The Fight to Save Juárez (39 page)

The far-left seemed unable to engage the violence outside of the rubrics that were left over from the 1960s and 1970s. There was no place within those frameworks for understanding a relatively new, third force, one that was neither the government nor a guerrilla/worker resistance movement but rather a force fueled by the requirements of narco-capitalism, which, even if driven by similar commercial instincts, was nonetheless an altogether different creature. Narco-capitalism was not run by the traditional Mexican elites (despite its influence and control over individuals both within and outside of local, state, and federal government). If in the 1980s the cartels had had to answer to state and federal law enforcement, there had now been an inversion of the power structure: today the cartels called the shots in many of the areas they controlled. But there was a populist patina to the narco-world given the humble origins of all of the important cartel players and given the emergence of a narco-culture that romanticized their exploits and celebrated them in the ever-present
narcocorridos
and
telenovelas
. That populism shifted the terrain for a political left long accustomed to an adversary defined as the nation's elites and long accustomed to viewing itself as a movement that defended the downtrodden. The cartel leadership and its cadres were mostly uneducated individuals from poor communities. And the cartels and their gangs were terrorizing poor communities through their violence and extortions. This was an awkward fact for the left when it came to framing adversaries. NAFTA and globalization were easy to fold into the traditional analysis given obvious facts, such as poor wages and an absence of even basic services in countless neglected communities. But the war against the cartels was not a new edition of Mexico's infamous Dirty
War
, notwithstanding the abuses of the military and other law enforcement agencies. It was a monster the likes of which Mexico had never known.

.   .   .

The pressure on Felipe Calderón was enormous given the national reaction following the tragedy at Villas de Salvárcar. There was a clamor for a change, for a pause that might usher in fresh deliberation. The circumstance demanded something beyond apologies delivered from Mexico City, no matter how sincere and heartfelt. The national debate was pushing the administration, forcing federal officials to break with their habits of mind. Even the PAN's state leader, Cruz Pérez Cuéllar, called in an open letter to the president for Calderón to concede that his policies had failed in Juárez. Reeling off statistics on the number of dead, he advised that the president come to Juárez “in humility.” If he did so, Cuéllar assured, the president could count on the support of the good people of the city.

Immediately upon his return from Japan and at every subsequent opportunity, Felipe Calderón began signaling a change in course in relation to his government's Juárez strategy. From the state of Aguascalientes, where he was inaugurating a new technical institute, he announced that his government would take the necessary steps to restore peace and tranquility to the city. He again expressed his deep condolences to the families whose children had been massacred and underscored as often as he could that it had become clear that they were good, decent kids. Calderón expressed his “solidarity” with the parents, siblings, and family members of the fallen. This tragedy, he said, had “not only wounded and hurt the nation, it had also aroused its indignation.” Calderón indicated that an announcement was imminent regarding “a new strategy” for Juárez that would involve its citizens. “We are all required to renew our commitment to Juárez,” the president declared. The new strategy would encompass new educational opportunities and areas such as employment, recreation, and community life, as well as prevention and treatment of addictions. In other words, it promised to be a broad, sweeping proposal.

The notion of a new strategy did little to change the tenor of what was taking place on the ground in Juárez and the rest of the nation. Historically, successive Mexican governments had often presented grand schemes that amounted to very little. In Chihuahua, the initial federal government intervention had been called Operación Conjunto Chihuahua. It had then been given a new name, Operación Coordinada Chihuahua, but for Juarenses living the day to day, the distinction meant nothing at all. So the promise of a new strategy to rescue Juárez, although it was given extensive coverage in local and national media, was received without credulity, much less enthusiasm.

Given the national clamor, President Felipe Calderón and his security
cabinet
, meeting at Los Pinos (the Mexican White House), soon came to the conclusion that nothing short of a full-on response could contain or absorb the powerful emotions that had been unleashed by the slaughter of the innocent in Juárez. The president's office announced that Calderón would be visiting Juárez on Thursday, February 11, 2010. The communiqué said that the president was undertaking the trip in order to personally address the concerns of the citizenry and to present a new strategy for taking back the city. The secretary of the interior, Fernando Gómez Mont, would lead an advance team that would lay the groundwork for the president's visit to the most violent and aggrieved city in all of Mexico.

.   .   .

“I waited until several days after the funerals before visiting the Villas de Salvárcar families,” Mayor Reyes Ferriz told me. The visit was private, in a house across the street from the scene of the shootings. “I expected a great deal of anger against the government,” he said, “but the overwhelming tone was more one of resignation and loss.” The families had just buried their children days before, and the gravity of it still hung in the air. “There was lots of pain,” the mayor continued. He recalled two primary complaints. The first was about the delay in the response by the Red Cross and the police. The second was against the president for his remarks in Japan. One of the things that the mayor remembered from that difficult encounter was a mother of a young girl. She had stood at the back of the living room, which was cramped and full of people. In her hands was a framed photograph of her daughter in a
quinceañera
dress. The woman never spoke, but her silent, mournful presence stayed with the mayor.

.   .   .

The secretary of the interior arrived in Juárez on Monday, February 8, three days before the president was due to arrive. The mayor had recommended to the president's liaison that Gómez Mont meet with the Villas de Salvárcar families and had provided a brief on his own meeting with the families a few days earlier, conveying that the tone had been somber and the complaints appropriate given what the families had just endured. “They [the advance team] were cautious about not creating problems for the government,” the mayor observed. This was especially crucial in light of the governor's recent reception on Villa del Portal Street. Governor Reyes Baeza and Mayor Reyes Ferriz met Gómez Mont at the airport, where the officials conferred and agreed that together they would visit the families of the victims at Villas de Salvárcar. It appeared that the secretary of the interior hoped to defuse the families' anger following the debacle of the president's comments in Japan. They left the airport and their entourage headed directly for the beleaguered
colonia
where, days after the funerals, the entire neighborhood continued to mourn.

The
three men met with the families privately at one of the Villa del Portal homes, across the street from the scene of the massacre. In addition to Luz María Dávila and Alonso Encina, the families of the other adolescents who'd been killed that night were represented. Gómez Mont told them that the president had sent him in order to express his deep sorrow for their loss and to give them his personal condolences. During the two-hour meeting the families pleaded for security. They told Gómez Mont that they feared for their lives. Gómez Mont did what he could to reassure them that they would be protected. He promised that representatives of the federal government would continue discussions with them and that their needs would be addressed. The families would get help, he said. The families had prepared a list of actions, including demands that the authorities allow “foreign law enforcement” to investigate the case; that federal, state, and local police as well as the military stop wearing ski masks to cover their faces when on duty; and that they stop pointing weapons at civilians during their
operativos
. Gómez Mont did not respond to those specific petitions.

Luz María Dávila had already shown that she was not one to buckle in the face of the powerful. She took advantage of the meeting with two of the most powerful men in the state of Chihuahua and the president's personal emissary, dressing down the secretary of the interior just as she had the governor days earlier. She told Gómez Mont that there was no trust, even though he'd promised a full and vigorous investigation.

Following the two-hour meeting, Luz María told
El Diario
that she remained angry; she felt there were no solutions to what was taking place in Juárez. She also struck out at the minister and at the president: “[Gómez Mont] said that when the president made his declarations he had erroneous information and that now he knows that it wasn't so, but I do not accept that as an apology.” Her sons were good boys, she said, and she demanded that the president publicly retract the comments he'd made at the press conference in Japan. She also pressed for justice: “Mr. President, until the culprits are apprehended I hold you responsible for the murder of these children!”

The secretary of the interior left the gathering in a five-vehicle convoy and headed for what would be a marathon ten-hour meeting with representatives from a variety of groups, including business leaders, human rights activists, and civic organizations. At a subsequent press conference with the governor and the mayor, Gómez Mont sought to sketch out the outlines of the president's new strategy, a strategy, he said, that would rest on support from four pillars: the federal, state, and municipal governments, as well as civil society. The one thing he specified about the president's forthcoming visit was that the president would meet with the families of the victims of the Villas de Salvárcar massacre, whose tragedy, the secretary of the interior insisted, had “moved the president deeply.” “The president knows that the
dead
were innocent victims and they were part of a youth that is involved in sports and their studies, that they represented the way out of the violence in Juárez, and any hypothesis regarding a confrontation between rival gangs has been discarded,” Gómez Mont affirmed. It was clearly a continuation of the full-court effort to defuse the public relations gaffe that had brought strenuous criticism against the president both locally and nationally.

The press conference was testy for another reason; the significant tensions between the governor and the federal government were evident. Earlier, the governor had publicly chastised the president for not coming to Juárez sooner. With national elections just five months off, he now said that it was “imperative” that whatever help Juárez was to receive not become part of the forthcoming electoral contest—in other words, that the money from the federal government not be used to further the PAN's political leverage in the city.

Following that meeting, in separate remarks to the press, Governor Reyes Baeza called the federal government to task for “creating victims.” This amounted to a public rebuke of President Calderón and the federal government's policies in the war against the cartels. Reyes Baeza said that the dead were not victims of a natural disaster but “of the war [against the cartels] which the president convened two years ago.” Referring to Calderón's statements in Aguascalientes and elsewhere since his return from Japan, in which he had expressed condolences and solidarity with the victims and their families, the governor scoffed at “expressions of solidarity” as insufficient. What people needed, he said, was “deeds.” Nowhere in the coverage of the governor's remarks was there mention of the fact that over the course of those two years the governor had himself sent virtually no support to Juárez. There had been no additional funding from state coffers to help defer the spiraling security costs (in fact, those expenditures had been reduced), and neither had the governor enhanced the presence of the state ministerial police in the city despite the rampant violence that had enveloped it and despite the mayor's repeated requests for assistance. In his own way, the governor was using the Villas de Salvárcar tragedy to political ends.

Beyond the governor's cynical comments, the massacre became fodder for political positioning both locally and nationally (municipal, state, and federal elections were slated for July 4, 2010). Víctor Quintana, the federal deputy representing Juárez from the PRD, the party that Calderón had defeated by the slimmest of margins in the 2006 presidential election, coined the phrase “youth-icides,” playing off of the so-called femicides, as the killings of young maquiladora women in the late 1990s had been termed. He noted that 80 percent of the Juárez deaths since the start of the drug war were young people, and 30 percent were under nineteen years of age. “We're living a youth-icide,” Quintana told Mexico City's
Proceso
magazine.
“
The youth of Juárez and the nation, whether execution victims or executioners, are victims. And Gómez Mont and Calderón are trying to blame them and make them delinquents.” He pointed out that Chihuahua had the highest incidence of youth between the ages of twelve and eighteen who were neither in school nor working (the infamous NiNis). The state had the highest incidence of middle-school and high-school dropouts. It was three times harder for youth between fifteen and twenty-four to find jobs, he argued, and the youth of Chihuahua, and, especially, of Juárez, faced limited alternatives other than forced migration, joining a gang, participating in drug trafficking, or suicide. “All of them,” Quintana insisted, “the executioners and the executed alike, are victims.”