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Interesting article from Harper's; Calderon's War
L E T T E R F R O M J U Á R E Z
Calderón’s War
The gruesome legacy of Mexico’s antidrug campaign
By Cecilia Ballí
The moon was still faintly visible over the garrison that houses
the Mexican Army’s 20th Cavalry
Regiment in Ciudad Juárez one cold
January morning in 2009. Down the
street, people huddled at corners,
waiting for buses. Old cars rolled by
noisily. But in front of the military
camp, a family stood begging for the
return of their missing son. Dressed
in thick jackets, they held up fluorescent
handwr it ten poster s:
return
jaime safely; jaime is just
a student, not a delinquent; his
mother is in despair.
Two nights earlier, a nineteen-yearold
law student named Jaime Alejandro
Irigoyen Flores had been forced
from his home by a group of men in
military uniforms. The next day, his
panicked parents had made the rounds
to police stations, government complexes,
human rights offices, but all
claimed to know nothing of Jaime’s
whereabouts. Yet his family was sure he
was inside the army base they now
stood before. They feared he was being
tortured, but at least that would mean
he was alive.
The story might have seemed
outrageous had it not fit a pattern
that emerged in Juárez the previous
year, when every day four or five
bodies had turned up in a city of 1.3
million people. So far there was
only one official explanation for the
increase in violence: the country
was ensnared in an escalating war
among its six or seven largest drug
cartels, and Juárez had become their
most intense battlefield. By the end
of 2008, Juárez’s annual homicide
rate had quintupled, to 1,623 murders
from 316 in 2007. But no tale of
warring cartels seemed sufficient to
explain those numbers, since it was
also the year that President Felipe
Calderón Hinojosa dispatched 2,500
soldiers and federal police to patrol
the city’s streets and combat the
cartels. Nor was it useful to conceive
of Juárez as a place where anarchy
and evil had simply been unleashed.
Surely there was some
system driving the unprecedented
slaughter, which, even for a city
with a history of violence, now surpassed
anything it had known.
I thought Jaime’s case might offer
some clues. As soldiers watched the
protesters from across the street,
Jaime’s
father, Alejandro Irigoyen, a
solemn, silver-haired man in jeans
and a brown nylon jacket, recounted
what had happened to his son.
Around 11 p.m., he told me, he’d
heard a loud, clanking sound from
his garage gate. Jaime (whom Alejandro
now called “my son, the disappeared”)
had been up watching a
movie with his eleven-year-old
brother, José Eduardo, and the pair
followed their parents downstairs.
When Jaime’s father opened the
door to the garage, he discovered
several men dressed in military fatigues
and helmets. Their faces were
hidden behind ski masks, a regular
practice of soldiers in the new antidrug
campaign. One of the men ordered
Alejandro to open the gate
and, setting his eyes on Jaime, told
the others, “That one. The one
with the glasses.”
The men forced Jaime to the
ground. Terrified that any misstep
could cost his son’s life, Alejandro
watched as Jaime was ordered back
to his feet and hustled into a dark
sport-utility
vehicle parked out
front. The truck made a quick
U-
turn and sped off. By the time
Alejandro made it outside and started
after them in his own car, they
were out of sight.
I asked Alejandro how he could be
sure the men had been soldiers, not
criminals in disguise. “Because of
their clothes,” he replied, “their accent,
their size.” The army’s young
enlisted men tend to come from central
and southern Mexico, where
there are stronger indigenous ties,
and northerners often like to think
of themselves as taller, lighter
skinned, and better spoken.
Certainly, Jaime’s case echoed a
handful of others in which uniformed
squads had abducted young
men from their homes in the city’s
poorer neighborhoods. Some of
those victims had minor criminal
records, but it appeared that others,
like Jaime, had simply been
unlucky—
guilty only of living on
the wrong side of town.
Jaime’s parents had worked at one
of the hundreds of small factories
that began dotting the city in the
mid-1960s, when the Mexican federal
government launched a program
to lure foreign companies to the
border with cheap labor and low
taxes. Both had risen from the assembly
line to supervisory jobs,
earning enough to purchase a small
home. They protected their sons
from the poor education, high unemployment,
and dalliances with
crime that dogged other men of Jaime’s
age and class. Handsome, hardworking,
and, by all accounts, drugfree,
Jaime played for the Juárez
university baseball team and had
been training for an upcoming state
tournament. “That was hi s
dream—” his father said, his voice
cracking, then quickly corrected
himself. “That is his dream.”
Jaime’s mother, María del Refugio,
a slight woman with short brown hair
and glasses, approached us from
where she and her elderly mother had
been waving black-and-white photocopies
of Jaime’s baseball-team portrait
at passersby. Her face was ashen.
“What color were the shorts he was
wearing?” she asked her husband. She
motioned to the street median, where
a television reporter was seated on a
motorcycle, waiting for her answer.
“Black with a red stripe,” Alejandro
said, “black with a red stripe.”
María returned to the reporter, and
her husband excused himself to join
them. From the compound’s entrance,
a growing line of soldiers observed the
spectacle. Then one of them crossed
the street toward the small crowd,
holding up a digital camera. As he
snapped pictures of each of us, I
thought of something Alejandro
had said: “Ever since the government,
the army, has been in Juárez,
we haven’t been able to say that
things have gotten better or that we
feel safer on the streets. What we feel
for them is not respect—
it’s fear.” When, in December 2006, ten
days after being sworn in, Calderón
announced that the army would become
the government’s chief weapon
against the cartels and deployed
more
than 20,000 soldiers to six drug-prone
states, most Mexicans welcomed the
news. Polls showed they trusted their
soldiers far more than they did any of
the notoriously corrupt municipal,
state, or federal police agencies. Although
approximately 1,200 people
were disappeared when the government
waged its dirty war against political
dissidents in the late 1960s and
1970s, most citizens believed that era
was behind them. The public seemed
to overlook the army’s bloody intervention
during the Zapatista rebellion
in 1994, and its growing prominence
in combating drug trafficking since
the beginning of the 1990s had not
diminished the institution’s popularity.
It helped that most soldiers were
tasked with civic duties such as vaccinating
the poor, providing disaster relief,
and guarding ballot boxes during
elections. After all, national defense
was a nonissue, as Mexico has no enemies
other than itself.
During seventy-one years of authoritarian
rule by the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI), the cartels
had run the drug business with a
steady hand, and their behavior had
been, one might say, civilized. Assassinations
were kept quiet and were
fairly infrequent by today’s standards.
Unspoken rules among the groups
shielded family members and the
public from most drug violence. The
government itself was largely responsible
for maintaining this order, negotiating
territories and creating a
system of bribes that extended from
local police to some of the highest
echelons of public office. Their guidance
ensured that drug habits north
of the border were sated while Mexican
society was untroubled.
In July 2000, when Calderón’s National
Action Party (PAN) finally
ousted the PRI, the cartels lost their
major political benefactors, and
Mexico rushed headlong into democracy
without a robust judicial
system that could investigate and
prosecute traffickers. As alliances
splintered and the cartels began battling
one another for territory, they
acted with increasing impunity.
No longer satisfied with settling
scores on private ranches and in safe
houses, public terror became key to
their strategy. Decapitated heads
were delivered to doorsteps in ice
chests, corpses were dangled from
bridges over major thoroughfares,
and, in what is still probably the
most horrific act, a victim’s face was
sewn onto a soccer ball. Cartel members
were kidnapped and tortured by
rivals, and their interrogations—
sometimes ending with the tiro de
gracia, a beheading—
were uploaded
to YouTube, eliciting excited comments
from viewers.
Even with the PAN in power,
municipal and state cops continued
to collude with the cartels, and so
another strategy employed to weaken
a rival group was to eliminate
agents on its payroll. Dozens of local
and state police were slain, and
soon the violence spread further:
journalists and small-town mayors
began to disappear.
As Calderón’s first year drew to a
close, his office pegged the national
death toll at 2,888. Juárez, one of the
main gateways to the United States,
had remained surprisingly stable, but
its relative calm began to crumble at
the start of 2008. On January 20, a
municipal police officer was murdered.
The next day, another officer
was shot and killed. That evening,
the regional commander of the state
investigative police went down. On
January 26, a handwritten message
was found taped to a public monument
to police who died in the line
of duty. One side of the note, labeled
those who did not believe, listed
the names of the five latest police
victims. A second column, labeled
those who still don’t believe, revealed
the names of seventeen officers
who were presumably next. Four
of them were dead within days. By
the end of February, several dozen
officers had walked off the job.
Juárez mayor José Reyes Ferriz
would later say he had been advised by
an undisclosed source that the
Sinaloa-based cartel headed by
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera
had declared war on La Línea, as the
Juárez cartel is known. But at the time
no one offered any explanations, and
rumor and speculation spread. Worried
that the dwindling and corrupt
local and state police agencies could
not contain the escalating violence,
Reyes Ferriz and the Chihuahua governor,
José Reyes Baeza, appealed to
Calderón for help.
The president’s response was swift.
On March 27, officials from all three
levels of government staged a press
conference to announce the launch
of a new public-security initiative
dubbed Joint Operation Chihuahua.
In the next three days, they said,
2,500 soldiers and federal police
would arrive in Juárez, bringing
along 180 military trucks, six helicopters,
and three C-130 Hercules
airplanes. It would be Calderón’s biggest
military deployment to date and
would serve as a chance for the federal
government to prove itself the
sole source of authority.
The operation would be under
the command of army General Felipe
de Jesús Espitia, a specialist in
“jungle warfare” who had trained
briefly at the School of the Americas.
The captain of the infantry had
been certified in counterinsurgency
tactics by the Guatemalan special
forces; he would lead a group of 200
similarly trained soldiers. News reports
touted the men’s highly specialized
backgrounds. But none
questioned how counterinsurgency
and jungle warfare prepared the officers
to battle criminal organizations
in an industrial metropolis
where, so far, the primary casualties
had been agents of the
state on the take. It was about an hour and a half
into the protest outside the military
base when Alejandro Irigoyen announced,
“The reporter says they
found a body.” He stared at the
ground while his wife, María, gasped
for air. Another family member cut
in, “And it was wearing shorts.”
Amid the panic that ensued, I was
able to gather that the reporter on the
motorcycle had received a call from his
news director, who said police had discovered
a body on an empty lot in a
northeastern part of the city. I asked
Alejandro whether the reporter had
mentioned anything about the color of
the shorts. “Red,” he replied, “he just
said red shorts.”
A brother-in-law was dispatched
to the crime scene to see if he could
view the body. Soon after he left, another
relative pulled up in a blue
minivan and dropped off Jaime’s
younger brother, José Eduardo. He
and a fourteen-
year-old cousin
named Johana had been with a
neighbor during the protest and were
watching television when the first
news report surfaced. José thought
he recognized his brother. Now, he
rushed into the arms of his parents,
his face buried in his hands. Johana
was sobbing. “I saw him!” she insisted.
“He was lying next to this really
big wall on this empty lot, just like
that, just like he is, and my cousin
said it was him.”
“Enough, Johana,” one of her
aunts snapped back. “Enough! We
already heard about that, but it’s not
him. They’ve got him in there”—she
pointed at the camp—“and that’s
where he’s going to come out of.”
More than an hour passed while
the family waited for an answer.
The brother-in-law eventually returned
looking defeated and said
the cops had refused to let him
near, so that all he’d seen was the
yellow tape encircling the crime
scene. Soon a second television
reporter
drove up in a news van and
approached the family, lugging his
video equipment. He said he’d just
been at the crime scene and had
footage of the body, if they wanted
to see. Jaime’s relatives and university
friends all swarmed around him,
trying to peer into the camera’s
small LCD screen. His mother
looked first, and instantly
recognized the red stripe. Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson
had watched the Juárez operation
unfold from the sparsely furnished
office where he worked as a state
human rights defender. An attorney
and Chihuahua native, he had
spent his career representing everyone
from disenfranchised workers to
displaced colonia dwellers to mothers
of disappeared men and young
women who were raped and murdered.
After accepting the job with
the state in 2005, De la Rosa began
keeping three cell phones around
his neck on black lanyards, two
Mexican lines and one American.
Large and bearded, De la Rosa
greeted me warmly from behind his
desk, showing off a drawing of a cat
he’d been sketching on his computer
screen. He’d recently taken up the
pastime to distract himself from the
stress of his work. As we prepared to
discuss the military’s role in Juárez,
however, his tone darkened. “This is
so serious,” he said, “that I’ve decided
to speak out and say everything.
Even if the personal cost ends up being
very high.”
He believed Joint Operation Chihuahua
had been doomed from the
start. The first mistake he saw was
that the mayor and governor invited
the soldiers in without congressional
approval and without requiring the
military to submit to state control,
thereby undermining the balance of
powers demanded by Mexico’s federalist
constitution.
“The army arrived as an invading
force,” he said, “as if it were coming
to confront an enemy.” The main
adversaries they targeted were the
municipal and state police forces,
which the mayor and governor acknowledged
were a locus of corruption
and needed to be cleaned out.
Within days of their arrival, according
to news accounts, soldiers nearly
killed one officer whom they shot in
the head after he failed to stop at a
military checkpoint. They also detained
at least thirty others, charging
some with weapons and drug
possession. At least five of the officers
arrested described being beaten
and tortured with electric shocks,
but state prosecutors were denied
access to military installations to
investigate the claims. By the end of
the first week of Joint Operation
Chihuahua, the National Human
Rights Commission had received
eleven complaints and beseeched
the military to refrain from arbitrary
searches and arrests, theft of
private property, illegal detentions
on military grounds, and the use of
physical harm during investigations.
Soon thereafter, Mayor Reyes Ferriz
announced that tensions between
local police and the military had
been resolved, and that all three
branches of law enforcement would
now work together. But disabling the
police was not without consequences.
Drug corruption aside, they had
played an important role in keeping
other crimes under control. As soldiers
became the chief presence on
the streets, thefts, carjackings, bank
robberies, kidnappings, and extortions
skyrocketed. “The first thing
the army did was to devastate public
security,” De la Rosa told me.
The number of killings also rose
dramatically. Yet De la Rosa noticed
that the profile of the victims was
changing. Before, the dead came
from the middle ranks of the drug
hierarchy: municipal or state police
officers, or men in their twenties
and thirties who wore good clothes,
drove nice cars, and often owned
bars, restaurants, car dealerships, or
auto-repair
shops they used as
fronts. These were oficiales; they
took orders from bosses, or patrones,
who didn’t even live in Juárez. After
the soldiers arrived, the carnage
shifted to the bottom of the drug
pyramid. Now the victims included
addicts, pushers, and small-time
criminals, once considered inconsequential
players.
As claims of violations increased,
the military’s leadership denied all
charges, maintaining that the rising
body count was simply fallout
from the Sinaloa and Juárez drug
war. Historically the military investigated
itself rather than submit to
civilian courts, so there was no way
for De la Rosa or anyone else to
know the truth.
Although this shift in victims
seemed to show that the cartels
were indeed battling over local
markets, De la Rosa came to believe
other factors were at play.
Wives and mothers came to him,
saying their loved ones had been
kidnapped by soldiers or federal police,
and a pattern, echoed in Jaime’s
story, began to surface. The
soldiers would force their way into
a residence without a warrant.
They’d turn the place inside-out
looking for drugs, stealing whatever
appealed to them, down to the
food in the refrigerator. If there
were young men around, they’d
blindfold and handcuf f them,
whisking them away without explanation.
Once in custody, the torture
would begin.
By midsummer 2008, the death toll
had reached 688, but army officials
seemed unfazed; they claimed that
their operation was fracturing the cartels,
who were now killing one another
off, which they suggested was
not such a bad thing. Questioned
about the violence during the campaign’s
first days, one general told the
press: “I would like to see the journalists
change their stories, and when they
write that there’s been ‘one more
death,’ they’d instead say
there’s one less criminal.” Nationally, year two of Calderón’s
war ended with 6,837 deaths,
putting the overall toll at 9,725.
The worse the violence became,
the more troops Calderón sent into
battle. Soldiers and federal police
were now engaged in thirteen antinarcotics
operations throughout
the country. With troop numbers
surpassing 10,000 by the summer of
2009, Juárez felt like an occupied
city. Soldiers were camping in emptied
factories that had shipped
their operations overseas, and federal
police now filled the rooms of
business hotels. With militarization
came more claims by citizens of ar-
bitrary searches and arrests, forced
disappearances, and torture, rape,
and murder.
I returned to Juárez that June to
gather more information about a case
that had briefly dominated local
headlines less than two months earlier.
It involved two young men who
were supposedly seized and tortured
by soldiers and federal police—one of
them so badly he died.
One afternoon, I went to see the
dead man’s mother after she finished
her shift at a dry cleaner’s.
We had agreed to meet at her
mother’s home in the working-class
neighborhood where her twentyone-
year-old son, Javier Eduardo
Rosales, had disappeared.
Mild-mannered and warm, Margarita
Rosales greeted me with a
light handshake and offered a seat
on a sofa draped in a blue-flowered
slipcover. Her dark hair was pulled
back in a small ponytail, and thick
bangs framed her brown eyes. Her
ten-year-old son politely brought in a
floor fan to cool off the room.
On a nearby end table, which had
been converted into a makeshift altar,
sat a graduation portrait of Javier, who
had finished high school on a scholarship
and earned a degree as a radiology
technician. She studied it and
smiled. “Look, that was my son.” He
was handsome, his head c-cked
slightly, a cool stare in his eyes. His
friends, who knew him affectionately
as “Filo,” had signed their names
around the white matting and left
adoring, heartbroken messages. He
was charismatic and popular, but, his
mother admitted, he could also be
impulsive and stubborn, which sometimes
had gotten him into trouble.
Margarita recounted the events
she was still struggling to process.
One Tuesday morning in early April,
Javier and his friend Sergio Fernández
Lazarín were walking to a nearby
convenience store when they were
stopped and questioned by soldiers
whose vehicle number a witness
later identified. No one heard from
them again that day. Margarita
didn’t immediately suspect something
was wrong, since Javier spent
the week with his grandmother and
often slept at friends’ homes. The
next morning, however, Sergio’s
mother phoned to tell her their sons
were missing. The two families spent
that Wednesday visiting police stations
and the state prosecutor’s office,
but no one had any record of an
arrest. On Thursday, Sergio’s mother
called again to say that her son
was home—he’d turned up on her
doorstep early that morning, barefoot,
dazed, and severely beaten. Javier
was not with him. Sergio said
his friend had been too weak and
stayed behind in the mountains.
Margarita found a ride to see Sergio,
who had been taken to the hospital.
He told her what he would
later repeat to a television reporter,
leaving a rare public testimony of
the abuse. In the video, Sergio lies
in a white gown looking confused,
his breathing assisted with nasal
tubes. After they were picked up by
the soldiers, he says, he and Javier
were driven to a police station,
where federal police took over. The
young men were hooded, then transferred
to what seemed to Sergio a
private home—“like a normal
house,” he says, “but very big.” They
were interrogated and tortured. Javier
had gotten it much worse because
of his tattoos—the officers
accused him of being a member of
Los Aztecas, a cross-border gang that
runs drugs for the Juárez cartel.
Throughout the ordeal, Sergio could
hear screams from other rooms.
“Now listen very carefully, this is
important, what I’m going to ask you,”
the reporter says in the video. “How
do you know they were federal police
and soldiers? You know the criminals
dress that way.”
Sergio responds in a weak voice,
“Well, because the truck said ‘federal
police.’ And then two other trucks
arrived and they were federales.”
After two days without food or
water, Sergio and Javier were told
they were going home. Instead, the
agents drove them to some desolate
foothills. Sergio recounts, “At the
end they said, ‘Take off your tennis
shoes, we want you to run the whole
length of the hill.’ The mountain
was full of cactus and all that, a lot
of thorns, and we had to run while
they threw rocks at us.” The two
friends hobbled forward until the
troops left. They stumbled upon a
plastic bottle with stale water, which
they drank, then they lay down because
Javier
was too ill to continue.
“We lay next to each other, and I
tried to calm him down, but then he
started to feel worse and worse.” Sergio’s
voice quivers. “Until that was
it. He couldn’t take it anymore.”
There is a slight pause, and the reporter
asks, “Your friend died?” Sergio
nods and says faintly, “Yes, I was there
with him.”
The fact of Javier’s death was somehow
lost in Sergio’s exchange with
Margarita, however. That same day,
she and her relatives combed the
mountains in search of him, while reporters
documented the effort. Thursday’s
search yielded nothing. It was
Holy Week, and the family returned
on Good Friday with Javier’s friends.
Three hours later someone called out,
“We found him!”
Margarita glimpsed the crumpled
form from a distance, next to a flattened
cardboard box Sergio had used
to shield Javier from the cold. She
recognized her son’s thick black hair,
now heavily matted with dust. His feet
were in socks. A relative rushed to
embrace Margarita as she collapsed in
sobs. “What did you do to my son?” she
cried. The exhaustion and shock overtook
her; she leaned forward and vomited.
One of Javier’s friends yelled in
rage, “It’s not like he was some flocking
narco, you sons of b-tches!”
The black-and-white photos of
Javier’s
autopsy report confirmed the
extent of his wounds. He was almost
unrecognizable, eyes swollen, face entirely
bruised. The skin on his buttocks
was so damaged it had torn open. The
medical examiners concluded he’d been
dead for a day and a half; the cause
listed was a neck contusion.
One of Margarita’s brothers-in-law
had tried filing a complaint with federal
officials, but they wouldn’t touch
the case. While state prosecutors said
they would conduct an initial investigation,
that jurisdiction ultimately fell
to the military. One of them did visit
with Sergio, who had fled to El Paso,
and took a long statement but failed
to ask him to sign the affidavit, which
rendered it invalid. The day we visited,
Margarita was more preoccupied
with working out Javier’s social security
benefits, which she sorely needed.
In the end, it wasn’t just the ineffectual
legal system that kept her from
seeking justice for her son but an even
more insidious and pervasive
obstacle: poverty. I’d hoped to speak directly with
someone who had survived the military’s
torture, but most of the victims
had either
fled Juárez or were
too traumatized or frightened to
speak. One morning I got a call
from Gustavo de la Rosa, who offered
to connect me with one if I
could be at the state penitentiary in
an hour. We met on a sloped concrete
walkway, just down the street
from the army’s compound. De la
Rosa walked up winded but wearing
a wide grin and a radiant, candyapple
red guayabera.
The prison’s legal director, whom De
la Rosa had taught in law school, welcomed
us into his office. We exchanged
pleasantries until a prison guard arrived
with a young man in shackles. The
director pointed the prisoner to a chair
by his desk and told De la Rosa to take
his time. Then he left us alone. The
guard stayed planted outside.
Twenty-four-year-old Benjamín Enrique
Medina Sánchez studied us with
curiosity. Hazel-eyed and olive-skinned,
he had a high forehead and wore his
hair spiked and gelled, his goatee neatly
trimmed. Except for his orange prison
vest, he could have passed for a
university student. De la Rosa explained
his work with the state human
rights commission and said he was here
to get more details about Benjamín’s
case. The young man obliged.
The soldiers, he said, had come to
his home one Saturday morning the
month before, as he was preparing to
fetch breakfast for himself and his
wife. He was rolling a joint when he
heard the rough voices on the patio.
He guessed what it was: Just a week
earlier the soldiers had detained him
for several hours, beating him so severely
with a baseball bat he’d been
unable to sit for days. Now he knew to
cooperate and made his way to the
patio door. But the soldiers had already
let themselves in. “They said they had
a report that I had drugs and weapons,”
Benjamín recalled, “and I told
them no, they’d already been by the
previous week and checked but hadn’t
found anything.” He pointed to an
ashtray on top of the television and
admitted he had marijuana, but only
for personal consumption.
The rest of the events unfolded as
if scripted. The soldiers started to
search everything. “They tore drawers
apart, then they started hitting me so
I would tell them where I kept it,
thinking I had more.” They asked him
where he’d bought the marijuana and
he told them. One of the soldiers
found 720 pesos (about $55) in his
wife’s purse, the rent money due that
day, and pocketed it.
Blindfolded, Benjamín was forced
outside and thrown into the back of a
pickup truck. He thought he knew
what was coming: they’d drive him
around for a while, beat him, then release
him. “Don’t be scared,” he’d told
his petrified wife, “I’ll be right back.”
But soon he began to sense something
was different. One of the soldiers said,
“Now the ones who are going to treat
you well are coming.”
Benjamín was transferred to a second
truck and transported to a building
where he heard the sounds of a
television. If he pulled his head back
far enough, he could see a sliver down
the side of his nose, and he noticed
the men there were not in uniform.
The men instructed him to remove
all his clothes. They wrapped him in
a blanket, tied him up, and threw him
inside a shower until he was drenched.
Then the interrogation began. The
men asked different versions of the
same two questions over and over:
Where did he get his drugs? Who sold
them to him? They used what felt like
a two-by-four to beat the bottoms of
his feet and his back, chest, and head,
causing a crack in his skull. They hit
his hands until he couldn’t move his
fingers. They wired him to a machine
of some sort and inflicted shocks
throughout his body, including his
genitals and tongue. Benjamín tried
to answer their questions, describing
the small plaza where he bought marijuana,
but he was too afraid to disclose
the pusher’s name, so the beatings
and questions persisted.
After hours of torture, he begged for
water. One of the men offered him a
full glass, refilling it every time he
finished it. “I grabbed it with my teeth,
and I just wanted to gulp it all down,”
he said. “Finally, around the third
glass—because they brought four or
five glasses in all—I started to feel a
deep, deep pain, like a burning sensation
all over my chest.”
The sun had faded by the time the
interrogations ceased. One of the men
said they were going to leave Benjamín
somewhere so he could return home.
They gave him a few seconds to dress
and loaded him back on the truck.
Instead of releasing him, however, they
drove him to a second location, where
a man in a military uniform inspected
his injuries. The medic seemed upset
by what he saw and wanted an explanation.
Benjamín had already been drilled
on how to respond: “Nothing happened
to me. I fell.”
The next place Benjamín was
taken was one he recognized—the
state prosecutor’s offices. As he processed
Benjamín’s paperwork, the
receiving agent shook his head, complaining
to the soldiers, “He’s gonna
die on us like the other one.” Then a
woman Benjamín thought could’ve
been a secretary walked in and
seemed equally dismayed: “You
should’ve just dumped him somewhere.
Look how you brought him.”
Although he didn’t fully understand
what was happening, Benjamín
was being sent to prison to await
charges for drug possession. But his
injuries required medical attention,
so he was first admitted to a hospital,
where a different group of soldiers
guarded his room.
By the following morning, Benjamín
was having convulsions and vomiting
blood. His urine was red, his body
bloated and burned all over from the
shocks. Four nurses had to hold him
down as a surgeon cut into his abdomen
and inserted a catheter to test
whether his organs were hemorrhaging.
He was told the water he’d drunk
had probably been laced with acid.
The most glaring revelation in Benjamín’s
case was how comprehensively
the state and federal governments in
Juárez were complicit in his ordeal.
Fellow soldiers, the army’s medics, the
prison staff, state prosecutors, and
judges all knew of the abuse. Even the
hospital’s nurses and doctors knew.
Yet, from a distance, it was easy to
believe that accounts of torture like
his involved just a few rogue soldiers
in an otherwise disciplined force, because
everyone chose to protect themselves
and their superiors instead of
acknowledging what was happening:
that the violation of civil liberties and
human rights had become a core
strategy of Joint Operation
Chihuahua. Before leaving Juárez, I had a
chance to see behind the walls of
the military camp where Jaime
Irigoyen’s family had stood demanding
his return five months before.
The army was holding a photo op to
incinerate drugs seized during their
operation, now fourteen months old.
I drove into the camp on a narrow,
two-lane road. The grounds were
sprawling and immaculately kept,
the road lined on either side by rows
of pine trees standing straight like
sentries. A series of white metal
signs displayed the army’s values in
simple black letters: patriotism,
discipline, esprit de corps. On the
horizon were the mountains where
Margarita Rosales had discovered
Javier’s body.
The assembled press had staked
their tripods into the dirt and had
video cameras and notepads at the
ready. Felipe de Jesús Espitia, the
general in charge of the operation,
was presiding over the event from
behind a table draped in blue cloth.
Across a dirt field, a low-lying concrete
façade painted white bore the
words operativo conjunto chihuahua,
and behind it a mound of green
bundles around eight feet tall stood
waiting to be burned. About a hundred
helmeted soldiers stood at attention
along either side of the approach.
The ceremony began with little
fanfare. A uniformed soldier walked
to the podium and recited a litany of
numbers that represented all the confiscated
drugs, weapons, cash, and arrests
the operation had yielded, from
grenades and weapons cartridges to
cocaine and marijuana to “two psychotropic
pills.” The total value of the
drugs alone came to 246 million pesos,
he said—more than $18 million.
The campaign had also netted 1,727
Mexican and seven foreign arrestees.
The government would not waver,
the announcer said, in its combat
against “the evil of the century.”
With that, it was time to reduce
evil to ashes. A ten-man bugle corps
launched into a squawking melody,
then a grainy rendition of the national
anthem exploded over the loudspeakers:
“Mexicans, at the cry of battle,/
Lend your swords and bridle . . .”
The earth would tremble at the
roar of a cannon for Mexico’s destiny
had already been written in
heaven. Then came the most powerful
part of the song—the one line
that brings goose bumps and inspires
deep patriotism. Should a foreign
enemy “profane your land with
his sole,” the lyrics go, Mexicans
would be prepared to sacrifice their
lives for their country. “Think, beloved
fatherland, that heaven/ gave
you a soldier in every son.”
I scanned the young troops surrounding
the field. They stood motionless
and transformed, their faces
uplifted, their eyes radiating satisfaction
and pride. Many hailed from
heavily indigenous communities in
the south, witnesses to the country’s
starkest poverty; they seemed out of
place in the urban north, where their
skin color and height and accent were
constantly derided. Here they slept on
factory floors and subsisted on rice,
beans, and ramen noodles. And yet it
was a better existence than back
home, where the only viable opportunities
left for them were to cross the
northern border illegally, join a cartel,
or sign up with the military. These
young men had chosen the most honorable
of the three routes, and here
they stood, tasked with carrying out
their country’s most important mission
since the 1910 revolution.
It was time for the incineration.
Sharing the honor with two of his
guests, General Espitia leaned forward
and solemnly pressed a button
on a small black box before him. Orange
flames shot up, igniting the pile
of drugs across the field. The fire
danced and kissed the bricks of marijuana,
making them crackle, and
small bits of burnt paper wafted into
the air. Plumes of black smoke rose
above us and overtook the
Juárez sky. The summer of 2009 marked two
and a half years of Calderón’s war, and
still the violence was growing. Nearly
one fourth of the army’s troops were
out of their barracks, patrolling the
sixteen states most overrun by the cartels,
yet at least 12,000 people had
been killed since Calderón took office.
Government leaders continued to insist
that the vast majority of the dead
were criminals, though organizations
such as Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch had stepped up
their criticism of the campaign. In
April 2008, the wife of a man killed by
army soldiers had filed suit, demanding
that military crimes against Mexican
citizens be tried in civilian court. But
on August 10, more than a year later,
Mexico’s supreme court dismissed the
case, keeping thousands of complaints
gathered by the human rights commission
under the military’s jurisdiction.
The problems in Juárez had not yet
registered on the national stage, but
on the ground it was clear they were
systemic and widespread. The mayor
had set up an office to handle complaints
against Joint Operation Chihuahua;
within fifteen months, more
than 1,000 were logged. While most
of those involved theft and illegal
searches, at least thirteen families
claimed that relatives picked up by
soldiers were still missing. And state
officials said the army was investigating
eight cases of possible murder.
Late that summer, Juárez was declared
the murder capital of the
world. Its homicide rate now exceeded
those of Caracas, New Orleans,
and Cape Town, which Foreign Policy
had previously ranked as the most violent
cities. The dead included prosecutors,
professors, lawyers, doctors,
engineers, journalists. Scores of shop
owners and street vendors became
targets for failure to pay the cuota—
gang extortion fees. The entire
public-
security system had unraveled
and criminal impunity had reached a
pinnacle. El Diario de Juárez calculated
that only 2.5 percent of the city’s
murders ever resulted in a trial. City
leaders estimated the violence had
left 7,000 orphans and displaced a
hundred thousand people, many of
whom had fled across the border to
neighboring El Paso.
Having been Calderón’s most
symbolic battle, the Juárez operation
was now looking more and more like
a failure, and pressure was mounting
for the president to change course.
In January 2010, the Mexican federal
police chief unexpectedly announced
that his forces would be
taking over the army’s
campaign,
surprising even the military’s leadership.
By April, the soldiers were
taken
off the streets, resigned to a
supporting role behind the 2,000
newly arrived elite police. The new
force was another experiment, part
of a larger plan to build a highly
trained and uncorrupted police entity
under a single command. Once
again, Juárez would
serve as the test case. When I returned in June 2010,
the change was palpable on the
streets. The city no longer felt occupied.
Though I did see soldiers standing
guard at an international bridge,
the once common sight of them fanning
out into defensive formations at
a gas station so their driver could fill
the truck’s fuel tank had been replaced
with that of the federal police’s
subtler navy-blue pickups.
The toll had slowed since the
agents arrived, but there were still
already 1,100 dead—more than in
the same period in 2009. And the
police seemed to have brought their
own brand of lawlessness. There
were fewer stories of illegal searches
and detentions, yet business owners
claimed they were being charged a
cuota not just by criminals but by
the federales: $900 to avoid having
their businesses shut down. The attorney
general had ten agents arrested
on charges of extortion. Nationally,
3,200 agents—10 percent
of the force—were fired that summer
for dereliction of duty. In Juárez
that August, several hundred agents
would protest against their commander,
who they said had ties to one of
the cartels. The presence of the blue
uniforms did not seem to impress the
cartels. By the end of the year, they
would kill thirty-five agents.
Under stifling heat one Tuesday afternoon,
I went looking for Margarita
Rosales at the dry cleaner’s, where she
emerged from behind racks of pressed
business shirts wrapped in plastic,
wearing the green jersey of the national
soccer team. Mexico had
played Uruguay in the World Cup
that morning, and Margarita had
watched the match on a small television
at work.
In the year since our last meeting
there had been little progress in the
investigation of Javier’s death—not
from the army, which had assumed
the case; not from the National Human
Rights Commission, which had
yet to issue a recommendation on
the case to the military. Javier’s
friend Sergio was back from El Paso
and Margarita thought she might be
able to persuade him to provide another
affidavit, but the commissioner’s
investigator in Juárez had told
her she would need to drive Sergio to
his office, and she had neither the
time nor the car. She told me she
was trying to stay strong and move
on, but she acknowledged how difficult
that was: she still broke down
when she was alone. She had begun
the painful process of giving away Javier’s
belongings. She’d given his
shirts to the young men in the park
where he’d once hung out but was
having more trouble letting go of his
baggy pants.
Gustavo de la Rosa was no longer in
Juárez. He had fled to El Paso after receiving
menacing phone calls and then
being threatened at a stoplight, where
a stranger pulled up next to him and
made a shooting sign with his hand. De
la Rosa was not the only Juárez human
rights defender who had been forced to
pull back. A woman named Josefina
Reyes was murdered after publicly criticizing
the military, and Cipriana Jurado,
another activist speaking out
against the soldiers, had also
left the city. Year four of the war finished with
15,273 murders, bringing the national
total to 34,612. While the deaths in
Juárez still outnumbered those of every
other city by the thousands, other
regions of the country were beginning
to witness their own terrors. In the
northeastern state of Tamaulipas, the
leading candidate for governor was assassinated
six days before the election,
the highest profile political murder in
more than a decade. Two months later,
Mexican marines discovered the
bodies of seventy-two Central and
South American migrants who were
kidnapped by the Zetas cartel on
their way north, then shot for failing
to pay extortion fees or for refusing to
join the cartel. Hundreds of other
bodies were unearthed from mass
graves in that state, as well as in
Sinaloa, Durango, and Zacatecas, all
territories disputed by the cartels. So
the national toll was an approximation,
because there was no knowing
how many more bodies might be scattered
underground.
On March 28, 2011, a twenty-fouryear-
old man was found dead in the back
of a Honda Civic in the central state of
Cuernavaca. Yet this victim was not
nameless. The crime had occurred fiftyfive
miles south of the nation’s capital,
not thousands of miles north. The victim’s
father was no factory worker but a
poet and popular political commentator.
When Javier Sicilia learned of his son’s
death, he was attending a literary conference
in the Philippines.
The distraught father penned what
he promised was the last poem he’d
ever write: “The world is not worthy
of words/ they have been suffocated
from the inside/ as they suffocated
you, as they tore apart your lungs . . .”
Sicilia soon emerged as the country’s
voice of conscience, channeling
his grief into a civil disobedience
campaign that became known as the
Movement for Peace with Justice and
Dignity. That June, he led a caravan
from Cuernavaca to Juárez, coursing
through the country’s vast north,
embracing other afflicted relatives
and survivors. Everywhere they
stopped, his group handed out photocopies
of a treatise titled “Proposals
for a National Pact,” which put
forth an analysis of the bloodshed
that contradicted the government’s
official line. Mexico had not turned
into a battleground solely because of
warring cartels. Inequalities generated
by international trade and security
policies had produced “a systemic
violence where the most
affected come from the most excluded,
marginalized, and vulnerable
sectors of society: women, youth,
children, migrants, indigenous communities.”
The worst casualties of
this “civil war” were the estimated 7
million young men to whom society
had closed all doors, leaving them
the options of joining a drug gang or
of enlisting in the military, both of
which assured imprisonment or
death. “This is about thousands of
youth in the military, thousands in
the prisons, thousands in graves.”
The caravan had ended in Juárez
because the group considered it “the
cradle of impunity.” After a day of
private gatherings and public rallies,
Sicilia and his followers staged a symbolic
march across the Paso del Norte
Bridge to the United States. In a historic
downtown plaza, El Pasoans
braved the desert heat to hear his
soft-spoken declamation. The other
victims who took the stage pleaded for
the Americans to share responsibility
for Mexico’s woes.
Not everyone was sympathetic to
Sicilia’s cause. One columnist dismissed
the movement’s demands as
“emotional.” Plenty of citizens still
felt the violence warranted sacrifices
in personal freedoms. Even as the
death count grew to 35,000—or
higher, by some estimates—four out
of five Mexicans continued to endorse
the army as the answer.
Calderón himself seemed to think
the opposition to his campaign rested
on a misunderstanding. If only his critics
grasped the complexity of drug trafficking
and public security, surely they’d
see his point of view. At a face-to-face
meeting with Sicilia and his followers
two weeks after the caravan, he refused
to apologize for his war.
The widely televised meeting had
been tense and ended uncomfortably.
So four days later, Calderón granted
a sit-down interview to a television
reporter to better explain himself. He
emphasized the war’s victories—
twenty-one of the thirty-seven mostwanted
traffickers were now behind
bars—but also admitted that those
weren’t the achievements people most
wanted. “What the people need to
see is peace and tranquility in their
homes,” he said.
The interviewer, Ciro Gómez Leyva,
asked the president if he was concerned
about his legacy. “No, because
I have a clear conscience, Ciro,”
Calderón replied. “As long as I have a
clear conscience, knowing I did what
I had to do, the rest is irrelevant.”
Leyva seemed unsatisfied. Wasn’t a
single case of military abuse enough
to submit him to judgment—maybe
even imprisonment? The president
frowned. “Probably.” But he insisted
that all instances of abuse had been
thoroughly investigated and all
wrongdoers punished. “Because what
I’m fully convinced of is that if we
want to try to construct a rule of law,
we must obey the law,” he said. “That’s
the last space of moral authority,
in which we are far superior
to the criminals.” On October 28, 2011—just a
month shy of the five-year anniversary
of Calderón’s war—a military court finally
seemed to cave to public pressure,
finding fourteen officers and soldiers
guilty of opening fire and killing two
women and three children in 2007 after
they drove through a military
checkpoint. The sentences were significant,
ranging from sixteen to forty
years. Prior to that decision, the eightynine
cases the military claimed to be
investigating had resulted in just two
convictions—one for torture, another
for unlawful arrest and detention—and
no one had been sentenced.
The court’s ruling wasn’t the only
sign of progress. Two weeks after
Calderón’s television interview, the
Mexican supreme court finally sided
with the human rights activists, ruling
that any troops accused of crimes
against civilians should be tried by
civilian judges. And yet, even if these
courts assert their jurisdiction, victims
and their families may not find
justice in a system that tries less than
2 percent of reported crimes—a statistic
borne out in Juárez. Javier Rosales’s
mother eventually received a
fax from the National Human Rights
Commission stating they had closed
the investigation into her son’s death
for “lack of evidence.” Jaime Alejandro
Irigoyen’s family, terrified of retribution,
never even filed a claim.
Benjamín Medina Sanchez decided
that the smartest response to his torture
was to accept the drug charges
the army imposed on him and wait
out his ten-month prison term. We
will never know how many men were
lost to this dirty war, because its victims
are not political activists or student
protesters. Because they were
nameless citizens on the margins of
the country and its conscience, few
will rise to defend them or reconstruct
their stories. n
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redmesa
Senior Nomad
Posts: 580
Registered: 3-12-2008
Location: Van Isle and Bahia Asuncion
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This is so beyond tragic that thought and words escape me. It is a world of total fear, death, oppression, and pain right at our doorstep.
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redmesa
Senior Nomad
Posts: 580
Registered: 3-12-2008
Location: Van Isle and Bahia Asuncion
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I did write a response to the article, but it was not accepted for
publication. So, I'll post it here for Frontera List members and I
welcome your comments:
Writing in the January Harpers, Cecilia Ballí laments the fate of the
“nameless citizens” victimized by “Calderón’s War,” while at the same
time giving names and voices to several (three to be exact) of these
victims from Ciudad Juárez—a city of 1.2 million people where more
than 10,000 have been murdered since 2007.
Ballí interviews the surviving parents of law student Jaime Irigoyen
Flores and Javier Eduardo Rosales, both victims of abduction, torture
and murder by the Mexican army, and Benjamin Medina Sanchez, now
serving a prison sentence after soldiers ransack his house, find a
joint and force him to confess to drug dealing after beating him
unconscious and giving him water laced with acid to drink. Despite
hearing such evidence (that is multiplied hundreds of times by daily
reports in Mexican media with names, dates and other details on the
ordinariness of thousands of victims), the writer never challenges the
central idea that “Calderón’s War” is anything but a steadfast and
heroic campaign against drug cartels and that the atrocities her
subjects experience are aberrations or unintended consequences of
President Calderón's earnest—though sometimes badly executed—war.
This idea is false. The hyper-violence in Mexico is an intentional and
systematic effort by the Mexican government to exert control (or to
regain control) over the huge profits generated by the drug trade—
money that is a necessary part of Mexico’s economy. And, Mexican
civilians—most of them struggling to survive in a failing economy—are
the overwhelming majority of the dead in this war.
In December 2011, Army spokesman Col. Ricardo Trevilla reported that
since 2006, a total of 126 soldiers had died in confrontations with
criminals. Estimates of deaths from homicide in Mexico from December
2006-December 2011 range from 51,000 to more than 80,000. While
President Calderón claims that 90 percent of those killed are
“criminals being killed by other criminals,” at the same time, his
government admits that at least 95 percent of the crimes are not
investigated.
In August 2011, El Diario de Juárez reported that in 3,203 homicide
case files in Chihuahua dating from January 2010-July 2011, the
evidence collected at crime scenes showed that in less than 2 percent
of these murders were weapons found near the bodies of the victims and
this indicates that they were unarmed and unprepared to defend
themselves at the moment they were killed, hardly the custom of
professional criminals.
There is ample evidence of the Mexican Army and/or paramilitary
commandos harassing, abducting and killing people even before public
announcement of the Joint Chihuahua Operation in March 2008. Juárez
activist Josefina Reyes-Salazar publicly accused the Mexican Army of
abducting and killing two relatives in April 2008. She was murdered in
August 2010 and by the middle of 2011, five more members of the Reyes-
Salazar family had been hunted down and murdered. Several surviving
relatives are now seeking political asylum in the United States,
claiming that Mexican security forces are systematically persecuting
social activists under the smoke screen provided by the war on drugs.
Journalists have also been targets of the Mexican army , and though
the military sits at the pinnacle of the impunity pyramid in Mexico,
it is one of many powerful groups that abduct, torture and kill
Mexicans. Drug trafficking gangs kill. Street gangs kill. Municipal,
state and federal police kill. And drug cartel operatives often kill
from the inside of these security forces. As former Chihuahua
governor, Jose Reyes Baeza, declared in March 2008, “"All of the
public security agencies are infiltrated—all of them, pure and
simple…” The governor predicted a “return to normalcy” as soon as
these agencies could be cleaned up. Five years on, more than 10,000
people in the city of Juárez alone are dead and so far this year,
another 3.4 people are added to the tally each day.
Just this week, a mother in Ciudad Juárez said: "For me, the police
are like an epidemic. They are the ones who are killing and torturing
and after that, they accuse [their victims] of being criminals.”
Juárez police chief Julian Leyzaola, a former army officer, was seen
beating this woman’s 24-year-old son to death after his arrest for
suspicion of involvement in another murder. Eyewitnesses testified
that the chief then ordered police to dump the body outside the city
to destroy the evidence. A few days after the mother testified in the
investigation of this son’s murder, while she was working a second
shift in an assembly plant to support her other 7 children, four
hooded men entered her house, shot 2 more of her sons (aged 14 and 20)
in their beds and set the bodies on fire in front of her other 5
children.
There is growing evidence that killings were and are carried out by
groups with military training. Reuters recently reported on a former
professional killer who said that he had been trained on an army base
and that he and other hitmen collaborated with soldiers to carry out
their jobs. Reforma, (a conservative national newspaper) reported
that the killings of 35 supposed “Zetas” in Veracruz in September did
not conform to the usual patterns of narco-killings, noting that the
bodies showed signs of materials and techniques usually associated
with the Mexican Army and Marines.
As Ballí’s article notes, President Calderón stands firm in his belief
that he and his security forces hold the moral high ground in this
war. Indeed, just last month, in a speech at an armed forces ceremony
in Mexico City, President Calderón called the criminals “c-ckroaches
and animals that have infected the country and that can only be
eliminated through social cleansing.”
The alleged war between the Mexican army and the drug world has killed
at least 51,000 ordinary Mexicans and less than 200 soldiers. This
same war has done nothing to curtail drug deliveries to the US, nor
has it raised prices paid by drug consumers. US taxpayers supply $500
million dollars a year to the Mexican army, thus contributing to the
creation of the largest human rights catastrophe in the hemisphere. US
citizens seldom hear these facts and Mexicans who flee north with
tales of government horror to seek asylum are ignored or shipped
back.
Molly Molloy
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM
Editor of the FRONTERA-LIST, http://groups.google.com/group/frontera-list
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Mengano
Banned
Posts: 1238
Registered: 9-26-2011
Member Is Offline
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Just for us older people with tired eyes, would you edit your posts and remove all the extra line breaks? My eyes keep jumping back and rereading the
same lines over again. You can do this quickly by first pasting your copied text into a word processor program and deleting the extra [CR's]. Then
copy and past into a forum message.
Windows has notepad built in and will do this, and it automatically strips out all the nonprintable characters in the text.
[Edited on 1-29-2012 by Mengano]
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toneart
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 4901
Registered: 7-23-2006
Member Is Offline
Mood: Skeptical
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Redmesa: "As Ballí’s article notes, President Calderón stands firm in his belief
that he and his security forces hold the moral high ground in this
war."
Well, certainly not by this kind of conduct!
Thank you Santiago, for initiating this post.
Absolutely shameful. And to think that we support this with our taxpayer dollars. For the record: NOT IN MY NAME!!!
As I have said repeatedly, violence begets violence It works both ways. The "high moral ground" is to stand down. Negotiate with the
Sinaloa Cartel and STOP THE VIOLENCE against innocent people.
Edited to correct and credit Santiago with initiating this post. My comments really are to acknowledge Redmesa's take.
[Edited on 1-29-2012 by toneart]
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redmesa
Senior Nomad
Posts: 580
Registered: 3-12-2008
Location: Van Isle and Bahia Asuncion
Member Is Offline
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Sorry Mengano. It looks fine on my computer. I know Santiago's post and mine were long but I did not want to edit it. I find I skim through
posting that I do not have time to read carefully.
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Santiago
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 3501
Registered: 8-27-2003
Member Is Offline
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Sorry about the way the posting looked. I had to bug out for the day just after I figured out how to post it but didn't have the time to figure out
how to make it more presentable.
I first tried posting a link to Harpers but you had to be a subscriber to read it online and I was pretty sure that most folks on this board don't
subscribe to Harpers. It's editorial stance is just a tad left of center....
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