This Love Is Not for Cowards (7 page)

“There's a little violence in El Paso like anywhere else,” Gil said in the car. “But I don't need to put bars on my windows or anything. It's a very safe place. It's a very good city. It's calm. When I want action I take my wife and kids to Disneyland and that's it, brother.”

El Paso
is
safe. City officials constantly—and I mean
constantly
—repeat that El Paso is the third-safest city in the entire United States. Bring up the ongoing bloodbath in Juárez and they'll ask what is this Juárez of which you speak? Is it a city in Mexico or something? Then they'll point out that in El Paso last year not even ten people were killed, a fraction of 1 percent of the annual slaughter taking place in—what city was that again? Juárez?

It certainly is quieter in El Paso. Walking back to the hotel from the gas station, I don't feel the slightest threat. My stomach is distended slightly, unclenched for the first time in a month. Which doesn't make me feel good, necessarily.
It's boring in the United States.
That's my impression upon my return. Isn't that a queer way to feel?
I wish I was back in the world murder capital, where life is—what—spicier?
Maybe I just wish I wasn't in El Paso. It's not even eight o'clock and the town is asleep. People in Juárez stay in at night because of the cartels and the killing. People in El Paso stay in by choice, I guess because they have nothing better to do.

Montana Avenue and the airport and my hotel all sit high on a ridge that rises quick and steep from the bed of the Rio Grande. Looking over the ridge, Juárez is most of what I see. Yellow streetlights mark López Mateos and Manuel Gómez Morin and other avenues I'm pleased I can identify on sight. I see the soccer stadium. Even in the dark I can make out the mountain exhorting me in Spanish to READ THE BIBLE, IT'S THE TRUTH. A wind starts in the valley. It blows over my apartment in Colonia Nogales. The wind rushes across the river, past the guard dogs of the Border Patrol, up and over I-10 before it buffets my jacket and my face. I wince to protect my eyes. Gil doesn't want to live down there, in Juárez. He doesn't think I should even drive down there. Francisco Ibarra
does
want to live there, but, for his safety, he now lives in El Paso just like Gil. Before Francisco was born, his mother had suggested she give birth in Texas. Why not? American citizenship might come in handy someday. “No!” Francisco's father barked. “We are Mexicans!” Francisco never even studied English, and still can't speak it. Yet he now lives in the United States. In El Paso. Across the river from where his flower was planted.

I'M IN MIAMI when the Indios host Santos. The game is touted as a geographic rivalry,
el clásico del norte
, but Santos's home city of Torreón and Juárez don't really have much in common, and with almost five hundred miles between them, the two teams aren't exactly crosstown rivals. Still, it's a game everyone has been anticipating. Santos is a good club, but they're not a
great
club, of, say, Monterrey's caliber. Like the Indios, Santos is relatively new to the Primera. Newer teams are the most likely to fall back down to the minors. If the Indios are going to be the squad that stays up, Santos is exactly the kind of team they need to beat. It helps that the Indios are healthy and rested. Olympic Stadium is hosting the border's first home game of the new season. The chances of an Indios victory are about as high as they'll ever be.

I watch the game at a friend's apartment in Miami Beach, two blocks from the ocean. I'm wearing shorts and a T-shirt. A soft breeze rustles palm fronds outside open windows. Tuning in to Televisa Azteca on a small set, I'm jarred to see how cold it still is in Juárez. The same sun warming Miami is shining on Juárez, too, but the colors of the border are muted, whites and blacks and dark grays that almost aren't colors at all. Fans shiver in puffy parkas, knit hats stretching over ears. The cold slows down the run of play, as if the ball were covered in frost. No score through halftime. Marco is in the game, looking fine.

Midway into the second half, a Santos player commits a hard foul that draws a red card; the referee sends the offender to the locker room. Santos must play a man down the rest of the game. Television cameras pan the bleachers, where El Kartel bounces in excitement. What an opportunity! The Indios are at home. They have a man advantage. Plenty of minutes remain on the clock. “Now is the time for the Indios!” the announcer bellows. Yet the Indios never put the ball in the net. They don't even come close. The final score, 0–0, feels like a loss. The next Sunday, down in Mexico City, the Indios lose outright to the Eagles of Club América, a team regarded in Mexico the way Americans regard the Dallas Cowboys. The final score is 1–0. It's the Indios' third-straight game without a goal. Club América wins despite missing its star striker. Six days before the game, in a Mexico City nightclub called Bar Bar, someone shot the player in the head. He fell into a coma. The gunman got away. Because Juárez was coming to town, national journalists speculated the shooting may have been a cartel-related hit.

Chapter 4

The Game

It takes three days to drive back to Juárez. My hatchback is crammed so full I can't see out my rearview mirror. I'm bringing to the border every single thing I own in the world. All my clothes—jeans, socks, T-shirts, dress shirts, suits I never wear, winter coats, a raincoat, every shoe, everything. I've got books, a portable safe protecting my tax records and birth certificate, essential pots and pans, decent computer speakers, cell-phone cables, and my Memory Hole, a small box containing photos and cards and scrap-paper reminders of who I am and what I've been through. I feel whole once again, a man reunited with his possessions.

The road trip starts early on a Sunday morning, a week before the Super Bowl. The game will be played in Miami. Ocean Drive's pink sidewalks already overflow with fans of the New Orleans Saints, a team making its first-ever appearance in the championship game. The sports punditry contends the Saints' success is the best thing to happen to New Orleans in the four and a half years since the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. They're probably right. All the Saints banners and bumper stickers and flags I see on the road make an impression. Fans declare themselves at the gas stations and fast-food restaurants where I refuel. When I cross into Louisiana, cries of “Who dat?” pour from every station on the radio. Every station: gospel, jazz, public, Cajun, hard rock. A city and a state are excited, united. It's rousing, evidence that a sports team really can lift the mood of a depressed city. I find myself authentically pumped up by the time I stop for the night in Baton Rouge. In my roadside hotel room, I fall into bed and turn on the news, primed to enjoy a few minutes of proudly biased Saints hype. I find instead the worst story out of Juárez yet.

Just before midnight on Saturday night, seven SUVs sealed off a street in the working-class neighborhood of Salvarcar, not far from the Indios' practice facility. More than a dozen gunmen stormed out of the trucks, showering bullets on a house where teenagers were celebrating a sports victory by their high school team. At least fourteen people were killed. The youngest victim to be identified so far was only thirteen years old. In images flashing across the television screen, blood drips down walls and pools on the house's concrete floor. Neighbors had called the police, but no officers or soldiers arrived until well after the shooting had stopped and the killers had driven off. These neighbors believe the shooting was a mistake of some kind. The victims, they insist, were good and responsible kids. Mexican president Felipe Calderón disagrees. The man who made Juárez the key battleground in his declared war on cartels states that the massacre must have been “a settling of accounts” between drug dealers, an insensitive and inaccurate remark for which he soon offers his “most heartfelt apology.”

Massacres happen in Juárez. It's only been a few months since gunmen shot up a drug rehabilitation clinic in El Centro, killing seventeen. Two weeks after that massacre, shooters outside yet another drug rehabilitation clinic slaughtered ten more. Those mass murders, as horrible as they were—surely some innocents were gunned down—could be written off as cartel thugs killing cartel thugs, the social cleansing Calderón reflexively invoked with the students. But the details of this latest massacre are so horrific, and the victims so universally believed to be blameless, that the slaughter rises above the
ruido blanco
of ten anonymous murders a day. President Calderón eventually declares the massacre a national tragedy. “Ciudad Juárez,” says an anchor on a Spanish-language network I flip to in my Louisiana hotel room, the anchor shaking his head and biting his lip at the end of his broadcast.

I reach Texas the next morning. My overloaded car shoots through Hill Country on my way to the flat and endless western half of the state. I drive all day and into the night, but I only reach Ozona, still three hundred miles from El Paso. I pull into a highway motel, my phone vibrating with text messages and phone calls from friends and worried family members. Black humor abounds: “Stay away from high school parties!” jokes a colleague. “I hear Juárez is nice this time of year,” writes a college friend who'd reconnected on Facebook and who thought my announced return to Mexico meant Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta. I reach El Paso the next day, not long after lunch, scared once again. It's the same generalized fear I felt when I first crossed the bridge in December. What in the world am I getting into? I haven't forgotten that Juárez, day to day, can seem mundane, like any other city. But part of me somewhere in my subconscious expects to be shot as soon as I cross the border.

I am not shot. When I cross, nothing happens at all. I drive over the Bridge of the Americas, otherwise known as the Free Bridge because there are no tolls. My car, visibly overloaded with all my possessions, is not stopped for inspection, not even for guns. No one checks my passport. I'm well into Mexico before I know it. I pass the statue of Abraham Lincoln, a supporter of city namesake Benito Juárez. A roadside vendor hands me a copy of
PM
I shoot down López Mateos to the Rio Grande Mall and then finally to my apartment. My car is unloaded at great speed—perhaps a bit too quickly, in my paranoia. When I'm done I lock the car in the gated lot that was a big reason why I signed a lease in this complex. I lock myself inside my apartment. I start to arrange my stuff. It's good to be home?

I MISS MIAMI immediately. When I step out of my car at the Grupo Yvasa complex the next morning, a puff of white exhaust forms in front of my face. It's cold—early February. I've voluntarily traded the warm breezes of Florida for the Indios' gray and icy practice facility. The two fields where the team trains have been wedged onto a large construction yard. Marco cycles through a passing drill before a backdrop of conveyor belts, water towers, and a herd of aboveground gas tanks. Dump trucks and bulldozers grind among enormous piles of sand and rocks of different muted colors. When the wind blows from the gravel toward the fields, as it is doing today, the air tastes acidic, like the prongs of a nine-volt battery.

Thick stone walls barricading the yard remind me of a colonial fortress. The walls stand some fifteen feet high and are topped with an extra few yards of chain-link fence and two strings of concertina wire snagged with plastic grocery bags. I scaled the walls once just to see what was behind them. I found a maze of houses the size of jail cells, rebar sticking out of their roofs and laundry strung across plots of dirt that pass for front yards. It's a humble subdivision very much like Villas de Salvarcar, where the students were killed. Alongside the houses sit two auto-body graveyards crammed with row after row of dead cars and pickup trucks, many having been shot into submission by up to seventy bullets each.

Old and sun-bleached plastic banners hang on the fortress walls, facing the playing fields. Two banners shout the single word HUEVOS! The word literally means “eggs,” which in this context means “balls,” in the genital sense, which means, essentially,
Play tough.
There's a banner paid for by the city government and another banner advertising Grupo Yvasa. This last banner features a slogan the company uses to advertise the houses it builds: WHERE DO YOU WANT TO LIVE? How many would say Juárez? Ramón in the media office laughs at me when I check in, as if he can't believe I actually came back. Wendy, a woman who works in sales, kisses me on the cheek and declares my return
un milagro
, a miracle.

I watch Marco run through strength and endurance drills, trying to sprint across the field while anchored to a weighted sled. The exercises progress at a rapid clip: A juggling contest. More sprints. Now shots on net. I'm a bit surprised by the efficiency of the drills. After poor results in the last two games, I expected to witness a lazy workout, but that's not the case. The coaches still command respect. The players continue to work hard. Pepe Treviño blows a whistle to start a half-field scrimmage. The
futbolistas
left out of the lineups jog laps around the pitch. I walk over to greet the usual scrum of reporters.

“You heard about the students, yes?” asks a reporter from
El Mexicano
, one of the daily papers covering the team. We still don't know the reason for the massacre.
El Diario
—the best newspaper in town—speculated in print that one of the murdered students had witnessed a shooting, and so had become a target. This theory has not yet been confirmed, and is not generally believed. The government claims the ringleader of the massacre has been killed in a firefight. Another suspect, paraded before television cameras, confesses his involvement. He helpfully admits that the shooters accidentally targeted the wrong house—a comforting closure only if anyone, anywhere, really thought the suspect was involved.

“No way,” chuckles a newspaper reporter. We all laugh, as if it's funny. The ringleader killed? Too convenient. This guy confessing his involvement? Then why is there still a million-peso reward offered for the killers? Mistaken identity remains our best guess, though. We think the killers shot up the wrong house.

“I live in Salvarcar,” says a photographer, referring to the neighborhood where the massacre went down. That's not a choice address. These reporters don't make much money covering the team. Few of them are even journalists in the traditional sense. Only the beat writer from
El Diario
shows consistent initiative and an independent voice. The rest of the guys, for the most part, type up the story released each day by the Indios' press office, sometimes simply reprinting the release in their papers. One photographer has told me he needs no more than ten minutes to capture his pictures for the day. For the remaining three hours of practice, he's just hanging out on the grass, talking to his colleagues and watching young men run around. Even if it's freezing cold, even if the air tastes like battery acid, it's still better behind these stone walls than it is out in the city. Or even inside his own home.

When practice ends, I congratulate Marco on his return to the starting lineup. “Anything happen in my absence?” I ask. He recaps the last two games. The Indios played much better, he insists. It was simply unlucky that the goalies for both Santos and Club América had happened to rise to a world-class level. He does not mention the Student Massacre or President Calderón, who is so chagrined by his own comments in the wake of the massacre that he's flying up to the border to apologize to the families in person. Marco has bragged to me that he never reads the newspapers and has not once watched the local news on bloody Channel 44. He remains in his soccer bubble, willfully ignorant of the game being played around him, outside the walls.

ATOP FRANKLIN MOUNTAIN, looking down from the bleacher seats, it's one big pitch. One giant brown field stretching on and on until the horizon dissipates in the haze. Shoebox-shaped factories. Little tan
casas
with gray-shingled roofs. Scrawny trees that, from on high, look like tumbleweeds. There's the BIBLE IS REAL, READ IT! sign that's definitely in Juárez. Closer are the tall buildings of downtown El Paso, banks mostly, the house collecting vigorish off every bet. One has to really strain to make out the line. It's down there, beyond the interstate, past the railroad tracks. A denuded slash, all sand and concrete. The chalky marker where the playing field begins.

El Paso is the sidelines. A safe zone, out of bounds. Team captains—
importers/exporters, ha-ha
—cruise to their West Side mansions in the Hummers and BMWs that have been banned from the field of play. The linesmen—DEA, FBI, Border Patrol, Secret Service, CIA, National Guard, Army—keep their flags down, never calling offsides, since no one brings the game over the bridge. El Paso is for rest, for safety. “It's much easier for them to commit their crimes in Juárez and get away with it,” El Paso County sheriff Richard Wiles said when asked why his city is so secure. More than fifty thousand wealthy Mexicans have moved to El Paso in the past three years. These are the elite. Even Juárez mayor Reyes Ferriz lives here, quietly socializing with the clubhouse attendants, the pillars of El Paso and Juárez, “honest” businessmen who pocket the spare change found when washing the laundry of the home team, or the visitors, or both if they can somehow pull it off.

It's crowded in the press box. That's in El Paso, too. Reporters prefer to fly into an American airport and sleep in an American hotel, close to the excitement but protected by all those linesmen and their flags spangled with stars. El Paso has hosted the international press for a hundred years, ever since Pancho Villa raided Juárez in part to impress John Reed, an American war correspondent watching the Mexican Revolution from a sideline seat. Even Armando Cabada broadcasts from El Paso. He's the anchor of the morbid Channel 44 news that Marco refuses to watch. Cabada is prominent and respected. It's not a stretch to call him the Walter Cronkite of Juárez. I prefer to think of him as the Crypt Keeper, because (1) he looks kind of sinister and (2) his newscast is one dead body after another. Cabada decries all the blood. Since the Student Massacre, he's been downright livid. Yet, just as the killings drive readers to the popular
PM
tabloid, there's no denying the dead bodies are great for Channel 44. Cabada calls the play-by-play from his remote studio in El Paso, where he lives and where he's safe.

We've established the teams already. La Línea is in maroon, the home side. The Juárez Cartel. A dynasty playing the game for decades. “You know why they're called La Línea, right?” the Indios' team masseur asked me one afternoon as we shared a lunch. “If you stay on the line you'll be fine, nothing will happen to you. The only people in Juárez who have anything to worry about are those who step off the line.” The Juárez Cartel formed in the 1970s, really coming into its own in the 1990s, when its former head coach, Amado Carrillo, chartered jumbo jets to fly his cocaine from Colombia to the border. It helped that Mexico's drug czar was on his payroll. The apparent blessing of Mexico's president helped even more. Carlos Salinas, who held office from 1988 to 1994, has always denied protecting the Juárez Cartel, but there's no doubt his close brother Raúl, a cabinet minister, amassed more than $100 million in cartel protection money. La Línea is still understood to control most local politicians in Juárez. City Hall, the municipal police. The Chihuahua state attorney won't call fouls on its players. When a riot broke out at the Juárez city jail, she ordered surveillance cameras to film only the insurgents that played for the visiting team.