The Fight to Save Juárez (47 page)

One officer who I encountered at a narco-lab, where the federal police had found twenty kilos of cocaine, had initially been standoffish and even brusque, but over the course of the four hours that I was there (a rumor had circulated that they were going to permit a tour of the lab once they had secured its contents), he eventually warmed up. He was a young man, only on the force for two years. “The girls here won't even look at us,” he lamented. “They all want narco-boyfriends, not men like us who are trying to do something for our country.” It was a moment of candor from a man far away from home on what was an increasingly thankless mission.

I also spent time on three different occasions with a federal police intelligence inspector (the man who'd hosted the meeting at the Intelligence Center where I'd seen the videotaped executions). He was a career officer who was disenchanted with the force and nearing retirement. He'd taken me under his wing, twice inviting me to lunch with him and his troops at one of the hotels temporarily housing deployed federal police (the hotel obviously catered to by-the-hour clientele when there wasn't a narco-war going on in town). I'd seen the respect with which his people treated him, and he them. He'd talked candidly about his views regarding the expensive security cameras that had gone up all over the city. (“They're useless,” he said. “They haven't helped us solve a single crime.”) He'd given me books about Juárez and shown me books he was reading, one about unorthodox European approaches to rehabilitating prisoners and the concept of prisons
without
walls, and one about the history of drug use that argued that every civilization had used drugs and that they should be legalized. “That would put an end to most of this insanity,” he'd said. The man was humble, and of humble origins; he was one of the older generation, the generation that had not gone to college, although his children were now at university.

I was aware of the fact that there were allegations that some of the federal police were extorting individuals and shopkeepers, competing with the local gangs for the
cuota
. Indeed, subsequently, in August of 2010, a group of 250 federal police officers mutinied in Juárez, accusing their commander, Salomón Alarcón Olvera, and his lieutenants of planting drugs and guns on people in order to extort them, while pressing the officers of their unit, the Third Group, to participate in their activities under penalty of losing their jobs. Those who did not comply were accused of crimes and arrested. In fact, the mutiny had been sparked by the arrest of an officer named Víctor Manuel Desid, who, his fellow officers maintained, had had drugs planted on him for not going along with Commander Alarcón Olvera's schemes. The mutineers had called the Juárez media after Desid's arrest, and when they arrived, the officers kicked in the door to the commander's quarters, where they found drugs and confiscated weapons that the officers said the commander and his people planted on innocent victims.

Alarcón Olvera and three of his lieutenants were immediately relieved of their duties.
²
Later that same month, Facundo Rosas, the director of the federal police and Genaro García Luna's right-hand man, announced that 3,200 officers had been relieved of their duties in recent months in a housecleaning effort that had been underway since May of 2010. That represented nearly 10 percent of the federal police force. Of these, 465 had been charged with breaking the law, while another 1,020 faced disciplinary actions after failing portions of the Confidence Test.

I asked José Reyes Ferriz about his views regarding the federal police. “Some of them came to Juárez to do their jobs,” he told me. “Others saw it as a ‘business opportunity.'
” He was well aware that there were federal police who were of the Alarcón Olvera mold, corrupt and, through that corruption, contributing to the losing battle for hearts and minds in Juárez. But in his view these were the exception. He said the federal police rotated through the city for three-month stints, after which the units were sent elsewhere, precisely in an effort to make it more difficult for them to be corrupted or engage in criminal activity. He also said that there had been several occasions on which he had asked Facundo Rosas to remove a unit because of allegations against it, and that Rosas had obliged every time he'd made such a request.

The mayor liked Genaro García Luna; he described him as strong, a man on a mission to leave his mark on Mexican law enforcement. “That's been
his
goal for years, everything he's trained for, aimed for, pushed for,” Reyes Ferriz said. He also described him as a man with a strong need for control, which had led to skirmishes within Calderón's security cabinet, skirmishes that García Luna invariably won.

The fact that the federal police were taking over in Juárez was an example of that influence. Reyes Ferriz recalled arriving at the military garrison for a security meeting in January of 2010. “It was the top dogs,” he said, given that the meeting included Guillermo Valdés, the head of the CISEN; Jorge Tello Peón, Calderón's national security advisor; Facundo Rosas, the director of the federal police; General Felipe de Jesús Espitia, commander of the 5th Military Zone; Governor Reyes Baeza; and the state prosecutor, Patricia González, among others. The surprise, however, was the presence of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, as well as representatives from the DEA and the FBI.
³
It was the mayor's impression that the Americans were pushing for the federal police to take over the Juárez operations, which is what was announced at the meeting. The shift was news to the army, which apparently did not take it well. General Espitia was furious, according to the mayor. “I thought it was a mistake,” Reyes Ferriz said. “The army was becoming more and more effective.” Reyes Ferriz suspected that the shift had not been implemented until April precisely because of the tensions it had created with the army. “WikiLeaks later confirmed it,” the mayor added. “The U.S. was backing the federal police over the army.”
⁴
Reyes Ferriz's point was that Genaro García Luna had won; “He clearly had the ear of the president,” he observed.

When I asked the mayor his opinion regarding the allegations that García Luna was in league with El Chapo Guzmán and the Sinaloa cartel, he remarked that his gut instincts were that it was not so, with the caveat that in Mexico anything was possible. As for corruption within the federal police, his response was, “Look, there's corruption everywhere. That's just a fact.” Mexico was engaged in a slow process of trying to change the mindset that fostered and lived within the culture of corruption, he noted. Sometimes it was also difficult to know with certainty what constituted corruption. He mentioned the famous security cameras that had been installed in Juárez. In his view, the price paid per camera had been excessive. Was that an artifact of corruption? “It's impossible to know,” he said. The same was true for the upgrade of the municipal police's communications equipment from analog to digital. The police had Motorola equipment, which could have been upgraded by buying inserts and new keyboards—everything else required to go digital, including the towers, was already in place. Reyes Ferriz said that the federal police had insisted instead on French equipment that was more expensive. Perhaps there had been an insider deal there, or technological issues that justified the decision; there was no way of knowing, the mayor
said.
Was García Luna aware of this? Was it underlings? Were there other pressures to go that route? “Who knows,” Reyes Ferriz said. “In Mexico it's still impossible to make deals without some of that. It's just inherent in the system. It's the way it all works,” he concluded. But Reyes Ferriz distinguished this kind of business culture or this kind of corruption, if indeed it played a role, from being owned by one or another of the cartels. Reyes Ferriz told me that he trusted García Luna. Though he described him as ambitious, in his view those ambitions were in line with the good of the country and the effort to change the world of Mexican law enforcement from top to bottom. “I think he's a good policeman, a policeman with a vision,” he concluded.

.   .   .

It took me a year and a half to secure an interview with Genaro García Luna. We met at the SSP (Secretariat for Public Security, SSP by its Spanish initials) headquarters—a recently refurbished and smartly designed compound in Mexico City that had once housed the Secretariat for Social Development. The SSP consisted of three administrative areas: the federal police, the federal prison system, and a unit responsible for providing security to federal buildings and administrative units such as the Mexican executive, legislative, and judicial branches. García Luna was one of the most influential players in Calderón's security cabinet; his ideas had held sway from the beginning of the administration and he'd survived a great deal of criticism as it became clear that the war against the drug cartels was not reducing the violence across the nation.

His office was an ample corner space with commanding views of the compound's well-maintained lawns, which were dotted with tall trees and crisscrossed by crisp paths. The walls in the office had a blond, beechwood veneer and the overall design of the room was quite modern, with clean lines throughout. His desk was large and orderly, with the telltale red phones via which he could reach the president at a moment's notice. I sat at a conference table, accompanied by his director of communications, Lizeth Parra, and her assistant.

García Luna strode into the room after I was seated. A man of medium stature with a sturdy frame, he sported a burr haircut and wore a navy blue suit, white shirt, and a fashionable electric-green tie. He was amiable and straightforward, talking at a quick pace with a modest speech impediment that the Mexican media has widely caricatured. In the interview, García Luna described his law enforcement philosophy, as well as his analysis as to why the situation in Juárez had proven to be so intractable. He talked law enforcement theory—the relationship between law and order and the state, civil society, and democracy, for example. He also described the evolution of the drug cartels in Mexico, referencing how the closing of the Caribbean
by
U.S. law enforcement had transformed Mexico into the primary funnel for Colombian cocaine headed to U.S. markets.

García Luna was especially animated when talking about the central role the federal police were playing in the war against the cartels country-wide, as it increasingly took the place of the army, and his plans to export the model of the federal police to state and municipal police forces. “It's obvious that you can't have a democracy if you don't have functioning police forces,” he said, noting that the process of transforming the culture of the police and, especially, the public's perceptions of the police, was proving slow and difficult.

As for Juárez, García Luna spoke about how the enormous migration to the city of people seeking jobs at the maquiladoras in the 1980s had transformed the city. “You had countless families where the fathers were away working in the United States and the mothers were working in the maquiladoras,” he noted, invoking Los NiNi without calling them such. He described Juárez as a city with the economy of a small country but one lacking in infrastructure, where streets had no lights, communities had no schools. He also described how the logistics of moving merchandise across the border (whether legal or not) were part of the city's identity, which is what had made it so indispensable to the cartels. Finally, he talked about the fact that the cartels had killed twenty-three federal police officers in the nine months preceding the interview, in what he described as a clear change in cartel tactics.

The head of the Secretariat for Public Security was very enthusiastic about the still-new Plataforma México, a national law enforcement database for tracking criminals with their police records, fingerprints, and other information; data about municipal, state, and federal police officers was also kept on Plataforma México, as were Interpol alerts and other information such as car registrations and license plates.

As the interview wound down, I told García Luna I had one last question. We both knew, I said, that there were allegations accusing him of links to the Sinaloa cartel. What did he have to say in relation to those? There was a pause and I braced myself for an angry response. Instead, he was surprisingly non-defensive. “Look,” he said. “That goes with this territory. It is impossible to be in this position and not have these kinds of accusations. And it is all but impossible to defend yourself against them,” he said. He cited the fact that his people had arrested many of El Chapo's men, including top capos, and he rattled off the quantity of drugs seized from the Sinaloa cartel. “I arrested El Chapo's brother,” García Luna added.
⁵

After a moment he continued, telling me that recently
Reforma
, the respected and politically moderate Mexico City newspaper, had printed an allegation that he lived in a two-million-dollar house (clearly beyond
what
was commensurate with his salary). The article further implied that there was no bill of sale for his prior home (suggesting, in other words, that the funds for the new house must have come from elsewhere) and that another home he owned in Juitepec, Morelos, was worth in excess of a million dollars. García Luna cited this to illustrate that he had been the object of “systematic calumny and defamation” because of his position, in addition to sustaining death threats against him and his family. “Any journalist could have tracked down the facts by searching public documents,” he told me. García Luna had written a rebuttal to the allegations, noting his annual salary over the prior three years (for the most recent, 2009, his salary had been the equivalent of $327,000 U.S. dollars), as well as bonuses and a severance package from the PGR over the same interval. I was subsequently shown purchase documents, and a copy of his mortgage on his home. The purchase price for the home, including renovations, came to $808,000 (less than half the value alleged in the
Reforma
piece). A portion of that had been paid for by the sale of his prior home, which he'd sold for a modest profit (there was a copy of the bill of sale documenting the transaction). An outstanding mortgage covered the difference.
Reforma
had subsequently published García Luna's response to the piece. I later found several references in other media accounts to the original allegations that García Luna lived in a two-million-dollar home, with no reference to his rebuttal and without supporting documentation.