The Fight to Save Juárez (33 page)

As the human rights complaints against the military accrued, most were about these tactics: that the soldiers were beating people up in the streets, and that the soldiers were entering people's homes without a search warrant and trashing them looking for drugs. And as often as not, such incursions resulted in human rights complaints against the military. The Javier Rosales cases, where the victim was held at some location, tortured, and purposefully or inadvertently killed in the process, represented a handful of the hundreds of complaints against the military, but they were so egregious that they became emblematic of the military's transgressions.

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The first leg of the Mérida Initiative, the United States government's three-year, 1.5 billion dollar financial package proposed by the Bush administration to aid Mexico (primarily) in the war against the drug cartels, was finally coming online after traversing an arduous path through the American congress. A complex assortment of groups from a variety of political perspectives opposed the aid, but a strong, persistent voice among these was that of human rights activists opposed to funding Mexico's military and law enforcement, given their records of corruption and human rights abuses. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chair of the Senate's appropriations and foreign operations subcommittee, was one of those who were not convinced that helping underwrite Mexico's antidrug war made sense given Mexico's human rights record. Cases such as Javier Rosales's were prime exhibits in the arguments against such support. Only a handful of the Mexican military had been prosecuted for these violations, a fact not lost on the anti–Mérida Initiative camp. Senator Leahy used his position to temporarily put the brakes on the release of the Mérida Initiative funds, and opponents launched a full-bore assault on the aid program, including letter-writing campaigns to American officials and reports and presentations by groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that assailed the Mexican track record on human rights.

Human rights were shaping up to be a defining issue. The U.S. Congress added stipulations to the Mérida Initiative to pressure the Mexican
government
to do more on this front and to give teeth to accountability efforts. A key issue was the fact that Mexican law did not allow military personnel to be tried in civilian courts and military tribunals were not sympathetic to civilian accusations. In fact, the military judicial system had sent very few soldiers to prison for abuses against civilians.

A lawsuit in which the military had killed a civilian in 2008 at a checkpoint in the municipality of Badiraguato, Sinaloa (the birthplace of El Chapo Guzmán and an area infamous for its poppy fields and narco-culture), argued that military abuses of civilians should be tried in civil rather than military courts. The suit had made it all the way to the Mexican Supreme Court, but on August 11, 2009, the court rejected the case on a technicality. The case had been followed closely by Javier Rosales's mother, given that its outcome would have direct implications for her effort to prosecute the soldiers presumably involved in her son's murder. She told
El Diario
that in her opinion the Supreme Court's decision would simply lead to “cover-ups.” “I don't think anything will happen [to resolve the case] because they're just going to protect themselves,” she added. She told the paper that she was against the military presence in Ciudad Juárez because the only outcome of Operación Conjunto Chihuahua was the death of innocent people.

The stage was set for a confrontation regarding Mexico's use of the army in the war against the cartels in a scathing seventy-six-page report issued by Human Rights Watch, which detailed seventeen cases from various parts of the country (none, in fact, was from Juárez) involving military abuses against more than seventy victims, including several cases from 2007 and 2008. Human Rights Watch argued that the abuses included killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions. They further noted that the military investigations into these crimes had not led to a single conviction.

Gustavo de la Rosa was an especially vocal critic of the military's tactics in the city. In mid-September, de la Rosa told the Mexico City newspaper
El Universal
that “the troops are committing excesses in the same way that the Holy Inquisition did during the Colonial Period, extracting confessions from innocent people based on torture.”

The human rights activist was becoming a spokesperson of sorts for critics of the military's activities and the government's strategy in Juárez. He accused the army of “disappearing” people and said that there was a rising tide of voices calling for the military to leave Chihuahua because of the army's excesses. De la Rosa went as far as to imply that the military was perhaps in cahoots with the narcos: “I get the impression that they only pretend to be fighting organized crime,” he told
El Universal
, “but basically they are in accord, and we're seeing the wholesale failure of president Felipe Calderón's strategy of bringing the army into the streets.” It was powerful rhetoric, and it posed a direct challenge to the government's policies.

In contrast, Mayor José Reyes Ferriz championed the military's actions
in
the city as indispensable, given the circumstances. There was no love lost between de la Rosa and the mayor. They'd known each other for years, taught law together at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, and been thrown together by developments in the city, but everything about their personal styles and ideological commitments dictated that they be antagonists. The rather disheveled, garrulous de la Rosa, with his unmistakable 1960s look, was the polar opposite of the somewhat reserved Reyes Ferriz, who had the starched, tailored-suit look of a successful businessman. Reyes Ferriz was not naive about what it meant to have the Mexican military patrolling the city. Some human rights violations were a given and not entirely unanticipated; such accusations had followed the military in all of its campaigns, whether against the Zapatistas in Chiapas, marijuana growers in Guerrero, or poppy cultivations in Sinaloa. Having five thousand military-aged men in the city for an extended period of time, away from their families, had even involved frank discussions during planning meetings about an increase in prostitution and other potential problems. For the mayor these were part of a cost-benefit analysis. Realistically, there was no way to have the army in the city without these attendant problems. It was a matter of degree; a matter of what was tolerable in exchange for the presence of a force that could help check the cartel violence.

For this reason, the mayor defended the army in public. “We should make every effort to make Ciudad Juárez a safe city and open our doors so that [the military] can do the necessary searches,” he said. He went further, stating that in his view the great majority of Juarenses supported the army's activities, including home searches, because they were hard working, law-abiding citizens who had nothing to hide. “I believe we should not be against the military searching homes,” the mayor said in mid-September 2009, amid growing human rights complaints of illegal searches. The army was routinely ignoring constitutional provisions that required a search warrant, and while not in support of such tactics, the mayor seemed to justify them for two reasons. First, the city was in a state of war. There were many months when the deaths in Juárez matched or surpassed those in war-torn cities like Baghdad, in Iraq, for example. The hard reality on the ground, with so many people being executed every day, was akin to a guerrilla campaign, with narco-commandos all over the city bearing assault weapons. In the heat of the moment there often was no time to make a run to the district attorney's office to secure a search warrant. But the second reason was equally to the point. “The military also knew that the people in the DA's office were reporting everything to the cartel,” the mayor told me. The army's excesses, which rankled idealists like Gustavo de la Rosa, were rationalized by pragmatists like Reyes Ferriz, although the latter did not condone the fate that had befallen Javier Rosales any more than did Gustavo de la Rosa.

Human
rights groups in Mexico and the United States, as well as international groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, kept the pressure on the Mexican government to address complaints related to the army's activities. On September 9, Gustavo de la Rosa met with attorneys who were fellow members of the Barra y Colegio de Abogados (an organization akin to a state bar association). He had already established himself as a vocal antagonist of the military, publicly demanding that the army leave the city. At the meeting, de la Rosa roundly criticized the military's actions in Juárez and said that “the army is losing the opportunity to cover itself in glory and if they continue torturing people they are going to have to retreat covered in manure.”

De la Rosa's statement was leaked to the press. There was already a great deal of hostility between the human rights activist and General Felipe de Jesús Espitia, the commander of Operación Conjunto Chihuahua. The latter had stated, in relation to complaints against the military, that there were “ties” between the drug traffickers and the human rights commissions. He'd all but accused de la Rosa of being in league with the Juárez cartel. Gustavo de la Rosa told me that General Espitia had become irate upon learning of de la Rosa's “manure” comment at the bar association meeting.

Around this time, de la Rosa had the unnerving encounter at the stoplight in which a man had walked up to his car, made his hand into the shape of a gun, and pretended to shoot him before saying, “You need to tone things down or we're going to kill you.” On another occasion, de la Rosa pulled into a gas station. While his car was being gassed up, he went into the restroom. A man entered behind him and said, “You know, I respect you and what you do, but if you don't tone it down you're going to be assassinated.” The man's tone was anything but respectful—it, too, was a direct threat.

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The Valley of Juárez, southeast of the city, was once a rich, vibrant farming area, until American agricultural runoff eventually left so much salt in the Rio Grande that much of the land on the Mexican side became useless for farming. Federal Highway 2 heads out of Juárez through the Valley of Juárez, running roughly parallel to the Rio Grande toward Ojinaga, some 250 miles to the southeast, the famed base of operations for Pablo Acosta, who'd mentored Amado Carrillo Fuentes in the ways of the drug business prior to Acosta's assassination in 1987. A score of little villages and hamlets in the Valley of Juárez along Federal Highway 2 was renowned for its history of smuggling, given that most of the towns were arrayed within easy access of the river and Interstate Highway 10, which follows the river on the Texas side for some seventy miles until it veers northward southeast of Fort Hancock, Texas. For decades, this geographical circumstance had made the Valley of Juárez prime territory for the Juárez cartel, which used it to smuggle drugs
across
the river with the same regularity that it used Juárez itself. That fact had turned the Valley of Juárez into a killing zone, where entire families were being wiped out. The Sinaloa cartel had issued instructions to move on anyone affiliated with the Juárez cartel in the Valley. According to de la Rosa, the instructions were to exterminate “anyone who'd had an economic tie or a familial tie to the captains of La Línea.” Those people had operated freely in the area prior to 2008. In fact, almost all of the families in the Valley had such direct or indirect ties. “They sold them alfalfa, they rented out or sold parcels of land, sold cattle, or worked on their ranches,” de la Rosa said.

Gustavo de la Rosa knew the Valley of Juárez well. He lived in the small town of San Agustín, less than thirty kilometers from Juárez. He raised prize-winning goats and enjoyed his country life, which was a welcome change from the dark realities he dealt with on a daily basis in Juárez. De la Rosa described the developments in a letter to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) as follows: “Beginning on the 15th of August 2009, the climate of violence intensified in the area around my home . . . This is due to the war between the cartels which, in this area, has taken on the character of open warfare and the authorities have abandoned their responsibilities to provide security; there's but a single checkpoint at the entrance to San Agustín.” In de la Rosa's small community, people were being killed, their homes were being razed, and there was widespread fear. Around this time, someone came to de la Rosa's home to tell him that he was on a hit list. “People from San Isidro, the next town over [two kilometers away], came to tell me that I was getting too involved with things,” he said.

De la Rosa asked the state director of the Chihuahua Human Rights Commission to ensure that he and his family were protected. His boss failed to act. On September 11, de la Rosa asked Víctor Valencia, now the commander of the state police following his disastrous stint as the governor's representative in Ciudad Juárez, to provide protection, but Valencia told him he didn't have the personnel available and, in any event, the Valley of Juárez was under the army's jurisdiction, not his. The state attorney general, Patricia González, said perhaps she could help, but he'd have to file formal requests. In short, de la Rosa, the controversial Juárez human rights representative, was on his own. “We're in a state of war,” de la Rosa told the head of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, “and I have received no institutional backing with respect to my personal security.” He requested that the IAHRC intercede on his behalf with the Mexican government in order to “safeguard my life and physical integrity as well as those of my wife, Laura Carrillo Moreno, and son, Alejo de la Rosa Carrillo, given the state of risk in which we find ourselves.” The desperation could not have been clearer.