The Fight to Save Juárez (35 page)

Alonso Encina took night courses and eventually managed to get himself promoted to the position of coordinator of quality control, which was easier work and better paid. He says that the maquila was supportive of his art and allowed him to sell his pieces to fellow employees at the plant. These were not conceptual pieces in the spirit of his
Light and Shadow
mural. Reflections on the human condition aren't that marketable. These were kitschy little trinkets with sayings like “You and Me” painted over a red heart for Valentines Day. The Virgin of Guadalupe was always a big seller.

By 2009, though, Alonso Encina was unemployed. Years of dedicated service had amounted to nothing when it came to laying off workers under the press of the economic recession that was grinding Juárez down to a nub.
Presently
, Encina was eking out a living as best he could selling his trinkets and small paintings on wood or plastic—things he could mass-produce at a workbench in his covered carport. He and his father-in-law, who had a shaved-ice cart, made their way to the nearby high school every day, where they sold his wares and his father-in-law's ices at recess and after school. Occasionally, Alonso made it to fairs and markets in the city to sell his things, but it all added up to a meager income with which to support a family. Adrián, his middle son, was encouraging him to go back to Torreón and find a job so that the family could follow. They were all worn out by the city's violence and eager for a life outside of the inferno, Alonso Encina told me.

.   .   .

The Encinas lived right in the middle of the block on Villa del Portal Street, almost directly across from the house where the birthday party was to be held. Alonso Jr. had just turned twenty and was at university, Adrián was seventeen and in high school, and Oscar Alan, fifteen, was in junior high. All of them were dedicated students. Adrián was especially promising. Just a few weeks earlier he'd been named to the prestigious Governor's Excellence List for the second consecutive year, and he had his sights set on studying either engineering or medicine when he got to college. Adrián was well liked among the friends at the party, some of whom attended the CBTIS-128 technical school and played on the school's football team, Los Jaguares, which was part of Juárez's high-school AA League.

That Saturday night, as the kids made their way over to the party (many from the neighborhood, others school chums from other
colonias
), Alonso arranged his art supplies on the workbench and started painting the pieces he'd be peddling that coming week. It was nearing eleven thirty and from the carport he could see the house at 3010 Villa del Portal, where the party was taking place. All three of his sons were there, and the sounds of the party floated across the street as kids came and went. It was cold, but as teenagers are wont to do, most kids were dressed lightly in jeans and hoodies or sweaters. Alonso's wife poked her head out of the front door and said, “It's after eleven, let's get the kids and go to bed.”

Just as Alonso was about to walk across the street, he heard the roar of vehicles round the corner to his right, coming hard and fast before stopping directly in front of his house. There were four SUVs and every instinct told Alonso that something nightmarish was about to take place. A wave of fear swept over him as he saw some two dozen
sicarios
pouring out of their vehicles, all armed with assault weapons. While a few remained posted at the SUVs, the rest rushed into the house where some thirty kids were celebrating the birthday. Immediately, the fusillade brought screams and cries from within the small house, where the attendees were trapped, like fish in a bucket. Some neighbors initially thought that the reports were
palomitas
(a
popular
Mexican firecracker) being set off at the party, but that illusion was momentary, quickly displaced by the awareness that something horrific was taking place.

Alonso Encina heard the shots and the screams and his only thought was that his three sons were in that house. He exited the carport intending to cross the street but was immediately confronted by a
sicario
who put an AK-47 to his head. “This is an
operativo
, steer clear,” said a cold, disembodied voice. Just then, a neighbor exited her house and ran across the street. She was gunned down on the spot. Alonso retreated to his carport; he was helpless, there was nothing he could do but look on in a state of shock and terror.

Inside the party house there was pandemonium. The rat-tat-tat of the assault weapons seemed eternal, and it was entwined with cries of desperation that saturated the space and broadcast from it out into the surround. Anguish, fear, and the smell of gunpowder and death infused the scene. In the confusion, some of the kids tried to exit through a back patio and jump over a wall but they were cut down.

Three students fled to a neighboring house, where the woman who lived there closed the door behind them and attempted to lock it. A
sicario
followed them, kicking in the door. In the meantime, the woman awoke her husband, alerting him to the presence of men with guns. He emerged from the bedroom in his boxer shorts to find an agitated
sicario
waving his assault weapon, shouting almost incoherently, “We've been looking for you!” It was senseless; the man worked at a maquiladora. Before he could respond the
sicario
shot him dead and shot the three students, two boys and a girl, huddling behind him.

The
sicarios
appeared to be on a rampage. They were wild and crazed, lost in a frenzy of death. The owners of the next house over ran a little store out of their home from which they sold candies, sodas, and
bolis
(small plastic bags of flavored chipped ice that they sold for $2.50 pesos, less than an American quarter). A couple on a motorcycle had pulled up to purchase sodas just moments before the commando unit arrived. They were shot dead, as was the owner of the makeshift store. The owner's wife was critically wounded.

The agony of the
operativo
, spasmodic and full of the perpetrators' shouts and the victims' terrified screams, ended in a span of fifteen minutes. The
sicarios
then boarded their vehicles and, in an eerily slow procession, drove down Villa del Portal to the corner, where they turned right and made their way out of the Villas de Salvárcar neighborhood. Behind them they left the gruesome carnage of the dead and wounded. As soon as they cleared the block, Alonso ran across the street and into the house. What he found there was ghoulish. The flow of blood was so profuse that it was difficult to hold
one's
footing on the thick, viscous fluid covering the floor in large pools. A woody, humid odor permeated the house, along with the sharp, acrid smell of gunpowder. Smoke from the extended fusillade hung motionless, suspended in the middle of the room, equidistant from the ceiling and the floor, giving the scene an infernal cast.

“I entered the house shouting for my three sons,” Alonso said. There were bodies everywhere. “No! No! No!” he shouted. In the hallway beyond the small living room area he came upon a mound of bodies, clutched together, as if the victims had sought sanctuary within one another. Then he recognized Adrián, lying face down. “I turned him over. His eyes, his lips . . . I knew he was dead,” he told me, full of grief. Adrián had been shot in the head at close range.

The forty-five-year-old stepfather of one of the kids who lived directly across the street from the party had exited his house in order to pull his car into his carport just as the
sicarios
arrived. Rosales had run into the party house trying to save the kids. “When I entered the house his body was on top of the group of dead kids,” Alonso said. “It was as if he had been trying to protect them all with his body.” Although at the onset of the holocaust the
sicarios
had yelled for all of the girls to leave, a seventeen-year-old named Brenda Escamilla had refused, clutching her boyfriend, in all likelihood knowing what lay in store. They'd shot her, too, and she was in the same pile.

All of the people in that mound of bodies appeared to be dead. Throughout the house there were spent shell casings. Alonso wailed. He shouted the names of his two other boys into the moans of the wounded and the screams of the neighbors and parents who were entering the house, crossing the lagoon of blood in search of their children or intent on lending assistance. The dead and wounded were strewn throughout the house. There was blood splattered on every wall and there was fear and nausea, an overwhelming scene that would never be digested or absorbed by those who witnessed it.

Alonso's youngest son, Oscar, emerged from a back room that was off of the hallway into which the bulk of the dead had been herded and shot. He'd taken refuge in a large closet with a sliding door along with two other kids. The closet had been strafed, and others in the room had been wounded, but, miraculously, the three in the closet emerged unscathed. Alonso's eldest son, his namesake, was nowhere to be found. Alonso allowed himself to entertain the idea that perhaps he'd been spared, but the thought was also present that perhaps he'd just missed him among the contorted bodies, some of whose features the bullets had torn beyond recognition. Then again, maybe the
sicarios
had taken him for some reason. In Alonso's desperation his mind was a jumble of thoughts and fears.

Down on the next block, Luz María Dávila heard the noise coming from
the
party. She would later tell me that she took the reports to be firecrackers. In a city where so many people had died, people's natural defenses still kicked in: firecrackers. Please, firecrackers, not bullets, she thought to herself. Luz María stepped out onto the street and immediately knew that something terribly wrong was taking place. The
sicario
convoy had already rounded the corner near her house on its way out of the neighborhood. What Luz María saw as she looked up the street was people running to the house where the party had taken place. The night was full of the shouts and screams of parents and their wounded children. She panicked; both of her sons had attended the party.

As she ran up the street, someone shouted, “Here they come again!” and she and her husband threw themselves under a parked car. Running up the street again after the false call she encountered the dead in front of the little store and the cruel sight of wounded teenagers, wailing in pain. One girl had the front part of her foot shot off and was screaming in agony. Inside the house she found both of her sons. The older son, nineteen-year-old Marcos, was in the tangle of bodies in the hallway. He was dead. A little farther on she found José Luis, her sixteen-year-old. “He was still breathing,” she recalled. He was critically wounded, having taken a shot to the head.

By now it was after midnight and despite repeated, frantic phone calls, neither ambulances nor police had responded to the appeals for help. “There were police two minutes away at the Seguro Social [hospital], but no one came,” Alonso said. “Not even the Red Cross.” Many of the families soon concluded that they would have to ferry the wounded to the hospital themselves, otherwise their children would surely bleed to death. Luz María Dávila and her husband went home for the family car, into which they loaded their wounded son along with two of the other wounded before rushing them to the Seguro Social Hospital, only five hundred yards away.

Alonso tried to help the others out. He heard a neighbor shouting, “Help! Help! He's still alive!” Alonso went to lend assistance, but it was soon evident that the boy was already dead. Alonso's impression was that he'd been dead all along; the shouting had been a parent's desperate wish that his child still had life. Meanwhile, Alonso Jr. was still nowhere to be found.

In the aftermath, it was difficult to piece a coherent narrative together about what had taken place. There were conflicting reports about how many vehicles were in the
sicario
caravan, for example. Alonso remembered hearing the
sicarios
say, when they'd first arrived and erupted into the house, “This isn't them! It's a bunch of kids!” But another voice shouted back from among the SUVs, “Fuck it! We're here!” Once the killing had begun, some of the kids had managed to run out the front door. Seeing how young they were, one of the
sicarios
guarding the vehicles was heard to say, “Let them go!” There was confusion and perplexity. No one could make sense of it. Why had this happened to their children?

By
the time the ambulances arrived along with the army and municipal and federal police, it had been forty minutes since the guns had gone silent. The authorities were received by a wave of outrage. The entire neighborhood was aroused, furious and incensed. They shouted obscenities and told them they were worthless. They demanded to know why there had been no ambulances to ferry the wounded to hospitals; why they had let their children bleed to death. They asked how it was possible that a convoy of multiple vehicles full of heavily armed
sicarios
could have made it to Villas de Salvárcar undetected when there were police and army checkpoints on the main boulevards all over the city. They asked every question and they challenged every soldier and policeman, and all the while the collective wailing of bereaved parents and siblings and neighbors formed a mournful backdrop to the angry interrogatories. “We said to them, ‘We hope something like this never happens to you, that they never kill one of your children because you have no idea what that's like, the impotence you feel, the pain, the rage that we feel,'
”
El Diario
quoted one of the parents saying to the officers who'd arrived to secure the area.

Mayor José Reyes Ferriz was at home when the first calls came in about what was taking place at Villas de Salvárcar. “It was around midnight and there was a great deal of confusion and misinformation,” he recalled. He was initially told that it was a
quinceañera
party. Over the course of the early morning hours he received at least a dozen calls from his police chief and other city officials keeping him apprised of the emerging picture of what had taken place. He issued instructions for the hospitals to receive the wounded (the Seguro Social Hospital, for example, was only supposed to treat patients covered under their auspices) and sent the administrator in charge of city purchases and expenditures to authorize coverage of all medical services for the victims. “The city's response was terribly inadequate,” Reyes Ferriz later told me. Despite repeated, desperate calls to the city's emergency response number, no help had come during the critical period in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, a time frame that might have made a difference. It was unconscionable. “It is possible that lives could have been saved,” Reyes Ferriz said of the failure of the city's emergency response services.