Ciudad de la Muerte
Ten years of murder. Three hundred women and young girls dead. No credible arrests. What unknown evil stalks the streets of Juárez? I almost found out for myself.
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As she scavenged her memory for clues, Irma recalled the young man who had invited her daughter to lunch and immediately sent her son to look for him. But the owner of the printshop said he'd left his job. He refused to give any more information. After several visits herself, Irma finally persuaded the shop owner's son to tell her where their former employee lived. She found the little house, but it was locked; she banged on the door, the windows, screaming loudly in case her daughter was inside, listening. Esmeralda had told her mother that the young man had asked her for her schedule and that he had wanted to know whether her mom always walked her home from work. As Irma circled the house, the man arrived. She explained who she was and asked if he knew anything about her daughter, but he brushed her away, saying that he was married.
A few days later, a co-worker at the maqui-ladora asked Irma if she'd heard the news: Eight bodies had been found in a couple of ditches at the intersection of Ejército Nacional and Paseo de la Victoria. Could one of them be Esmeralda? Next came the phone call from the state prosecutor's office, asking her to identify the body. At the morgue, however, Irma was told it was too gruesome to view. She would have to obtain signed permission from the prosecutor's office. They offered to bring out the blouse that was on the corpse when it was found; Irma's heart collapsed when she glimpsed the speckled yellow, pink, orange, and white. It was the blouse that Esmeralda's older sister Cecilia had sent from Colorado, where she had moved to with her husband.
Yet there was still that lingering doubt, so Irma requested the permit to see the body. Fearing the shock would be too great for their mother to bear, her two eldest sons insisted on identifying it themselves. When they arrived home from the morgue, they were silent, their heads hung low.
"So?" Irma asked anxiously. "Was it your sister?"
But the response was hesitant, brittle: "We don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?!" Irma sputtered.
"It's just that . . . she doesn't have a face."
The words shattered on the floor like a Christmas ornament. She burst: "But what about her hair—was it her hair?!"
"It's just that she doesn't have any hair," came the grief-stricken reply. "She doesn't have any ears. She doesn't have anything."
The corpse presumed to be Esmeralda's was one of the three found on November 6, a day before the other five were discovered a short distance away. All of the bodies were partially or wholly unclothed, some with their hands tied. But unlike the other girls, most of whom had been reduced to mere skeletal remains, Esmeralda's state of decomposition was particularly grisly and perplexing. She was missing most of the flesh from her collarbone up to her face. The authorities suggested that the rats in the fields had had their share, but Irma noted—and Oscar Maynez, the chief of forensics, concurred—that it would have made more sense for them to feast on the meatier parts of her body. The mystery deepened when the forensic workers took hair and blood from Esmeralda's mother and father and sent them to a laboratory in Mexico City. Even when DNA samples from the parents who had identified clothing were compared with those from the girls wearing the clothing, the results came back without a match. This opened up two possibilities: Either the samples had been grossly contaminated or, even more eerily, the murderers were switching clothes with other, as yet unfound, victims.
"Why?" Irma cried out as I sat with her one wintry afternoon in her tidy home, which is crammed with curly-haired dolls and deflated balloons and stuffed animals her daughter had collected—the last traces of happiness left in her little house. "Do they want to drive me crazy or something? Is it her or isn't it?" In a silver frame on top of a brown armoire, Esmeralda sat squeezed into a strapless red top, her shoulder-length hair dyed a blondish brown. She was laughing irresistibly—cracking up—but across from the photo, Irma slumped in her chair in blue sweats and a denim shirt, her body heaving uncontrollably as I listened, speechless. "Why does God let the evil ones take the good ones away? Why the poor, if we don't bring any harm on anybody? Nobody can imagine what this trauma is like. I go to work and I don't know if my children are going to be safe when I return. It's a terror that's lived day by day, hour by hour."
Like numerous stories I had heard from other victims' families, Irma's included the lament that her family has fallen apart as her children struggle to confront the tragedy of losing their sister and try to assign blame. Unable to channel their newfound hate, they have begun hating each other. Her eldest sons have stopped talking to her. Zulema, who refuses to sleep in her bunk bed now, attempted to kill herself and her eight-year-old brother with tranquilizers a doctor had prescribed for Irma. Defeated, the woman spoke with the shame of a child who has discovered that she has made an irrevocably wrong choice. She wished, with all her might, that she had never made that fateful decision to come to Juárez. "They've destroyed my life," she said with vacant eyes and a flat voice, once she had regained her composure. "I don't believe in anything anymore. There is a saying that one comes here in search of a better life, but those are nothing but illusions."
Irma eventually claimed the body, she says, so that she would "have somewhere to cry." Instead of determining whether more lab work needed to be done, the authorities instantly handed it over. They never interrogated the suspicious young man Irma had reported, and in a tasteless act of disregard for her daughter, they ruled that the cause of the young woman's death was "undetermined," even though it seemed apparent that she had been strangled. On November 16 Irma buried the corpse, using the quinceañera savings to pay for the $600 coffin.
"SOY DE EL PASO," I said to the man outside the restaurant. I held my breath. I remembered what Diana had told me when we first met to talk about the story: "They know who to leave alone. They leave the Americans alone. They leave the rich girls alone, because there might be trouble. The other girls? A dime a dozen." And yes, his interest faded instantly. "I'm sorry," he said, still bearing his apologetic smile, though somewhat more sheepishly. "I—I just saw you holding that piece of paper so I thought maybe you were looking for a job. Sorry." He turned around and began to walk away.
I was still frightened, but now that I felt a little safer, the journalist in me began to return. "Why?" I called out nervously. "Do you know of a job?" He turned around and stared at me. "I hire girls to work at a grocery store," he said. His eyebrows crinkled. "Where are you from?" Shaking my head, I stammered, "Oh, no—I'm from El Paso. My friends are waiting for me inside this restaurant." I brushed past him in a hurry, skipping up the restaurant's steps and to the table where the rest of the group was finishing their meal. Diana was gone. I took my seat. My legs, my hands, trembled violently.
"You'll never guess what happened to me," I said in a shaky voice. The others fell silent and looked at me with interest. "I just got offered a job." As the words spilled, one of the group nodded slowly. "You fit the profile," she said. When I described the man to her, she said that he had walked into the restaurant earlier, while I was on the phone. He had chatted with the woman who was cooking, taken some food, and left.
I jumped from my chair and stepped over to the counter. "Excuse me, señora," I said to the woman at the grill. "Do you know the man who just came in a few minutes ago?" "Not very well," she replied. "At night he guards the lawyer's office next door and by day he sells candies on the street."
At that moment, something blocked the light from the doorway. I turned around and found myself face to face with the same man from outside, this time without his basket. He looked nervous. "Let me buy you a Coke," he offered. "No, thanks," I replied firmly. Then I asked him, "Do you really have a store?"
"You're a journalist," he said, "aren't you?" His question caught me by surprise. I turned toward my table, then back to his intense gaze. "I—I'm here with some journalist friends," I stuttered. "No," he said forcefully, "but you're a journalist, aren't you?" It was obvious that he knew. "Well, yes, but I'm just here accompanying my friends, who are working on a story." His tone softened. "Come on, let's sit down. Let me buy you a drink. En confianza." You can trust me. "No," I repeated, "I'm with my friends and we're leaving." I walked back to the table. Diana had returned, unaware of what had transpired. Later I would learn that she had gone to the lawyer's office, encountered the candy man, and told him she was with a group of journalists who wanted to see his boss. But with the man standing there, all I wanted to do was get away. We all gathered our belongings and hurried toward the door. "The lawyer says he'll be here tomorrow, if you want to see him," we heard the man call out to us. I never turned back.
That night, safe in El Paso, I stared at the ceiling in the darkness of my hotel room and replayed the afternoon's events over and over. My family had worried when I told them that I was going to write about the women of Juárez, even after I assured them that plenty of other journalists had done so safely. But you, they shot back, as if I'd missed the most obvious point, you look just like those girls. I thought of how much care I had taken not to go to Juárez alone, even if it had meant sacrificing my journalistic independence. And yet, in that one brief instant I had let my guard down, and I had been approached by someone mysterious. I will never know for sure if that was it—if, as I have told colleagues I felt at that moment, I really touched the story, my own life colliding with those of the girls whose lives I had been hoping to preserve. What I do know is this: that I had felt my heart beat, the way they must have felt it beat too.
As I thought this, warm tears spilled down the sides of my face and trickled into my ears. And I realized that I was crying not for myself, but for the women of Juárez—for the girls who had died and for the mothers who survived them. They say that whenever a new body is found, every grieving mother relives her pain. I was crying for the girls who had stayed on the other side of the border. For the ones who couldn't leave their reflections on paper and run far, far away, as I was going to do. I cried because I realized how easy it would have been to believe the man who approached me; because I understood that the girls were not naive, or careless, or as a former attorney general of Chihuahua once said, asking for it. They were simply women—poor women, brown women. Fighters, dreamers. And they weren't even dreaming of all that much, by our standards: a secretarial job, a bedroom set, a fifteenth-birthday party. A little chance to live.
I cried because of the absurdity of it all, because it was possible for a life to be worth less than a brief taste of power. I cried thinking of how we had failed them.
My Library
