Pubdate: Sun, 4 Oct 2009
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Contact:  2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Website: http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: Ed Vulliamy, The Observer
Note: Amexica: War Along the Borderline, by Ed Vulliamy, will be 
published next year by Bodley Head, London; Farrar, Strauss and 
Giroux, New York; and Tusquets, Madrid
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/topic/Juarez

LIFE AND DEATH IN JUAREZ, THE WORLD'S MURDER CAPITAL

Ed Vulliamy reports from the Mexican city where death squads roam the 
streets at night and criminal anarchy reigns

The executioners burst through the gates of the Anexo de Vida (Annexe 
of Life) drug rehabilitation centre at almost the exact moment that 
Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, and mayors across the country, 
including the one in Juarez, rang bells to proclaim the 199th 
anniversary of independence from Spain.

Next morning the courtyard was still full of the bittersweet stench 
of fresh blood congealing in pools. The killers threw a grenade into 
the first room on their right, occupied by a 16-year-old guard. They 
had soaked up his blood into the soles of their boots and stamped it 
around in footprints that anyone who cared to might examine. But no 
one did care to.

The carnage divided, along each side of the courtyard. To their left, 
the killers entered the room of the centre's director, who made it 
outside, where the pond of his blood putrefied on the cement. Next 
were the quarters of his deputy, a woman. Her blood was flecked 
across a floral bedspread and smeared the sofa on to which she collapsed.

The death squad moved past the main dormitory, to which a former 
patient returned to pick up the tools and shoes he left behind the 
previous night. "I slept over there," he said. "We were watching the 
boxing on TV. We heard the explosion, then shooting, and hid under 
the mattresses. The whole thing took no more than about two minutes."

Outside the Enfermeria, the medical centre, was another pool of blood 
and the wall was pitted with bullet holes. Inside the infirmary was a 
puddle of blood by the door, but whoever shed it forced a desperate 
way out. His blood was splattered across the bullet-riddled wall as 
he staggered outside to die in a spot now labelled Cuerpo F (body F). 
To the rear of this clinic reception were bunk beds, more blood, and 
a label reading Cuerpo H. There was no record of Cuerpos A, B, C, D, E and G...

This killing of between 10 and 13 people (the number varied according 
to the source ) on the celebration night of El Grito (the 
"independence cry") helped take the number of executions in Juarez in 
September above 300. That gruesome threshold was also crossed in 
August, so that these became the bloodiest months in the city's 
history, escalating the tally for 2009 to more than 1,800. In 2008 a 
total of 1,600 died.

Another morning in Juarez, population 1.6 million and as of this 
month the most murderous city in the world. Another 12 victims died 
on the first day of October, five in one machine-gun attack.

Last April the mayor of Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, pledged that this 
city would become "a national model" in combating drug violence. And 
last week at a conference in El Paso, across the Rio Grande in Texas, 
he insisted that corruption was being rooted out and the killers were 
being apprehended.

Juarez is supposed to be the showcase of Calderon's declaration of 
war on Mexico's drug cartels, a city now occupied by 10,000 troops 
and legions of paramilitary federal police, as well as the state and 
municipal forces, columns of which have traditionally been aligned 
with the Juarez drug cartel.

But the carnage has intensified despite successive military 
reinforcements in March, May and June. What is going on in this 
border metropolis?

Gustavo De La Rosa is a leading member of the team of investigating 
ombudsmen working in Juarez for the Chihuahua human rights 
commission, the state offshoot of a national government agency. Last 
week he became the most senior public official to flee Mexico for El 
Paso, after threats to his life.

Many people have fled Mexico's drug war to seek asylum in the US, but 
they faced threats from the narcos; De La Rosa was threatened by, and 
is in flight from, the Mexican army. On his second night in exile, De 
La Rosa ate a meal with his son and daughter before bidding them 
goodbye, across the bridge. "Thank God they haven't threatened my 
family," he sighed. He is now planning his next move away from Juarez.

"I have to work out what to do," he said, "consider the risks, 
whether to return or live with the fact that my work will disappear". 
The "work" includes cases in which he believes the Mexican army is 
responsible for some of the plentiful homicides and disappearances.

An intermediary in Juarez through whom De La Rosa communicates with 
the military commander, General Jorge Juarez Loera, urged him to stay 
away from the city.

"The threat was direct," said De La Rosa. "I was told by soldiers 
while pulling up at a traffic light that if I did not leave I would 
be killed. Later I learned that the general had told my boss, 'Get 
that man out of Chihuahua'."

De La Rosa's flight complicates a shorthand version of Mexico's drug 
war, which began in December 2006 after Calderon dispatched the army 
to try to break the cartels' power and end smuggling to the US - a 
war that has since cost about 15,000 lives. The simple account is 
that a federation of narco cartels, each with its own plaza, or turf, 
along the border, broke up into rival syndicates, which violently 
contested and divided up the frontier region bordering Texas and Arizona.

But in Juarez, the murderous kernel of the war, the city has imploded 
into a state of what one of the few journalists left working 
seriously here, Julian Cardona, has for some time reported as 
"criminal anarchy" rather than a neatly mapped cartel war; what De La 
Rosa calls "martial law, without the law".

Juarez has long been a laboratory for the entanglement of legal and 
illegal markets. It was the pioneer city for maquiladora factories 
that line the border - sweatshops manufacturing goods for US 
companies, paying wages that create a developing world economy 
conveniently across the river from Texas. A decade ago Juarez became 
famous for the widely publicised kidnap, violation, mutilation and 
murder of hundreds of young women, many of whom worked in the maquiladoras.

And the city was the bastion of another pioneering multinational 
corporation: the Juarez cartel - during the 1990s, according to the 
US Drug Enforcement Administration, the biggest single trafficker of 
narcotics in the world. The cartel and maquila managers were 
neighbours in the richer neighbourhoods, their economies inseparable.

Recently both markets have changed dramatically. The quantity of 
drugs smuggled across the border is now dwarfed by that to supply 
catastrophic domestic addiction. The Juarez cartel thereby fragmented 
into a federation of criminal enterprises called La Linea, running 
street gangs called the Aztecas. Against them, other gangs contest 
both the export and domestic markets.

The result is a lethal lack of order, even among the criminals of 
Juarez. Antonio Brijones, former member of a gang called Calle Jon, 
who now tries to redirect criminal energy into positive social action 
after many of his friends were killed, said: "No one knows who they 
are selling drugs for, who they are killing, or for which cartel."

This splintered market creates even more addicts cutting and selling 
drugs to feed their own habits. The Juarez-born journalist Ignacio 
Alvarado says, with hollow humour: "The collapse of the old narco 
pyramids has made the drug business much more democratic. There has 
been de-monopolisation, outsourcing to the street and stimulus to the 
free market - which of course generates great freedom of opportunity."

Meanwhile, at the top of the tree, managers of the maquiladoras - 
faced with recession and competition from Asia - needed fewer 
workers, spewing their surplus humanity (which flocked here from all 
over Mexico) into the new narco-economy of "opportunities" for 
murder, extortion and kidnapping.

But who are the death squads and who are their victims? In hiding, 
initially holed up at a motel near the border - the lights of Juarez 
twinkling to the edge of the desert horizon beyond - De La Rosa 
sought to give an answer. He noted that "the majority of those killed 
or kidnapped are malandros: down-and-outs, urchins, petty criminals 
and addicts" - waste products of the Juarez marketplace. "People of 
no value in this war," he said, "no use to any cartel; desperate, 
below poverty whose death has no explanation, except as part of (and 
he uses this term limpia social, social cleansing) the extermination 
of the lowest of the low."

Last April General Juarez Loera, commander of the 11th military 
region, to which Juarez belongs, all but endorsed De La Rosa's view 
when he urged the assembled media at a press conference: "I would 
like to see the reporters change their articles and where they say 
'one more murdered person', instead say, 'one less criminal'."

De La Rosa mapped out what he saw as the dramatis personae of 
execution in Juarez. "First, there are sicarios working for the 
cartels - who fire a few bullets, or 60 bullets, through a small hole 
at their specific target". Then there are barrio-based gang killers, 
who federate against one another on behalf of the cartels.

But then, said De La Rosa, "there are execution squads, another breed 
forensically killing malandros, planned assassinations of the 
unwanted. And if we look at exactly how they are done, they are 
experts in killing characteristic of training by the army or police.

"I do not think these killings are the work of sicarios, because I 
don't think that anyone would want to pay the money the cartel 
sicarios charge to kill malandros. Sicarios kill members of the rival 
cartel; you wouldn't need a sicario to kill malandros in a 
rehabilitation centre or abandoned house taking drugs.

"I'm not saying," insisted De La Rosa, "that the army is directly 
killing these people. But, in a city living in a culture of 
delinquency, soldiers become part of that culture. I kept a map and 
watched how these squads move across the army checkpoints without 
hindrance. Until I was told to stop."

De La Rosa was in effect fired. He had opened detailed investigations 
into 10 homicides he believed were committed by the army and 14 
kidnappings or disappearances. "These cases," he said, proceeded in 
theory "from my office to the state prosecutor, thence to the 
military authorities in the city and an internal army investigations 
office in Mazatlan, Sinaloa. From there, not a single file ever got 
to the examining judge".

By day Juarez is a city that appears almost normal - this is not the 
Sarajevo or Grozny that visiting reporters expect. Shop windows are 
prepared for Halloween, the local Indios football team struggles 
against relegation, children shriek with glee at a fun fair and there 
are custom car races across the parking lot of a Del Rio supermarket 
making the air smell with smoke from screeching tyres, not gunsmoke. 
The singer Sarah Brightman was performing in town.

By night, it was always a place of naughtiness and dancing girls. But 
now they dance pretty much to one another, under Juarez's 
self-imposed curfew, when after dark bars or rehabilitation centres 
are attacked by gunmen and death squads respectively. Two weeks 
before the Independence Day slaughter at Anexo de Vida, another 17 
recovering addicts were executed at a rehab centre called Aliviane. 
The previous week, 40 were killed in three days.

The mutilation and torture of those kidnapped in the continuing drug 
war - whoever it is between now - is ever more inventive: 
decapitations are de rigueur and a certain Sergio Saucedo was brought 
forcibly from El Paso a fortnight ago, had his hands chopped off and 
carefully placed on the chest of his body, found next morning. Last 
week even a waif washing car windscreens at traffic lights was executed.

As the heat of a desert sunrise bears down on the breeze-block walls 
of the Vision En Accion asylum, casualties and refugees from the most 
dangerous city in the world begin another day.

Marisol was a topless waitress before drugs fried her brain, Becky 
was a nurse, despite being raped at 14, before she killed someone and 
was jailed, and another man was a serious gang banger. But all three 
are now commanders of their wards, and take charge of morning showers 
and changing the nappies of those who wander about the yard screaming 
and muttering to themselves, like Lucio, made blind by the narcotic 
cocktails he was taking.

Manuel is recovering from severe drug abuse: when I met him last 
year, he was sliding back into visions in which "the rapper, Mr Bone, 
tells me to kill my mother and shows me the four little witches". 
Now, Manuel is trying to recover through an interest in Thai boxing, 
but when asked whether he might one day knock out Mr Bone, replies: 
"Yeah, but I want to fuck the little witches. They are gringas, 
blonde and very cute."

This defiant, miraculous centre was established by Pastor Jose 
Antonio Galvan, once a street-fighter in El Paso. It is overseen with 
rigour by an extraordinary man called Josue Rosales - one-time heroin 
addict who arrived close to death, now transformed into an asylum 
worker manager and role model "building back the lives of people who 
were like me. You need to have been there, and they need to know you 
have been there". He adds: "We are just the little guys. Whoever runs 
this killing are big guys and only God can beat the big guys."

These are the kind of people - not the politicians and speech-makers 
- - struggling to save Juarez, who work and sleep in hope for the 
future they want to build. But who also sleep in mortal fear of who 
might arrive any night, as they have done elsewhere - whoever they 
are, behind their ski masks and the automatic fire tearing this once 
mighty, charismatic and vibrant city to shreds.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake