Cities
“There Is No Law”
In Juárez, where drugs flow freely, eighteen gangland-style executions since July 4 isn’t a horrifying anomaly; it’s business as usual.
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Certainly the public never saw anything like the August 3 massacre at Max Fim, a showy night spot topped by a red pyramid on Juárez’s most Americanized thoroughfare. The place was packed with a festive crowd from the bullfights, a Sunday tradition for the city’s see-and-be-seen set. Among the diners that night was Alfonso Corral Olaguez, a reputed member of the Herrera clan in Durango, an old-time smuggling family that had schooled Carrillo early in his career. Without warning, two well-dressed men walked in and aimed their assault rifles at Corral’s table.
A hundred bullets is a fearsome thing, neither discreet nor precise. They struck two targets, Corral and a bodyguard. But they also hit Teresa Elida Herrera Rey, a 26-year-old socialite who had gone to the fights with several girlfriends and was swayed enough by Corral’s charms to join him afterward at Max Fim. As another bodyguard ran for cover, the assailants followed him in their sights, but by mistake they mowed down David Ramírez Rojas and María Eugenia Martínez Joo, two young sweethearts from humble backgrounds who had decided to splurge on a birthday dinner. As the gunmen headed for their getaway car, they unleashed one last burst of lead, killing a top Juárez prison official who had heard the chaos from outside and was running over to lend his help. A newspaper editorial quoted a lyric from the great Mexican folk singer, José Alfredo Jiménez: “La vida no vale nada.” Life’s worth nothing.
Three weeks later, scores were still being settled. A gun battle erupted between two cars, one of them driven by attorney Ricardo Prado Reynal, a partner in Max Fim. He was critically injured but managed to survive and pop off a few rounds himself, wounding one of his assailants. Later that day the wounded assailant sought medical help, persuading four respected physicians from the Guernika and San Rafael hospitals to pay him a house call. There is no indication that the doctors—an orthopedist, a urologist, an anesthesiologist, and, oddly, a gynecologist—had any idea whom they were treating. The next day their bodies were found piled atop one another; the marks around their necks suggested asphyxiation, as if choked by a belt or a towel. “Juárez is a very violent place—a cauldron of criminal and social problems—and we have to respect that,” says Jaime Bailleres, one of Juárez’s legendary street photographers, who has chronicled hundreds of murders. “But that’s only a partial vision of the truth. It’s also a very vital place, a place of opportunity. To understand Juárez, you have to demystify the violence.”
A good starting point is about three hundred years ago, when Ciudad Juárez was the original El Paso, and Texas did not yet exist. To be precise, Juárez was El Paso del Norte, the Pass of the North, a transit point for travelers and merchandise headed across the Rio Grande. Over the years, names were swapped, but not Juárez’s geographic fortune. It is a city that was created by traffic—first conquistadores and missionaries, then cattle and tequila, later drugs and migrants, and more recently, eighteen-wheelers and maquiladora-assembled appliances.
The hope that some of that commerce might rub off, or propel them even farther north, has lured hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to Juárez from the nation’s impoverished heartland. Their sprawling colonias built from cardboard and tin keep stretching the city’s boundaries and swelling its population to a number that cannot be calculated—1 million? 1.5 million? 2 million?—but is said to make Juárez the largest sea of humanity on any international frontier. Those who are lucky earn $5 a day in the foreign-owned plants. Others beg on the streets or at noisy topless bars named for distant dreams: the Hollywood, the Las Vegas, the Hawaiian. Alarmed by what is heading their way, U.S. authorities try to push back, to “hold the line,” as the Border Patrol’s El Paso strategy is called—a move that succeeds largely in increasing the value of what can be smuggled across. “Juárez is a sandwich,” says Astrid González Dávila, the president of Comité Ciudadano de Lucha Contra la Violencia, a citizens’ committee against violence. She does not deliver the punch line, but it goes something like this: “And we are the baloney.” Under pressure from both sides, Juárez’s infrastructure has crumbled, its institutions riddled with corruption. The police make laughably little progress in solving any of the drug killings; indeed, they appear complicit in more than a few. Despair, even when dulled by alcohol, flows freely. Tucson writer Charles Bowden, who is working on a book about Juárez, calls it a “city of sleepwalkers.”
And so I took it as quite a civic achievement when, during the hottest part of a 95-degree day in August, some one thousand protesters filed into the streets, a silent procession in the name of peace. Relatives of the most recent victims led the way, the faces of surviving loved ones cradled in their arms. The wife of Dr. Javier Quintero Heredia, whose body had been discovered the day before, cried until her lipstick was smeared. “The narcos won’t hear us,” said Father José René Blanco, who guided the marchers from Borunda Park, down the Avenida 16 de Septiembre, to the sanctuary of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Church, “but maybe God will.”
Later that evening, my final night in Juárez, I walked up to the apartment of Carmen Lupe Joo de Martínez, whose 27-year-old daughter, María Eugenia, had been among the Max Fim victims. I wanted to know whether she shared Father Blanco’s faith, whether the public show of outrage had done anything to assuage her pain. Before she would consent to an interview, however, she had one condition—a favor, really, which I was asked to grant without knowing what it would entail. I said I would try to oblige. She led me to the kitchen, where I was left in the care of Leticia Jaguez, a family friend and an evangelical healer, who promised to inoculate me with a dose of what she called her spiritual medicine.
“Close your eyes,” Leticia said. “Open your palms.”
I looked for a graceful exit, but it was too late. Jaguez moved close to me, holding my wrists tight, using the tips of her fingers to rub in a few drops of holy oil squeezed from a plastic vial. I tried to peek, but she was just inches from my face, her breath a hot rush of mumblings about my lost soul and God’s infinite power. At last she stuck a hand on my forehead and gave a pretty solid push—the signal for me to collapse under the Almighty’s weight. I had to take a step backward just to keep from being toppled.
If Carmen was disappointed by my resistance, she did not look surprised. Back on the living room couch, next to a candle that burned for her absent daughter, she answered almost all of my questions with the same response:
“We live in a culture of death.”
“We have ears, but we cannot hear.”
“We have eyes, but we cannot see.”
“We are the living dead.”
“We are the living dead.”
“We are the living dead.”
Jesse Katz is the Houston bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times.
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