The Fight to Save Juárez (23 page)

José
Reyes Ferriz approached his second Christmas in office with a sense of dread. The only lighthearted news he'd had in months had been the arrest of Laura Zúñiga just a couple of days before Christmas. Zúñiga, a twenty-three-year-old beauty queen, was Miss Sinaloa and had recently won the national pageant, which meant that she would represent Mexico in the 2009 Miss International pageant. Zúñiga had been traveling in an entourage of two SUVs, in the company of a man named Ángel Orlando García Urquiza and six bodyguards, when they were stopped at an army checkpoint near Guadalajara. Urquiza was a top operative in the Juárez cartel. The army found a large stash of weapons and $53,300 dollars in cash. Miss Sinaloa's defense (she was subsequently dethroned) was that she was under the impression that they were on their way to Colombia “to shop.” In the city where the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels were in a fight to the death, the idea that a Juárez capo was having his way with Miss Sinaloa inspired much holiday humor.

Note

1
. These phones are ubiquitous in Juárez. The “push to talk” feature changes frequencies every time, which makes it nearly impossible to trace or monitor calls made on a Nextel phone (which can only be made to other Nextel phones). Colombia had banned the use of these phones because they were key tools of the drug cartels.

C
HAPTER 16

Forty-Eight Hours

By the spring of 2009, Roberto Orduña, the “Pajama Chief,” had been at the head of the Juárez police for almost a year. The mayor had relied on him to oversee numerous efforts to clean up the force, including the Confidence Tests and the firing of over a third of the force. The mayor trusted him. Through these actions, Orduña had incurred the wrath of many in the department, all the while knowing that the cartels had put crosshairs on his back.

The army's operations continued to garner arrests and seizures of drugs, money, and weapons, but such victories were having no effect on the violence; the tally of the dead continued its steady, disquieting rise. The fact that Orduña was a former military man backed by the commander of the region's military forces, General Juárez Loera,
¹
facilitated coordination between the police and the military. Such coordination was particularly delicate given that there were ongoing confrontations and skirmishes between the army and elements of the municipal police, some of whom were clearly still in the service of the cartels. Notwithstanding the Confidence Tests, the efforts to clean up the police had not solved the problems within the force; police corruption was proving to be as intractable as an antibiotics-resistant strain of bacteria.

It was all a matter of strategy. Somewhere, from the safety of their protected enclaves and safe houses, the leadership of the cartels had made the calculus that control of the municipal police remained indispensable to their operations in Juárez. The cartels continued to use their time-tested techniques of violent coercion, abduction, and inducement in order to infiltrate and control the force. José Reyes Ferriz and the federal government strategists had made their own calculus and arrived at the same conclusion, which is why they had devoted so many resources to cleaning up the force. Whoever controlled the police controlled the city.

Reyes Ferriz's agreements with the federal government were being reevaluated and renegotiated every six months. The mayor knew that the army and the federal police were not going to stay in Juárez indefinitely. Eventually he was going to have to have a police force that he could trust; the alternative
was
either a city besieged by continuing cartel violence or a city in the hands of the last cartel left standing. The police, in other words, remained a strategic objective, the key to future viability for the city.

One of Orduña's most trusted aides was a man named Sacramento Pérez Serrano, a former army captain who'd graduated from Mexico's most prestigious military college. Orduña had handpicked Pérez the prior July to oversee the police cleanup effort. Pérez was forty-nine years old, an energetic man with a decidedly military bearing. He was part of a thinly veiled or at least not formally acknowledged strategy to recruit ex-military to the ranks of the Juárez police, in the hope that they would be more disciplined and less susceptible to cartel corruption. Orduña and Pérez had gone as far as the southern-most Mexican states in search of recruits. On one Sunday afternoon, February 17, 2009, Pérez and his bodyguards were traveling in one of the police department's large Ford F-150 big-cab pickups, just blocks from the U.S. consulate, when they were blocked in on three sides and attacked by
sicarios
in multiple vehicles. Pérez's pickup was not armored; the fire from the assailants' assault weapons penetrated the truck with ease, killing everyone on board. The fusillade left the windshield and driver's-side windows pocked with holes that gleamed like snowflakes gathered on the shattered glass.

Sacramento Pérez typically traveled in an armored vehicle with an accompanying “wing” car in a blocking position to prevent just this kind of an ambush. However, the woman who ran the city prison had received numerous death threats, prompting Pérez to let her use his armored pickup temporarily until her security was reinforced. Reyes Ferriz and Orduña were convinced that someone inside the police department had tipped off the Juárez cartel to the fact that Pérez was now driving an unarmored vehicle, making him an easy target.

Pérez became the third director of operations to be assassinated in less than a year. For José Reyes Ferriz the assassination of one of Orduña's key people was an enormous setback. There were few people he could trust, and the mayor counted Pérez as one of the good guys. The boldness of the attack (in broad daylight, just blocks from the U.S. consulate—a tony area that was constantly patrolled by municipal, state, and federal police) once again served to remind that the fight for control of the police was far from resolved.

Reyes Ferriz felt trapped, like Sisyphus. No matter the effort, no matter the strategy, the result always appeared to be variations on the same: terrifying executions of police personnel. Within hours of the killing of Sacramento Pérez, a series of coordinated narco-messages surfaced throughout the city giving Orduña forty-eight hours to resign. The messages, left at a car dealership, a cell phone store, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken, among other
locations
, threatened to assassinate a police officer every forty-eight hours until the police chief complied.

At a news conference, José Reyes Ferriz told the press that he and Orduña were standing firm in the face of the new attacks. “We will not be terrorized by these criminals,” he declared. But forty-eight hours later, a municipal police officer named César Iván Portillo heard a knock on his front door. When he opened it, a lone gunman emptied his 9-millimeter pistol into Portillo, killing him instantly. A handwritten narco-message left next to Portillo's crumpled body said, “The [forty-eight] hours have passed and the director of public security, Roberto Orduña Cruz, has not resigned.”

A prison guard was killed a few hours after Portillo's assassination. These two deaths, and the assassinations of Pérez and his bodyguards, brought to six the number of law enforcement officers killed in just two days. Reyes Ferriz was again facing a crisis. “Orduña told me he was going to resign,” the mayor recalled. This would again leave the police force with no leadership. Reyes Ferriz did what he could to talk Orduña out of it, first appealing to his military pride: “We can't allow the criminals to dictate to us,” Reyes Ferriz told him. But the entreaties were futile; Orduña had already made up his mind. The police chief responded in kind with a military analogy: “When someone retreats in the battlefield it does not necessarily mean the battle is lost, sometimes it's simply a strategic retreat,” Orduña told the mayor.

At a hastily arranged press conference, Reyes Ferriz and the chief of police appeared together to make the announcement. Reyes Ferriz spoke first, stating that Orduña had tendered his resignation and praising him as a dedicated officer. Orduña then stepped up to the microphone. “I can't put my professional pride above the lives of my men,” he said. “Respect for the lives that these brave officers risk every day on the streets for the residents of Juárez obliges me to offer my permanent resignation.” Mustering profound indignation, Orduña added: “To the enemies of Mexico I say, don't misunderstand the action I am taking. Notwithstanding your initial reluctance [the chief gestured toward Reyes Ferriz, who was standing next to him], this is an intelligent step for life, not for death,” Orduña said.

Immediately following his resignation, Orduña left Juárez, seeking refuge across the border in El Paso just as his predecessor, Guillermo Prieto, had done almost a year earlier. For good measure, the Juárez cartel left another narco-message for the mayor: “It's good that you have gotten rid of Orduña, but if you put in another asshole working for El Chapo we're going to kill you.”

It was Friday, February 20, and José Reyes Ferriz found himself once again staring out his office window onto the streets of Juárez that lay below. Almost exactly a year earlier, Patricio Patiño had visited Juárez and the mayor had met with federal authorities for the first time. They'd sent two
hundred
federal police, they'd sent the army, they'd given his entire police force Confidence Tests and he'd overseen the firing of hundreds of officers, yet here he was again without a chief of police and with Sacramento Pérez, the second in command, executed. Scores of police had been killed over the course of the year, and the city was enveloped in a crime wave of such proportions that Juárez seemed to be devolving into anarchy. Sisyphus, the mayor thought as he stood alone in his office staring out the window: Sisyphus.

.   .   .

The cartels are strategic. They plan, they observe, and their actions have a clear and definite logic. The execution of Sacramento Pérez and the decision to oust Roberto Orduña were calculated moves, but the cartel wasn't finished. They appeared to have received inside information about a federal plan to reinforce Ciudad Juárez. José Reyes Ferriz and the governor of Chihuahua, José Reyes Baeza, were to travel together to Mexico City on Sunday, February 22, to meet with Genaro García Luna, Guillermo Valdés, and the other key members of President Calderón's security cabinet to seal the deal.

The Mexico City meeting was scheduled for Sunday evening. That morning, while waiting to catch a flight to Chihuahua City, where he was to rendezvous with the governor (they would fly to Mexico City together aboard a state plane), the mayor received a call from his communications director, Sergio Belmonte, informing him that there were narco-messages all over the city threatening to decapitate him and kill his family.

The Juárez cartel was raising the stakes for Reyes Ferriz on the eve of his meeting with the federal authorities. “It was the first time that they had threatened me so publicly and it was the first time that they had threatened my family,” Reyes Ferriz told me. The mayor had already moved his wife and children to El Paso as a security precaution. The narco-message made specific reference to that, indicating that there was no safe haven for them. Reyes Ferriz cancelled his flight in order to set in place the necessary security measures, calling the governor to say that he would catch a commercial flight and meet him in Mexico City later that evening. The governor informed him that there was no rush; the meeting had been rescheduled for Monday morning at the offices of the secretary of the interior.

Sunday night Reyes Ferriz arrived at the Marriott Hotel in the fashionable Polanco neighborhood in Mexico City. The plan was that he and the governor, also at the hotel, would convene to discuss their approach to the meeting with the federal people. Moments after checking in the mayor received a call from Governor Reyes Baeza's personal secretary; the governor's convoy had been ambushed in Chihuahua City and one of his bodyguards killed. Two other bodyguards had also been wounded in the attack. The Juárez cartel had obviously decided to send the governor a message
as
well. Though the governor was unscathed, Reyes Ferriz was informed that he had cancelled his trip to Mexico City. That meant that responsibility for decisions regarding federal involvement in Juárez would be the mayor's, and the cartel had made clear how they felt about it. Once again, José Reyes Ferriz was alone.

The next morning, José Reyes Ferriz made his way to the Interior Ministry at Avenida Bucareli 99, near the city's Centro Histórico. The ministry occupied an ornate nineteenth-century building surrounded by a lush garden, but its beauty belied the fact that within its walls some of Mexico's most powerful men had shaped the destiny of the nation. Fernando Gómez Mont, the secretary of the interior, was of that mold; he played host to the members of Calderón's security cabinet and Reyes Ferriz in the ministry's richly appointed library, which had an exquisite antique conference table that could comfortably seat forty people. The cabinet members were aware of the death threats that the mayor had received and the prior day's ambush on the governor's convoy. Gómez Mont went straight to the question at hand: “Are you going to resign?” he asked Reyes Ferriz. The mayor's response was equally direct: “Absolutely not,” he said, adding that while this was the first public threat, he had received numerous death threats since the outbreak of the narco-war in Juárez. Reyes Ferriz assured the security cabinet members that he planned to stay the course until the end of his term of office in October 2010. The federal people presented their plan to Reyes Ferriz: They would send five thousand more troops into Juárez, and the army would take over all policing functions in the city, in addition to other measures to shore up security.