The Fight to Save Juárez (40 page)

Similarly, David Penchyna, a PRI congressional deputy, declared that Calderón's security policy and his so-called war against the drug cartels were merely a ruse to “legitimize” a presidency “that was not legitimately won at the ballot box.” “Don't be confused, comrades,” the legislator said, “
this
is Mexico's cancer” (thus mocking Calderón's oft-invoked metaphor that the drug cartels were a cancer upon the nation). It was as if the cartels, their gangs, and the orgy of violence to which they had subjected the country were a figment of the administration's imagination, invented merely to justify themselves.

Javier Corral Jurado, a federal senator from Juárez affiliated with the president's party, the PAN, in turn blasted Penchyna and the PRI. “That's how the PRI reduces the problem of insecurity,” he said. He noted that the PRI held practically every political position of consequence in the state of Chihuahua, yet 31 percent of the victims who had already died in the violence across the nation had been killed in the state (Juárez alone accounted for almost a quarter of the national drug war fatalities). He further noted that the state had a 50 percent higher rate of marijuana use than the national average, and twice the number of people consuming cocaine (4.8 percent in Chihuahua as opposed to 2.4 percent nationally). “Those are hard numbers,” the senator noted. “And yet in Chihuahua judicial investigation is almost non-existent, hundreds of dossiers lay unattended.”

From the floor of the Mexican Congress, Javier Corral also implied that Governor Reyes Baeza had ties to the narco-traffickers, suggesting that therein lay the reason for his “negligence” in fighting the cartels and, specifically, the unbounded violence that had overtaken Juárez. He accused Reyes Baeza of accommodating the narco-traffickers, arguing that the governor had blocked attempts to clean up the state police apparatus that was known to have close ties to organized crime. “The government of Reyes Baeza is a spectator before the dispute between the narco capos,” he said, implying that the inaction was due to the governor being compromised.

The PRD party's state secretary, Hortensia Aragón, declared that Chihuahua
was
presently “ungovernable” because of the federal forces and announced that the party would propose legislation to force the departure of federal forces from the state. She argued that fifty crimes were committed every day in Chihuahua, a fact that “required” the withdrawal of federal forces. Aragón's pronouncements lacked coherence. As an antidote to the lawlessness, the PRD proposed that neighborhood groups patrol their own streets. It was, at best, a naive strategy, one that ignored the raw brutality of the cartels and their well-armed gangs and the extent to which they were already terrorizing communities. If the government forces had been ineffective, the viable alternative was hardly to create a vacuum that would give the cartels unfettered control of the city and its neighborhoods. The Villas de Salvárcar families, for example, were clamoring for more protection, not less.

In the days after the announcement that the president would soon be arriving in Juárez, the head of the PRD in Chihuahua, Víctor Quintana, accused him of delaying so long that the situation in the city had become “rancid” and “putrid.” “He had to wait until we had more than four thousand executions in the state before coming to Chihuahua,” Quintana said. Quintana reiterated his call for the removal of all federal forces not only from the city's streets but also from the entire state. Quintana warned that whatever the president imagined his reception would be, the people of Chihuahua would demand an accounting of his actions, of his presidency. “He's not coming as ‘The Savior'! The times do not call for the appearance of a ‘Messiah!'
” Quintana pronounced. But, in truth, the embattled Juárez needed nothing short of that.

.   .   .

As the president's team prepared for his visit to Juárez, they appeared to send mixed messages regarding what the city's citizens might expect. For example, they sought to minimize expectations, initially saying that only the president and the secretary of the interior would be coming and implying that the visit would be brief. Most took this to mean a cameo appearance by the president, something akin to what he'd done on two prior occasions when he'd come into Juárez, given a brief talk to business groups, shaken hands, and dispensed a few
abrazos
before departing for another destination. At the same time, at several press conferences, the president and Gómez Mont indicated that the new program would touch all spheres of the city's life, including education, the economy, unemployment, and public spaces—signaling, in other words, an ambitious plan. The latter suggested the possibility of a significant infusion of federal funds.

The governor of Chihuahua apparently felt he was being cut out of the deal. The day that Los Pinos announced the president's trip to Juárez, the governor contacted the state media to convey his displeasure. As the media carried stories about the president's arrival, headlines all over the
state
simultaneously described the governor as “mad” and “excluded” and “thundering” in his anger. “By excluding local authorities, the president's new plan has started on the left foot,” the governor protested. Journalists described the governor as “visibly upset” at having been excluded from the planning for the new strategy. “I wasn't invited,” he complained to the media. He went further: “This plan is not going to work without the participation of the state government.” However, according to José Reyes Ferriz, each of Gómez Mont's visits, as well as the subsequent president's visits, were preceded by numerous meetings with the president's advance team that included the mayor of Juárez and the governor of Chihuahua. The mayor dismissed the governor's statements as misrepresentations. In fact, he described an atmosphere of contentiousness: “They argued about everything, down to the forks and silverware!” the mayor recalled. “It was all conflict with the state government.” The mayor attributed this to Reyes Baeza's electoral worries.

The governor's protestations continued for days. Three days after the announcement of the president's visit, the governor complained that “I still have not received a call [from the president].” The governor thrashed the president and his team. “I don't know how they intend to create new strategies,” he said, “when all they do is that some come, others leave, and they just have meetings at Los Pinos, but the governor has not been called to participate.” He told the media that, with respect to law enforcement, he had made “unprecedented” efforts, “perhaps even beyond what was constitutionally permissible” (by allowing state police to investigate crimes that fell under the federal purview). His government had invested fiscally to professionalize and clean up the police, the governor maintained. The governor also argued that whatever resources the federal government was sending should be spread across the state and not be limited to the border.

But the fact was that the governor had done relatively little to support the city of Juárez. And even though he declared that it was “strange” that he had not been included, the most likely explanation was that there was significant mistrust of the governor, who had long been hounded by allegations of alignment with the Juárez cartel. The governor accused the federal government of playing election tactics, implying that they were throwing federal funds around in Juárez in order to buy the 2010 election that was just months away. No doubt somewhere political calculations formed part of the Los Pinos thinking; it was only natural. But, unlike the governor, Mayor José Reyes Ferriz, who was also a member of the PRI, appeared to be fully in the loop with the federal people. And in terms of election positioning, it was of far greater utility to the PAN, the president's party, to be able to show a measure of progress and success in Juárez than to have a successful election in Chihuahua per se. The entire nation was looking over Calderón's
shoulder
, demanding results. From that perspective, perhaps it was more useful to the president's opponents that his policies fail.

.   .   .

The Juárez visit by the secretary of the interior had not gone far in calming either the nerves or the rage in the city. A little more than a week after the massacre, the day after Gómez Mont had visited Juárez, Governor Reyes Baeza and Mayor Reyes Ferriz attended a prearranged convocation at the gymnasium at the CBTIS-128, where students from Juárez's four technical schools had come together for a series of crime prevention presentations focusing on avoiding gangs and criminal organizations and preventing drug addictions. The mayor and the governor faced a near-riot at the school. There was a chorus of loud boos when they entered the auditorium and again when they were introduced. The students shouted demands and called for action; they wanted the political leadership to take action not only to solve this case but also to bring peace and security to their communities. Ten students were evicted from the event as they shouted, “We demand justice!” There was pandemonium. Eventually, the students settled. “The students of Ciudad Juárez are not delinquents,” Reyes Ferriz assured them in his comments. “They are good people, they are kids who study, they are kids who are going to work for their city and they are the ones who will move Ciudad Juárez forward.” For the mayor and governor it was a harrowing experience. The students' wrath was undiluted, pure, and it reflected the sentiments of the entire city.

.   .   .

The massacre at Villas de Salvárcar had become a focal point of discussion throughout Mexico. Every newspaper, from the most important and widely read papers in Mexico City to small newspapers in provincial towns, carried the story and reflected on its meaning. Every television newscast in the country had broadcast the gory images from the house on Villa del Portal, and now television stations and radio programs were mustering their best and most respected pundits to analyze what had taken place. Villas de Salvárcar broke down the national denial that previously had accommodated the horror and found ways of avoiding it; it became the stark fact that forced the nation to engage with the brutal realities it was living.

There was an air of gravity as the president of Mexico prepared to board Avión Presidente Juárez, the Mexican version of Air Force One, bound for the northern border city that shared its name, the city on which he'd bet the success or failure of his presidency. The president, as well as the members of his security cabinet and his broader team, knew full well that the stakes for this visit were high and that Juárez remained restive and angry in the aftermath of unspeakable tragedy.

C
HAPTER 25

The Visit

President Felipe Calderón was about to enter a maelstrom. Throughout Juárez, people prepared responses to the visitor from Los Pinos. At the high schools, students were going to mount protests against the violence. At Juárez's universities, where nine faculty members and thirty-one students had been assassinated over the previous two years, students would protest for the victims of the violence. At Catholic churches, congregations would gather to pray rosaries for the Juárez dead. Civic groups were planning marches at the international bridges and at the “Mega Flag,” a city landmark in the heart of Chamizal Park. The president would be greeted by citywide expressions of protest and discontent.

José Reyes Ferriz told the press that the president would announce a plan that had been in the works for months, in collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank. He called it the “Juárez Intervention Plan.” He said the municipal government had been working on it since April of 2009, and that it had been in negotiations with both the state and the federal governments. Carlos Chavira, the head of the influential business group Coparmex Juárez, announced that the city's business leaders would tell the president that he had six months to show results, otherwise many of them planned to leave the city. Many already had.

The presidency announced that there would be one public event, at Juárez's Cibeles Convention Center, during which the president would meet with representatives of various sectors of the city. For the first time, the president's team referred to the new program that was to be unveiled as “Todos Somos Juárez: Reconstruyamos la Ciudad” (We Are All Juárez: Let Us Rebuild the City). Although it wasn't announced formally, word was leaked that the president also planned to meet with the families that had lost their children at Villas de Salvárcar.

The president's advance men arrived at the Juárez airport at the crack of dawn on Thursday, February 11, 2010, and by early morning there were five military helicopters hovering above the Cibeles Convention Center and the army and federal police had set up new checkpoints all around the city. The immediate vicinity around Cibeles was the object of especially intense
security
measures. The spokesperson for Operación Coordinada Chihuahua, Enrique Torres, said that approximately seven thousand army troops and three thousand federal police had been deployed to ensure security during the president's visit.

In a surprise announcement, the president's office said that not only would the president be arriving with his secretary of the interior, Gómez Mont, as had previously been anticipated, but he was also bringing much of his cabinet to Ciudad Juárez. In addition to Gómez Mont, the entourage was to include Secretary of Public Education Alonso Lujambio; Secretary of Social Development Heriberto Félix Guerra; Secretary of Health José Ángel Córdova; Secretary of the Economy Gerardo Ruiz Mateos; Secretary of Agriculture Abelardo Escobar Prieto; and Secretary of Public Security Genaro García Luna. It was a formidable gesture, intended to signal that the president was committed to putting the full resources of the federal government behind changing the realities on the ground in Juárez.