The Fight to Save Juárez (6 page)

The
new judicial code ostensibly changed the role of the municipal police, who would now be responsible for securing and gathering evidence at crime scenes, activities that heretofore had been the exclusive responsibility of the district attorney's office, part of a byzantine and fractured law enforcement arrangement. Historically, the mission of the municipal police was merely “preventive”—they patrolled the streets and they could arrest people caught in flagrante delicto, but they were neither trained nor authorized to investigate crimes (that function was solely under the purview of the state police). The new role of the municipal police was characterized as “revolutionary”—it, along with new judicial processes, would result in more solved crimes and greater transparency in prosecutions as well as a positive impact on human rights, long a sore point when it came to Mexican law enforcement.

It was in this spirit of reform that Chief Prieto ceremoniously took a seat at a desk at the Juárez Police Academy as if he were just another fresh recruit. Later that day, Prieto's second and third in command, Director of Operations Juan Antonio Román and Supervisor of Field Operations Francisco Ledesma, respectively, would also come to the Academy to take part in the training. The police department's top brass were there to set an example, sending the rest of the force a message that the Juárez Municipal Police was making a fresh start and breaking with the old ways of doing things.

Francisco Ledesma was a young, snappy-looking thirty-four-year-old officer who, as the face of the municipal police in the community, was frequently out in the field. In fact, later that same day Ledesma attended a meeting involving some seventy angry and worried parents from working-class neighborhoods who were fed up with the local gangs that roamed the streets and tormented law-abiding residents at will. The gangs were partly a simple nuisance: neighborhood kids with nothing else to do but stand around on street corners drinking beer until all hours of the night, getting into minor mischief. But there was a more problematic and insidious side to the gangs. Some of them were responsible for the rash of burglaries, car thefts, and other crime that plagued the neighborhoods. The parents were also worried because they knew that these groups were often feeders for the city's more hardcore gangs. It was Ledesma's job to reassure the parents that the police department was on top of the problem and would be deploying their new gang task force, known as the Puma Group, into the neighborhoods to reduce gang-related crime and, specifically, gang violence.

The culture of neighborhood gangs was a widespread problem in Ciudad Juárez. Ledesma estimated that there were some eight hundred gangs operating in the city, whose active membership consisted of some fourteen thousand adolescents between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. The majority of these gangs, 521 of them according to Ledesma's Gang Taskforce, were
operating
in the eighty-six toughest
colonias
, where inter-gang violence and gang crime had become epidemic and a festering social problem. These neighborhood gangs were a fertile network whose ties and alliances formed the recruitment base for hardcore gangs like Los Aztecas, Los Mexicles, and Los Artistas Asesinos. The ubiquitous Juárez neighborhood gangs were thus the entry point for the gangs that, at the street level, ran the narco-show in Juárez.

For generations, neighborhood gangs had been a way of life in Ciudad Juárez, especially in the poorer
colonias
. Hanging out together night after night on the dusty, dreary corners of these enclaves, smoking cigarettes under the scraggly trees that grow in this desert climate while mangy, neglected dogs cast a weary gaze incubated life-long ties. One day, on our way back from a crime scene, Raymundo Ruiz and I drove through the
colonia
where he'd grown up. The streets here were mostly gravel, with an occasional ribbon of pavement bisecting the neighborhood here and there. Ruiz was a photographer for
El Norte
, one of the Juárez newspapers. “This hasn't changed since I was a kid,” he volunteered as we made our way down a bone-dry arroyo that transformed into an engorged, angry flow when it rained. Houses sat up on the banks, their cinderblock walls raw and without so much as a trace of paint or decoration, surrounded by desert scrub brush and abandoned tires. A plume of dirt rose behind us until it was caught and fractured by the wind as we made our way down into the arroyo and up the other side.

Farther on, a man driving an old, battered truck spotted us and pulled to a stop midstreet. “
Que pasa
, Ray?” he shouted moments before he and Raymundo exchanged a knuckle-bump, slap-punch greeting through their respective windows. We were in Raymundo's gasping lime-green Toyota Tercel. The driver's-side mirror casing dangled against the door, barely attached by a single cable, the mirror itself long gone. The car's front grille was missing, too, exposing the black, dust-covered housing of the radiator fan. The front-right tire wobbled hideously any time our speed exceeded thirty miles per hour, which was frequently. The back seat was a pile of old newspapers, consumed water bottles, and a child's car seat (Raymundo has young children). A “Press” sign was taped to the inside of the car's windshield, giving Raymundo parking access at official events.

Raymundo's friend was indifferent to my presence. He told Raymundo that he'd been clean for a year and that he was going to church at a rehab center. “That's good,” Raymundo said, right arm draped across the steering wheel as the Tercel sputtered, “that's real good.”

After a few more minutes Raymundo said goodbye to his childhood friend and we pushed on through the wind-stirred dust along the streets of his old neighborhood. “That guy's been in and out of prison all his life,”
Raymundo
volunteered once we were on our way. “He was a big-time user, doing petty chores for you know who,” which I took to be a reference to the Juárez cartel. He never mentioned the cartel by name; that was part of his discipline. Raymundo paused. “He's never gotten his act together. I hope it sticks this time,” he said.

Raymundo took advantage of the fact that we were in his old neighborhood to ring the doorbell of a woman who was his mother's best friend when he was growing up and whom he still visited on occasion. She was in her late seventies and lived in a small compound comprising several structures, one of which, like Raymundo's childhood home, was constructed from wood pallets lined with cardboard and tarpaper. The freestanding room was askew and appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The woman broke into a radiant grin the instant she saw that it was Raymundo at the door. She was wearing glasses with gray frames and had a matching shock of gray hair. Her ankle-length black dress gave the impression that she was a widow.

The three of us stood in the street in front of the house while Raymundo and the woman caught up on his brothers and sisters, the woman's children, and what had become of the neighborhood. “I'm sick of it,” she volunteered. She told us that the gangs were out every night and that they had taken to pressing her to pay them $100 pesos a week (the so-called and increasingly ubiquitous
cuota
) in exchange for safe passage from the bus stop to her house. “It's extortion,” she exclaimed. “I only make $300 pesos a week,” she added. She told Raymundo that the neighborhood had gone to hell. The gangs were giving everyone the squeeze and there was no relief, she told us with a tone of resignation. It was an established fact that in Juárez the neighborhood and midlevel gangs now imitated the cartel strategies to increase their non-drug-related revenues. The difference was that the cartel gangs were extorting bigger businesses, while the neighborhood punks were extorting maquiladora workers, small shopkeepers, and street vendors.

Down the street we turned a corner and Raymundo pointed out graffiti marking a local gang's territory. “That gang's been here since I was a kid,” he told me. At the time, there were gangs every two or three blocks—anywhere that there were ten or fifteen kids living in proximity. “We fought neighboring gangs, but it was fistfights, sometimes maybe sticks and rocks, that's the worst it ever got. We didn't kill each other,” Raymundo volunteered. The gangs also didn't rob or terrorize the neighbors. On the contrary, the gangs were about the neighborhood; that was the source of their pride and identity. “Mostly we hung around and smoked cigarettes and drank beer and talked all night. Kid stuff.” But some of Raymundo's friends had gone off in other directions, including some who ended up in “the business” and quite a few who ended up addicts, in jail, or dead.

.   .   .

Within the Juárez Municipal Police Department, Francisco Ledesma's charge, in part, was to address these facts of life given that gangs were a problem all over the city. Ledesma met with the group of parents on the morning of January 21, 2008, four days after Patiño's visit to Chihuahua. The meeting took place in a neighborhood that was indistinguishable from the one in which Raymundo had grown up. It was a neighborhood where parents worried about the gangs that were swarming all over the
colonia
, intimidating residents and acting as if they owned the territory. As the public face of the municipal police, Ledesma was the front man who did the meet and greets and told agitated parents and community leaders about the department's plan to rescue them from the grips of the gangs that were increasingly crushing them, threatening them even within their own homes. Ledesma talked as if he knew the ropes, as if he understood the game. He gave them facts and information about gangs and how they operated and what the Grupo Puma was going to do to take back the night in their communities—how it was going to put an end to the fear that had come to reign upon their lives.

But the next day Francisco Ledesma was dead. At 7:45 a.m., as he was leaving home on his way to his weekly Monday morning meeting at the Babícora police station, a commando team appeared out of nowhere and cut him down in a barrage of gun fire. Two men had waited patiently in a white Chevrolet Express van for Ledesma to leave his house. As Ledesma got into his car, the van pulled up and one of the men exited, briskly walking over to Ledesma before drawing a pistol from his coat pocket and assassinating the officer in full view of several witnesses, including a woman who was walking her children to the nearby elementary school. The van would be discovered a month later parked at a safe house; it had been stolen in El Paso almost four years earlier, in August of 2004.

Every morning, José Reyes Ferriz had a standing 7 a.m. phone appointment with his police chief in which Guillermo Prieto reported the events of the last twenty-four hours. The Ledesma assassination occurred after the daily report, so the mayor was not briefed on it. Instead, he was briefed on the murder of a police officer who had been hunted down and killed the day before. Later in the afternoon on the day of Ledesma's assassination, a third municipal police officer had been gunned down. His name was Julián Cháirez, and he came from a family with deep ties to the Juárez cartel. One of his brothers, also with the municipal police, had been assassinated a year earlier while traveling with a state ministerial police officer who was also executed (the then–director of operations, Saulo Reyes, had been unable to explain to reporters why it was that one of his agents had been traveling in a ministerial police vehicle, a fact that was highly irregular). In
addition
, acting on a tip from U.S. authorities, the federal police had apprehended another brother, Leonel Cháirez, in July of 2007. (American law enforcement had arrested an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent named Margarita Crispín, whom they charged with accepting bribes from Leonel Cháirez, who was smuggling opium, cocaine, and marijuana across the border.)

The day's execution of police officers wasn't finished. That same afternoon yet another officer, this one with the state ministerial police, was gunned down in a hail of bullets that left fifty holes in him and in his vehicle. Almost concurrently, across town, there was an attempted assassination of a fifth law enforcement officer, a member of Agencia Estatal de Investigaciones, the state's investigative agency. He survived, but he was gravely wounded. In just two days, five law enforcement officers had been ambushed in Juárez and four of them assassinated. That tally nearly matched the total number of police killed over the course of the entire previous year.

.   .   .

At his offices at the Presidencia Municipal, José Reyes Ferriz was feeling in the grip of a process that would soon envelope and consume him. In the aftermath of the assassinations the tension was beginning to permeate the entire city. Some speculated that the wave of police executions was related to the arrest of Saulo Reyes in El Paso, suggesting that perhaps the Juárez cartel was executing those who had betrayed him. Alternatively, it was hypothesized that the cartel was executing anyone whom Saulo Reyes might have given up. A young man with a wife and family accustomed to upper-class comforts might easily be induced to talk under threat of years in prison now that he was in the hands of the DEA, so the thinking went. Perhaps the cartel was cutting its losses by executing people who might now be pressured into revealing more information about its operations, some speculated.

On January 23, two days after Ledesma's assassination,
El Diario
published the truth. It cited “unofficial sources” to the effect that “the criminal organization of El Chapo Guzmán” had authored the attacks against the police. The article further stated that the attacks were aimed at “destabilizing” the police force in order to wrest control of the
plaza
from the Juárez cartel. The
El Diario
article also revealed that a few days prior to the recent attacks on Ledesma and the others, El Chapo's people had contacted commanders in the ministerial and municipal police offering them an undetermined amount of money in return for their collaboration. Apparently, some them had not signed on.