MURDER CITY

Everyday I pray for the people of Juárez. Literally, I pray. I light a stick of incense and pray for peace, good health and spiritual well-being for the people of Juárez. If you pay attention to the news, you know my praying does nothing, but it keeps the city and its people in my mind and heart. Like most everybody else I’m overwhelmed by the bloodshed. I don’t go over there much anymore and I don’t write much here on my blog about the city. Other people do the writing much better that I ever could. Especially the journalist Charles Bowden. I emphatically suggest you read his new book Murder City:  Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (Nation Books). Juárez has become his tar baby. He’s slapped it across the head a couple of times (see Note 1) and each time his fist gets stuck deeper in the goo. The bloody mess of flesh and bones. And the River Styx washes away the names of the dead. Violence, Bowden shows us, doesn’t work, no matter its scale. The citizens of Juárez must repeat this truth everyday of their lives, but the sicarios, the killers, they aren’t listening. Nor would they care if they were listening. As I write this well over five thousand people have been killed since the bloody reign terror began in 2008, over 800 have been killed in 2010 alone, and the homicides in April have been approximated at 205--more than double the number of 90 registered in April 2009 and four times the number of 55 cases in the same period in 2008. The month of May is keeping pace (Note 2). A few weeks ago, on just one day the killers found 22 more souls to dispatch to the other side. The governments and the mainstream media want to ascribe causes to the carnage. They are either liars, or they still believe in solutions. They certainly don’t look deeply into their mirrors. But the violence in Juárez is proving to be more like a viral epidemic, like AIDS or the Black Plague, except the host body is culture and government. There is no cure, no silver bullet. Its beginning is hypothesis, its end will not be found in the blather of politicians and talking heads, and certainly not by more violence--whether sanctioned by the government or not.

Murder City documents the year 2008, the year that the murdering began. It coincides, of course, with Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s infamous and duplicitous declaration of war against the cartels. Bowden, like Alice, does decide to walk into the mirror and see what awaits him. More than ever now, he becomes a subject of his writing as he wanders the streets of death with his list of names and places, trying to catch hold of some sort of understanding. Some theory to serve as anchor in the flood. Factual school-learned journalism doesn’t work. Statistics, names of the dead and descriptions of murder scenes don’t carve real substance into the readers’ heart. They don’t or won’t listen sincerely, the statistics become mottos for cocktail parties and e-chatter, the kind of abstractions that remain arms-length from the human heart. But Bowden wants his reader to feel the terror and inhuman evil of the epidemic. It’s the conundrum, although contrary, that a religious mystic confronts—how do you explain the experience of God to somebody who hasn’t experienced God? Bowden is pointing his finger at the blackest of moons. He finds us real live people to create a four-headed Virgil to guide him through this 21st Century inferno, these peculiar buoys that float up almost unbidden in the muck to direct him toward the deepest ring of hell:

Miss Sinaloa: a beauty queen from the state of Sinaloa. Her story begins as the archetypical story of the beautiful Mexican woman, but because of the glories of her body, she becomes trapped in the web of the narcotraficantes. She goes to a party in Juárez to have a good time, she's fed drugs and booze, she’s raped and sodomized for three days and then she finally re-surfaces at the “crazy place” where El Pastor looks after her. She becomes Bowden’s imaginary, but very real, companion in the City of Juárez. She’s a vision of lost beauty, she whispers truths in his ear and she understands the needs of the human heart and body.

El Pastor: the rehabilitated drug addict who went out into the desert and finds Christ (Note 3). On his return he builds “the crazy place” from the rubble of Juárez and there he houses and cares for the lost souls of the city, the lepers and untouchables of Juárez, people like Miss Sinaloa. He teaches Bowden about compassion and the meaning of love. He is no romantic. He is afraid. He knows he might die. In fact, as I write this, he might already be dead.

El Sicario, the hired killer: as far as I know, this is the first extended recorded interview with a Mexican narcotraficante since Terrence Poppa interviewed Pablo Acosta and documented it in Drug Lord. It’s a frightening interview. Not only the interview itself, but the details of finally getting in touch with this man who, because he has felt the presence of God, wants somehow to find a little bit of peace. Like with El Pastor, the discovery of God has found him some relief but the residue of his many murders still armors his body and mind.

El Reportero: Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a reporter from Ascensión, Chihuahua (Note 4). He fled with his son to the U.S because the Mexican army was looking for him. They wanted to kill him. In 2005 he had reported about a specific incident of an Army patrol walking into a hotel where migrants stayed before their journey north in search of work. Migrants carry money and valuables, their tickets through their illegal passage. The Army knew this, and they robbed each and every one of them. Now the Army had threatened to kill Emilio. He fled for the border. He hoped he would get asylum, but what he got was a jail cell and a seven month separation from his son. Listen to what Emilio teaches Bowden:

It is possible to see his imprisonment as simply the normal by-product of bureaucratic blindness and indifference. But I don’t think that is true. No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum, because if the U.S. government honestly faced facts, it would have to admit that Mexico is not a society that respects human rights. Just as the United Stataes would be hard pressed, if it faced facts, to explain to its own citizens how it can justify giving the Mexican army $1.4 billion under Plan Merida, a piece of black humor that is supposed to fight a way on drugs. But then, the American press is the chorus in this comedy since it continues to report that the Mexican army is in a war to the death with the drug cartels. There are two errors in these accounts. One is simple: The war in Mexico is for drugs and the enormous money to be made by supplying American habits, a torrent of cash that the army, the police, the government, and the cartels all lust for. Second, the Mexican army is a government-financed criminal organization, a fact most Mexicans learn as children (page 202).

And Bowden plays himself, a reporter, a character like Dante who is really no longer Charles Bowden, but the character who he must stand up in his place. As a poet, I find Bowden’s personal improvisations riffing off the confrontations and conversations with these four persons the most interesting writing in the book. Sure, Murder City is full of facts and first-person accounts and description, but he employs the methods of novelists and storytellers, and, even more radical, of poets to tell the fractured stories of Juárez.

The only other writer to come close to Bowden’s writing about Juárez is Roberto Bolaño. The great novelist, like Bowden, came to see the city of Juárez as emblematic of our new world. Of course, Bolaño doesn’t write about Juárez. He writes instead about the city Santa Teresa that he invents from the cloth of his imagination in “The Part about the Crimes” in his epic 2666: A Novel. In fact, Bolaño wrote from Spain as his own life was running to its conclusion. He used as source material El Huesos en el Desierto by Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez, as well as a long correspondence with Gonzalez, who appears in a fictional role in 2666. I’m pretty certain that Bowden used El Huesos also (Note 5). Bowden and Bolaño tell all this much better than I, so I’m going to shut up soon. I do want to emphasize to you to read Murder City. When you’re done, read 2666. These are not only important texts for now, but for the years to come, even those years when the killing fields move from Juárez to the next place. They will still be the same killing fields. The same ignorant federal laws of prohibition and the human greed which capitalizes (as in “Capitalism”) on those laws will still be feeding the global killing fields. I wish I could say differently, but I can’t. These killing fields are one of the by-products of the Age of Globalization—our brave new world, a world of centralized corporatization and governmental regulation that segregates us further and further from a real understanding of ourselves and our planet.

I will continue to light my stick of incense for the people of La Ciudad Juárez. And for us all.

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Note 1. Juarez: A Laboratory of the Future and Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family.
Note 2. I get my figures from the Frontera List Serve. Molly Molloy at the New Mexico State Library monitors newspapers on both sides of the border and daily tabulates the ever-growing figures. I also recommend following Frontera del Sur, which also originates at NMSU through the Center for Latin American and Border Studies, especially the work of Kent Patterson. Thanks to all you guys. You do important work.
Note 3. People who write or talk about Bowden and his work rarely mention his ability to let others do their own talking. Both the Pastor and the sicario have had experiences of God. Those experiences are the foundations of their conversations with him. Bowden, on the other hand, is a big gregarious and hard-headed intellectual who did his apprenticeship with the likes of Ed Abbey deep in the outback, and he carries around a large backpack full of doubt like the rest of us in the intellectual community who read his books. Yet, he reports faithfully on these two men’s experiences of God without remark. And he likewise gives the late Esther Chavez Cano, an atheist, full voice in his description of her. Indeed, I think his writing on Chavez Cano is truly the greatest eulogy to this great lady that I have read  Bowden understood her like he understood Miss Sinaloa and El Pastor and El Sicario and El Reportero. I applaud him. I applaud them all. And I might add, it’s almost impossible to write about Mexico without letting its peculiar and very complex spirituality seep into your writing.   
Note 4. To read about Emilio in particular, you can read Bowden’s article online in Mother Jones: “We Bring Fear: A Reporter Flees the Biggest Cartel of all, the Mexican Army.”
Note 5. Maybe I’m wrong but I bet $10 that the woman Heidi Slauquet (page 31, Murder City) is the same party-hostess for the rich and famous who turns pimp for the narco-traficantes that Bolaño describes. She eventually ends up one more dead body on a road leaving Juarez.

JUAREZ, JUAREZ: The March of Februay 13

Juárez, Juárez, no es cuartel
Fuera ejercito de el

Juárez, Juárez, no es cuartel
Fuera ejercito de el

This is video I took last Saturday in Juárez during the march protesting the nightmare of narco-violence and the army's occupation of the city. Ben Sáenz and I had walked over the bridge to be a part of that. There's not much else we can do. It’s a deadly waltz, these two dancers--the narco traficantes and the Mexican Army. The music is courtesy of the federal governments on both sides of the river. The Mexican government plays the guitar and the trumpet, and the U.S. strums on the bajo sexto, keeping the beat. Everyday citizens, like Gabriel who works for Lee and me, will tell you they don’t know what’s worse--the traficantes who are murdering each other and innocent bystanders, or the soldiers who are abusing the citizens and the society that are supposed to be protecting. The citzens are deathly afraid of both. Ben and I were happy we went. It was invigorating. Mostly young people (1500 by one count, "hundreds" by other count and I guessed it as 1,000 at least), lots of enthusiasm and vitality and joy, lots of anger, lots of solidarity and friendship. The marchers walked from the Parque de Benito Juárez to Avenida Diez y Seis de Septiembre to Avenida Juárez and then north to the Santa Fe Bridge where the pink cross stands commemorating the deaths of women in the city over the last two decades.

The events that triggered the rally and protest march are complicated--simply said, the people are angry and scared and fed up--but several recent incidents are the immediate cause:

The very highly publicized Massacre of January 31 which stunned Mexico and the world and the ensuing confrontation between Luz Maria Dávila (mother of  two teenage boys who were killed) and Mexican President Felipe Calderon. On th night of the massacre hired assassins working for one cartel or another carried out a premeditated attack on a high school celebration and murdered 15 people, mostly teenagers. The Mexican government, stunned by the national and international outcry, quickly arrested two individuals who supposedly participated in the attack. If you like irony, try this--the continuing violence between cartels has accounted for the death of over 4,500 people in Juárez since January 1, 2008, and well over 90% of those murders have gone unsolved and unpunished.

And the much less publicized assassination of Josefina Reyes on January 3. Josefina was a political activist, known for her work in protesting the femicides in Juárez as well as her fight to protest installation of a nuclear dump in Sierra Blanca, TX. In recent months she had denounced the Mexican army’s human rights abuses in Juárez and condemned the military presence in the city, calling it unconstitutional. Josefina had been harrassed and received numerous threats from the army and others.

 

The poster reads: "For condemning the abuses of the military, the government killed me.--Josefina Reyes"

How come Mexicans don't like negative space?

I was thinking about this important question looking into a huge bowl of menudo at Delicious Mexican Foods to Go on Fort Boulevard. It was my Saturday morning pilgrimage. I go there in the firm belief that I will be the only güero in the place and I will be listening to Mexican music and will be hearing only Spanish spoken. As usual, I was right.

The menudo was stuffed with pozole and tripe submerged in soupy red sauce and then I threw in chopped onions and cilantro and dried chili pepper and salsa verde and whatever that green dried herb is (oregano?) and then I squeezed a half of lemon on top of the concoction. The nice lady also gave me chopped ajo crudo (raw garlic for what ails me), two buttered bolillo buns hot from the oven and a glass of water and a cup of coffee. There was no space left on the table for anything except hunger. I began to eat. The menudo was glorious. But in the midst of my reverie, my little table crowded with menudo and its supplements got me to thinking about Diego Rivera and the Aztec Calendar and Frida Kahlo and even Pancho Villa for God’s sake. If any of them saw even a little bit of negative space, they would fill it up with paint or blood or prophecy about the end of the world. It was like they wanted to answer every question there is to ask. Then Japan popped into my head. The Japanese love negative space fertilized with unanswerable questions--like miso soup and strange little sushi on a big platter and Zen and haiku and inked scrolls showing some monk sitting on a stone dwarfed by the totally empty void.

The wild cornucopia of Mexico’s visionaries and the subtle emptiness of Japan with its Zen Buddhism and gardens of rocks and sand.

Suddenly inside my head I found the beginnings of a world championship lucha libre bout. I ate my menudo and wondered who was going to be the techno? And who was going to be the rudo? Or maybe they would be a tagteam struggling together against the Beasts of Gringolandia, George Bush and Sarah Palin? They would be the two-headed avenging angel of my imagination, the ying and the yang, doing battle against the globalization of greed in the 21st Century. Together they would put an end ot the murderous war in Iraq, together they would rip out the wall between the U.S. and Mexico. At least in my own heart.

No wonder I can like Mexico and Japan so much at the same time?

So this was my little Saturday morning epiphany at the Delicious Mexican Food to Go.

Am I crazy or what?

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I sent a version of this as a question to Gustavo Arrellano of Ask a Mexican fame. He says he's going to answer the question. Stay tuned.

Lost in the pain of Juarez

This 6-foot square mural decorates the wall of a tattoo shop on Avenida Juárez across the river from where we live (photo from June 2008). Certainly created by a man, this idealized depiction of a beautiful Disney-esque young woman with nails piercing her head, face and neck is tragically unreal. There’s no blood, no tears, no one counting the dead. On this side of the river we don’t see the blood or the tears or the dead up close, but certainly on the other side the people see the blood every day. There’s a war going on, but it’s lost in the white noise of our national and regional media.

Since the beginning of the year in Juárez, Chihuahua (a 15 minute walk from my desk here on Texas Avenue in downtown El Paso) men with guns have murdered over 800 people as part of an never-ending drug war between rival gangs of narco-traficantes—the remnants of the Juárez Cartel founded by the Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who supposedly died on a plastic surgeon’s operating table getting himself a new face, and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. Their bloody struggle is for control of the Juárez “plaza” (or “franchise,” perhaps a better term for American ears). Whoever wins controls the smuggling of drugs and human beings and any other illegal product that is valued north of the Rio Grande. This business, worth billions of dollars, dwarfs any other enterprise on the border.

Below is the body count between Monday 4th thru Friday the 8th, August 2008 (El Paso Times / Chihuahua State Police):

Monday: Two separate quadruple-homicides. Plus, seven other homicides.
Tuesday: A man is fatally shot in a boot shop in the village of Guadalupe Distrito Bravos. Plus, three other deaths.
Wednesday: Eight men are killed and five wounded in a Juárez drug rehab center. Plus, five other deaths.
Thursday: Three men are gunned down and another man wounded at a junkyard. Plus, nine other deaths.
Friday: The bodies of two men are found wrapped in blankets. Their hands were cut off and left next to the bodies, which showed signs of torture. Six others were slain, including Cristian Alcantar, 16, and Jesus Villanueva Dominguez, 19, who were shot and killed while riding in a Saturn Ion with Texas plates.

This sadness seems to have no end.

To begin to grasp what’s going on Juárez and here on the border, I strongly suggest you read the following articles that have recently appeared in newspapertree.com, an online magazine that covers El Paso and the region.

In the first--My Brother's Body, A True Story--Rachel Showery documents how drugs and incredible piles of money seduced first her brother and then her husband. The über-text is about her journey to retrieve her brother’s body from the morgue in Juárez in 2002. Ms. Showery decided to write this tragic and terrible family tale after reading day after day about the murderous violence that has gripped Juárez. She wrote it somehow to exorcise her own ghosts and as an offering for peace. Here, like in so many articles about the violence in Juárez and Mexico, the line between the men in uniforms (police or army) and the narco-traficantes seems very nebulous.

The second--15 Minutes of Hell in an Juarez Prayer Meeting--is by Molly Molloy, a librarian by trade and a long-time observer of the border and the issues that affect it. Since January the violence across river has exacerbated everyday and Molly, because she can’t find sufficient news in U.S. regional or national papers, spends her mornings reading the Juárez dailies. She counts the dead. It’s her obsession. Like all of us, she has good friends across the river, and she loves the city. The constant news of the murders has overwhelmed her. She has felt powerless and angry. Then she read about the massacre of eight people on August 13, 2008, at the CIAD (Center for Drug and Alcohol Integration) Rehabilitation Center #8 in the Colonia First of September in the foothills of the Sierra Juárez in the southwest part of the city was just too much. People had come together to offer themselves to God. It reminded her of her own upbringing in Louisiana, the little church where she learned the tenets of Christianity. She had no choice but to go went to investigate for herself. This is her report, and it’s frightening. It appears that the narco-traficantes even consider drug rehabilitation centers as competitors and therefore enemies. They must believe, like Amado Carillo Fuentes before them, that “Only the dead are innocent.”

For further news on this continuing tragedy, I suggest you sign up for the newspapertree.com newsletter on their home page. Their news will be personal and local and so, like the Showery and Molloy pieces, will give you a true taste of what’s going on.

Otto Campbell: La Brigada por la Paz

Painter Otto Campbell, and a group of cholos he recruited from the streets (la Sociedad de la Esquina), of downtown Juárez, Chichuahua, painted this mural La brigada por la Paz. I figure they did the job in 1996. The photograph is by Virgil Hancock and it appears on the cover and in his remarkable collection of photographs, Chihuahua: Pictures from the Edge (University of New Mexico Press, 1996, with a companion essay by Charles Bowden). The reason I'm putting it up on the blog (it's a copyrighted image and I've lost contact with Virgil) is that I was googling Otto Campbell the other day and I found absolutely nothing about the man. No text, no images. He was an important artist and cultural activist in Juárez (he died in 1997) and there should be some trace of him and his work available on the web. My friend the Mexican novelist Willivaldo Delgadillo says of Campbell, "He had a man-size wisdom and was one of those rare human beings who appeared to be reconciled with himself." The mural was painted on the corner of a major intersection in Juárez--Avenida Diez y Seis of Septiembre and Avenida Francisco Villa--which is right across the street from the downtown el Restaurante Villa del Mar, one of my favorite restaurants across the river. I saw the mural only once when poet Joe Somoza and I were over there walking and talking about poetry and eating fish soup. It was not finished yet--it was only in its preliminary black and white stage, and it was truly remarkable, ghostlike. I never got to see the finished mural. Soon after it was completed it was obliterated. Again, Willivaldo: "The local Coca-Cola honcho ordered it removed because he didn't like the fact that the bishop had a $-sign on his hat. The mural was replaced by a small notice on the repainted wall that read: Please Do Not Adverise. Coca Cola."

Willivaldo has told me that a young artist is now doing research on Campbell and that more work may be made available. I hope so. He's one of those mysterious fronterizos that make an important mark on our lives here on the border and then disappears somehow into the white noise. I would have liked to have known him.

The reason I have the image in the first place is that Virgil was kind enough to let Cinco Puntos Press use the photograph for the cover of my book of poems, The Price of Doing Business in Mexico. Virgil, if you're out there, I'll be happy to remove the photograph from the blog if you so wish. But I have a hunch that you, like me, will understand that Otto Campbell should certainly be googlable.

Which reminds me: There's a a small story that tell the reason I was googling Otto Campbell. My son John Byrd wrote an article about the band Radio La Chusma and a Sunday night concert they did at the Chamizal Park down by the river. John titled his piece "Dreaming of a Sunday Evening at the Chamizal" which is an allusion to Diego Rivera's great mural in Mexico City "Dreaming of a Sunday Afternoon in La Alameda." John didn't feel using an image of the Rivera mural was appropriate to his piece, so I suggested Campbell's La Brigada por la Paz. Especially since "chusma" can be translated into something like "street people." And, instead of searching through my own files for Virgil's photograph, I googled Otto Campell and found absolutely nothing.

Border Books

Last month I blogged Bad Business on the Border about the US/Mexico border, El Paso and Juarez in particular. This is an appendix to that piece because I'm thinking readers from elsewhere might want to know more about this place. I’m a poet, so my understanding comes through story and metaphor and mythos, not by statistics and theory. That said, if you’re interested in reading well-written books about El Paso, the drug trade along the border and the Mexican Diaspora, I would recommend the following:

Sam Quinones' two collections of essays about the migration of Mexicans to the U.S., True Tales from Another Mexico and Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream. Sam doesn’t talk about the Mexican diaspora as “immigration,” which infers a political situation with a governmental solution, but as “migration,” which is an anthropologic term inferring organic movement for specific reasons (e.g. climate change, famine, disease, poverty, etcetera). This may seem like a minor point, but it’s not. It allows for a much more in depth understanding of what we are witnessing. Next, Sam doesn’t write about statistics, he writes about people. And he uses these people’s stories to understand certain geographies and circumstances and cultures. His two pieces on Juárez are brilliant. His piece in True Tales, although written in 1999, still is the most insightful piece about the murdered women. He shows how the vacuum of law enforcement and city services has created an environment of violence that allows such tragedy to occur. And in Delfino’s Dream his piece documenting the black velvet painting craze that put Juárez on the map should become a definite part of our history.

Next is Charles Bowden’s Down by the River: Drugs, Murder, Money and Family. Chuck has a love/hate relationship with El Paso and Juárez. He loves it for its down-home realism and grainy streetwise truth, but he hates to see how the drug industry and the U.S. militarization are tearing at the fabric of relationship of these two cities and their two-million people. Further, the inattention that U.S. media, in particular, the El Paso Times, gives to the on-going terrible dilemmas in our sister city infuriates him. The 1995 unresolved murder of Lionel Bruno Jordan (the brother of DEA bigwig Phil Jordan) in the Bassett Center parking lot struck a match in Bowden’s imagination. He spent years coming to El Paso and Juárez to write this book. Bowden's prose gives us a revelation of the drug world that is the underside of our culture here on the border, but it also reveals much of our culture here, our cross-border relationships, that is being destroyed by the militarization, plus the narco and immigrante wars. Chuck’s book Juarez, A Laboratory of the Future, along with an article in Harper’s, first brought national attention to the terrible tragedy of young women being murdered in Juárez. The book also made famous a loose collective of photographers (aka “street shooters”) who were documenting the violence in their city. The collective splintered as organic arts communities do, but one photographer in particular, Julian Cardona, continues to document the ordeals of living just south of the border.

Our own Cinco Puntos Press has also published a number of books that are relevant to these issues:

Gary Cartwright’s Dirty Dealing describes in page-turning prose the history of El Paso’s Chagra family and the almost romantic beginnings of the drug trade along the border. This book remains a best seller in El Paso after all these years. And the anthology of essay Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots and Grafitti from the U.S./Mexico Border. The anthology has essays by Debbie Nathan, Charles Bowden, Sam Quinones (his piece about the murdered women), David Romo, Louie Gilot, Cecilia Balli and many others. In the interest of full disclosure: these last two books were published by Cinco Puntos Press, which is our family’s publishing company. Indeed, my son John and I, along with Tijuana novelist Luis Humberto Crostwaite, edited Puro Border.

These are all good and interesting books, very relevant to what's going on today. A man works for us from time to time, Gabriel. An American citizen, he lives in Juarez with his Mexican wife and two sons (one born on this side) for a web of stupid bureaucratic reasons. He crosses over to work on this side. This morning he was telling me about the 2000 federal troops that Calderon has sent to Juarez to curb the narco violence. He says the troops bring their own form of violence. According to Gabriel, the troops are going into homes for searches and when they leave they take with them money and jewelry and televisions. Meanwhile, the violence and murders continue, although not to the extent that it was before the troops came.

Bad Business on the Border

Lee and I moved to El Paso with our three kids in 1978. Our daughter Susie, the oldest, was seven, John was five and Andy was three. We tell people that before we moved to El Paso Susie had lived in fourteen different places—rented houses, a few apartments and even one hotel. We had moved from Alamosa west to South Fork in Colorado, then down along the Rio Grande to Albuquerque, then Las Cruces, then Radium Springs in New Mexico. Finally we came to El Paso. We were the exemplary lost citizens of the 60s that you read about in Newsweek. I was a poet, Lee was writing fiction—that will do it to you. Since then we have lived in this one house, a brick bungalow on Louisville Street. It was built in 1927. Our neighborhood, which began ITS life as a middle-class white neighborhood on the east side of the very small city of El Paso in the 1920s, has evolved into a mostly Mexican-American blue collar neighborhood that is now considered central El Paso. Many of our neighbors are first generation Americans, others were born on the other side and a few are probably illegal. Nobody cares. Spanish was the first language of probably a majority of our neighbors, but that might be changing some, although not much. We can see Juárez, Mexico from our front porch and can be across the river in 10 minutes. This is our neighborhood, our home.

I say all of this because I want to start writing some about the border on this blog. El Paso has truly become our home, although Lee was raised in New Jersey and I in Memphis. It’s the place that our children still call home, although our son Andy lives and works in San Antonio. But when we first moved here it was a place that carried a little bit of gritty fantasy and romance in our hearts. Living on the border was an idea, almost like living in Mexico. Somewhere between then and now, for a period of three or four years, I got depressed and uncomfortable living here. I felt like I was an outsider, a foreigner. But more time passed, for years we ran our business out of our home, and suddenly I realized I was truly home. If you’re interested in this evolution, read my poetry.

The import of all this is that we’ve been watching the border and El Paso change since we’ve been here. It happens slowly, much like Al Gore’s frog in the hot water. If you live here, you go about your life and you are not aware of the changes that are happening. But for folks returning to the border after a long time away, especially if they go back and forth across from Juárez to El Paso, then they might say, Holy shit, the water is boiling.

So I’ll start with this parable of the primary business along the U.S./Mexico Border—the drug trade y los narcotraficantes. I like the story because it implies the true dimensions of what’s going on. I heard three or four years ago. Supposedly, the engineer told a friend and his friend told me. Supposedly, it’s true. But maybe it’s another one of those bizarre urban legends that sprout up along the border. Strange stories that carry a nugget of truth. Not so much urban legends, but border legends.

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Once upon a time—let’s say it’s 1996, 12 years ago—an industrial engineer lived in El Paso. The man was famous in certain circles for his clever and intuitive ideas. He knew how to do things creatively that saved big corporations lots of money and lots of time. Anybody who can save big corporations money and time does very, very well. This man was no different. He made very good money, and CEOs of multi-national corporations sought him out to solve their problems.

One day the engineer was leaving an office building in downtown El Paso and a couple of thugs walked up behind him. Without saying a word, they grabbed the engineer by the arms and the man on the right stuck a gun into his ribs. “Cállate,” the man holding the gun said. A black car with tinted windows and Mexican plates pulled up to the curb and the two men pushed the engineer into the backseat. They climbed in on each side of him, a gun still pressing firmly into his ribs.

The driver stomped on the gas and the car sped away to the Bride of the Americas which is known here in El Paso as “the free bridge” because no tolls are charged. The engineer was on his way to Juárez on the other side of the Rio Grande. Maybe 15 minutes away. The engineer was frightened. He asked questions, but his Spanish was lousy. It didn’t make any difference. The thugs didn’t say a word. They looked out the windows like any suburban commuter. The engineer thought he was a dead man for sure, but he didn’t know what he had done. He was innocent, he told them. “Soy inocente! Inocente!” The guy on the left lit a cigarette. The car crossed the free bridge into Mexico.

When they got into the hubbub of Juárez the thugs pushed the engineer’s face down between his legs. They wrapped duct tape around his eyes and head so he couldn’t see. The engineer didn’t want to die. He was weeping. He wished he had learned to speak Spanish when he had the chance. The car traveled for maybe 20 more minutes.

Finally it stopped. Someone yanked the engineer, still blindfolded, out of the car. They pushed him into an air-conditioned building, stopped him and with one quick snatch, they ripped the duct tape from his eyes. It hurt bad, and he was blinded by the bright light. He wobbled and dropped to his knees. The floor was cold concrete. He looked around. He was in a very large warehouse. The warehouse was crowded with bales of cotton. Except they weren’t bales of cotton. They had an odd greenish tint like they were spinach or something. Maybe they were bales of marijuana. And then he realized they were bales of money. U.S. currency. His captors had disappeared. Two other men—one tall and large, wearing a gun strapped across his t-shirt; the other, a small man in an expensive suit, a pock-marked face—were watching him.

The big one spoke to the engineer in a broken English. He told the engineer that they had a problem.

“A problem?” the engineer said. He felt better.

“Sí.”

“What’s your problem?” He couldn’t figure. They had all of this money.

“Rats.”

“Rats?”

“Sí, rats. Rats eat the money. Like thieves, they are eating our money. We cannot protect the money from the rats. Poison don’t work, traps don’t work, even gas don’t work. Nothing works!” The big man was pissed even thinking about the enemy of rats.

The little man looked at the engineer, and the engineer knew that the little man was the boss and that he was evil. He knew that the little man was Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies. He got his name from flying huge planes to the border filled with cocaine. He was worth billions. His pocked face glimmered, his eyes were cold. Killing was of no import to him. His motto was “Only the dead are innocent.” What was important to Amado was his money. The engineer rose to his feet and thought about the problem of the rats and the money. They watched him.

“Can I walk around and look?”

“Si. Go ahead. No way out of here.” The big man laughed. The little man only watched.

The engineer breathed in and out like a man trying to swim to the shore from a long way. He walked up and down between the rows of bales of money. He saw the rat turds, he saw a few cats. The cats, like other solutions, had proved useless against the rats. Thirty minutes passed, maybe more. And then he knew the answer. It appeared magically, rising up with his breathing. He went back to where he had left the big man and the little man. They were sitting on folding chairs waiting for him.
He said, “Pipe. PVC pipe.”

“Huh?”

“PVC pipe. You know, the plumbing pipe? Get the pipe in three-foot diameters. Buy caps. Stuff the money into the pipe and cap it. It’s good to go.”

The big man looked at him and thought about the answer. Then he smiled. He turned to the little man. He said, “Pipa de plástica.” And he made his arms into a big O. The little man understood immediately. He turned and walked out without ever saying a word. The big man waved his hand and a man grabbed the engineer from behind and quickly wrapped more duct tape around his eyes. They loaded him in the car again, and the engineer had to wonder again if they were going to kill him and leave him out in the desert. He had read stories and heard rumors. But they didn’t. They drove him to the pay bridge at Avenida Juárez. They gave him a quarter and two nickels for the toll and pushed him out of the car, cut the tape from around his wrists but left the blindfold alone. They drove away. The engineer slowly pulled the tape away from his eyes. Then he walked back across the bridge into the United States.

He never spoke of this to the authorities. He didn’t want to die.

▲



The Mexican government says that Amado Carrillo-Fuentes died in 1997, the victim of a botched (or planned) plastic surgery on his face. Yet, rumors persist that the man who died on that operating table was not Amado. Who knows? The doctors who performed the surgery are now dead. Murdered. The illegal drugs continue to pour into the U.S. through different hands. And now, 11 years after Carrillo-Fuentes death, just across the river from where we live, a war is being fought for control of the drug traffic. This last week, which was Holy Week, 23 people were gunned down. They were among the 59 murdered throughout Mexico in this gruesome blood-letting, most along the U.S./Mexico border.

In popular news reports, the media will blithely state that the two principle money-makers for Mexican economy are oil revenues and the money that immigrants to the U.S send back home. They all ignore the narcotics industry. They don't want to say that illegal drugs is number 1 on the list, and if it disappeared, the Mexican economy could very well tremble and splinter like Mexico City during the 1985 earthquake. That’s scary, huh?

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is totally blind to seeing how our addiction to these drugs create these problems and how our strict heartless anti-drug laws exacerbate them. Now, in the post-9/11 environment, immigrants have replaced drugs as the national bugaboo. And the federal government, like with its blindness to the U.S. addiction to the drugs that Mexico supplies, does not see that our economy is likewise addicted to the cheap labor that migrants supply. No matter. The anti-immigrant phobia has become our language-borne virus. For us who live on the border, we are told to be quiet. The U.S. Government, in particular, the Homeland Security bureaucracy--aided and abetted by its allies, the rabid talk show hosts--know best, and they are adamant about militarizing the border and building its fences.

The city that my family and I moved to in 1978 is drying up. El Paso is becoming No Paso. The border is being damned up like a river, until finally, if our future continues to unravel like this, nothing will grow on either side.

I hope to write more about this.

Peace.

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NOTES on the photographs:
"El Chuco" is slang for El Paso. The image was done on the side of the Marty Snortum Photography Studio down the street from where we live. I don't know who the artist was.
Bruce Berman took the photograph of the kids swimming in the Rio Grande. It must have been the early 1980s. Life is not so pastoral on this stretch of the river any more. I'll write more about that later. The original is in color and this image is cropped. I think I have it in my files from when I was an associated editor of the Bridge Review back in the day.