The Fight to Save Juárez (8 page)

Everything that could be said about Mexico's national crisis in relation to the drug cartels applied to Ciudad Juárez by many orders of magnitude. As the Mexican government began to roll out its intervention in Juárez, it became clear that getting to “the root of the problem,” as Guillermo Valdés, the head of the CISEN, had said, would prove to be much more difficult than anyone imagined. In Juárez the disease was so entrenched and insidious that even the federal government's top intelligence operatives had difficulty wrapping their minds around it.

C
HAPTER 5

Public Relations

The Monument to Fallen Police in Ciudad Juárez sits on a small knoll where two thoroughfares, Juan Gabriel (named for a native son turned Mexican pop idol) and Avenida Sanders, intersect. Its centerpiece is a bronze statue of a larger-than-life police officer standing on a cone-shaped pedestal. The officer is rendered in über-exactitude: wearing a sharply pressed uniform with a policeman's day-to-day instruments of work—a gun and spare ammunition clips, a baton, a radio. The officer's eyes are closed as if in deep reflection and his head is oriented toward a police cap lying on its side at his feet—a symbol for all the fallen comrades whose names are recorded on plaques on a semicircular wall that frames the statue. Along the perimeter, facing the wall, are three metal benches, like those found in almost every town square in Mexico, where visitors can sit and reflect on the fate that has befallen these public servants. The first time I visited the monument my impression was that there was something excessively self-conscious about the setting's solemnity.

The monument had been a year in the making when, in 2002, it had fallen to José Reyes Ferriz to inaugurate it by placing a commemorative plaque to mark its completion. At the time, he was serving a nine-month stint as interim mayor, having been appointed by the Chihuahua state congress following a mayoral election that had been nullified because of irregularities.

The ceremony must have been infused with irony: grave and full of pomp as the police band played something formalized and fittingly reverential, yet tainted with the awareness that the police force was so full of corruption and prone to abuse of power that most citizens feared the police rather than revered them. At the time of the inauguration of the monument there were twenty-one names on the memorial wall, but in many cases it was impossible to know which officers had died in the line of duty, defending the citizens of Juárez, and which had died because of their involvement in illicit activity, including work on behalf of the Juárez cartel. In any event, the 2002 inauguration was likely but another of those de rigueur appearances that fill up a mayor's calendar, like so many ribbon-cuttings chock-full of formalisms and speechwriter-driven turns of phrase.

.   .   .

José Reyes Ferriz was born on July 23, 1961, in Chihuahua City, the state capital. His father, José Reyes Estrada Aguirre, was a judge in Camargo, a small, picturesque colonial town of less than forty thousand inhabitants in southeastern Chihuahua. There were no hospitals in Camargo, so the judge sent his pregnant wife to live with his mother in Chihuahua City until José's birth. The legendary General Práxedes Giner Durán, also from Camargo, was a close family friend. The general had fought in the Mexican Revolution as part of Pancho Villa's famous División del Norte (Northern Division, as Villa's army was called), and his exploits made him an icon, especially in his native Chihuahua. Partly riding on that fame, Práxedes Giner Durán had handily won the Chihuahua governor's race in 1962. The general then appointed José Reyes Ferriz's father to be his personal secretary, prompting the family to move to Chihuahua City before José had reached his second birthday.

The family took up residence on the second floor of José's paternal grandmother's house, which was just two blocks from the Palacio de Gobierno. It was a large, rambling structure whose architecture was classic Mexican provincial, with very high ceilings and an inner courtyard. José's grandmother was an avid gardener, and the house had lots of plants in pots and in the gardens. (The house still stands, but it has long since been converted into a school.)

When José got a little older, his father sometimes took him to the state capital building in the afternoons. His childhood memories include playing with his Hot Wheels cars on the parquet floors of the Palacio de Gobierno. When general Práxedes Giner Durán showed up, the
secretario general de gobierno
, who was also a good friend of José's father, would say, “Salute the general,” and little José obliged. Then he'd say, “Sing the national anthem for him.” José, who was not quite seven, already knew all twenty stanzas of the anthem, which he dutifully sang for the general under his father's proud gaze.

José Reyes Ferriz's father became a judge (he'd studied law in Mexico City) in Ciudad Juárez in 1968, when General Práxedes Giner Durán left the governorship. Reyes Ferriz was just beginning second grade. “My father always saw Juárez as a place of opportunity,” he said. Along with the elder Reyes Estrada's real responsibilities, for a period he worked in his share of quickie divorces for American celebrities. (It has long been rumored that Elizabeth Taylor divorced Eddie Fisher in Juárez while she was making the movie
Giant
in Marfa, Texas. Although the evidence is sketchy, it was good PR for the city's tourism. Anthony Quinn did obtain a divorce there in December of 1964.)

The young José Reyes Ferriz was close to his father, whom he describes as a friendly, amiable man with a firm sense of duty. “He was a very serious
person
even though he was outgoing,” the mayor recollected. From an early age, father appeared to be grooming son for politics. “I'd go out with him and he'd approach the city as if he were the mayor,” Reyes Ferriz told me. His father would point out parks that needed to be redesigned, or repairs that streets required, or problems with how neighborhoods were going up. “He had that kind of an eye and he brought it to bear to everything he did,” Reyes Ferriz remembered. His family was also prone to dinner conversation that spanned everything from local political skirmishes to issues of national and international importance. Both of his parents were very interested in politics and government affairs, and the family culture in their home was suffused with those topics.

Sundays the Reyes family ate together. “Once a month or so we'd go to a restaurant called Las Vacas,” Reyes Ferriz remembered. The establishment specialized in tripe (“Delicious!” the mayor exclaimed) and the proprietor was a well-known butcher whose shop was next door to the restaurant. It was a very rustic, no-frills place with a concrete floor and wood chairs and tables. Each table had a small metal hibachi-type burner with glowing charcoal to keep the tripe warm. “It gets very greasy and it loses its flavor if it gets cold,” Reyes Ferriz noted. The tripe was served with avocado, salsas, and fresh tortillas. “That was it. And we drank bottled Cokes.” The manager of Las Vacas was none other than Rafael Muñoz, who, along with Rafael Aguilar and Gilberto Ontiveros, would soon found the Juárez cartel in the 1970s. “I saw him many times,” Reyes Ferriz told me. “He was a normal guy, just the restaurant manager. None of us imagined anything.” In the Juárez of the 1970s, with the Juárez cartel emerging as a powerful force, it was commonplace to see people like Rafael Muñoz, Rafael Aguilar, and Gilberto Ontiveros out and about even as people came to know who they were and what they did.

With the exception of a second-grade stint at Catholic school where he was taught by nuns, José Reyes Ferriz's education was in the city's public schools. He attended El Chamizal high school, which was on a parcel of land that Mexico had recovered from the United States amid great fanfare in the 1960s. The school was in a building that had once served as a U.S. immigration detention center prior to reverting to Mexico. El Chamizal was in the shadows of the El Paso skyline and the border was a short walk away. “There were almost no border guards in those days,” Reyes Ferriz remembers. If he had a free period he and his friends would cross the bridge into El Paso to eat at McDonald's (there were no McDonald's restaurants in Mexico at the time), and after school they'd cross again to go bowling. “All you needed was your passport, there were no lines to speak of,” he recalled, contrasting it with the present-day congestion at the international bridges.

The future mayor of Chihuahua's most important city spoke flawless
English.
“My father forced us to watch English programs on television,” the mayor recollected. “When the family moved to Juárez in 1968 we had a black-and-white Zenith television and my father wouldn't allow us to watch channels two and five, the Mexican channels, so that we'd only watch English-language TV.” It wasn't until high school that he took his first English class, but by then he'd already learned the language. He later learned some French while attending college at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in 1982 and 1983.

After graduating from high school, José Reyes Ferriz went to aviation school at the renowned FlightSafety Academy in Vero Beach, Florida (the same flight school that the late John Kennedy Jr. attended), before going to work for Vitro (an enormous Mexican glass company) as a commercial pilot. While he was at aviation school, his father was elected mayor of Juárez (his term ran from 1980 to 1983).

José Reyes Ferriz would have been glad to make a career as a commercial pilot, but in 1982 Mexico suffered a profound economic crisis and Vitro downsized. Twenty-one-year-old José Reyes Ferriz returned home to Juárez to take some classes at UTEP and attend law school at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, where his interest in politics was again rekindled. His father's successor as mayor was a man named Francisco Barrios Terrazas. Barrios's party, the Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN, had never before won office in Juárez. Chihuahua, like the rest of Mexico, belonged to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI (in fact, the PRI had run Mexico since the end of the revolution, even though already in other northern states the PAN had begun to mount some successful challenges—the first signs of a budding democratic emergence in Mexico). Francisco Barrios was an engaging, charismatic man who later became the first member of the PAN to win the governorship of Chihuahua as well.

The PRI's hegemony had been so complete that Barrios's win shook the state. José Reyes Ferriz was a member of the PRI youth organization and as a project he set out to try to study how Barrios had won the mayorship by analyzing his campaign. “I came to realize that the Francisco Barrios campaign had followed the blueprint laid out in
The Making of the President
, step by step,” Reyes Ferriz recalled, referring to the Pulitzer Prize–winning and hugely successful Theodore White book about the 1961 campaign to put John F. Kennedy in the White House. Reyes Ferriz then studied political marketing and began consulting on PRI election campaigns.

Reyes Ferriz's big break came in 2001, when irregularities led to the nullification of the Juárez mayoral election. It was the state congress's job to name an interim mayor until new elections could be held, and Reyes Ferriz not only had name recognition and party bona fides with the PRI (which still controlled the state congress), but he had also taught some of the PAN
delegates
when they were law students, so they knew him. The fact that he had a popular fifteen-minute radio talk show covering the financial markets and other topics of interest to the business community also broadened his support. Three candidates for the interim spot had been placed before the state congress and José Reyes Ferriz thought he was a long shot. “I called my mother and told her they'd put me in as a filler,” Reyes Ferriz recalled. But the evening of the decision, as the clock neared midnight and he sat watching a movie in his pajamas, he received a call from the governor's representative in Juárez to tell him that he'd won the most votes. It was during that nine-month stint as interim mayor that Reyes Ferriz had inaugurated the Monument to Fallen Police.

.   .   .

For José Reyes Ferriz, the memory of the inauguration of the Monument to Fallen Police was just one among a blur of obligatory events that public office imposes on a mayor's schedule. He had neither been to the monument nor thought about it again for six years until early January 2008, when he'd come to lay a floral wreath as part of an annual event honoring the city's fallen police officers. Then, just a week later, a group of men exited a dark sedan in the dead of night and crept up to the monument, where they left a “narco-message” written on a white sheet of poster board. The message was simple, divided into two sections: at the top, in the smaller of the two sections, someone had written in neat if uneven Magic Marker calligraphy, “For those who did not believe.” The word “not” was underscored several times with lines of decreasing length that reached a point below the word, forming an inverted triangle and giving the gesture the stylish flair that one might expect from a child in elementary school. Beneath this heading were the last names of five dead Juárez municipal police officers: Cháirez, Romo, Baca, Cháirez, and Ledesma. They were listed chronologically according to when they had been assassinated.

It had only been five days since Francisco Ledesma's execution. All of the men on the “For those who did not believe” list had been cut down in a hail of bullets save one, Romo, who had been
levantado
(“lifted”) in June of 2007, never to be seen again. He had apparently been one of the early victims of the Sinaloa cartel's intelligence operation, in which they had been “lifting” key Juárez cartel operatives and torturing them for information at clandestine locations before killing them. The bodies of people who were lifted sometimes turned up in trash-filled vacant lots or in some dark corner of the city, but as often as not they simply disappeared altogether without a trace. If Romo's family had held out hope that he'd turn up alive, those hopes were dashed by his appearance on the “unbelievers” list.