This Love Is Not for Cowards (8 page)

That would be the Sinaloa Cartel. Picture them in uniforms the same navy blue as the federal police, who are believed to be under their control. (Alternate uniforms: green, for the army, which they control, too.) The Sinaloans are dominant upstarts. Their star player is Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the most wanted man in the world. A drug trafficker hunted everywhere but, it seems, in Mexico. El Chapo bribed his way out of a maximum-security federal prison in 2001, escaping in a laundry cart. Officially, the Mexican government wants him back in jail. There's a five-million-dollar bounty on his head. Yet El Chapo has been seen riding around the state of Chihuahua in caravans protected by the Mexican army. His Sinaloa Cartel has captured lucrative drug routes on the Pacific coast, on the Gulf coast, and in the populous heart of the country. The Sinaloans are said to control eight seaports. Chapo's cartel has even occupied its own hangar at Mexico City's international airport.

It helps that the current president is on Chapo's side. Or seems to be, at the very least. Felipe Calderón is the league commissioner, the man responsible for a level playing field. He won the presidency in 2006 by the very slimmest of margins; some two million protesters insisted the election had been rigged. To show strength, and perhaps to placate the angry masses, Calderon took office promising war on an agreed evil, the cartels. He sent troops to Baja to cripple the Tijuana Cartel. He ordered the army to take down the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel. He won some battles. In almost every victory, the Sinaloans, whom he insists he is also at war with, ended up moving into the coveted territories, growing their cartel ever larger.

“This isn't to say that the president of Mexico has deliberately made a deal with Chapo Guzman,” UTEP anthropologist Howard Campbell tells me. “But people below him may have, and the outcome may be about the same.”

When Calderón declared his war on cartels, Chapo Guzman stepped up his pursuit of Juárez, the World Cup trophy of drug routes. Juárez has been a smuggling corridor for as long as there's been a border. Even with all the military attention shining on the city, and even with $3.4 billion from the United States government to fight importation, Juárez remains an ideal place to move drugs up to Dallas and Denver and Chicago and Manhattan. La Línea has been vulnerable ever since Amado Carrillo died during plastic surgery, in 1997. (The bodies of the Colombian surgeons who botched the operation were found encased in concrete.) Guzman wants Juárez. The home team refuses to give it up. Last man standing. That's what the fight is. That's the sport being played.

El Chapo's game plan is scorched earth. Kill, burn, behead. Destroy anything in his path. Since the Sinaloans invaded Juárez, some ten thousand stores and restaurants have burned down or been otherwise extorted out of business. An entire roster of La Línea players have been executed or tortured or both. The home team matches this aggression with a spirited counterattack. La Línea foot soldiers shoot Sinaloans and decapitate turncoats who jump like grasshoppers to the other team. The rise in violence is in itself a victory for the visitors. If La Línea can no longer guarantee stability, then there's no reason for the city to tolerate its historically murderous presence. Just give us a winner, the people demand. We just want to get back to work.

The game has raged for three years now. There are no signs it's about to stop, and no shortage of bodies waiting on the benches of both teams. The cartels remain stocked with moonlighting police whose day jobs give them guns and badges but not enough money to live on. These cops fight alongside migrants unable to find honest work in a city with a recession-hammed unemployment rate that has climbed in five years from less than zero—there were more jobs in Juárez than there were people to fill them—to over 20 percent. Even those “lucky” enough to find work in the maquiladoras can earn less than one hundred dollars for six days of labor. It's cheaper to live in Juárez than in El Paso, but not by
that
much. You need to eat. Your kids need to eat. You do what you have to do.

The league commissioner flies up to Juárez on the Thursday after the massacre. I leave practice early to try and catch him, but my car is blocked by traffic when they shut down the Carreterra Panamericana, the main road to the airport. All I can do is watch as Felipe Calderón rolls past in a caravan of Chevrolet Suburbans with heavily tinted windows, long radio antennas, and Mexican tricolors for license plates. First stop, I will later watch on the news, is the Villas de Salvarcar, where the massacre occurred. The president meets with the families of “Los Estudiantes,” as the dead have come to be called. “They were good students and good kids,” he says. “I'm sorry.” Protesters respond with signs stating CALDERON DOESN'T SERVE YOU and CALDERON: FUCK YOUR SYSTEM.

At a convention center near his hotel, the commissioner outlines a new social program, Todos Somos Juárez—“We Are All Juárez”—named so that residents of Monterrey and Toluca feel connected to the border violence. He vows to expand his efforts beyond the military. There will be sports centers for youth, more social programs, and subsidized health care for 25,000 families. He says he'll improve 066, the Mexican version of 911. Free English classes will be taught. The specificity of his promises amazes me. At one point, he vows to start up an orchestra. But even while protesters chant that the soldiers are part of the problem, Calderón also announces he is flying four more military helicopters to the border, to aid his ongoing cartel war. At least 435 additional federal police will join the thousands of soldiers and federal police already patrolling Juárez—troops and police widely believed to be serving the visiting team from Sinaloa. Several women in the convention-center audience stand up and turn their backs.

“As far as I'm concerned, you are not welcome here,” a mother of two boys slain in the Student Massacre shouts at Calderón, dramatically standing right in front of him, maybe four feet from his face. “If somebody killed your child, you'd be looking for his murderer.”

The audience claps when the mother finishes chewing out their nation's president. Calderón stays quiet in his seat behind a conference table. Functionaries flank his shoulders. Whatever his intentions, whatever his alliances, Calderón is the commissioner of a game with one of the ugliest scoreboards of all time: more than nineteen thousand Mexicans slaughtered since he launched his war. In Juárez, in January alone, 217 fresh kills. Among the dead: fourteen “good students and good kids.”

THE SUNDAY OF the game against Monarcas Morelia is the nicest day in Juárez since I've moved here. A bright sun lifts the winter chill. It's still sweater weather—most of the players will take the field for warm-ups in long-sleeved jerseys—yet the air is exceptionally soft for the first week of February, fresh in a way that carries the promise of spring. It feels good to be alive, even to be right here at this particular spot on the map. No clouds blot the bright sky. The trash and broken windows I pass on my walk to the stadium don't seem so ugly. The paint peeling off abandoned houses gives off a shabby-chic sort of vibe, reminiscent of the old palazzos in Venice. Sort of. A little bit.

I watch the game with Gil Cantú. He usually sits in the stands just below the press box, one section over from where Francisco Ibarra sits with his family. Gil's knee twitches during the Mexican national anthem, which always precedes kickoff. “I was up all night worrying about the game,” he shares. “If you don't worry, that means you don't care anymore.” The Indios come out energized. Edwin and King Kong and Maleno Frías launch sustained attacks on the Monarcas goal. The Indios hold on to the ball for so long, waiting for a defensive mistake, that they seem to be toying with the visitors. It's a cocky performance. Whenever Monarcas do manage to touch the ball, Marco—he's started his third game in a row—calmly squelches their attacks, distributing the ball back to Edwin for another offensive push. TV cameras pan the bleachers where El Kartel waves its flags. My learned pessimism has vanished. The Indios definitely belong in the Primera. Then, seconds before halftime, a Monarcas forward somehow slips an impossible, low-percentage shot past goalie Christian Martínez. That's all they need. That ends up being the final score: 1–0. Another loss.

“They're all on the take,” Gil spits, venting to me about the refs. “Bad calls cost us seven points last season. They cost us at least one point today. Probably three! I know for a fact the refs don't want to travel anymore to Ciudad Juárez. No one in the league wants to come to Ciudad Juárez anymore.”

The refs? Aren't the Indios losing because they can't score? The players don't appear to have the skills. They
want
to do the right thing. They work hard, in my opinion. I know they practice hard. With Marco on the field, the defense has really tightened up, letting in a total of only two goals in the past three games. But who's stepping up on offense? King Alain N'Kong? No goals. He's grown so predictable I know what he's going to do the moment he touches the ball. Edwin Santibáñez? “Edwin is a fighter,” Gil whispered to me before the start of the season. “He deserves to be in the first division, but between you and me he doesn't have the talent.” I'm expecting little from this new Guatemalan striker Gil found, whose go-to move is to flop to the ground whenever he's challenged, hoping for a penalty shot. Even favorite son Maleno Frías disappoints. He hasn't scored, either. Nobody has scored.

“I told the ref at halftime, What do we gotta do—buy a TV station?” Gil continues, still arguing for a conspiracy. Monarcas are owned by TV Azteca. “They hate us. We're this city in the desert, the forgotten city in the desert. They take a lot of our tax money and use it to fund the Metro in Mexico City. Government fails us. Police fail us. The [Mexican Football] Federation fails us, too. It's not easy to play this game, but it's even harder when the refs conspire against you. It's us against twelve. It's corrupt to the core.”

Gil complains for so long I start to tune him out. Everyone gets bad calls, sir. The Indios could not have streaked to twenty-three games without a win because one corrupt guy on the field carries red and yellow cards in his pocket. If you don't want to lose by one goal, then put two goals in the other net. Score more often than the other team. Play better. “The Federation came up here last season. I told them, ‘You cost us four games,' ” Gil continues. “Four games the Federation cost us!”

He goes on, drones on. Gil is whining, showing me an unattractive side of his personality. It doesn't matter if I pay attention. I scan the field instead, watching the groundskeepers rip down the goal nets. I look up above the opposing seats to see the towering Mexican tricolor flying on this gorgeous day. It's huge, a
megabandera
, 50 meters long and 28.6 meters wide. It's also a good reminder: I'm not in the United States. I'm in a country where the former president and the drug czar were in the pocket of La Línea. I'm in a country where the current president, wittingly or not, is helping the Sinaloa Cartel take over this strategically valuable city. Mexico is where Chapo Guzmán, the most wanted man in the world, can escape from a maximum security prison with the laundry, and where he can live in relative freedom despite a five-million-dollar bounty on his head. Why wouldn't Gil believe there was a conspiracy? Is his reasoning really so irrational?

“Conspiracy?” laughs Sofia, Ken-tokey's girlfriend. “The players just don't want it bad enough. They don't give their all out there.” Sofia's standing with the rest of El Kartel in the parking lot on the west side of the stadium, along the fence protecting the team bus and the small pen where reporters interview the players after the game. I've left Gil to enter the pen. Marco took a tumble in the second half that was so serious he had to rest on the sideline for a few minutes. He returned to the pitch, but I still want to see if he's okay. While I wait, El Kartel grows more animated. They are chanting for Pepe Treviño's head. My sobriety after watching the game with Gil—he was on the job, and he doesn't drink anyway—allows me to notice how wasted El Kartel has gotten. Ken-tokey and Kinkin and several others rattle the fence. The chain links shake with enough violence that a soldier standing near me grabs what looks like a sawed-off shotgun and pulls the trigger. A canister the size of a twelve-ounce beer arcs over the fence.

Hey, that must be tear gas,
I think as the canister falls onto the parking lot. A Kartelero picks up the can and tosses it back over the fence, into the pen where I'm standing. The white trail that follows the can reminds me of a comet, or an Independence Day smoke bomb. It's kind of pretty.

Tear gas paralyzes lungs, making it impossible to breathe. “Irritates” is too mild a word for what the gas does to my eyes. It's so painful, so quickly, I find myself mad at the officer who first released it. I run from the press pen, striving not to trample a toddler in my blind animal instinct to get as far away from the gas as possible. I join a mob of fans and reporters and even police clawing back inside the stadium. Security wisely opens up the field. There's nowhere else for us to go; a toxic cloud hovers in the sheltered air over the seats where Gil and I had watched the game. The gas seeps into the owner's box, too, and then down into the players' dressing rooms. It will take hours to defumigate the motor coach that had been waiting to drive the Indios away. All around the field, men and women and quite a few children hack and spit, breathing through jackets and shirtsleeves to filter the poison. The sprinklers have started up near the southern goal, pushing us all onto the north half of the field. Close to where I'm standing, a very young boy kneels on the ground, soon dropping to all fours like a dog. Warm sunlight shines on the stream of vomit falling from his mouth.

Chapter 5

EK

My eyes still sting as I cross Chamizal Park, heading to a nightclub located near the Free Bridge. Liverpool Bar is El Kartel's regular postgame hangout. Pregame, too. It's also where everyone parties most Friday nights. A Kartelero owns the place, which he has named after his favorite English soccer team. The big main room is painted Merseyside red and white, a color scheme that extends to clusters of vinyl couches and to a long plywood bar that looks as if it were constructed in a high school shop class. It's a big space, crowded with the whole gang. Everyone enjoyed the tear gas experience, which doesn't surprise me. I think all that these guys really want is some attention. The Super Bowl plays out on TV, back in Miami. I accept a beer. Before I've finished it, my bad feelings from the loss and its ugly aftermath dissipate. I fall into friendly conversation.

What do I think of the Who, the halftime entertainment at the football game? Someone buys me a watermelon-and-vodka shot.
“Vamos Indios!”
he cheers. Another guy tells me there's no reason to use Facebook since he's already on MySpace. His e-mail address ends in @hotmail.com. He also shows me his brand-new phone, a model of BlackBerry I grew out of five years ago. Mexico really
is
behind the times. Do I like the music of Rush? I'm asked. The band from Canada? No, not really. People still listen to Rush? They do in Juárez.

“There's a saying in Mexico,” a man at the bar tells me. “Only a rat jumps off the ship. I am not a rat.” He's a systems analyst at the huge Delphi maquiladora. He moved here from Chihuahua, which is like moving to Chicago from Springfield, Illinois. He loves the Indios because he loves Juárez. This city gave him an opportunity, he says, feeding me the universal line. Day to day, life isn't dangerous, he insists. He claims to have never seen a body. He works, he comes home to his house and his family. Nothing more. As for the slaughtered innocents, they kind of deserve it. “If you know your friend is mixed up in something, that's it—end it,” he tells me. “If you hang around a bad friend, you will be killed. That's just street smarts.”

Someone asks where in Juárez I live. That gives me a chance to bitch about my apartment. The place isn't working out. It's too dark, and it's also too hot; the heat I'd freeze to death without comes in only one strength: full blast. A recurring sewage backup in my building sometimes makes my place smell like a Porta-Potty. I'd rented the apartment impulsively, for a number of good reasons. It's in a better neighborhood, it's affordable, it's furnished, and it comes with a locked lot where I can park my too new car. I suspect that on some level I was also attracted to my unit's thick concrete walls and to the way my building hides at an angle off the street. A sister building stands just seventeen feet across a narrow walkway. Unless they start minting bullets that curve, there's no way a stray shot can find me as I sit on the couch watching television. That's good. That's how paranoid I was when I first got here. But the fact that my apartment looks directly into another apartment means I must cover my windows with thick blankets for privacy. A staircase up to the second-floor units blocks all sun from ever reaching the windows anyway. It's totally dark inside, twenty-four hours a day. Pitch-black dark, like a cruise ship's inner cabin. I've started calling the place Alaska, the land of the noonday moon. I'm pretty sure I'm developing seasonal affective disorder.

“You should come live in the El Kartel office,” suggests Mike, the Kartel capo. He's overheard my complaints. “There's an open room.”

I laugh, at least initially. Seriously? Live with you hooligans?

THE EL KARTEL office is a three-bedroom apartment near the university. Don't picture a Cape Cod bungalow on a leafy street in Ann Arbor. The campus itself isn't so bad: tan cinder blocks stacked into language arts centers and halls of science, each building fitted with windows so small and narrow they remind me of bunker gunsights. Like all good property in Juárez, the university cowers behind high concrete walls ringed with barbed wire. A particularly ugly neighborhood festers outside the walls. Empty gravel lots collect mounds of garbage. Black bunting hangs from the roof of a burrito restaurant, a signal that someone there has been murdered. The neighborhood isn't a slum; all the houses and apartment buildings are constructed of concrete. It's just that the buildings are particularly uninviting. The office occupies the ground level of a four-story unit where even the windows on the second floor need the protection of iron bars.

I often end up at the office after the postgame action at Liverpool Bar dies down. I'll buy a hamburger from Don Roberto, an El Kartel co-founder who tells me he earns his living catering the after-parties. I'll sit atop one of the many cars spilling from the front yard into the street, talking soccer with as many as fifty other Karteleros. Indios players have stopped by a few times, including Maleno Frías. When I've had enough talk and Tecate Light for one night, I'll throw out fist bumps, holler
buenas noches
, and start the long walk back to my home. Mike, the other founding capo, doesn't need to walk. He lives at the office. Until recently, so did Kinkin, the guy who hazed me on the bus to Monterrey. Kinkin's decided to move into the apartment of his serious girlfriend, an American who is also in El Kartel and whom I consider to be a friend. Kinkin's become my friend, too; surviving a road trip was all it took to earn his respect. His decision to decamp from the office has opened up one of the bedrooms. Mike says I can have it for only a thousand pesos a month, or about eighty dollars. I won't even have to chip in for electric, water, or (most attractively) to pay off the
ladrones
at Gas Natural de Juárez, an evil monopoly that handed me a first-month heating bill so high I thought it was a misprint.

The office's small living room—
la sala de estar
—is painted with the Indios' soccer-ball logo and with the gunsight logo of El Kartel. A Mexican flag hangs over a computer where Mike designs fliers and posters for upcoming road trips. Furniture consists of four office chairs of varying stability and, surprisingly, a live ficus tree. One wall is blank save for a hook rug of the Indios logo, clearly homemade. Someone's also knitted an El Kartel scarf, which has been taped to an air duct along with a small painting of Che Guevara. Che makes a second appearance on a red flag near the kitchen, along with the words HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE. There's also a Cuban flag, which I recognize from Miami.

The three bedrooms are minimalist. Each tiny square features a worn mattress without sheets. Kinkin's clothes remain piled on the floor of the room he occupied, along with a bass drum and a stack of empty aluminum cans. I poke my head in Mike's bedroom to find it similarly distressed. One room always remains open, I'm told. The office is not only where everyone in El Kartel comes to paint banners and sew flags before games; it's also a great place to ingest drugs and screw girlfriends. I don't think this could be a permanent living situation. But for a few months, at least, it might be a good experience. The price is definitely right, and how much worse can it possibly be than Alaska, the black hole where I currently live? I check the stove and microwave in the kitchen. They work. So does a refrigerator stocked with eggs, Coca-Cola, and Don Roberto's hamburger meat. We're so close to the border my American cell phone picks up a signal. I'm tempted.

“Don't do it,” an Indio warns me at the next practice. Keep your nose down. Stay on the line. “Do not move in there. Even if you think of these guys as your friends, you don't know who they might be messed up with.”

It is with some reluctance that I tell Mike thanks, but no thanks. I'm going to persevere in the Last Frontier. If I'd accepted his offer, I almost certainly would have been there, in the office, when the gunmen broke in.

MIKE IS HOME alone, sketching out a new El Kartel T-shirt. The executive committee sells the shirts outside Olympic Stadium before every home game. A new design every two weeks. Some in El Kartel grumble that their
barra brava
seems to be devolving into an arts-and-crafts club. I've heard whispers that the capos, Mike and Don Roberto, are channeling their energies away from team support and into mining as many pesos as possible off the membership. The grumbling is pretty low-level. The shirts remain popular. I've bought a few myself, and have requested that they reprint an old design I've seen: the words EL KARTEL DE JUÁREZ ringing a silkscreened image of a man wearing a black ski mask over his head, like the
sicarios
do. I think the shirt looks badass. Mike's working on his current design at the computer in the living room. Suddenly, four men burst through the front door. Maybe there's as many as six of them. All the men are armed with automatic rifles. That they are concealing their identities behind ski masks is an ironic detail Mike doesn't have time to contemplate. One of the men grabs El Kartel's captain by the hair and drags him into the street, out where we eat our hamburgers.

“Where are the drugs?!”

More forcefully: “Where are the drugs! Who's selling the drugs?” A gun barrel pokes Mike's stomach. Other gun barrels circle his face.

“Pinche puta!”
Where the fuck are the drugs, faggot? Mike is sure—Mike knows without a doubt—he is about to die. “We know someone in El Kartel is moving cocaine. Who is it? Where is he? Where are the drugs?”

Mike sells insurance. He makes pretty good money for Juárez, or at least for a member of El Kartel. He's thirty-one, though the puffy skin around his eyes makes him look at least ten years older, perhaps even on the cusp of fifty. He's the father of two young daughters, both living in El Paso with their mother, a woman who left Mike some years ago. Soccer split them apart. Even before Francisco Ibarra started up the Indios, Mike followed Juárez's semi-pro and amateur teams. The Astros. Los Soles. When the Indios arrived, he fell hard, immediately. He hasn't been able to explain to me the sudden and intense love he felt for La Frontera's new team. “It was a diversion,” he offers. “It was fun.” He began attending all the games. With Roberto he formed El Kartel so he could think about the Indios all week long. His wife eventually laid down an ultimatum: me or that stupid soccer team. Indios it was. Indios it remains. She took the kids and moved to Texas. Mike stayed in Juárez with El Kartel.

Don Roberto handles the social side, recruiting new members. Who knows how many Karteleros there actually are? Members of the 915s, the El Paso subgroup, get angry when they pull up to Chico's Tacos to find an unfamiliar car with the El Kartel logo displayed in its rear window. A splinter group of kids living in Juárez near the new U.S. consulate calls itself Los Fabulosos Muertos, with
muertos
basically meaning “dead bodies.” The stickers these guys display in the windows of their trucks feature three menacing skulls. Another subgroup calls itself Los Sicarios. El Kartel's Internet chat room keeps all these subgroups in the loop. Dues are voluntary. There's no secret swearing-in ceremony. To become a member in full, all you really need to do, I've discovered, is survive a road trip to Monterrey.

Mike certainly doesn't monitor membership. He handles logistics. He books the road-trip buses and the hotel rooms. He signed the lease on the El Kartel office. He does not know where the drugs are. He does not know who is selling the drugs. Lying on the pavement, his eyes clenched shut in expectation, Mike thinks of his mother, who died recently. They were very close. He'll miss his daughters, but he'll see them again someday. While he waits for them, he and his mother will be together again, together forever.

It's taking too long. He's still breathing. When Mike opens his eyes, he sees the gunmen running off. He does not know why. He's still on the street, on his back. He clutches his ribs, which are bruised from boot kicks. He does not think to call the police. There's a very good chance those
were
the police. He knows only one thing for sure: The El Kartel name, which was
una broma
, a joke, a spin on the border's negative image, is no longer funny.

“YOU'VE GOT TO come to the meeting,” Ken-tokey shouts when he reaches me on my Mexican cell phone. Everyone is gathering at Liverpool Bar. “They're changing the name of El Kartel!”

By the time I arrive, the meeting is already under way. Mike stands on a platform where young
rock en Español
bands sometimes play. He lays out his case, speaking with passion and force. His words carry the weight of his acknowledged leadership. Still, no one wants to change the name except him. “We're a different type of cartel!” counters Ken-tokey. Someone points out that when Francisco Ibarra once offered to pay their traveling expenses for a season if they'd rename themselves after the indigenous Tarahumara Indians, El Kartel turned the owner down. To placate the malcontents, Mike offers a compromise that carries the day. From now on the
barra brava
will be known only as EK.

Everyone breaks for beers. Big Weecho the
luchador
finds some blue electrical tape, which he uses to cover the “l” and “artel” on the T-shirt hugging his mammoth frame. Mike will surrender the lease on the office. He'll cross the bridge to El Paso, an application for permanent residency in his hands. Immigration rules bar most people seeking residency from returning to Mexico for at least six months. Mike, the man whose love for the Indios is so strong it broke up his marriage, can't attend the team's games. He can't set foot anywhere in Juárez. As if that's even something he might want to do anymore.

I start walking back to my dark apartment well before the emergency meeting breaks up. I need to pack for an extended road trip I'll be taking with Marco and the team. On the way home, I buy an
El Diario
. I flip the newspaper open to see that Francisco Ibarra has bought a full-page ad. The tear gas fired after the loss to Morelia shouldn't sour anyone on the Indios or the team's noble mission, he writes. Yes, the play on the field has been poor. Yes, it will take a true miracle to avoid relegation to the minor leagues. But whatever happens, the Indios aren't going anywhere. The club will not fold. His commitment to “this social experiment” is strong and in his heart. It can be difficult to stand with a team as it struggles, Ibarra admits. Be patient. Be brave.