To Die in Mexico Read online

  But names travel too far to be entirely erased or destroyed. Names always leave a trace. Even when they kill you, dismantle your body, or bind it in duct tape, and leave your remains on the side of the road, your name waits.

  José Humberto Márquez Compeán. He was found like so many: tortured, killed, wrapped in a blanket (encobijado is the term of art), and discarded in a vacant lot on the edge of San Nicolás de los Garza, near Monterrey in Nuevo León, Mexico. At first glance he would appear to be only another death to add to the body count of 22,000 drugland executions in Mexico between December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón of the rightwing National Action Party (PAN) launched his self-proclaimed “war” against drug traffickers, and late March 2010, when a local reporter photographed Márquez Compeán’s body lying lifeless and bound across a dry scratch of earth. Such were the facts: death, a beaten corpse, a barren field in San Nicolás de los Garza. Behind these facts one can glimpse the intentions of those who killed Compeán and dumped his body there: to end his life and turn his body into a nameless mass of death.

  But there was a glitch. The reporter assigned to the story saw beyond the message of death. By sheer coincidence Francisco Cantú, a 37-year-old reporter for Multimedios in Monterrey, recognized a coffee-colored shirt with an orange letter B stitched over the chest. Cantú had seen the shirt and the man wearing it, José Humberto Márquez Compeán, only hours before. In fact, he had photographed Compeán only hours before.

  Cantú had just started his shift at 5:30 a.m. that Monday morning when his editor told him there was a shoot-out in San Nicolás de los Garza. Cantú hit the road, but then got a call while he was en route. There was no gun battle, but rather a body found in an abandoned lot, his editor said. He might as well take the picture anyway. Cantú kept driving and was the first reporter on the scene. “I took the first photos from a distance,” Cantú told me, “and then I slowly got closer to see if the authorities would say anything.” When he noticed that the police were not paying attention, he walked right up to the body to take more photographs. “I take the photo and when I look at it and I see the B on the shirt I say, Oh damn! This is the same guy from yesterday.”

  To confirm his observation, he went back to his car and opened his laptop to review and compare images from the day before. “I can see that it is the same person,” Cantú said, “because of the T-shirt, he had that same brown shirt, but his face was all beaten. His face was messed up.” The man lying dead on Monday morning in San Nicolás de los Garza was the same person, José Humberto Márquez Compeán, that Cantú had photographed on Sunday afternoon in perfectly good health. In the first set of images, Compeán is walking with his hands tied behind him, looking down, an expression that appears caught between stoicism and dread on his face. Soldiers from the Mexican navy surround him, and then lead him into the back of a navy pickup truck. Compeán is in military custody, handcuffed, uninjured, surrounded by heavily armed soldiers. It is Sunday afternoon. He would next appear before the world on Monday morning as a dead body in a field.

  Compeán’s wife, Hilda Rodríguez, told Cantú and his colleagues at Milenio Televisión, a branch of Multimedios, “I saw him in the news, how they put him in a police truck and then a helicopter, and then he turns up dead. Why did they kill him? Who killed him? I want justice. I have three children.”

  On Sunday, March 21, 2010, a convoy of municipal police in Santa Catarina, Nuevo León, detained Compeán and José Adrián Lucio Barajas. The convoy was on its way to the municipal hall when the police supposedly spotted the two men selling drugs. Santa Catarina security chief René Castillo and police chief Luis Eduardo Murrieta were on board and in command of the police convoy. They stopped, detained the two men at gunpoint, roughing up Barajas in the process. Minutes later an unidentified convoy of presumed drug assassins attacked the police, killing two guards and a bystander and wounding the police chief. The police retreated to the station to wait for a navy escort to take the wounded to a hospital.

  When Cantú arrived at the scene of the shoot-out at around 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, he heard that an official had been wounded and taken back to the police station. After taking photographs of the scene, he went to the station. When he arrived the navy and police had cordoned off the area. The police tried to stop him from taking photographs, but he was able to slip past the cordon and keep working. The navy started to escort the wounded out of the station. “First they took out the wounded guy [Barajas] and then they took out the wounded official, but with a hood over his head,” Cantú said. “Then they took out this other person who was wearing a coffee-colored T-shirt with an orange letter B on it. That struck me, those colors, and so I took his photo.” Cantú captured the images of soldiers leading the wounded and detained first to navy trucks and then later onto a navy helicopter. He mentioned the man in a brown shirt in the story he filed that evening. After that, no one seems to know what happened to Compeán, how exactly he went from being held handcuffed in navy custody to, some fourteen hours later, lying wrapped in a blanket, dead, in San Nicolás de los Garza.

  On Monday morning, upon discovering that he had photographed Compeán in navy custody only hours before photographing him dead, Cantú called his editors and sent the pair of images. The Mexican national media picked up the story within hours. Navy officials said in a press release that they only lent their support to municipal authorities by taking the police chief, Barajas, and Compeán to a nearby hospital. After that, the press release said, they turned everyone over to municipal authorities and do not know what happened. Witnesses at the hospital told the Nuevo León correspondent for La Jornada, Mexico’s largest left-leaning daily newspaper, that they saw the chief, Murrieta, get off the helicopter and enter the hospital for treatment, but they never saw Compeán get off the helicopter. The Santa Catarina municipal officials said that federal authorities maintained custody of Compeán, not them. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s my position,” René Castillo, the chief of security who, together with Murrieta, originally detained Compeán and Barajas, told the Associated Press at the time. Murrieta and Castillo both disappeared for a few weeks, and then quietly returned to their posts. No one has been charged with the murder of José Humberto Márquez Compeán. The barren lot where Cantú photographed Compeán’s dead body is only about a three-minute drive from the regional naval base.

  Hilda Rodríguez’s questions—“Why did they kill him? Who killed him?”—are those that the practice of anonymous death, the killing and ritual depositing of the mutilated person’s body, tries to render impossible to answer. If a body is just a body, who will step forward to ask why someone was killed and who killed him or her? If a body has no name or history, then who will demand justice? When a person’s ruined body is crafted into a message, the meaning is clear: This can happen to you. The dead must have done something to end up like that—crossed a line, spoken up—so better to do nothing, better to look away.

  Anonymous death needs silence. Names are thus dissolved. Facts vanquished. Times and locations obscured. Who was she? No one says a thing. Why did they kill him? Not a word. How is it possible that they could massacre all those people and simply drive away? No one poses the question. But if he was last seen in navy custody? Do not ask. Who controls this town? Where does she live? What businesses does he own? All questions you can get killed for asking. Silence is essential. Where murder is part of the overhead in an illicit multibillion-dollar industry, impunity becomes a fundamental investment. And impunity cannot hold without silence. Hence Mexico has become the most dangerous country in the hemisphere for journalists, those whose labor requires voice. Mexico’s “drug war” has become one of the most perilous beats in the world. Sixty-eight reporters have been gunned down since 2000—forty-seven of them slain between July 2008 and September 2010—and at least fifteen disappeared since 2006; which is to say, silenced. How many of those murder cases have been solved? Not one. How many of the disappeared journalists have been located? Not
one. Silence travels in armed convoys of twenty to fifty highly trained assassins equipped with military-issue assault rifles and fragmentation grenades. Those who labor in the terrain of voice carry notebooks and pens, cameras, and tripods.

  At 7:00 a.m. on April 6, 2007, Amado Ramírez Dillanes, a 50-year-old reporter with both Televisa and Radiorama in Acapulco, Guerrero, finished his daily one-hour radio program without a glitch. He left the Radiorama studio at around 7:20 a.m. and walked to his parked car on La Paz Street in the bustling center of Acapulco, a block from the town square, a few yards from a police station, and right in front of the California Hotel. As Ramírez Dillanes opened the driver’s door, a gunman approached him from behind and opened fire with a .38-caliber pistol, hitting him twice. Ramírez Dillanes ran to seek refuge or help in the California Hotel. The gunman followed and shot Ramírez Dillanes in the back. The gunman then walked away. Five minutes later Ramírez Dillanes was dead. Scores of tourists and local residents witnessed the murder. More than one hundred police officers, detectives, and forensics experts from six different municipal and federal agencies arrived on the scene an hour later. No one has been charged with the murder of Ramírez Dillanes.

  On the night of September 23, 2008, Alejandro Xenón Fonseca Estrada, a well-known journalist with the radio station EXA FM in Villahermosa, Tabasco, set out to hang banners across town denouncing a surge in kidnappings in Tabasco and across Mexico. One banner read simply: NO TO KIDNAPPING!!! Fonseca Estrada was standing up on top of a truck parked on the corner of Paseo Tabasco and Adolfo Ruiz Cortines hanging up a banner when a group of men in an SUV pulled up and asked him what he was doing. Hanging this banner, he said. They told him to take it down. He refused. They ordered him to climb down and get in the car. He refused. One man grabbed an AR-15 assault rifle, held it out the car window, and fired into Fonseca Estrada’s chest. He died. They drove away.

  On the evening of May 25, 2009, Eliseo Barrón Hernández was at home in the town of Gómez Palacio, Durango, with his wife and two daughters. Barrón Hernández worked for ten years as a reporter for the newspaper La Opinión in the neighboring city of Torreón, Coahuila. He had recently published articles about a police corruption scandal in Torreón that led to the firing of some three hundred police officers. On May 25, eleven masked gunmen broke in, beat him in front of his family, and took him away. Twenty-six hours later his dead body was found in a ditch with five bullet wounds and signs of having been tortured. During his funeral the next day five banners signed by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán were hung across Torreón warning journalists to be more careful. One of the banners read: WE ARE HERE, JOURNALISTS. ASK ELISEO BARRÓN. EL CHAPO AND THE CARTEL DO NOT FORGIVE. BE CAREFUL, SOLDIERS AND JOURNALISTS. A few weeks later the Mexican army produced a few suspects detained in unrelated events who had supposedly confessed to murdering Barrón Hernández on orders from the Zetas, the enemies of El Chapo. In April 2010, a spokeswoman for the attorney general told representatives from the Committee to Protect Journalists that she could say nothing about the suspects’ whereabouts or trial date. On May 31, 2010, Barrón Hernández’s friend and colleague Julián Parra Ibarra published an editorial on the passing of one year since Barrón Hernández’s murder. The investigation had gone nowhere, with no further arrests, no trial, and no information about the supposedly confessed killers. Parra Ibarra concluded, “Nothing has changed, and worse still, no one says anything.”

  Silence.

  Valentín Valdés Espinosa was a 29-year-old local news reporter and the cofounder of the newspaper Zócalo de Saltillo in Coahuila. On January 7, 2010, he and two colleagues left work around 10:45 p.m. A few minutes later two SUVs cut them off. Gunmen forced Valdés Espinosa and one of his colleagues into the vehicles and drove away. The colleague, whose name was not released, was set free sometime later. Valdés Espinosa’s body, bearing bullet wounds and signs of torture, was found a few hours later in front of a motel. A handwritten poster board sign was left over his chest: THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO THOSE WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND. THE MESSAGE IS FOR EVERYONE.

  And yet people talk, or sometimes whisper. The drive to understand, the drive to communicate is unstoppable, though it may be forced into hiding, sent scurrying into the myriad corners of private life. Most everywhere one travels in Mexico one can hear people talking, lamenting, debating, and marveling over the latest headlines from the drug war. Silence does not often seek as its prey the murmurs of rumor and small talk. Silence—this special breed of paramilitarized narco-silence—takes aim at a particular type of speaking that has, typically, two characteristics: it may be heard by many and it enunciates facts that are bad for business.

  For drug war silence is not the mere absence of talking, but rather the practice of not saying anything. You may talk as much as you like, as long as you avoid facts. Newspaper headlines announce the daily death toll, but the articles will not tell you anything about who the dead were, who might have killed them, or why. No detailed descriptions based on witness testimony. No investigation. The same goes for the homicide detectives tasked with investigating the murder. They will arrive on the scene, count the bullet casings, snap a few photographs of the body, and file it all away. Politicians might denounce violence in the abstract, but they refrain from ever mentioning the names of those fighting over the territory in their districts.

  And yet people across Mexico still challenge this reign of silence, this bullet-imposed public ban on facts. As a result they often find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun into the eyes of silence. Journalists, human rights activists, family members of murder victims, rural guerrilla fighters, and occasionally, honest government officials are those most often within the crosshairs of silence. Their speaking is a combat tactic in the battle against anonymous death; theirs is a true battle, not against plants and those who like to use them to get high, but against the insidious regime of illegality and impunity that makes the drug business such good money, and that imposes the death and silence necessary to keep it that way. These are people who still, despite all the blood and broken promises, believe in some form of justice—if not the justice of the state, of the law, of police and courts and legislators, then the justice of knowing, for speaking and contributing to knowledge are forms of rebellion against silence and murder. The bloated profits to be had in the illegal narcotics market require that vast and complex networks of human activity—farming, processing, packaging, international shipping, warehousing, distribution and sales, arms trafficking, surveillance, money laundering, and extensive political protection—remain submerged in a nebulous space of constant talking and perpetually enforced ignorance.

  The stories and voices of those who rebel against silence and anonymous death are the heart of this book.

  THIS IS WHAT THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO SAY: The Mexican army and federal police have administered drug trafficking for decades. Drug money fills the vaults of Mexico’s banks, enters the national economy at every level, and, with traffickers’ annual profits estimated at between $30 billion and $60 billion a year, rivals oil as the largest single source of cash revenue in the country. (And Mexico is not the only place where this is so.) The chief national capos, or drug lords, are not only the most wanted narcos of the day—such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán—but also generals in the Mexican army and commanders of the federal police. The federal police forces are the main recruitment center for mid-level drug-trafficking operators. The army and the state police are the main recruitment centers for the enforcers, the paramilitary units in charge of assassinations, and the armed protection of drugs and mid- and high-level operators. According to the federal government’s own estimate, people working for the various illegal narcotics businesses have directly infiltrated more than half of the municipal police forces in the country. During the seventy-one-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the Mexican army controlled the division of territory for drug production and trafficking routes, allocating sub-divisions to local franchises, co
lloquially called cartels. A given territory under a cartel’s control is known as a plaza. Murder has always been a part of settling business deals gone wrong and of fighting for control of a plaza. People who fall in police busts and stand guilty before the television cameras are either those who have fallen out of favor and are thus turned over to the cops, or those who have been betrayed—by federal officials interested in selling the plaza to someone new or by former allies interested in taking it over. Producing arrests is a necessary feature of the industry, and so, like murder, arrest becomes a way of settling accounts or invading territory. High-level federal officials in United States government know all of this and go along with the theatrics, because, among other reasons, the U.S. economy is also buoyed by the influx of drug money. The defense industries profit handsomely from arms sales to armies, police, and the drug gangs themselves; the police are addicted to asset forfeiture laws; prison guard unions are addicted to budget increases; and the criminalization of drugs has proven a durable excuse to lock people of color in prison in a country still shackled by racism.

  The so-called “drug war” in Mexico is really two wars, a war between disciplined, organized, and intensely well-funded trafficking organizations in which the state also participates, and a media spectacle that presents combat and arrests as the product of diligent law-enforcement operations. The current, overlapping drug wars in Mexico date to the so-called democratic transition period between 1994 and 2006. During the six-year term of Carlos Salinas (1988–1994), the Gulf Cartel bloomed from a loosely organized group of runners into one of the most powerful transnational criminal enterprises in the hemisphere, and one capable of competing with the longer-standing Sinaloan cartels based in Tijuana, Guadalajara, Culiacán, and Ciudad Juárez. Salinas’s successor, Ernesto Zedillo, furious with Salinas for leaving him with the 1994 peso crisis that battered the Mexican economy, attacked the Gulf Cartel. His administration arrested and extradited to the United States the Gulf capo Juan García Ábrego. Zedillo also imprisoned Salinas’s own brother, Raúl, for “illicit enrichment” (Swiss banks froze almost $100 million in accounts that Raúl had opened under false names) and involvement in the murder of José Francisco Ruiz Massieu. Then chair of the PRI and set to become the PRI majority leader in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, Ruiz Massieu was also Raúl and Carlos Salinas’s ex-brother-in-law. When the PRI lost the 2000 presidential elections and Vicente Fox and the PAN took control of the presidency, Fox and the PAN also favored the Sinaloa Cartel over the Gulf Cartel. El Chapo—the presumed head of the Sinaloa Cartel—escaped from a maximum-security prison in a laundry basket six weeks after Fox’s inauguration. The Fox administration orchestrated the capture and extradition to the United States of García Ábrego’s successor, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the capo and mastermind who created the paramilitary Zetas unit in 1997 by recruiting from within the Mexican army’s Special Forces units created by Zedillo as counterinsurgency shock troops, and then sent to kill Cárdenas. But by 2004 the Sinaloan trafficking organizations loosely allied as The Federation began to fracture, and former allies turned upon each other, vying for territorial supremacy and thus initiating a drugland civil war that began to rage throughout the country. By the end of Fox’s six-year term in 2006, the war was full on, and literally, heads were rolling. Calderón entered office in December 2006, after widespread accusations of electoral fraud that led to months of huge protests. Calderón refused to agree to a full recount of the votes and had to sneak into Congress at midnight for his inauguration in order to avoid protester blockades. The electoral protests were not isolated. Mexico in 2006 was gripped with powerful social mobilizations such as the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign and the teachers’ rebellion in Oaxaca. Calderón staked his presidency on sending the army into the streets to wage “war” on drug traffickers and send an unequivocal message of military might to the massive protest movements that had surged throughout the country in the preceding months.