo de la Rosa had become the Chihuahua Human Rights Commission representative for Juárez in April of 2008. He was the perfect man for the job. His credentials as a human rights activist were impeccable, going back decades to his days as a law student in the 1960s. His mercurial personality, though, had gotten in the way of his being named state commissioner for human rights; Governor Reyes Baeza had nixed that possibility, even though de la Rosa had been the odds-on favorite for the job. “He's too controversial,” the governor had said. Instead, de la Rosa was given the Juárez post.

Between the time when the 1990s femicides receded from the headlines and the cartel wars began, being the human rights representative in Juárez had meant the occasional complaint for maltreatment at the hands of the municipal police, things of that sort. The arrival of thousands of troops, who were patrolling the city's neighborhoods and engaging in often rough confrontations with anyone they believed to have a suspicious mien, translated into a substantial increase in human rights complaints against the military.

One of these complaints involved the murder of a twenty-one-year-old man named Javier Eduardo Rosales Rosales, who worked as a radiology technician at a hospital called Ángeles, located in a poor neighborhood called Vista Hermosa. On the night of Monday, April 6, 2008, Javier and a friend named Sergio Fernández, also twenty-one, had been drinking beer with a woman they knew. The drinking had gone on all night, and the next morning Javier and Sergio set out for a nearby store to purchase some more beer. They'd made it just a couple of blocks before they were stopped by a military patrol. The army had been focusing a great deal of attention on this neighborhood in recent weeks, and residents described the prior week as one marked by an unusually high military presence. One source told
El Diario
that the soldiers found each of the men to have a small amount of marijuana in his possession, and on that basis took them away.

The two men were purportedly taken to a safe house (though others allege that they were taken to the military garrison), where their clothes
were
removed save their boxers and they were beaten and tortured. According to
El Diario
, the men were repeatedly asked where drugs were being sold in the neighborhood. Javier was abused most severely, because his captors took his extensive tattoos to mean that he was a member of Los Aztecas.

Thursday morning, after two days in captivity, Javier and Sergio were hooded and taken to the nearby deserted foothills of Cerro del Águila (The Eagle's Hill), on the southwestern side of the city. Javier was severely hurt. In the fog of confusion and disorientation, accounts of what the men were wearing differed. In one, they were naked save their boxers; in the other, they were given clothes that did not belong to them. In any event, once they were out of the vehicles the soldiers reputedly mocked them and pelted them with rocks, telling them to move. Traumatized, Javier and Sergio made their way as best they could, barefoot amid the cactus and rocks, seeking to distance themselves as quickly as they could from the men taunting them. Shortly thereafter, Javier collapsed and Sergio noticed that his eyes had “gone blank” and he'd stopped breathing. He knew Javier was dead. Sergio covered Javier's body with some torn pieces of cardboard he found nearby before continuing.

It took Sergio a long time to pick his way back home, even though the distance was not far. He finally showed up at his mother's house later on that Thursday morning, torn, bloody, and dazed. Despite his state, Sergio managed to give her an account of what had transpired over the previous two days, including Javier's death on Cerro del Águila.

Sergio's mother took him to the hospital. She then called Javier's mother and told her what had transpired. Javier's mother is said to have gone out to the street and stopped a military patrol, seeking their help. A search party of family members and friends was quickly rounded up, and they made their way to the Cerro del Águila, where they spent four fruitless hours in search of Javier's remains.

Thursday evening, Javier's mother came back into the city to file a report with the state and federal authorities. It was an exercise in frustration, the typical buck-passing. At the offices of the state attorney general and again at the federal attorney general's offices, she was told to file a complaint against the military at a separate location across town. The family chose not to do that, fearing retaliation. Later that evening, they returned home; their efforts to muster official help had been futile.

Friday morning a new search party was mounted and again it scoured the foothills of Cerro del Águila looking for Javier. A little after noon, one of Javier's friends shouted out “He's here!” as he stood over the stiff remains of Javier Eduardo Rosales Rosales, still lying beneath the weathered scraps of cardboard that Sergio had put over him. His body showed telltale signs of torture: severe abrasions to his face, body, and feet.

It
took the authorities an hour and a half to reach the location; they came en masse, nearly fifty in all. When they arrived, the collection of friends and family greeted them with a chorus of “Assassin soldiers!”

In the aftermath of the discovery of Javier Rosales's remains there was more confusion. “The previous day we had already searched in the area where we found him,” Javier's mother told
El Diario
. “He wasn't there the day before.” She also noted that Javier was dressed in clothes that did not belong to him, whereas Sergio Fernández had indicated that the soldiers had left them at the location in boxers after pelting them with stones. Javier's mother accused the military of having replaced her son's body there after the previous day's search.

A woman named Raquel García presented herself before the Juárez media to say that the two young men had been drinking at her home Monday evening and Tuesday morning before they were picked up. She accused an officer named “Captain Molina” of leading the unit that had lifted the two men, and she identified their vehicle as unit number 2321370. She went further. “I know them, they're with the Red Berets. I know that because I work with a group of women who ‘service' the military and they asked me to send them girls.” Raquel García accused the military of threatening her since the events had come to light, saying that they would plant drugs on her, so she'd decided to go public, including disclosing the nature of her work and why she knew the soldiers as well as she did.

After two days of silence, the
secretaría de la defensa nacional
issued a terse press statement:

In relation to the newspaper article published on the 11th day of April of 2009 in the newspaper
El Diario
of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and the stories aired on Channel 2 of the local station “Televisa Juárez,” regarding the presumed participation of military personnel in the actions that eventuated in the death of the civilian JAVIER EDUARDO ROSALES ROSALES: The command of Operación Conjunto Chihuahua roundly denies that military personnel had any role whatsoever in the said actions, which are turned over to the corresponding authorities for investigation and so that the identity of those responsible for the murder of the young Rosales Rosales man may be clarified.

As soon as Sergio's medical condition stabilized, his family transferred him to a hospital in El Paso (he was an American citizen). Javier Rosales's family was afraid that there would be reprisals against them for speaking out; when asked if they were going to press charges, they said they would not appear at the attorney general's office but that they would present themselves at the office of the Chihuahua Human Rights Commission in Juárez to file a complaint against the military.

This
was the dark underbelly of the government's efforts in Juárez. Since March 1, 2009, the date that marked the official outset of Operación Conjunto Chihuahua, 140 complaints had been filed against the military at the Juárez office. This fact placed Gustavo de la Rosa on a collision course with the federal forces.

In mid-April, the Mexican Army issued a statement, ostensibly unrelated but clearly in response to the firestorm over the allegations against them, in which they noted that it was not uncommon to discover military uniforms as well as federal, state, and municipal police uniforms in the narco safe houses that they raided. The implication was that perhaps narcos dressed in army uniforms had lifted Fernández and Rosales, generating unfounded accusations against the military.

In this instance, the explanation was implausible. The military and the other federal forces were sometimes overplaying their hands, entering homes without search warrants and lifting people to garner information, some of whom were tortured and some of whom died in the process. But it was also the case that the cartels and gangs kept stashes of official uniforms that they sometimes donned in an effort to disguise their identities; caches of such uniforms had been reported by the press covering raids on safe houses long before the human rights accusations against the federal forces had begun gaining traction. Regardless, the mounting opinion in Juárez in relation to the Rosales case was that it was, indeed, an example of human rights violations on behalf of the military.

Such abuse was an inevitable outcome of the circumstances. When Calderón initiated the war against the cartels, the military was the only tool in the shed. The federal police were a force of but a few thousand, and local and state police were in the control of the cartels. There were no law enforcement resources to use in the declared war; only Mexico's 240,000 army troops
¹
were available for the purpose. In Juárez, the military set up roadblocks and patrolled neighborhoods, but there was a circumstantial quality to their work. If they happened to see someone suspicious as they patrolled, they stopped them. If cartel operatives or gang members stumbled into one of the army roadblocks, they apprehended them. But there was no systematic approach to their engagements with the cartels and their minions, and very little intelligence work. The seizing of Sergio Fernández and Javier Rosales (two males in their early twenties, one of them tattooed up, hanging out in a hardscrabble neighborhood that was full of gang action) fit the profile of how the military worked perfectly. Taking them to a safe house or, as it was alleged, to the military garrison, where they were beaten, may have been a product of the soldiers' conviction that the men were gangbangers doing cartel work. This was the military's “intelligence” work. This was how they extracted information and learned whom to go after next, or where the drug
sales
were occurring in the neighborhood. Similarly, if a suspect ran into a house, the military pursued him. If they suspected that a cartel operative lived in a given house or that drugs were being sold there, they simply went into the house and turned it inside out. Though Mexican law requires that a search warrant be obtained from a judge or a prosecutor's office for that kind of entry and search, it was rare for the military to resort to such legal niceties. Everything was spur of the moment, driven by circumstances on the ground. Soldiers weren't about to call in for such permissions every time they came across something suspicious. Then there was the problem that they had every reason to believe that the local and state judicial system had been compromised, penetrated by the cartels.