The Fight to Save Juárez (44 page)

Just a month earlier I had visited the Intelligence Center, which was on the second floor of the Emergency Response Center (known as the CERI), when José Reyes Ferriz had invited me along to attend a security meeting. The building is a solid, squat structure made of native stone with a sky-blue glass façade. Heavily armed soldiers and federal police guarded the entrance. The bottom floor of the CERI is a large space enclosed by thick glass walls, where army and federal police monitored information coming in on the city's anonymous tip line and from emergency calls. Each workstation had three computer monitors, where pairs of agents were supposed to work the calls, identify their locations, and track the location of nearby law enforcement patrol units (this was the system that had presumably failed to respond to the calls coming from Villa del Portal Street).

The security meeting was held on the second floor, in a large operations room at the front of which was a long oval table covered by a forest-green tablecloth; a bottle of water had been placed in front of each seat. The mayor chaired the meeting, sitting at the head of the table. Seated to his right was the city district attorney; to her right was her immediate predecessor, an army colonel who was transitioning out. A federal police inspector who had been overseeing the placement of three hundred security cameras throughout the city sat at the other end of the table, across from the mayor. Next to him was José Luis Lara, an engineer who was in from Mexico City as the chief consultant on the security camera project. To his right was Gerardo Ortiz Arellano, the head of the municipal prison.
¹
Finally, there was Julián
David
Rivera Bretón, the former army general who was now heading up the Juárez municipal police following Roberto Orduña's resignation almost a year earlier.

Each of the principals had brought their personal aides to the meeting, who, standing, were arrayed around the table, periodically responding to various requests from their respective bosses. The federal police appeared to be hosting the meeting—their uniformed staff attended to the needs of the participants, offering them coffee and sodas or opening up the bottled waters and pouring them into glasses. The discussion around the table that day centered on how to track convicts once they were released from the municipal prison. The mayor asked if prison personnel were routinely obtaining addresses and if someone was checking in on the ex-cons after their releases. Ortiz Arellano, the director of the prison, noted that social workers were already doing that, but the mayor was insistent that the procedures in place were not adequate—as often as not former prisoners disappeared from the addresses they'd given upon release. The mayor later summarized his frustration, noting that the municipal police arrested approximately three thousand people a year. “The majority,” he told me, “are let out within a day or two.” Of those three thousand, only 150 or so were ever actually sentenced. “Your chance of getting off for anything from murder to car theft to rape to assault in Juárez is 95 percent” the mayor told me. “Those odds look good to most criminals.”

The mayor and the others reviewed the newly implemented Crime Stoppers program. A complication was that it only took calls related to local crime, that is, crime that was under the auspices of municipal police. The federal police were triaging calls to the corresponding authority depending on whether they fell under the federal, state, or municipal purview, but there was considerable confusion in the public's mind about what law enforcement entity was responsible for what kind of crime.

At the conclusion of this meeting, the federal police inspector approached the mayor and asked if he cared to see the progress they had made with the security camera program. The cameras had gone up all over the city and were being used to monitor criminal activity from this site as well as from the federal police command center in Mexico City. The inspector led the way to a workstation, where two federal police officers sat in front of a large computer screen. “We're going to show you an execution that we caught on the cameras last week,” one of the officers said as he began rolling video. On one corner of the footage was the date and time code, which whirred as a function of the speed with which the officer ran the footage. The first image was of a city street with a fair amount of traffic at an intersection with a traffic light. The main boulevard was two lanes running in either direction while the other street, perpendicular to it, had a single lane in
each
direction. As the agent fast-forwarded the video, cars zipped across the screen and beyond in the blink of an eye. “Watch this maroon SUV,” the officer said. “It's the car carrying the hit team.” The car in question drove up to the stoplight and then made a U-turn, going off-camera. “They're scouting the hit,” the agent narrated. “This car,” he said, pointing the cursor at a white Mercury, “is also involved. And so is this one,” he said, drawing our attention to a pickup truck. Over the course of several minutes, those three vehicles made a series of passes through the target area.

It was evident that the video had been closely studied. “These hits all have the same basic profile,” the agent said. The vehicles involved in the execution had first moved through the busy intersection prior to the hit. To the untrained eye, they were easily lost in the ordinary flow of traffic. The officer explained that the team actually carrying out the hit typically traveled aboard one or two vehicles. There were also several scout cars, as well as a car that would block others from pursuing the hit team once it completed its work. “Finally, there's always a car that remains behind to ensure that the targets are all dead before it leaves the crime scene,” he added. Each of these players had been identified. The time code at the top of the screen made it clear that the video spanned a little more than ten minutes.

For the execution, the federal police officer rolled the tape in real time. The maroon SUV came into view from the opposite direction it had taken during the first two passes. The lookout cars were positioned on both sides of the street. The escort car then made its way through the intersection. At that point, the maroon SUV pulled up and the
sicarios
could be seen jumping from the vehicle, weapons in hand. A group of six men ran off camera, where they took down their target before scampering back into the SUV, almost leaving one of them behind. The maroon SUV then headed down the cross street to the right, where two getaway cars had already been positioned. The so-called “verification” car was also in position just past the intersection. Just then, the pickup truck that we had seen make several practice runs through the intersection rounded the corner and blocked the street down which the
sicarios
had just made their getaway. To my surprise, at that moment two municipal police cars arrived at the scene of the execution. Rather than giving chase, they jumped out of their patrol cars and ran to the victim. The pickup truck continued to block the getaway route and the police paid it no mind. I found it hard not to draw the inference that the police were either afraid of a confrontation or were in collusion with the
sicarios
. The final image was of the white Mercury, the verification vehicle. Once the blocking vehicle left the crime scene following the getaway path, the verification vehicle proceeded slowly down the street, eerily merging into the afternoon traffic as if nothing had happened. The federal police officer froze the frame at that point, with the Mercury at the top of the screen.

Those
of us standing around the workstation fell silent. Even in this city of so many executions, so many deaths, it was rare to actually see one live. Typically, one saw photographs or video taken in the aftermath, or one managed to arrive soon after, but it was unusual to see images of an execution as it was taking place. But the silence also pressed an obvious question. Why had the municipal police done nothing? It seemed to me that perhaps the federal police officers had left the white Mercury floating at the top of the screen as if posing a question.

The mayor broke the silence. “Who is the victim?” he asked. He was told the victim's name, but there was no information as to why this man had been executed. The mayor asked if the vehicles' license plates could be brought into focus. He was told they were working on that. What was perfectly evident, however, was the sophistication and planning that had gone into pulling off this execution. The operation had involved six different vehicles; the federal police agent estimated that the entire team consisted of fifteen to eighteen men. They had carried out a precise, highly choreographed hit wherein every actor knew his exact role. They had rehearsed the hit in every detail, making practice runs before executing their target. Each person had done his job to perfection; the execution was carried out flawlessly.

The Mexican federal agent swiveled in his chair, turning from his computer screen to look at the mayor. “Here's another hit by the same team,” he said. We were now looking at a Soriana shopping center. According to the date on the video, this hit had taken place several days later. The maroon SUV, the white Mercury, and the pickup from the prior execution were again playing key roles. The other vehicles were different. This time, two men in a beige pickup truck were sandwiched in between two
sicario
cars at the exit to the shopping center. A hit-team van then closed off the adjacent lane, sealing the unsuspecting vehicle off from any possibility of egress. As before, the
sicario
team's vehicles had made several dry runs through the target area some fifteen minutes prior to the execution. The white Mercury, parked across the street, was again the verification car. Another vehicle pulled up alongside the target, and the smoke from the blazing gun barrels firing at the occupants in the beige pickup truck was plainly evident on-screen. When the shooting stopped, the targeted vehicle coasted out into the boulevard on its own accord, as if piloted by an invisible ghost. The pickup continued rolling slowly through four lanes of traffic until it hit a curb across the street. One of the
sicario
cars had pulled into the intersection, blocking traffic as the other vehicles slipped off down the street and disappeared from view. As before, once they'd verified that the two men in the pickup truck showed no signs of life, the white Mercury exited from the scene, merging into traffic as horrified drivers attempted to maneuver around the bullet-ridden beige
pickup
, aware, now, that within it lay one or more additions to Juárez's tally of the dead.

.   .   .

The CERI, where I saw this footage, was the location of the Intelligence Center to which the February 24
Washington Post
article had referred, indicating that American FBI, DEA, and possibly other law enforcement agencies would be working in collaboration with Mexican law enforcement, especially the federal police and Mexican Army intelligence personnel. Historically, U.S. law enforcement had kept its Mexican counterparts at arm's length. The legacy of corruption and cartel infiltration into Mexican operations at all levels was too widespread and too well known to allow for meaningful collaboration. Information leaked by corrupt authorities readily endangered the lives of informants and agents in the field. Memories of Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, the DEA agent who was kidnapped in 1985 and tortured extensively prior to dying at the hands of a drug cartel in Guadalajara, formed the backdrop to those fears. U.S. authorities knew that the old federal judicial police had had a hand in the agent's assassination and had played a role in the Mexican government's efforts to cover it up and block a meaningful investigation.

Mexican law enforcement, in turn, had similarly kept the Americans at a distance, if for different reasons. In the past, working too closely with the Americans might have translated into pressure to launch operations that were “inconvenient.” While there had long been a DEA and FBI presence in Mexico, along with other American intelligence services, relationships with Mexican officials were typically tense for a variety of reasons, including legitimate Mexican apprehensions about American operations in their territory for reasons of national sovereignty, a long-standing factor in U.S.-Mexican relations. Thus the notion of close collaboration between American and Mexican intelligence agents was jarring and novel to most who came across the
Washington Post
article. The article also reported that recently, U.S. agencies had grown more comfortable with the prospect of such collaboration, having developed a new respect for Mexican law enforcement, at least at the federal level. American agents would now be working closely with Mexican federal police who were recent graduates of DEA and FBI training programs.

A DEA spokesman in El Paso confirmed the
Washington Post
report to
El Diario
the following day, stating that “closed door meetings” had been taking place between American and Mexican federal agencies, not further identified. However, the story appeared to have taken both American and Mexican governments by surprise: the respective ambassadors claimed they knew nothing about the reported development.

It is likely that the national criticism of Felipe Calderón's strategy in the
war
against the cartels had also made such collaboration more tenable. Calderón was already more inclined to work with the United States than his predecessors. In just the first three years of his administration his government had extradited far more cartel operatives to the United States than any prior Mexican president.
²
Leading up to and especially in the aftermath of the Villas de Salvárcar massacre, the Calderón government had been feeling considerable political pressure over its policies: there was a chorus of people, even within Calderón's own party, who increasingly viewed the federal government's efforts as teetering on failure. In Juárez, two years of federal intervention had produced no change in the violence. On the contrary, there were more and more dead, and people felt less and less safe. Mexico had taken down many big-name cartel capos, but there was otherwise little to show for the government's efforts in terms of a reduction in violence (or, apparently, in the availability of cocaine and other drugs in the United States). Such a circumstance lent itself to permitting greater collaboration between Mexican federal law enforcement and American law enforcement.