The Fight to Save Juárez (15 page)

That had first changed on January 21, following the attempted assassination of a man named Fernando Lozano, who was a regional commander with the Agencia Estatal de Investigaciónes, the investigative division of the state police. Lozano had received extensive training with international police agencies. At around 8:40 on the evening of the twenty-first, Lozano left the state police command center in his armored Jeep Cherokee on his way to visit a relative at Juárez's Centro Médico de Especialidades, a respected local hospital. En route he realized that he was being followed by what appeared to be a cartel commando team. Lozano attempted to make his way back to the command center, but in his efforts to elude the
sicarios
he ran into another car and hit a bus-stop bench. The gunmen jumped out of their car
and
started raking Lozano's vehicle with automatic weapons fire. In the fury of the attack, Lozano exited his vehicle, pistol in hand, and shot back at his attackers. The assailants fled, leaving the severely wounded commander on the street. Lozano managed to flag down a passing motorist, who drove him to the nearby Centro Médico de Especialidades.

There is evidence to suggest that Lozano may have been collaborating with American law enforcement. His training had brought him into contact with many American law enforcement branches, including the FBI and the DEA. And as he received emergency surgery (a four-hour procedure to remove two bullets lodged in his thorax and lung), the Mexican Army maintained a perimeter of tight security around the hospital, including heavily armed guards posted at all entrances. This was highly unusual; it would have been typical for the municipal police to play this role, not the army. The police obviously could not be trusted to protect Lozano. Several days later, once Lozano's condition had stabilized, he was transferred to Thompson Hospital in El Paso under tight security. There were concerns that assassins might attempt to ambush Lozano's ambulance to finish the job, so a brand-new ambulance, one that presumably matched Lozano's social station, was used as a decoy. The empty ambulance left the hospital and headed for the international bridge under heavy army escort that included armored military vehicles with 50-caliber machine guns at the ready, while Lozano and a medical team, who were actually aboard an old junk-heap of an ambulance, trailed the convoy at a short distance. Authorization for the Mexican ambulance to cross the bridge into the United States is said to have come from high-level government authorities in Washington, DC. Once at the Thompson Hospital, Lozano remained under heavy guard by U.S. marshals and the El Paso Police Department. Lozano would never return to Mexico.

Within minutes of the Lozano assassination attempt, the army began patrolling the streets. The army set up intermittent roadblocks on main transit points hoping to catch people with weapons and drugs. Mexico's constitution prohibits citizens from owning weapons that are “for the exclusive use of the military,” such as AK-47s, AR-15s and other assault-style weapons, as well as grenades, bazookas, and rocket launchers. Similarly, drug trafficking and organized crime are also federal offenses in Mexico. Thus, focusing on these specific crimes provided the legal cover (an inadequate basis, some would argue) that allowed the army to take to the streets and engage in what was, essentially, police work, even though the army was not involving itself with “ordinary” crime.

Almost immediately, the army's deployment produced successes. In the first week the military arrested Gabino Salas Valenciano, head of a Juárez cartel cell in the Valley of Juárez, when he was stopped at a military roadblock. In one raid in early February the army discovered a significant cache,
including
twenty-five automatic weapons and five handguns, seven fragmentation grenades, fourteen bulletproof vests, communications equipment, and five vehicles. Although the Juárez media described the site as a Juárez cartel safe house, the fact that three of the five confiscated vehicles bore Sinaloa license plates suggested that perhaps it was the Sinaloa cartel occupying the safe house.

A few days later, the army, along with the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI), raided another building in which one of the cartels was processing cocaine and other drugs for retail sales. The army and the AFI appeared to have arrived just as something significant was about to take place, given that twenty-one individuals, some of them reputedly hit men, were found gathered in the building. Here, too, they found many weapons, but they also found 13,700 individual doses of rock cocaine and two kilos of “cocaine base,” as well as 136 boxes of plastic sandwich bags and bicarbonate powder, which was used to cut the pure cocaine prior to packaging it in doses. The authorities also discovered both army and AFI uniforms in one of the rooms, presumably used for impersonating law enforcement. The twenty-one men were led from the building in blindfolds, Iraq War–style, and taken to the federal attorney general's compound for processing. Tellingly, all three of the vehicles seized at this second site also bore Sinaloa plates, although once again the authorities speculated that the site was a Juárez cartel operation.

These successes came on the heels of the army's seizure of nearly two tons of marijuana at the end of January. Near Juárez, the army had laid siege to the small town of Buenaventura, where they found a narco-armory with nine thousand bullets of different calibers, sixteen AK-47s and AR-15s as well as military-style sharpshooter rifles and tear gas grenades, thirty-one AK-47 silencers, thirteen handcuffs, Kevlar helmets, and, again, a stock of federal law enforcement uniforms.

Mayor Reyes Ferriz and other city officials were quick to applaud the army's successes. City council members who were part of the city's Public Security Commission praised the actions, lamenting only that the army had not been mobilized sooner. The fact that the army was receiving anonymous tips, which they credited for leading them to the two safe houses, also suggested that the people of Juárez were responding to their presence, even as negotiations were underway to secure even more army troops for Juárez (the troops in the streets were those who had already been stationed at the garrison).

However, the army's activities immediately drew criticism from some quarters as well and, at times, misinformation. For example,
El Heraldo de Chihuahua
, a newspaper from the capital city, asserted that the army's seized narco-lab had actually been a facility run and protected by the army.
The
federal attorney general's office immediately repudiated the allegation, noting that there had been armed people arrested and a cache of weapons and drugs seized. No other Chihuahua newspaper carried the
Heraldo
's version of this story, but it revealed the media crosscurrents in a state where newspapers were sometimes in the pay of the cartels.

The army also did little to endear itself to the press. One night shortly after the narco-lab bust, the army arrested two groups of people in a rural area along the U.S.-Mexico line. One group was in possession of 57 kilos of marijuana, while the second was carrying 107 kilos of marijuana. In all, ten men were detained in the two incidents, five of them carrying assault weapons. However, when reporters from
El Diario
arrived to cover the second action, there was a confrontation with the army. An armed man in civilian clothes wearing a ski mask flagged the journalists' car down and demanded to see the driver's press credentials. He told the driver that the “commander” wanted to speak to him. The situation appeared dangerous—the reporters were unarmed, it was the dead of night, and there were no witnesses. The driver refused, at which point the man tore the press identification from the reporter's hands and ran off with it. In a third incident involving the media, the army raided yet another safe house in Juárez, where numerous vehicles were stored. The army arrested three men inside the property, where they'd again found weapons and a modest amount of marijuana. As the cars were being impounded, a man walked up to a soldier and complained that one of the cars being impounded belonged to his brother. The man was taken into custody, but reporters covering the incident clearly thought he was innocent. They called out to him to give them his name, and in the published accounts he was described as someone who had merely happened upon the narco-house during the army's operation.

From the first days of its new role in Juárez, the army's overzealousness, and at times abuses, quickly created significant tensions between it and the press. Most of the coverage, especially by the Juárez newspapers, appeared fact-driven and fair. Unlike the false report in
El Heraldo de Chihuahua
, the local papers were covering the army's actions, good and bad, with professionalism, which meant that they not only covered the successes of the army and other federal law enforcement, but also the complaints against them. For example, a woman who lived next door to the first safe house had filed a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission claiming that the soldiers had not obtained a search warrant and had broken the lock on her front door and looted her home. Similarly, in a separate incident, a woman accused the army of breaking into her home at three o'clock in the morning and taking her father and husband away. Neither, she protested, was involved in the narcotics trade. In most instances, there was no way of determining the validity of either the accusations or the denials. But the
discourse
that defined those first months of 2008 was already enveloping the army's operations in controversy; the very legal basis for what was taking place was questioned, even as the army's actions were applauded in some quarters. “We all see ourselves as potential victims, that's why we want the heavy hand [of the federal forces],” one editorial read, citing, simultaneously, the need to guarantee civil rights. That was the double-edged reality of the situation in Juárez. People wanted protection from the drug cartels and their gangs and the wave of violence they had unleashed upon the city, yet they also wanted their civil rights safeguarded.

Patricia González, the state attorney general, told
Omnia
, a weekly Chihuahua magazine, that the use of the army to carry out policing functions was a violation of the Mexican Constitution. The governor took a similar stance. González voiced support for legislation pending in the Mexican congress that would enhance the municipal and ministerial police forces, allowing them to investigate organized crime, which at that time fell under the jurisdiction of federal forces. She further argued that seeing the army patrolling the streets “generated a climate of emotional instability among the citizenry.”

The violence in Juárez, where there were daily executions, and elsewhere in the state of Chihuahua cast an ominous shadow over everything. González's call for judicial reform and improving municipal and state law enforcement turned a blind eye to the present crisis. In Mexico, there had been calls for such reforms for decades, but the Mexican congress was a body of quicksand that first slowed any proposal of substance down to a halt before extinguishing it altogether by sucking it under. Even forward-looking proposals that at first glance appeared innovative and transparent, like the new laws governing oral arguments at trials and the presentation of criminal evidence, were being perverted, perpetuating a system in which most criminals were simply walking free. The country was hopelessly mired, unable to move forward on this front. Substantive reform was indispensable to Mexico's future, but so was putting an end to the web of corruption and violence that had allowed criminal organizations to become power players in broad swaths of the country.

In Mexico City, the respected daily
Reforma
called for a recognition that within the emerging “Calderónista” war there had been “almost imperceptible” signs that the Mexican Army's role in the current political system was changing. The army was playing a new role in the realm of public security, the editorial noted, and this role “had no precedent” in Mexican history. The editorial further warned of the constitutional risks inherent in this strategy, as well as potential risks to the reputation of the Mexican military.

Reforma
may have been correct in its analysis, but the problem was that Calderón had no good alternatives. Any objective appraisal of the national
situation
could not miss the conclusion that significant portions of the Mexican border states (states that were the economic dynamo to the country's financial well-being) were already under the control of one or another of the cartels. There was no municipal or state law enforcement agency in any of these states that could meaningfully counter the presence of the cartels. In fact, as was true in Juárez, most of these police forces were controlled by the cartels. In many places, the political structure in these states was also heavily influenced by the cartels. The same was true for a number of important states in the interior of Mexico, such as Michoacán, Durango, Guerrero, Quintana Roo, Oaxaca, and Sinaloa, among others, where powerful cartels operated. In many instances these cartels had been deeply entrenched for decades. The deployment of the Mexican Army raised a slew of important questions, but given the national crisis there were no viable alternatives.

.   .   .

The main body of the federal forces that had been promised after the mayor's meetings with Patricio Patiño and General Juárez Loera started making their way into the city on the twenty-eighth of March 2008. They came in long convoys arriving from Mexico City and other parts of the country. The olive-green trucks sparkled in the morning sun of the Chihuahuan desert, and the sight of twenty-five hundred troops in full gear, weapons at the ready, was impressive. The Mexican Army was sending its best forces into Juárez.

The army units immediately started patrolling the city and once again, right away they produced results. Everything that one might expect in a city that was an international hub for drug trafficking was suddenly happening: there were almost daily reports of army arrests and there were significant confiscations of drugs, cash, and weapons. The military had swagger and a sense of confidence and, most importantly, they did not appear to be intimidated by the cartels.