This Love Is Not for Cowards (23 page)

I again asked for their names and for some way I could contact them. I repeated that it was simply fact-checking, that I needed to make sure they actually existed. “There are a couple people you can ask, but they're not there anymore. And I'd have to contact them, okay?” she replied. Washington Valdez promised to contact them and get back to me. She has yet to do so.

That list she read in London also traveled with her to Philadelphia for her speech at Drexel. She reads from it on camera in a video posted on YouTube. Printed on the list are the five likely reasons women have been murdered in Juárez:

Drug dealers killed women with impunity, including to even celebrate successful crossings of drugs across the border.

Violent gangs that have killed women to initiate new members.

Two or more serial killers who are still loose, never been arrested.

A group of powerful men who killed women at different times for different reasons.

And then you have your copycats who have taken advantage of this situation to hide their own murders.

Powerful men killing women at different times for different reasons? That sure is broad. Serial killers? An FBI investigation in 1999 concluded that the sex crimes were probably committed by many different men who did not know each other. “It would be irresponsible to state that a serial killer is loose in Juárez,” the agency reported. Reading her book and her articles on femicide and watching all her videos on YouTube, I started to wonder if maybe Washington Valdez is being pranked. That perhaps one of her unnamed sources told her that a serial killer from Tijuana was murdering women for blood sport just to see if she'd run with it. Orgies involving
los juniors
, the offspring of the wealthy elite? Harvesting of organs? Her published theories lack any possible path to reinvestigation. They can't be checked out in any way.

“It's not my job to solve the crimes,” she told me at lunch. “It's the investigators'. They know who did it.”

Three times in our interview, she said she couldn't answer a specific question because it would put her in too much danger. She told me she can't go into Juárez anymore for her own safety, that she's grown too high-profile. Spookiness, I suspect, is central to her appeal. She's invited to travel the world on the femicide speaking circuit because she hypes the mystery. Since none of the murders have been prosecuted, none of her theories can be proven wrong. And her theories are much more exciting than what has been documented to be behind the majority of the murders, at least before 2007: domestic violence. Given what Washington Valdez includes in her list, it's worth noting what she leaves out. She never mentions the word “boyfriend.” Or the word “husband.”

“There are reporters in Juárez who actually think it's a myth,” Washington Valdez told me at lunch. She was referring to the whole femicide phenomenon. From the expression on her face, I gathered that I was supposed to find this unbelievable. This reporter—who has blamed the dead women of Juárez on villains ranging from orgy throwers to “blood sport” psychopaths to organ harvesters to two or more currently active serial killers—looked at me as if the idea that there never has been a femicide in Juárez was the craziest thing she'd ever heard.

“PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED in the dead women of Juárez because it's a way not to look at Juárez,” Charles Bowden said in an interview broadcast on NPR. “If you say it's young girls, sixteen to eighteen, being killed by a serial killer or rich guys for fun or whatever, then you have a finite problem and you don't have to look at the city. And you can ignore the fact that while one to three hundred women have vanished, depending on who's counting, 2,800
people
have died. You can ignore the fact that seven hundred men have disappeared in the same period. You can just pretend that really the only problem in Juárez is this bizarre slaughter of young girls, and then you're safe.”

Bowden was one of the first journalists to bring wide attention to the dead women of Juárez. In
Murder City
he eulogized Esther Chávez as a champion for justice. Yet he regards his initial writings on femicide with some regret.

“I created a Frankenstein's monster without even knowing it!” he told me. “Suddenly there developed this cottage industry.”

The longer I've lived in Juárez, the more I feel the city's problems have little to do with gender. Girls are not being snatched off the street by serial killers or kidnapped and killed by U.S. Border Patrol officers making snuff films or whatever it was Gaspar de Alba conjured up for her mystery novel. The problem is that life itself in Juárez, across the board, has been devalued. Murder is effectively legal. You can kill almost anyone you want just about anytime you want. To separate the killings of women from this larger truth is to misdiagnose what is really wrong.

“Mexicans who have tried to solve cases of murdered women have actually taken real risks,” Molloy tells me. “They've organized and criticized the government. And they have suffered retributions of one kind or another. They've been harassed. That doesn't mean the focus on this should be based on something false. The truth is bad enough. It's just more mundane.”

I believe her. I believe that what happened to the dead women of Juárez is bad. It is horrible! But it isn't all that mysterious. What happened to them—what is still happening to women in Juárez—is what would be happening to a percentage of women in any city in the world where the government has given up on law and order. It's remarkable, actually, considering the mayhem in this town, that more women aren't among the dead.

THE COTTON FIELD isn't far from my apartment. At midday, the field broils in the sun. A woman walks past me, shaded under a pink umbrella. She swings a bottle of Coca-Cola in her free hand. A friend walking with her flips through
PM,
the daily documentation of fresh kills. They pass old cement blocks piled into mounds. I spy a box of aluminum foil with some foil still on the roll. An old cup of
Danonino
drinkable yogurt molds on the ground next to a flattened plastic Sprite bottle. And the fender from a truck, one work glove, a crushed Marlboro box, and countless squares of Styrofoam. This remains a place where things are dumped.

Every documentary about the dead women of Juárez includes a scene filmed out here. Diana Washington Valdez, in both the author photo on her book and the profile photo on her Facebook page, is standing in the cotton field, in front of eight wooden crosses painted pink. The crosses have changed over the years. In some photos I've seen, the crosses are tall and feature the names of each woman found here painted in cursive letters. The crosses in the field this afternoon are shorter, have the words NI UNA MÁS stenciled on them in black paint, and feature a stenciled fist inside the symbol of Venus. Three of the crosses stand in the dirt, their stability bolstered by small piles of rocks. The five other crosses have toppled and lie in a pile.

“Even if they were not statistically significant (ever) they are certainly significant in human rights terms,” Molloy once told me in an e-mail. She was referring to the women found in the cotton field and also to the court case their families fought. “The fact that the families were ignored and spurned and even ridiculed by the government officials is really important. Esther's work in calling upon the government to do something was so very important. She called the government on their impunity. And that was a good, important and risky thing for her to do.

“I'm not against anyone,” Molloy added. “I don't want to seem flippant. I respect what people think, I really do. If it was my daughter murdered, I'd be crusading the rest of my life.”

I understand that. I understand why these mothers of the murdered women keep fighting, why all the activists aligned with the mothers fight, too. In a city where nobody gets justice, they have collectively convinced an international court to pay attention to their cases, and convinced that court to demand that the governments of Mexico, Chihuahua, and Ciudad Juárez pay attention to the cases, too. It's token. Nobody, especially not the families, expects the government to ever solve these crimes. But attention means something. Women from Philadelphia to Sydney are marching in the streets. Cash reparations have been ordered. If it takes a murder mystery to keep the attention flowing, then, well, fine.

Driving back from the cotton field, I stop at my apartment to feed my dog and pick up a pile of laundry. It's a short drive on to the Rio Grande Mall. There's a
lavandería
there, and I need to wash my dirty clothes for the week. I turn north up Montes de Oca, crossing a handful of east-west streets. At
Avenida Vicente Gurrero
, at a red light, I notice two fliers pasted to a yellow utility poll. Such fliers are common in this city, yet they are something I usually, almost deliberately, try not to notice. The fliers are for a missing girl. They are taped to a utility pole the way someone in another city would advertise a lost pet. She happens to be young and female, this missing person. I know she does not represent all the dead. I know there are many other people besides girls who go missing in Juárez. But still.

The light changes to green. I don't want to move, but there are cars behind me. I touch the gas and roll through the intersection. Extortion, murder, fliers for missing girls—it's all in our faces every day. At the
lavandería
, I throw my clothes inside a couple machines, separating the colors from the whites, adding soap and dropping tokens to start the wash. I watch suds bubble up. I think about the girl's parents doing everything they can to get their daughter back. Everything—anything—though we all know there's little chance she's still alive. I imagine them taping up the fliers, hoping for some response, and … the sadness is more than unspeakable. I feel so sad, thinking about it. It is so utterly sad.

Chapter 17

Good Sports

Semana santa. Holy week on La Frontera. Gyms and restaurants close up early or shut down altogether. Teenagers lug wooden crosses around Juárez, reenacting the passion of Jesucristo. A massive sandstorm settles over the valley, ramping up the biblical feel. I can no longer see Franklin Mountain from the rattling windows of my apartment. Sand scratches my sheets, my tile floors, and the old couch in the living room. An almond grit coats my kitchen counters, even gets inside my refrigerator somehow. The murder rate drops dramatically. On Holy Thursday, only two people are killed, both of them before sundown. This leaves the vampires on Channel 44 scrambling for something to cover. They need blood to survive.

“
Juárez está tranquilo
,” reports Gaby, their main newswoman out in the field. The anchor—that Crypt Keeper guy—cuts over to another reporter driving around streets empty of all traffic. This second guy has nothing to relay, either, though he tap-dances impressively for close to four minutes. Eventually they cut back to Gaby, who has found an awning that has blown down in the strong wind.

On Easter, the Son of God rises from the dead. The Indios remain in their grave. They lose at home to Pachuca, a championship team from a relatively small town—think of them as the Green Bay Packers of Mexican soccer. The final score is 2–1, a competitive enough game. The real battle is taking place off the field. A full-on mutiny brews. Players, with no more season to save and nothing else to lose, openly grumble about not, you know, being paid. The papers run with the complaints, building a case against Francisco Ibarra. He's a terrible businessman, apparently, a soccer screwup. Surely he'll be forced to sell the team. So loud is the grumbling that before the Pachuca game kicked off, Ibarra took to the field with a microphone. Don't listen to the stories, he implored the fans. I'm not going to sell the team. The Indios aren't going anywhere.

“I have such a headache, brother,” Gil Cantú tells me when he shows up at the Yvasa complex for the next practice. “I only got four hours of sleep last night, and the whole time I was dreaming about the Indios.” He says that Kappa, the uniform provider, hasn't sent the Indios a promised check. Even S-Mart is withholding funds; the supermarket chain wants to distance its brand from Gil's team of confirmed losers. At S-Marts throughout Juárez, everything Indios has been reduced to half price. Jerseys, hats, water bottles, and even, in the automotive aisle, Indios-logo air fresheners to hang from rearview mirrors.

“It's hard to pay the players if our sponsors don't pay us,” Gil tells me before stepping onto the pitch to address the team, hoping to quell the mutiny. “But we need to pay them their money. How can we ask them to do all these things, to work so hard, if we don't?”

Marco stays relatively quiet. He doesn't want to publicly complain about Francisco or Gil or his missing pay because, while the team has been struggling, Marco's professional stock is on the rise. He starts every week, without question. His stress-free defensive play is in no way responsible for the Indios' descent. (That would be the lack of goals.) Even though he has no agent nor a grand plan beyond finishing out the season as best he can, he's hoping someone will notice him, and will rescue him from this mess.

“Have you seen how people are tearing their Indios stickers off their cars?” Marco asks me, stretching at midfield after Gil wraps up his briefing. I have noticed a few cars with soccer-ball-shaped patches of glue where logos used to be. I've also noticed that the groundskeepers at the Yvasa training complex have taken down the JUÁREZ: LAND OF CHAMPIONS banner. “Everything was great here,” Marco says. “I was happy here. Then it went down.”

Practice is extra crowded this morning. A crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has descended for a story on the Indios' sad end. The Canadians arrived in two trucks, with two cameramen, a producer, an interpreter flown up from Mexico City, and a correspondent flown in all the way from England. The correspondent tells me she rode in a truck with
federales
last night, but they didn't come across a body, to her disappointment. I tell her she should have gone out with Channel 44. No better way to find a corpse, unless it's Holy Thursday.

With no dead bodies on their B-roll, the Canadians have brought to the practice some live ones: boys from Colonia Altavista, Maleno Frias's old hood. The cameramen film the boys talking to Maleno. Indios sign jerseys for the kids, and that's a wrap. The CBC packs everything up, I wish them well, and they drive off. Marco scurries to the locker room; he's got a pre-wedding obligation to attend with Dany. Head Coach Gabino steps into the interview room, it being his turn to take questions from the press. The local reporters follow him inside, eager to ask about the financial crisis. I stay outside to bathe in a sun that's emerged for the first time in a week.

There's another visitor at practice today, one not brought by the CBC. She's a young girl missing a leg. She lost it when a Mexican soldier shipped to the border to make Juárez safer got drunk and crashed his truck into her family car. Her metal limb is painted pink. A white sock decorates its false foot, which tucks into a clunky black Mary Jane. The fake leg is a little too long for the girl's body; I guess she'll grow into it soon enough. It juts out to the side a few degrees when she hobbles after the soccer ball the team gave her. The ball has been autographed by all the players, but when the girl received it, she immediately bounced the ball on a concrete sidewalk; a toy is more fun to a seven-year-old than a collectible. The team gave her a jersey, too, also autographed, but she peeled it off as soon as the sun emerged. She's really cute, and of course more than a little heartbreaking.

Her presence isn't a media stunt. The CBC didn't even notice her. Someone in the front office—Wendy, I think—simply thought the girl would enjoy a morning with the team. It's cool how the Indios give attention to kids like her, victims of the violence and the military buildup. The girl hobbles around and shoots on Christian the goalie. He's on his knees, grunting with her every kick as if it takes great effort to stop the ball. When a shot rolls past him, he howls in disappointment, which makes the girl smile. She puts her all into each kick, planting her artificial limb so she can swing with her live leg. On her approach, she hops twice on her good leg, once on her limb, twice more on her good leg, and then she kicks.

Team captain Juan de la Barrera walks over and asks if he can join the game.
Claro que sí!
she shouts. Of course! She asks him to hold her hand so she can put more torque on her shot. Sometimes she kicks the ball with such force she topples over, even with Juan holding her. She always bounces right back up, always laughing. Neither Juan nor Christian has been paid in months. With practice over, their responsibilities to the team have been met. Yet they play with the girl for close to an hour. They're not doing it to burnish their images or the fading reputation of their team. If they even think of me as a reporter, they can't tell I'm watching. They just do things like this. Although they play for the worst team in the history of Mexican soccer, they know they can still make people happy. It's a role they're pleased to still play.

“IT WAS THE most awkward text I've ever gotten.”

Arson Loskush is telling me about his brother's murder. We're at a Texas Roadhouse on the far west side of El Paso, just off the interstate and close to the yellow-and-red signs welcoming drivers to New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. His brother, Charlie, had sent the text. What it said, the text of the text, wasn't so odd: “Call me back!” It's the timing that makes it hard for Arson to forget. The text hit his cell phone around midnight on an evening when everyone was celebrating a Mexico win in World Cup qualifying. About an hour later, Arson learned Charlie had been shot.

“I didn't find out through the police or anybody. I found out through this girl. She was in Juárez celebrating the win with everyone else. My mom had gone earlier that day to visit Charlie, and he told her he was going to watch the game at a bar with this guy he knows. When Charlie texted me, I tried to call him back, but I couldn't get through. At around one, that's when this girl rang my phone. She said there was a shooting at Bongos on Lincoln. The crime scene was a mess, she said. It was dirty with glass and bullets and lots of blood. She thought maybe Charlie's truck was involved—the truck was the same model and color as Charlie's. I asked her if there were a bunch of stickers on the back window. She looked and said, ‘Yes.' I asked if one of the stickers said ‘El Kartel.' When she said yes, that's when I knew for sure Charlie had been shot.”

Arson's just finished up a shift at his father-in-law's warehouse, restoring big wooden spools built to hold copper wire. I happened to be on the El Paso side, so we've met up. We've been running into each other quite a bit lately, an indication Arson is hanging around El Kartel more often these days. His story of Charlie's murder lines up in fundamental ways with the version first relayed to me by Saul Luna. The main differences: Arson never brings up La Línea. Or drugs—trafficking, or their consumption. Also, Arson never mentions a fat man named J. L. Those details, in his memory, aren't relevant.

“My mom used to work at the Bowie Bakery, in El Paso's Segundo Barrio. She'd cross over from Juárez through this tunnel. Lots of people would do it, every day. She'd work a full shift, and then she'd walk back to the tunnel and return to Juárez. When I was three months old, we all crossed over and just stayed. We came over illegally. That's the attitude: Get here first, then figure it out. We got permanent residency cards the year I turned seventeen. Charlie would have been nineteen. Right after we all got residency, that's when Charlie got busted robbing a house. They deported him back to Juárez. He'd sneak back over to see us sometimes, but he got caught doing that, too. He was a screwup. He had bad luck his whole life. So he was over in Juárez for good. My mom, she would go visit him every three days. She'd bring him money and clothes and food.

“Being deported really does fuck with you. He'd embrace people, anyone, and that's how he got linked to bad shit. Like the night he got shot, he went to watch the Mexico game with this guy we'd never heard of. We don't know where they met. We know only that the guy had called him up and asked if he could catch a ride to the bar to watch the game. Everybody wanted to watch the game, right? Before they go over to the bar, Charlie swings by this mechanic he knows. The mechanic tries to warn him to be careful, that the dude he's with is dangerous. We later find out that the mechanic saw a gun.

“When that girl called me, I called my mom. I went home and woke her up. I said, ‘Something's happened to Carlos; we're going to Juárez.'

“We went to the clinic where they told us they'd taken Charlie. In the waiting room there was a path of blood from where they were bringing in the bodies constantly. We can see blood dripping from one guy. We can hear him, too, still alive but choking on blood, gasping for air. The doctors told my mom there was nothing they could do for Charlie but wait for him to pass away. ‘Wait?!' my mom yelled. ‘What the fuck does that mean? You can do something!' They gave my mom the runaround. As she's arguing with the doctors, I'm listening to that one guy choke on his blood. I'm looking at him and suddenly I realize that it's Charlie, that he's the one choking on his own blood!

“We need somebody to transfer Charlie to a hospital as quickly as possible. We have to find an ambulance. But we can't find one willing to stop by the clinic. We eventually get an ambulance to show up, but when it gets there, the driver asks what had happened to my brother. When we said he'd been shot, the driver wouldn't transport him—he doesn't deal with victims of gun violence. We had to beg and then sign forms and also pay the driver in cash up front. It takes us two hours, but we finally get Charlie to the best hospital in Juárez, Hospital Angeles. When we get there, the doctors tell us the same thing: that they don't take shooting victims. My mom yells and argues and finally they say they'll take Charlie, but we have to pay five thousand dollars in cash right then and there, and then they're going to charge us a thousand dollars for every half hour after that. And Charlie ended up staying in the hospital for two weeks!

“Military and federal police guarded the intensive care unit. They set up two roadblocks. Two municipal police stood outside Charlie's room. One of the first things a soldier says to us was that from here on out we shouldn't speak to any of the municipal guys. ‘Don't give them addresses. Don't share with them any personal information. These people are involved in all this,' the soldier said. ‘We can't trust them. They already know what happened. They know more than you do. So don't tell them anything.' The municipal officers who were guarding the door started asking me about my brother. That made me suspicious. Why are they so interested in finding out about him if they've just been assigned to guard the room?

“We actually thought Charlie would make it at first. The doctors gave us hope. Even though he'd been shot in the head, his mind seemed to still be working. He was reacting to sounds and voices. But he got really sick that second week. He started getting blisters in his mouth, infections in his mouth and down his throat. The infections spread into his lungs and made them collapse. He passed away on the sixteenth of September. It was ironic to me that he had been celebrating Mexico's win.

“A lot of players sent condolences. Guys on the team called me up to say they were sorry. I heard that Juanpi [Uruguayan midfielder Juan Pablo Rodríguez] was out driving to a restaurant with his wife when a teammate called him and told him somebody from El Kartel got killed. Juanpi just drove around. He didn't eat. Instead of going to a restaurant, he ended up returning home. He called the El Kartel office and left a message for me. He wanted me to know he was sorry.