We Built the Wall Page 10
José Luis hails from the heart of Mexico City. His father has a business selling electrical equipment on Victoria Street, almost on the corner of Balderas. As a journalism student at the Autonomous University of Mexico in Aragón, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 1988 to earn his master’s degree at the University of Austin. Although he had originally planned on going back to Mexico, the financial crisis unleashed there in 1994, known as “the December mistake,” helped convince him to continue his academic career in Texas.
José Luis is honest when he talks about his own migration experience. He knows he had a particularly privileged situation, a far cry from what hundreds of thousands of Latin American immigrants in the United States go through. “The immigration system in the U.S. is divided in two,” he says. “It’s designed to attract talent from outside, and in that sense it’s easy to come here. But the other part forces people to migrate in very tough conditions, so they become cheap labor.” Similarly, he says, “Austin is a city divided by race.” He reflects on the racism in the academic world: the scholarships and grants that go through public and private networks made up of white, Anglo-Saxon professors, and the predominance of white ideology—“North American intellectual parochialism,” as he puts it—in university systems that by their very nature should be diverse.
“We are giving these young people the knowledge and the history of their heritage,” he says of the CSUN program. Without it, he says, “these students would be immersed in the monocultural education system of the United States, where coming from a different culture is not seen as an advantage, but a disadvantage … Our program reverses these roles: Do you know Spanish? You have opportunities to broaden your horizons. We want them to see journalism as a possible catalyst for change, like the black press has been. In that sense, these young people have a broader vision than many of their professors.”
Kent, José Luis points out, is one of the few academics he knows who is sensitive to this diversity.
We travel down the highway surrounded by city lights, the ones in El Paso indistinguishable from the ones in Juárez. These two cities are sisters. None of the stories we have been hearing should have happened.
José Luis conducts all the Spanish-language interviews, and Kent handles those in English. On this trip, all the interviews have been in Spanish. José Luis stays calm, closely listening to the stories that tend to unfold in a matter-of-fact way for the first hour, but by the third hour have built to a soul-crushing intensity. It’s as if the speaker’s pain permeates the very air around us. When we breathe it in, it settles deep in our bones; by the evening our bones ache, as if we have just run a marathon.
I am struck by how Kent manages to get through the long interviews in a language he doesn’t speak, so good-naturedly. When I comment on this, he reminds me that his wife is Mexican, and that he is used to being in this situation during all of their family gatherings. Still, it is clear that although Kent may not understand the words, he understands what is going on, especially at the most painful moments. I observe how he reacts in a far less visceral way than José Luis, as if he was accustomed to confronting pain. It must be because he’s a gringo, I think to myself one afternoon.
A few weeks after our trip, we are sitting in Kent’s office at the Institute of Arts and Media at CSUN, a large room with black-and-white photographs adorning the walls, including a striking image of Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and Sammy Davis Jr. at a civil rights march in Los Angeles. Kent tells me about some events in his life as if they had happened to someone else, making an effort to remember the details, giving me not particularly long answers: in 1965 he joined the U.S. Marines, and spent two and a half years in Waukegan, Illinois, working in a medical laboratory at a navy hospital with 800 beds. This was during the war in Vietnam—he is emphatic on this point: not the Vietnam war, but the war in Vietnam. In 1968, the marines sent him to the front lines.
All of Kent’s sixty-seven years are visible in his clear blue eyes. I have known him for several weeks now; we spent five days together in El Paso–Juárez listening to horrific stories. But as we talk on this day, it’s the first time I see the mark of pain that settled deep inside him after he was “not in the rice paddies, but up in the mountains, in the jungle, up, down, ‘looking for’ the enemy.” He describes tending to the wounded flown in on helicopters, bleeding, missing limbs, with their guts hanging out. He describes watching a friend die on the operating table.
“I know people who are overwhelmed with guilt; it’s a natural reaction for people who come back,” he says. “You see people in the States like nothing happened, going shopping, not knowing about what’s happening in Iraq or in Afghanistan, sending their kids to Sunday school and to soccer practice, not realizing they are part of a machine that prepares them to kill people … [Military service] is the closest thing to a slave a white person can be in this country. And now I accept that it was part of my life, even that it’s something that has had a role in my emotional life as an adult. Maybe that’s why some people think I’m detached. But you learn to live with it.”
9
Impunity
Sandra Rodríguez is sitting at the edge of the bed. We are in the same bedroom where José Luis interviewed Gloria three days before. Sandra lives in Juárez, but she has come to El Paso to continue a conversation with José Luis and Kent, which began on July 29 the year before.
An experienced journalist, at forty Sandra is tall and slender, with long, wavy hair, a penetrating gaze, and a measured smile, marked by the bloodshed of the Calderón years. She grew up in the city of Chihuahua. In 1993, when she was nineteen, she moved to Juárez to go to school and began working at the newspaper El Diario de Juárez, where she stayed for four years. After a stint working for other news outlets in other cities, she returned to El Diario in 2003. For eight years her job was to report on everything that happened in Juárez, at a time when everything started happening in Juárez.
“A lot of people in 2007 knew there was going to be a battle [between crime syndicates] for the city,” Sandra told José Luis in her first interview. “But in January [of 2008] I do remember a series of murders, and among those there were several that didn’t have any signs of organized crime, but you noticed them because it was so apparent: there were a lot of murders, a lot … And by January 21, when they fired on the police, it was very clear: this is going to be very heavy. I remember I wrote a story to close the month, the most violent in years—forty-three killed.”
Sandra’s perception of that era coincides with Charles Bowden’s, the American journalist who Kent and José Luis invited to CSUN. In his book Murder City, Bowden provided an analysis of the culture of violence in Juárez, its origins, and the toll it took on both sides of the border. In one passage, Bowden describes how, while gathering documentation for a story, he followed the unstoppable wave of growing violence in the city.
At first, it is simply a clerical task. Read the papers and put down the names, if given, and the time of death. Then the volume grows, and the reports get sketchy. People disappear, and their fates never get reported. Nor are there any real numbers on the kidnapped since families hardly ever report such events, because they are afraid of being murdered. Then, the killings per day get larger, the reporters more and more threatened. By June 2008, the city cannot handle its own dead and starts giving corpses wholesale to medical schools or tossing bodies into common graves … By the end of 2008, the monthly totals [of people killed] reached beyond two hundred. By summer 2009, more than three hundred murders in a month becomes normal in Juárez.1
In Bowden’s almost obsessive reporting, in one article after another, the story of escalating violence is told. On January 3, a man is killed in his car. On January 5, a homeless man was found with his head bashed in by a rock. On January 12, the newspaper reports sixteen murders have been committed so far that month. On January 24, the district attorney is trying to identify the murderer of a young girl. On January 25, Cathol
ic leaders pray for an end to the violence. On January 27, a handwritten sign is found on a street with the names of four municipal Secretary of Public Security agents who had recently been killed, and another seventeen agents, still alive, with the message: “to the non-believers.” On January 28, an El Paso newspaper quoted Bowden: “The United States government has not stopped drug trafficking to the interior of the country, and this has caused a rise in violence in Mexico, especially along the border.”
Sandra understands this phenomenon—the violence in Juárez, something many are still struggling to explain—better than almost anyone. It is not just about the war on narcotrafficking, and it’s not a specific period in time with a clear beginning and end. It has to do with at least two decades when Juárez became a social laboratory, and several factors converged: the agricultural sector ceased to be a main source of income, with industrialization and factories taking its place as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); the demographic growth that took place resulting from the rise in industry, without adequate urban planning to support that growth; and the increase in narcotrafficking cartel activities, among other things.
In an effort to make sense of these factors, Sandra wrote her first book, La Fábrica del Crimen. Starting with the story of León, a sixteen-year-old boy who killed his parents and sister and set their bodies on fire, Sandra analyzed recent events in Juárez and the cultural normalization of violence there. The key factor: impunity.
Traveling there by plane, it’s easy to make out Juárez on the ground below. Juárez is a gray splotch dotted here and there with green, in the middle of a vast brownish-orange desert. In this sandy expanse that goes on for miles—and which around El Paso–Juárez becomes a jumble of desert, houses, factories, mountains, factories, houses, more desert—a clear line delineates the two countries. On a clear day, the four border bridges connecting the two cities look like stitches trying to close a wound. A mountain to the west bears a message in enormous white letters: “Ciudad Juárez. La Biblia es la verdad. Leéla.” (“Juárez City. The Bible is the truth. Read it.”) This is, of course, on the Mexican side.
Violence in Juárez has been growing since 1993. In 1997 there were 250 killings in the city, most of them after the death of drug kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of the Sky,” who became head of the Juárez cartel in 1993 after his predecessor, former federal police commander Rafael Aguilar, was assassinated.
The city experienced a population explosion and economic growth during those years. Once a mid-size city, it became the capital of Mexico’s burgeoning factory industry in the 1990s. Dozens of multinational corporations subcontracted to other companies, which sent buses with recruiters down to states in Southern Mexico, bringing back tens of thousands of workers who joined the labor force and bustling scene on the border, at a rate of almost 100,000 newcomers a year.2 The population grew at rates never before registered in any other part of Mexico. Paradoxically, Juárez became an employment “paradise” in the decade when thousands of rural jobs were lost, as a result of competition from government-subsidized U.S. agriculture after NAFTA went into full effect in 1994. This new reality seemed like a win-win: factories generated jobs for Mexicans, and the multinational corporations had an attractive business model. While factory jobs in the United States paid $200 per week, salaries for employees in Mexico were just $60 per week. For millions in Mexico, factory work and narcotrafficking became the only employment options.
Juárez is the capital of both industries, although the latter is not openly discussed. In official communications the government deliberately positioned the factories as the engine that would grow the national economy. With attractive financial incentives and favorable tariffs for investors, every part needed for assembling cars was produced in the plants and factories built in Juárez. These factories needed workers, and the workers themselves meant dynamic growth for the local economy: this new population required housing, transportation, food, schools, entertainment, and means of communication, and these needs represented a major opportunity for those who wanted to invest in the region. As Sandra writes in her book,
The money poured in, and you could see it in the continuous construction of warehouses, shopping centers, and, especially in the southwest, housing developments with thousands of homes for the factory workers. And there were thousands of cars on the streets, new and older models, and just about anyone could buy one because the United States was getting rid of millions of used ones. On top of that, we all went out almost every night to dozens of packed bars and restaurants. There were still even some North American tourists.3
But stark signs of inequality also emerged across the city along with the heady rise of industrial production and commercial growth, an unplanned surge in population, and narcotrafficking. Half a million people suddenly found themselves living in hastily constructed slums at the foot of the mountains emblazoned with a message promising the Bible as their salvation. It would take years for basic services like running water and electricity and a sewage system to arrive. Large tracts of land filled with sand, trash, and leftover debris from housing construction separated this area from the other side, the southwest neighborhoods, “like islands in a sea of desolation and waste.” The long walk to work in the factories from one side of the city to the other became a challenge, and very soon posed a real danger.
On top of the physical evidence that the new wave of economic growth in Juárez was not benefiting the residents of the city came the spiraling violence reflecting social and political imbalances. Between 1993 and 1997, the bodies of over 150 murdered women were dumped throughout the city and in desert land surrounding it. This wave of violence was widely covered in the local media, inciting feminist groups to action. In 1997 the story was picked up by national and then international media, and the victims became known as “las muertas de Juárez” (the dead women of Juárez).
“The brutality with which they had been killed,” Sandra wrote, “and the way their bodies were found … revealed the existence of a contempt for human life, the implications and lessons of which we as a society have yet to understand.” At this time the “levantón,” or “pick-up,” arose in the Juárez popular consciousness: kidnapping a person “at gunpoint, almost in silence” from their home, or as they left work, or as they were simply out walking the streets. That was how criminal groups settled scores.
By 1997, narcotrafficker Amado Carrillo controlled the region. He lived up to his nickname, “Lord of the Sky,” which he had earned thanks to the fleet of aircraft at his disposal for transporting massive quantities of illicit drugs from Colombia. It was common knowledge that the drug cartel enjoyed the protection of the Mexican army, the police, officials from all levels of government, and politicians from all parties. The city therefore stayed silent, and the men who had been “picked up” were linked in public discourse to the criminal activities of these groups and “buried in the communal grave of suspicion.” These men had disappeared because they had made a “misstep.” But no logical explanation existed for the women’s killings.
Observing the city’s dizzying transformation as both a resident and reporter, Sandra Rodríguez noted,
The physical characteristics of the city were more than favorable for someone to commit a crime. Just seeing all the big empty spaces all over the place was enough to understand how easy it would be to be the victim of an attack without anyone being able to help, or even hear you scream.4
In July 1997, Amado Carrillo died during a plastic surgery procedure in Mexico City. His death unleashed a war for territory between organized crime groups: assassinations took place in broad daylight and deaths multiplied, with no motive supplied for the murders. Sandra describes this period during her second interview with José Luis in El Paso. She seems tense. A few months earlier, she resigned from El Diario, and she seems to be settling accounts. “All the elements that fed the violence that we lived through are still there: corruption, impunity, traffi
cking, business, and permissiveness,” she says.
Sandra describes how the judicial reform announced in 2004 and put into effect in 2008, which aimed to eliminate excessive bureaucracy and corruption in the Mexican criminal justice system, resulted in stripping the system down in Juárez to an apparatus of police, expert witnesses, and Public Ministry agents incapable of presenting evidence that would implicate those likely responsible for crimes. By 2010, evidence was presented in only three of every hundred murder cases. Expert witnesses continue to work: recording the time the victim was found, a description of the body’s position, autopsy data, entry and exit points of bullets, a description of each wound, sometimes amounting to hundreds of gunshots. But in the vast majority of cases, no further clues are sought. No witnesses are found and questioned beyond the victim’s family members, and that is almost always to get a single piece of information: What did the victim do for work? If there is any indication that the victim may have had direct or indirect contact with narcotrafficking, the investigation will most likely try to establish which criminal group could be implicated in the matter. And that is the end of the investigation, which concludes that the killing was the result of drug gang warfare.
José Luis and Sandra talk about the hundreds of stories she told as a journalist in those years, some of which appeared in her book, and how they helped her to understand the causes and consequences of impunity. Its local manifestations in Juárez are, she says, evident throughout the country. “Pay close attention to the justice system,” she warns, “because a country that does not punish … crime will never be able to stop it.”