This Love Is Not for Cowards (21 page)

This is not good. Not at all. The Indios need to score two goals now. They have not scored two goals in a single game all season. Gabino has no choice but to double down, to push even harder. He pulls off Edwin, replacing the veteran with younger and fresher legs. Two more players are soon swapped out as well, to energize the attack. That's all the substitutions we're allowed. I find myself feeling nervous, my leg fidgeting like Gil Cantú's before the Monarcas home game.
If you're not nervous, then you don't care, brother.
I wasn't invested in the team when I moved to Juárez. I am now. I don't want the Indios to lose. I want Edwin's hard work to be rewarded. I know a loss will pain Marco tremendously. He needs a goal, from somebody.
We
need a goal. Check that: We need two goals. The team that scores next, though, is Atlante. Again. And again off the counterattack. Two-nothing. Juárez is done.

I can see the Indios deflate. The players still on the field—Marco, everyone—they just dissolve. It's over. They have been kicked into a pit of fiery skulls. Score three goals in the fifteen remaining minutes? Not even in a fever dream. The moment everyone in Juárez has been dreading—and everyone else in Mexico knew would come—has indeed arrived. Very late in the game, with any chance of a comeback already shot, our goalie Christian stops a breakaway the only way he can: by taking out the opposing player, a move that earns him a red-card expulsion. The Indios have no substitutions left. Someone on the field will have to step into the net. Maleno Frías gets the call. He's handed a pair of big white gloves and a fluorescent orange jersey that indicates he's the goaltender from here on in. His first job is to stop a penalty kick. Impossible. Embarrassing, really. His flailing stab at the ball—he comes nowhere close—is a fittingly ridiculous end. Three-nothing, then the final whistle. The Indios will drop to the minors next season.

On leaving: The players shine with sweat as they slump off the field. Marco strips off his Indios jersey as if he's disgusted to have it covering his chest. Just before he ducks into the locker room tunnel, he throws his uniform into the stands, wanting nothing to do with it. The sweaty shirt is caught by a man named Christian Sanchez. He's an architect. Seven years ago, after finishing up his studies in Mexico City, he moved to Juárez cold, not knowing anyone but confident the border's booming population would give him plenty of work. He found clients almost from the day he arrived. He landed so many commissions he was able to start on a personal project, a home of his own.

He gave his house a clean, modern look. Silvery steel railings and trim, walls painted rich cream or a deep, contrasting plum. He wanted the details of the house to signal quality. The garage door is like no other: two steel slabs that appear to be acid-washed. The front door is huge, maybe twice the size of a normal door. While the first floor of the house appears fortified, which is a traditional Mexican look, the second story is unusually public. Glass walls illuminate an upstairs living room. From the master bedroom, a wide porch overlooks the street. Even before construction started, the architect knew it would be the most striking house on his block. It was to be his calling card, the example to show prospective clients. But by the time the builders wiped a final polishing cloth across the granite kitchen countertops, the murder rate in Juárez had exploded. Who needs an architect with bodies stacking up in the street? Why pay for picture windows when they expose you to stray bullets? Families abandoned thousands of the finest homes in the city, flooding the market—if it could be said there was even a market anymore. Sanchez started planning his escape. He put his dream house up for sale, having never moved into it. He prayed someone would buy it.

Marco, after meeting Dany in the gym, began looking for a place where the two of them could live together. He drove all over Juárez, checking out everything available. When he saw Christian Sanchez's showpiece, he fell in love for the second time in a month. The list price: $180,000, less than it cost to build, but probably still too high, now that all property in Juárez is considered distressed property. Marco offered $140,000 in cash, the bulk of his savings account. The architect accepted the offer immediately, gratefully. Marco probably could have bought the house for a lot less, but he wanted it badly. It was perfect. He thinks it still is perfect, as does Dany. “I love my house,” she's told me. With everyone else running away from the city, Marco sank into Juárez all he had in the world. At the closing, as he turned over his pesos and signed the deed and other paperwork, he saw himself as Juarense for the long term. At that closing, Christian Sanchez shook Marco's hand. And then he moved to Cancún to start over. He moved that very same day.

GABINO IS THE first Indio I find. The stadium has emptied—it was never that full to begin with—and the youth teams of both Atlante and Los Indios are on the field for their meaningless exhibition. I spot the head coach in a box seat, along with the Indios' goalkeeper coach and the team doctor. Gabino shakes my hand politely when I step into the box, but it's obvious he's in a bad mood, and not merely the kind of upset anyone might feel after a loss. He's angrier than that, very mad. He had prepared the team to play their best, he thought, had all his ducks lined up in a just-right row. Yet his forwards failed him, as usual. It's as if a few key players didn't care that the loss permanently kills the Primera dream and that everyone, including Gabino, is now stained with red stripes of stink. The goalkeeper coach signals to Gabino that it's time to go, that the team bus is about to leave. Gabino signals back that he's going to stay. The team can leave without him.

I slink out of the box as quietly as I can, heading to the parking lot to see if I can catch Marco. We're in different hotels, and I'm staying in Cancún yet one more extra day—why not, right?—so this might be my only chance to talk to him. I pass Domino's pizza vendors liquidating their inventories with slashed prices—a whole pie for about a dollar. Beer ladies who'd expected more fans at the game roll coolers full of unopened Corona bottles through the loose gravel that rings the stadium. I watch a young female television reporter navigate the gravel in five-inch stilettos. Her skirt is the shortest I have ever seen in the wild, so mini I really, truly, and honestly cannot help but notice that her panties match her tight black tank top. When she finally makes her wobbly way over to the dressing rooms, Atlante players crowd around her, eager to be interviewed.

There's significantly less buzz outside the Indios' locker room. I'm the only Juárez guy here, and only two Cancún reporters collect the obligatory “We feel bad” quotes from the losers. “We knew we were going down,” Marco tells me. “We just hoped it would be longer before it was official.” Marco and I both notice Alain N'Kong—the top forward on my list of suspected quitters—signing autographs and talking to friends he made when he played down here. He's upbeat, telling jokes, smiling and laughing. It makes me mad, his indifference. I want to pull an Oskar and crack one of those Corona bottles over his skull. “Alain's living in the past,” Marco practically spits, angry too. He climbs on the bus, and a few minutes later Kong joins him. They pull away from the stadium without their coach. Atlante fans jeer as the bus slips through a guard gate. It rolls onto the street, not to come back this way for a long time, if ever again.

“They lost the game, they lost the city, they lost the people,” states the Indios' Ramón Morales in an especially melodramatic press release that lands in my cell-phone in-box. I trade in the green bib I needed to wear to sit in the press section, receiving my passport in return. It's almost eleven P.M. I'm too worked up to go back to my hotel, and I don't want to go to a spring-break nightclub. I walk Cancún in search of food, hopefully someplace far away from American college students. I cruise up and down side streets until I come across Rolandi's Restaurant Bar & Pizzeria. It might be a tourist joint—the sign is in English—but when I step inside, everyone is speaking Spanish and the pizzas smell so good and the crowd looks local and I ask for a table. I'm seated near a man and woman enjoying a date. Two women share a table across the room, under a TV showing a boxing match in Monterrey. Near me, a woman absently taps the back of her toddler, his head resting on her shoulder. A family out at almost midnight! I love it. “You're alone?” my waiter asks, concerned. Yeah, but I'm happy to be here. The ceviche is pushed, but I want comfort food tonight. Those Domino's vendors at the stadium got into my head. I order a pizza margherita topped with shrimp and onion. The waiter brings me a Negra Modelo and pours it into a tall glass. I take a long first sip and lean back in my chair.

I don't know how to feel about the Indios. Obviously they were going down. Tonight is not a big surprise or anything. “Nobody thought we'd even reach the Primera,” Marco told me once, same as that young woman I spoke to at halftime. It's been nice, for a while, to be in the fold, to be a city all of Mexico has to acknowledge is indeed in Mexico. However fleeting the coverage on ESPN Deportes, Juárez was still on ESPN Deportes. The Indios games against Santos and Toluca and Club América were broadcast across North America, sometimes even down to Colombia and Argentina. The city's name appeared in the league standings every week, if always at the very bottom. After tonight, order is simply being restored. Juárez will once again disappear.

It was clear they were going to be relegated. Of course. Not only did they need to beat Querétaro, and then Atlante tonight; they had to win five more games after that. This team that can't score needed to win seven games in a row. That was not going to happen. But we liked to think it could have. That the team would rebound just like Juárez can still rebound from this violence and become “like Las Vegas but Mexican, so better,” a city where dentists are not shot at and where ambitious architects can build a practice. The end of any dream hurts. It forces us to take a cold look at where we stand. If we're being honest with ourselves, we know Juárez won't get better, not any time soon. We know it's probably going to get a lot worse, actually. Calderón's social programs will fix nothing. Some of the maquiladoras will pack up and move to China. Some of the bus drivers that serve the remaining maquiladoras will be murdered. In the morning, the Indios will return to a hemorrhaging city.

I think of a line by the author Charles Bowden, an American who's covered Juárez for nearly two decades. Before I moved down, I read his border big three:
Juárez:
Laboratory of Our Future
,
Murder City
, and
Down by the River
. And then I put the books aside. I don't want to re-plow land he's already harvested, which is something many journalists who visit Juárez end up doing. I've even tried to dodge him physically, though, perhaps inevitably, I did run into him one Saturday afternoon at the El Paso Museum of Art. While I've kept my distance, lines he's written flash in my brain all the time. “The governments of Mexico and the United States are not waging a war
on
drugs, they're waging a war
for
drugs.” Forty years in, illegal drugs in the United States are cheaper, more available, and of better quality. Proceeds from the sale of these drugs—perhaps fifty billion dollars a year—prop up the Mexican economy. NAFTA, Bowden argues convincingly, has been a social disaster, a prime reason why so many Mexicans are compelled to illegally cross into the States. (And, by the way, border fences aren't going to stop a desperate man or woman from crossing. Fences clearly aren't in any way stopping the flow of drugs). My favorite of his many sharp insights: People in Juárez are murdered twice. First they are killed. Then their reputation is assassinated. There are exceptions for victims like Pedro Picasso or those massacred students, but for the most part, if you're gunned down, it's assumed you did something to bring on the bullet. Why else would you be killed?

I recommend Bowden's books. Yet as I sit in the pizza parlor, I find myself dwelling on a line of his I've always disagreed with. “In Juárez you cannot sustain hope,” he wrote in
Laboratory of Our Future
. No hope? Hope is all that Juarenses have. They overflow with hope. Hope is the ultimate coping mechanism. It is hope that drew so many to the border in the first place, eager to cross to the United States or, barring that, to land a factory job after the earthquake took everything or the drought evaporated their crops or NAFTA destroyed the only way to make money their family had ever known. The hope that maybe the maquiladora will work out, that the impossibly low wages—just do the math—will magically provide for the family they must leave every day. The hope that, after making the sensible and pragmatic decision to slip into the drug trade, they will be the one exception, the only man—or woman—to make it out alive: rich, honorable, loved, old. It won't happen. None of it will happen. But they can hope. There is nothing else. It is hope that repels the odor, that toxic stench as the shit they are drowning in bubbles ever higher.

Now
I'm
getting angry, like Gabino after the game. Bowden may be right after all. It's disappointing, the loss. It's truly too bad the Indios are going down. The team's failure feels like an argument against hope itself.

Chapter 16

The Dead Women

I arrive back in Juárez in a good mood somehow. I can't be that upset about the Indios; I knew they were going to lose, same as everybody else. I've enjoyed one last day at the beach. And now I get to again see my supercool new dog, who was being watched by a friend. I get to sleep in my own bed, too. “It's funny how you miss this place when you've been gone,” the bass player of an El Paso rock band said one night when I was clubbing with Paco Ibarra; the band had just returned from a California swing. The sentiment's the same on the Juárez side. Even after five days in Cancún, I'm jazzed to be back on my home turf, in such high spirits that I walk with my luggage from the Free Bridge all the way back to my apartment, maybe two miles. A choking dust floats in the air. I pass abandoned buildings and junker cars and I walk on roads bruised with potholes. None of this bothers me. When I step into my neighborhood, I hear little kids playing in their front yards. They look like animals caged behind iron bars, yes, but they are still little kids, and they are still playing. Buds green on trees lining my street. There's my apartment up ahead, and I melt a little when I see it. Home remains sweet, even in Juárez. It's funny how much I missed this place.

“Hey man, did you see that guy that got killed?” a neighbor asks me. “They killed him right over there, right at the dip in the road. I guess he was slowing his car because of the dip and they shot him. They shot up his car with a thousand bullets. It was in the news. It was right over there. He was the son of a woman who owns one of the houses over there. She was all crying. The police weren't even around.”

My neighbor is excited to be breaking the news to me. He ducks inside his apartment to fetch a copy of
PM
published the day after the shooting. He saved the paper because our building appears in it, like we're famous. Yep, there's my usual parking space. That is indeed my apartment right there in the photograph. The man was executed maybe a hundred yards from my front door. “Liquefied by bullets” is how the newspaper put it. And if my neighbor hadn't told me about the shooting and saved the paper, I wouldn't have known a thing. All the evidence has been swept up, like it never happened.

THE VERY FIRST time Marco and I went to lunch, he gave me a somewhat surreal driving tour of the city. There's the new consulate flying the American flag. There's the mall, and there's the bowling alley, the only place we feel safe going out at night. Here's where I was carjacked. Oh, and you've heard about the dead women, right? That cotton field over there is where a bunch of them were found.

I'd heard about the dead women. Until it evolved into the killing capital of the world, Juárez was best known for one thing: the murder of women. The basic storyline has been disseminated in newspapers, via television and radio reports, even in the arts. There's Oskar's favorite book,
2666.
(“It concerns what may be the most horrifying real-life mass-murder spree of all time: as many as 400 women killed in the vicinity of Juárez, Mexico,” wrote Stephen King in a review published in
Entertainment Weekly.
) There have been separate movies starring Jennifer Lopez, Jimmy Smits, and Minnie Driver. TruTV.com posted “Ciudad Juárez: The Serial Killer's Playground.”
Ms
. magazine published “The Maquiladora Murders,” linking the dead women of Juárez to free trade policies. Tori Amos wrote a song. Jane Fonda and Sally Field marched over from El Paso to read
The Vagina Monologues.
Juárez: It's where women are murdered just because they're women, and where authorities care so little about women they refuse to resolve the crimes.

I still see the religious iconography around town. Painted pink crosses, a little faded by now, cling to telephone poles along Avenida Colegio Militar, in view of the border and Texas beyond. A large wooden cross framed in pink and studded with the kind of spikes that crucified Jesus Christ guards the Santa Fe Bridge, the last thing a tourist sees before walking back to El Paso. With tourists no longer visiting, the spikes have been repurposed as hooks for plastic trash bags and as shelving for newspapers sold to Mexicans lined up to escape. Deeper inland, a pink cross welded from metal rebar protects the justice center. And there are still eight small pink wooden crosses huddled in that cotton field Marco pointed out to me, the site where the decaying bodies of eight young women were found.

Femicide, as the mysterious killings have come to be called, first received attention in Juárez close to twenty years ago. That attention has not abated, at least internationally, even as the city has undergone its dramatic upswing in overall violence. In the past few months, I've seen femicide stories in the
Christian Science Monitor
, in the
Los Angeles Times
, and on several news broadcasts. The dead women were a plot point on the television show
NCIS.
Drexel University in Philadelphia, in conjunction with Amnesty International, sponsored an “ArtMarch” to call attention to those being murdered in Juárez “simply because they're women.” On International Women's Day (March 8), a group called Sydney Action for Juárez gathered in the center of their Australian city wearing pink-and-black clothes and carrying pink crosses.

“Most of the Juárez femicides have been young maquiladora workers,” the group's coordinator told the
Sydney Morning Herald
. “The women seem to be targeted just because they are women.”

Most significantly, just before I moved down, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that a pattern of gender-based violence in Juárez had been well established by the time the women's bodies were discovered in the cotton field, in 2001. The Mexican government was ordered, among other things, to continue investigating the cotton-field murders and to give $800,000 in compensation to the victims' families and their lawyers.

“This ruling is a landmark,” Amnesty International's Mexico researcher, Rupert Knox, told me via e-mail. “It confirms that femicide has occurred and that the State's failure to prevent and punish the crimes is a violation of the State's responsibilities. This is important.”

When Knox sent me that e-mail he was an ocean away, in London, where he lives and works. The court that ruled that a femicide has occurred in Juárez adjourned in Costa Rica, several countries south of Mexico. In my time on the border, I've noticed that when the topic of femicide comes up, the words locals use to describe the dead women often differ dramatically from those disseminated by Amnesty International over in Europe or by the court down in Central America. When I'm in Juárez I hear words like “myth.” And “black legend.” And “a great lie.” When I showed a young Juarense a photograph I'd taken of a pink cross, she scrunched her face into a frown.

“Ugh,” she said. “That's super cliché.”

“FEMICIDE IS LIKE a religion,” Molly Molloy told me the first time I met her. “I used to be a true believer. Then when I started looking at the real numbers, I changed my opinion. Now I'm a heretic. Now I'm like someone who has escaped from a cult and feels compelled to attack the cult.”

Although she's not even five feet tall, Molloy has become one of the most visible people studying La Frontera. A librarian at New Mexico State University, in Las Cruces, she's spent almost two decades collecting and disseminating information about the border. She reads every newspaper published in Juárez, every morning, in an attempt to track every death in the city. Three, five, nine times a day, she updates her Frontera listserv with stories of fresh kills and with articles about Juárez published in the
Washington Post
, the
London Guardian
, and anywhere she finds them. When I went to visit her at the NMSU library, I found an
Onion
headline taped to her office door: KITTEN THINKS OF NOTHING BUT MURDER ALL DAY.

The Frontera listserv has given Molloy a platform she has not hesitated to use. In frequent e-mails, she slaps down any reporter who dares romanticize the border, perhaps by lamenting the sharp drop-off in business at the Kentucky Club. “I have a hard time balancing more than 28,000 dead in Mexico and nearly 6,500 dead in Juárez with the hard times of a few bars,” she wrote after the airing of an NPR story.

Her biggest criticisms, the ones she marshals the most energy to launch, come when any journalist, academic, or filmmaker dares focus solely on Juárez's dead women. Her 2,600-word essay “A Perspective on the Murders of Human Beings (Women, Men & Children of Both Genders) in Ciudad Juárez” arrived in electronic mailboxes packed with stats and supporting a main point Molloy is increasingly comfortable espousing: What is happening in Juárez is much more than a femicide. It's a human-rights disaster.

“Those in the press and academia who have written extensively about the murders of women, those who coined the term ‘femicide' to define the killing of women as a product of their gender, seldom acknowledge the actual numbers of victims of violence in Juárez and the fact that the killings of women are a small percentage of the total,” she wrote. “And that this gender ratio in murder statistics is not uncommon, not in Mexico, not elsewhere.”

In 2001, the year the eight bodies were found in the Juárez cotton field, 12 percent of all murder victims in Juárez were women. That's not a high percentage for any city in North America, and 2001 wasn't an anomaly. The rates have held steady since 1993. Since 2008, when the overall murder rate in Juárez accelerated, the percentage of women murdered has fallen below 7 percent. By comparison, close to a
quarter
of all murder victims in the United States are women.

Some of Molloy's other findings:

It is not true that hundreds of the murders of women that occurred in Juárez between 1993 and 2007 are unsolved. The majority of the cases have been shown—by Mexican officials as well as by independent researchers—to be domestic violence cases: The killers are known, and they were known to the victims.

Across Mexico, the number of women killed per capita between 1995 and 2005 has been highest in cities in the center of the country, not in Juárez or anywhere else along the border.

And then there's impunity. It's a core contention among femicide proponents that
machismo
has kept Mexican authorities from prosecuting crimes against women. The Inter-American Court for Human Rights specifically ruled that “gender bias” undermined the government's investigation of the cotton-field murders. Molloy counters, with sources, that 99 percent of
all
reported crimes in Mexico go unpunished, male victim or female victim. And only one in one hundred crimes are reported in the first place.

“I don't want to be misunderstood,” Molloy later insisted to me via e-mail. “There's nothing wrong with people mobilizing, organizing and challenging the government in Juárez and Chihuahua to solve these murders. There's nothing wrong with these women [from the cotton field] getting a judgment against the State for not solving these cases. These cases deserve attention. The wrong thing is not what the Mexican activists have done. It's what the idiotic American and international activist and feminist theorizers and these Hollywood people have done in turning it into this mysterious untrue thing, this myth.”

THE MYSTERY, EVERYONE agrees, began back in 1993. Amado Carrillo Fuentes took control of the Juárez Cartel. The murder rate in the city subsequently took off. The number of men killed doubled from the year before, from fifty to one hundred. The number of women murdered shot up from six deaths in 1992 to twenty-three, almost a quadrupling. A retired accountant named Esther Chávez Cano focused on the spike in female murders in a column she'd launched at
El Diario
.

Chávez became an exceptional advocate. She was never afraid to call up a journalist or a politician or anyone else she felt could prod the government into action. She criticized officials up to the state governor for, at least initially, blaming the victims for staying out late at night or for dressing provocatively. When her activism prompted reforms, Chávez insisted that the reforms never went far enough. Not one more murdered woman was her goal—
Ni una más
, to this day the rallying cry of the femicide movement. Chávez went on to found Casa Amiga, the border's first rape crisis shelter. She won the Mexican government's National Human Rights Award, specifically for her work on behalf of “the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez.” She died of cancer on Christmas Day 2009.

“She literally changed the world for women in Juárez, bringing the struggle of the raped, the disappeared, the discarded women and girls to global attention,” wrote
Vagina Monologues
author Eve Ensler, who performed her play in Ciudad Juárez in 2004, along with the actresses Sally Field, Jane Fonda, and Christine Lahti.

Hollywood actresses marching across the Santa Fe Bridge marked the high point of the femicide movement in Juárez itself, says Kathleen Staudt, a UTEP anthropologist. After that, at least locally, energy began to drop off. I stopped by Staudt's office one morning during a break between classes. An insect frozen in amber held down papers on her desk. A poster from Amnesty International hung on a wall behind her chair. The poster featured a green road sign embossed with the words WELCOME TO CIUDAD JUÁREZ. The overall population of the city was listed on the road sign, as well as the total number of men who live in the city. There was no corresponding number for women, only an arrow pointing to a graveyard.

“Away from the border, some would surely wonder how many border women were still alive,” Staudt told me with a chuckle. “I don't know if they did that for fundraising purposes or what.”

In her 2008 book
Activism on the Border
, Staudt credited Chávez with introducing femicide to a wider audience. Juárez proved conveniently malleable, a blank slate upon which anyone or any group could sell whatever agenda they pleased. With none of the crimes ever prosecuted, any theory behind the murders remained, technically, viable.