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 Table of Contents

Title Page
Praise
DEAD MAN IN CANAL WAS A STREET CORNER CLOWN
Dedication
PROLOGUE

Miss Sinaloa
Dead Reporter Driving
Murder Artist
Miss Sinaloa
Dead Reporter Driving
Miss Sinaloa
Murder Artist
Dead Reporter Driving
Murder Artist
Dead Reporter Driving
Murder Artist

Afterword
After That Year
APPENDIX - THE RIVER OF BLOOD
EXTENDED PHOTO CAPTIONS
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Also by Charles Bowden

Killing the Hidden Waters

Street Signs Chicago: Neighborhood and Other Illusions of Big City
Life
(with Lew Kreinberg)
Blue Desert
Frog Mountain Blues (photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)
Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions (with Michael
Binstein)
Mezcal
Red Line
Desierto: Memories of the Future
The Sonoran Desert (photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)
The Secret Forest (photographs by Jack W. Dykinga)
Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America
Chihuahua: Pictures from the Edge (photographs by Virgil Hancock)
Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau (photographs by Jack W.
Dykinga)
The Sierra Pinacate (by Julian D. Hayden; photographs by Jack
Dykinga;
with essays by Charles Bowden and Bernard L. Fontana)
Juárez: The Laboratory for Our Future (preface by Noam Chomsky;
afterword by Eduardo Galeano)
Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
Blues for Cannibals
A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior
Inferno (photographs by Michael P. Berman)
Exodus/Éxodo (photographs by Julián Cardona)
Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future
Trinity (photographs by Michael P. Berman)
His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But
he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be
paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention
must finally be paid to such a person.
—ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman

But you see that line there moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, told you, I was one of those.
—LEONARD COHEN, “FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN”

Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.

—ANATOLY RYBAKOV, Children of the Arbat, FICTITIOUSLY
QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN

I shot a man in Reno

Just to watch him die.
—JOHNNY CASH, “FOLSOM PRISON BLUES”

Thank you for waiting.

—ANONYMOUS, THE FINAL WORDS OF THE FOURTH
DEATH LIST OF COPS
POSTED IN CIUDAD JUÁREZ, JUNE 2008. THIS ONE WAS
LEFT OUTSIDE THE
STATION.
DEAD MAN IN CANAL WAS A STREET CORNER
CLOWN

Armando Rodriguez, El Diario, Ciudad Juárez,

November 13, 2008

The man assassinated

Tuesday night in the Diaz Ordaz viaduct
was
a street clown,
according to the state authority.
Nevertheless, this person has not been identified,
but it was reported
that he was between 25 and 30 years old,
1.77 meters tall,
delicate,
light brown complexion,
short black hair.
The victim’s face was painted as a clown,
green with a red nose,
reported the State Prosecutor’s office.
He wore a red polo shirt,
a navy blue sweatshirt, blue jeans,
white underwear,
gray socks labeled USA,
gray and white Converse tennis shoes
and a dark, cherry red beret.
The body was found in the Diaz Ordaz viaduct,
at Norzagaray Blvd in the colonia Bellavista,
on November 11 at 9:40 pm.
The body was found on its side,
with bullet wounds in the right side,
chest
and head.
At this time, the motive for the murder is unknown as well as the
identities of the murderers.
 For Armando Rodriguez, who was gunned down
on November 13, 2008, after filing 907 stories on the
murders of that calendar year.

Like the rest of us, he was a dead man walking.

His last story appeared hours after he was killed.

BLANCA MARTÍNEZ RAISES THE PHOTOGRAPH OF HER
HUSBAND, ARMANDO RODRÍGUEZ, WHILE REPORTERS AND
EMPLOYEES OF EL DIARIO PAY THEIR LAST RESPECTS TO
THEIR MURDERED COLLEAGUE. SHE IS ACCOMPANIED BY
ROCIO GALLEGOS.
 PROLOGUE

GET IN THE CAR

Here’s the deal.

We’re gonna take us a ride.
Now be quiet.
Time’s up, you gotta ride.
We brought the duct tape—do you prefer gray or tan? No
matter, get
your ass in.
We have the plastic bag, the loaded guns.
You have been waiting?
Everyone is waiting, but our list is so long.
Everyone pretends we will never come.
But everyone is on somebody’s list.
Well, for you, the wait is over.
Let me tell you about a killing season.
What?
You don’t like violence?
I understand.
But get in the car.
You say it hard to see because of the darkly tinted windows?
You will learn darkness.
Miss Sinaloa is a detail. She was special, so fine.
Of course, she took the ride, my God, what a ride.
Okay, yes, there is the matter of cocaine and whiskey and
sanity that might undercut her standing in the community.
See those people on the street pretending you don’t exist and
 this big machine with tinted windows doesn’t exist, pretending
that none of this is happening to you?
That was you until just a few minutes ago.

The killings?
Murder itself is simply a little piece of life and so it can be
dismissed as exceptional or irrational or extreme.
Though it is curious how, if you kill with style, it does get
everyone’s attention.
Surely, we know that even at our best we can only know little
pieces of life.
What, you are uncomfortable? The tape binding your hands
behind your back is too tight?
Shut your fucking mouth.
You want this pistol cracked over your ugly face?
No?
That’s better.
Now shut up before I have to tape your mouth.
What was I saying?
Oh, yes.
We can still believe that destroying another human life is an
extreme act.
Unless of course, the slaughter is done by governments. Or
the killing is done to some vague group variously dubbed as
terrorists or gangsters or drug dealers or people—and this
varies with location—of other color or religious notions.
Still, you can see, there is really nothing to worry about since
 people know how to ignore whatever interferes with the way
people want to think about the world.
Yes. I mean this. People can have murders all around them
and have people vanish in broad daylight and still go on just fine
and say, well, those people were bad, or it doesn’t happen that
often.
What?
Stop shaking your head. You say nothing and do nothing.
You understand?
You are simply along for the ride. And all those things you
said didn’t matter, well, now maybe you will change your mind,
just a little bit.
The trick is to leave, fade away and stop thinking about the
killings.
In the first eleven days of August, seventy-five go down. On
Monday, August 11, fifteen are murdered.
Let it go, fade away, turn the page, change the music.

Let me tell you of an incident.

I come back from the shadows against my will.
What?
You don’t believe me?
Believe me.
This incident, yes, this incident. There is this woman, and she
is very nice-looking, and a friend invites her to a party being
hosted by men who apparently work in the drug industry. The
woman, the one I am talking about, and damn you, listen as if
your fucking life depended on it, well, this woman lives in
southern Chihuahua and so she has little to do with Juárez just
 as Juárez has little to do with the real world, you know, the
United States, Europe, all those kind of places where the real
world exists.
When the car comes and she gets in it, her friend takes
money from the men but does not come along for the ride.
For the next few days, she is gang-raped.
When she returns to the workaday world, she gives a
deposition to the authorities, and suddenly she is on the front
page of the newspaper. She goes into hiding, though she is still
bleeding from her vagina and rectum. She remembers that at
the hospital, she was shunted aside because her case was not
considered an emergency.
And so she becomes a detail. That is the way of life.
Everything becomes a detail if it interferes with the big picture.
She has never met Miss Sinaloa, but now, they truly know
each other and they talk throughout the dark hours of the night, I
can hear them, and this makes sleep difficult for me.
But I hide from such matters. I am a coward by nature and I
do not like cities, loud sounds, guns, violence, or open sewage
systems.

Twice I was at a fresh kill, and the freshness does matter, and flies
buzzed up into my face from the blood. I cannot remember the names
of the dead, hardly anything about them, but the flies buzz in my face all
the time, follow me into good restaurants, trail me to fine venues where
people read poems or play serious music in the calm air of the
fortresses of culture.
Perhaps you think I am mad? I can see that look in your eyes, and
yes, I understand why you have your reservations. But then you do not
have to listen to those two women talking into the night. I cannot decide
what is worse: when they are crying or when they are laughing.
 And something has changed inside, something in a deep part, near
that place we can never locate but often claim is the core of our being.
In the past, I have covered kidnappings, murders, financial debacles,
the mayhem that my species is capable of committing. I spent three
years mired in reporting sex crimes. There is little within me that has
not been battered or wrenched or poisoned. But the path I followed
with Miss Sinaloa proved all my background to be so much nothing. I
have not entered the country of death, but rather the country of killing.
And I have learned in this country that killing is good.
For years, I toyed with a history of my earth, and I found that the way I
could understand my earth was through its elemental fury.
Freeman Dyson, a major physicist, once tried to express the allure
of power and killing. “I have felt it myself,” he warned. “The glitter of
nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To
feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars,
to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons
of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of
illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our
troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that
overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”
I think Dyson erred in one detail: This attraction to slaughter and
power is not simply a temptation of the mind.
I found this glitter in a room with flies buzzing off the fresh blood on
the floor and walls. A candle glittered in the corner by a crucifix. The
bodies had been taken out, the machine gun fire had died. There was
nothing left but the flies and the flame.

Imagine living in a place where you can kill anyone you wish and
nothing happens except that they fall dead. You will not be arrested.
Your name will not be in the newspapers. You can continue on with
your life. And your killing. You can take a woman and rape her for days
and nothing will happen. If you choose, if in some way that woman
displeases you, well, you can kill her after raping her. Rest assured,
nothing will happen to you because of your actions.
Enough. I can barely speak of this change within me. I can hardly
expect others to understand.
How did this change come to pass?
It began with a woman.
In the beginning, I was not looking for Miss Sinaloa. In fact, I had
never heard of her and had no reason, no reason at all, to think she
even existed. I remember clearly, it was a bright winter day, the sun
poured down on me, and the desert seemed so kind and generous
after spending time in the colonias and bad bars of the border city.
Suddenly, she appeared in my life.
Miss Sinaloa is . . . waiting.
Relax.
This is a nice car, no?
We’re gonna have us a time.
 I have been to the far country with her and now I am back.
The air of morning tastes fresh, the sunrise murdered the night,
and now the light caresses my face. I chew on ash and bone, this has
become
my customary breakfast. I drink the glass of blood for my health.

She does not speak. I no longer listen.

The far country lingers on my clothes and in my hair.

I can still smell it here in the morning light. I have brought her
with me and now we will live together for the rest of my days.

Her lips gleam a ripe red and fragrance

floats from her white skin.

Ernesto Romero Adame is thirty-three years old on New Year’s Day,

2008. He sits in his 2005 black Jetta Volkswagen. Bullet holes mark
his neck, throat, and chest as he waits stone dead at Paseo Triunfo de
la Republica Avenue. He is the first official kill of the season.

It is twenty minutes after midnight on Sunday, January 20, when Julián

Cháirez Hernández is found dead by gunshot. He is a lieutenant in the
municipal police and thirty-seven years old. Seven hours and ten
minutes later, Mirna Yesenia Muñoz Ledo Marín is found inside her
own home. She is naked and has been stabbed several times. She is
ten years old. On Monday, January 21, at 7:50 A.M., Francisco
Ledesma Salazar is killed in his SUV. He is thirty-five years old and
the coordinator of operations for the municipal police. The gunshots
come from men in a minivan. At 9:30 A.M., the body of Erika Sonora
Trejo is found by police in the bathroom of her home. She is thirty-eight
and eight months pregnant, and officers think her father-in-law has had
at her with an axe. Later that Monday, at 5 P.M., a year-old skeleton
turns up in the desert. That evening around 8:40 P.M., Fernando
Lozano Sandoval is cut down in his SUV by a barrage of fifty-one
rounds. He is fifty-one and the commander of the Chihuahua Bureau of
Investigations. Two vehicles, a red SUV and a gray car, figure in the
attack. Later, Lozano is transported to an El Paso hospital since
Juárez has had recent incidents of killers visiting the wounded in
hospitals in order to finish their work.

A list appears on a Juárez monument to fallen police officers. Under

the heading THOSE WHO DID NOT BELIEVE are the names of five
recently murdered cops. And under the heading FOR THOSE WHO
CONTINUE NOT BELIEVING are seventeen names.

As the killings increase in early 2008, rumors begin to spread of

Mexican army troops suddenly increasing in Ciudad Juárez and
northern Chihuahua. On February 13, the soldiers go to a house and
find twenty-five big guns, five small arms, seven fragmentation
grenades, 3,494 rounds of various calibers, a bunch of bulletproof
vests, eight radios, and five cars with Sinaloa plates. On February 16,
they find twenty-one men, ten AK-47s, more than 13,000 hits of
cocaine, 2.1 kilos of cocaine base, various uniforms—some of the
Mexican army, some of AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigación, the
Mexican equivalent of the FBI), 401 cartridges, 760 grams of
marijuana, and three vehicles with Sinaloa plates. On February 21,
they seize a helicopter.
On the twentieth, seven men are picked up by the army. Later, they
say the soldiers beat them with cables, among other gestures.

Around 8 P.M. on Wednesday night, March 5, he crawls across the

white tile floor of a small bakery near central Juárez. He has been gone
two days and is a member of the city’s traffic cops. Juán Rodriguez,
sixty-five, looks down from his counter of bread, sweet rolls, and
candies and sees that the man is barefoot and beaten and that all the
insignia have been ripped from his tattered traffic-cop uniform.
Then, he hears Carlos Adrián De Anda Doncel say, “No! No police,
please! Do not call the police!”
Instead, he calls his wife and says, “My love, I am well.”
Within five minutes, members of his own unit arrive and whisk him
away. Two days later, he flees the city. His commander says that since
he is absent from duty, he will lose his job. He has three children.
Four days after the kidnapped and beaten cop appeared in the
bakery, Rodriguez offers me a roll and refuses payment. When I ask
him about the frightened cop begging that he not call the police, he
says softly, “I can no longer say that.”

Silence has returned again to this city of two million souls. The
governor of Chihuahua has been in seclusion since January—they say
his face is frozen due to some mysterious medical condition. The city
police have announced they will no longer be answering calls but
prefer to stay in their station houses.
The newspaper account of that night notes that the cop’s safe return
was a miracle, a historic act, because his captors—never named or
identified, and they most likely never will be—“pardoned his life.”
Over the previous weekend, seven men died in executions, one of
them a Mexican army captain who worked in intelligence and died
driving his car on Sunday morning down a Juárez avenue. By Monday,
March 3, eighty-nine murders had been tallied since New Year’s Day.

In 1999, Juárez went a solid year without public evidence of an

execution—meaning 365 days without a corpse being left on the street
in the customary style of hands bound with duct tape, mouth taped
shut, and a bullet through the brain. Then, on the 366th day, the bodies
began appearing again. Locals think the year of silent murder came as
greeting to the newly elected governor, Patricio Martinez. And the
return to executed bodies being left on the street also came as a
message to this governor after his first year in office.
Juárez has long supplied Americans with what they wanted—booze
during Prohibition, women at all times, opiates when they were
outlawed in the United States, quick divorces when the marriages
soured—and like the rest of Mexico, the city has operated as a
partnership between criminal organizations and government.
Geography has made the city the link between the center of Mexico
and the transportation arteries of the United States. But in the 1980s,
major cocaine routes shifted from Florida to Mexico, and Juárez
became the beneficiary of this change. Profits increased manyfold,
and by 1995, the Juárez cartel was taking in $250 million a week,
according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
Violence grew accordingly, as did corruption of the local government
to protect this money. But nothing in this past of vice, drugs, corruption,
and money prepared the city for the violence it was suddenly
experiencing. Juárez had tasted two hundred to three hundred murders
a year in the 1990s and most of the new century. Suddenly, a month of
forty or fifty executions seemed quiet—the previous record slaughter
for the city was thirty-nine in September 1995. A new day had begun
and it looks like night.

I sit on a curb on a heavily rutted dirt street. About ten blocks away
rises a new Catholic church, a huge edifice with red-tiled domes
etched with yellow tiles, fine new wooden doors, the walls gleaming
with stained-glass windows. The church is encircled by new pickup
trucks and SUVs, all with deeply tinted windows. Inside, people pray.
Set against the surrounding dirt streets and general poverty, the new
huge church seems like a miracle. But in this city, it is not. Like the
huge discos and fine restaurants of Juárez, it is built not of bricks and
mortar but of narco-dollars.
No one speaks of this.
No one doubts this.
But where I sit on the curb, the world is linked to the church and the
people praying there this Sunday. Across the street is a two-story
home painted yellow and green with iron trim and a satellite dish. Up
and down the dirt street, men in dark uniforms with flak jackets and
machine guns stand around and watch for something. They are busy
digging for bodies in a building just down the street. I can hear the soft
voices of people, the bark of dogs, the swish of clothes drying on a
line. Overhead, the sun hunts through the clouds. In the yard behind me,
there is a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, grape vines, and a large
rose bush.
The digging goes on and on for days. There is much to uncover.

I am standing in the desert. A crazy man is talking to me. He says,

“Someone is attacking me. I was contracted to make a killing. My
family is American.”
He wears a pink sport shirt.
I am sitting in a café.
The waiter asks, “Why did you come back? Aren’t you finished yet?”
I tell him the people of the city keep killing each other.
He laughs.
I am in the crazy place when a retarded man hands me a children’s
book.
 It reads, “One windy day during the harvest time, Quail sings a song
—just as Coyote walks by.
“‘Teach me your song, or I shall eat you up,’ cries Coyote.
“But Quail’s song is no ordinary song, and Coyote may end up
swallowing more than he bargained for. . . . ”
That is clearly the risk.
On a Sunday, a man in a Dodge Neon is gunned down.
On Wednesday, two beaten and tortured cops are found under a
bridge near the cemetery.
On Wednesday night, that cop crawls into the bakery.
On Thursday, another man is executed.
On Friday, seven men are slaughtered in a house in the state capital
by the authorities.
On Saturday, a man in a car is machine-gunned near the crazy
place.
On Sunday, a police bodyguard is cut down.
At first, I keep a list, try to see things in sequence, search for cause
and effect.
Then I learn and give up.
The kidnapped and beaten cops that turn up, well, they were never
reported as kidnapped until they suddenly reappeared.
The cop cut down, his name is not printed, nor the fact that the
comandante he was guarding had his name on a certain list.
The names of the seven men killed in the state capital are also never
made public.

When I cross from El Paso to Juárez in January, the river is dry. Nine
thousand jobs have vanished in the past few months as the economy
sinks. It is thirty-three degrees and very still. Air presses down like Jell-
O and has a gun-metal blue cast from the wood fires of the poor. A
vendor walks with a stack of newspapers on his head and carefully
plods between the puddles.
Everything has already begun, but at this moment it has not yet been
said out loud. The beginning will come later, when the dead get so
numerous we can no longer silence them.

He is really unimportant. He seems to move in and out of jail in New

Mexico. He is in the United States illegally, that is true, but he has a list
of injustices he wishes to state, injustices that cover thirteen years in
the country.
For example, U.S. authorities try to interview him when he is too
tired to talk. Also, he suffers from gastrointestinal problems and he is
seldom given the right medication at the right time. He has an infection
in his right arm, and he does not get proper treatment for that, either.
Detention officers have pounded on him and dislocated his shoulder.
He says the guards mess with his medications so that he will go crazy.
Also, once a dentist drilled his tooth and that tooth disappeared.
He has been drinking fairly hard since age seventeen. Yes, there
have been blackouts. When he was young, he did marijuana and
inhalants.
As for his family members, they have no history of suicide. True, his
dad drank a lot and was violent and his mom got violent also and once
tried to choke him when he was a boy.
The examining doctor notes that he has a poorly groomed beard
and sometimes does not make sense. He can’t quite figure out what is
wrong with him, but the physician does not think the man can represent
himself before the authorities. Eventually, the United States kicks him
back into Mexico.
And then he winds up at the crazy place in the desert outside Juárez.
He is part of a story that never gets told.
There is a rhythm of casual violence in the city that almost always goes
un-mentioned. The mayor of Juárez lives in El Paso so that he can
keep his hand on the pulse of the city. The publisher of the daily paper
in Juárez also lives in El Paso. The publisher of the daily paper in the
capital of Chihuahua lives in New Mexico. A growing number of the
businesspeople of Juárez live in El Paso. Leaders in the drug industry
also keep homes in El Paso.
But for the average citizen of Juárez, such a remove is not a
possibility. They lack the money and the legal documents to live in the
United States. As winter slides into spring and the killing season
accelerates, the poor continue their lives in Juárez and often find their
deaths there. The new violence is simply an increase in the volume of
their tired lives.
A woman and her boyfriend sit in a car drinking and arguing. Her
young daughter is in the car, also. Then the man sends the girl to a
nearby Laundromat. When she comes back, she notices her mother is
not moving. The boyfriend says that she is sleeping. He takes the girl
home. Later, the authorities determine the woman died from a
laceration to her liver. She was forty-seven when her boyfriend paused
in his drinking to beat her to death. It is early March.
On Sunday, March 15, a violent dust storm sweeps the city. In the
past thirty hours, there have been six reported murders. People fly
kites all over the city.
There is a report of a woman who is beaten by her husband. And
she flees for her life with her two daughters. He follows. Her Mercedes
is found empty.
The daily paper reports that local citizens are complaining of traffic
delays because streets get suddenly shut down as police investigate
and do forensic investigations at kill sites.
Far down the road, long after the killings splattered across the city, the
mayor of Juárez gives an interview. It is June and he says now that he
knew in very early January that the killing season was coming—he
does not explain how he came to possess this gift of prophecy. He
says he was informed that the murders would begin on January 6, but
actually, he learned they began January 5. No matter, because you
see, the killings are really between two criminal organizations and do
not actually involve the decent citizens of Juárez. He is the man in
charge and he says, don’t worry.
There is a comforting system here. No one really knows who the bad
people are in Juárez. Until they are murdered, and once they are
murdered, then everyone knows they are bad because good people
have nothing to fear. The mayor says only 5 innocents can be found
among the 500 people that have been murdered so far. Which means
the killers, whoever they are, have revealed to the city 495 bad people
that no one really knew about until the gunfire unmasked them.
He does admit that Juárez suffers from “a lack of tranquility.”
 Miss Sinaloa

She came to this place in the desert to live with the other crazy
people under the giant white horse. She did not belong, but then
neither did the caballo. The half-mile-long horse was sketched on the
Sierra de Juárez with whitewash by a local architect in the late 1990s.
He copied the design from the Uffington horse in Great Britain, a three-
thousand-year-old creation deep from the dreamtime of neolithic
people. He said he was doing it as an exercise in problem solving (this
horse faces right, the original faces left and is three times as large)
and as a way to draw attention to the beauty of the mountains. What he
did not say is what some in the city whispered, that the horse was
sponsored by Amado Carrillo, then head of the Juárez cartel.
The cartel begins in the mists of time, but with the flow of cocaine
starting in the mid-1980s, it becomes a colossus. In the spring of
1993, the head of the cartel is murdered while on holiday in Cancún,
and Amado Carrillo takes over. He has a genius for business, and
soon ten to twelve billion a year is flowing into the cartel coffers.
Carrillo becomes the organizational genius who brokers cocaine
shipments for the other Mexican cartels, buys the Mexican government,
and lands full-bodied jets full of cocaine at the Juárez airport. By the
time he is murdered in 1997, he has taken the Mexican drug world
from that age of the outlaw into the era of a multinational business.
But the era of Carrillo was the golden age of peace in Juárez, when
murders ran two or three hundred a year and, at any one moment,
fifteen tons of cocaine was warehoused in the city and waiting to go
visit American noses.
 There was a time when death made sense in Juárez. You died
because you lost a drug load. Or you died because you had a drug
load. Or you died because you tried to do a drug deal. Or you died
because you were a snitch. Or you died because you were weak and a
woman and it was dark and someone thought it would be fun to rape
and kill you. There was a pleasant order to death, a ritual of federal
police or state police or the army taking you, then tying your hands and
feet with duct tape, torturing you, and finally killing you and tossing your
body into a hole with a dose of milk, the friendly term for lime. Your
death would be called a carne asada, a barbeque. Life made sense
then, even in death. Those were the good old days.
Now, the world has changed. Since the first of January 2008, El
Paso, the sister city of Juárez and just across the remnants of the Rio
Grande, has had one murder in two months. In the first two months of
the year, Juárez has officially had ninety-five, and there is likely some
slippage in these numbers. Two of the dead were Juárez police
commanders, the one shot twenty-two times—a third commander
somehow survived and was taken to the bridge (according to rumor, in
a tank, but actually in a Humvee—every fact in this city soon succumbs
to magical fraud) and transferred to an ambulance and then to an El
Paso hospital, where he was guarded by local and federal agents.
Now he has vanished and left no forwarding address. As of February
2008, besides the people murdered in the Juárez area, another three
hundred have died in Mexico, also mainly in drug killings. Thirty
thousand Mexican soldiers are said to be fighting the drug world. By
2009, there will also be twenty thousand U.S. Border Patrol agents on
the line facing down Mexico. Just two governments taking care of
business.
Just yesterday, a friend came upon the body of a cholo who had
been executed and left on the street. This killing did not even merit the
attention of the newspapers. But then, outside of a few mentions, the
U.S. media paid little notice of the slaughter until early 2009, when it
became clear that neither the change of the calendar year nor the
presence of the Mexican army had done anything to decrease the
death toll as the months passed. True, the commanders at Fort Bliss in
El Paso declared Juárez off limits to soldiers because they might get
hurt. But like almost everything else that happens in this city, the
response has been silence. Amado Carrillo had a thorough-bred
racehorse he named Silencio, Silence. It is a good trait to have in this
place.

She was beautiful and they called her “Miss Sinaloa.” She was a
teenager when the white horse was created in the late 1990s. At that
time, Miss Sinaloa knew nothing of giant horses painted on mountains,
nor of the cartels or of the crazy place here in the desert. She came
here very recently to visit her sister, sometime in December 2005. She
stayed some months and then went home to Sinaloa, the Mexican
state on the Pacific coast that is the mother of almost all the major
players in the drug industry in Mexico. She was very beautiful. I know
this because Elvira is telling me everything as I stand in the wind with
the sand whipping around me.
Elvira is heavy with a coarse sweater, pink slacks, dark skin, and
cropped hair with a blonde tint dancing through it. She is one of fifteen
caretakers at the crazy place—the asylum in the desert—and receives
fifty dollars a week for cooking three meals a day, six days a week. A
man straddles a bicycle by her side, a boy in red overalls carrying a
pink purse stares, and sitting on the ground is the lean and hungry dog
of the campo. Smoke fills the air from a trash fire behind the asylum
where they all work. The facility—a concrete block wall with various
rooms inside—hosts a hundred inmates. A doctor drops by on Sunday
to check on the health of the crazy people, and the whole operation is
sponsored by a radio evangelist in Juárez, a man all the inmates call
El Pastor.
Every five days, the staff takes the blankets from the inmates,
washes them, and then comes out beyond the walls and clumps them
on creosote or yucca plants for drying. They now huddle in the wind like
a herd of beasts—green, red, blue, violet, and one is gray with a tiger
and her kitten on it. My mind spins back to the mid-1990s, when
Amado Carrillo ran Juárez and for a spell was leaving bodies wrapped
in tiger blankets. He was rumored to have a private zoo with a tiger,
one he fed with informants, but of course, such a custom was a
common legend in the drug industry. Then for a spell, he was wrapping
informants in yellow ribbons as gifts to the DEA. All this happened in
the quiet days of the past, when the killing was not nearly so bad.
Elvira explains how people wind up in her care: “There are many
brought here because they tried to stab a father, or they are addicts, or
they have been robbed or assaulted and broken forever. Many of the
women here have been raped and lost their minds forever. There is a
thirty-four-year-old woman here who saw her family assaulted and then
she was raped and lost her mind.”
She says this in a calm voice. It is simply life. The inmates consume
twelve kilos of beans a day, she continues on, and could I bring them
some frijoles?

The wind blows, the dust chokes, the white horse watches, and
suddenly, Elvira starts talking about Miss Sinaloa, her exact phrase,
this Miss part, yes, Miss Sinaloa she says, a beauty queen who came
to Juárez.
“Once,” she says with pride, “we had a very beautiful woman, Miss
Sinaloa. She was here about two years ago. The municipal police
brought her here. She was twenty-four years old.”
And then Elvira takes flight about her beautiful hair that hung down to
her ass, and how very, very white Miss Sinaloa’s skin was, oh, so
white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and replaced by elegant
tattooed arcs to echo the hair. The police had found her wandering
around on the street one morning. She had been raped and she had
lost her mind. Finally, Elvira explains, her family came up from Sinaloa
and took her home.
The asylum facing the giant horse is not a place in Juárez where
beautiful women with white skin tend to stay. Just down the road to the
east is La Campana, the alleged site of a mass grave where Louis
Freeh, then head of the FBI, and various Mexican officials gathered in
December 1999 to excavate bodies. That story slowly went away
because the source was a local comandante who had fled to the
United States, a man known on the streets of Juárez as El Animal. And
he could produce very few bodies, basically only a handful, and each
and every one of them he had personally murdered. The burying
ground itself was owned by Amado Carrillo. One of his killers, who
worked there, now teaches English to rich students in a Juárez private
high school. Of course, he continues to take murder contracts between
classes. And then to the southeast of La Campana is the Lote Bravo,
where dead girls have been dumped since the mid-1990s. All this
history comes flowing back to me as I hear the story of Miss Sinaloa.

I have been coming to this city for thirteen years, and naturally, I have,
like everyone here, an investment in the dead. And the living. Here is a
story, and like all stories here, like Miss Sinaloa, it tantalizes and floats
in the air, and then vanishes. A poor Mexican woman in El Paso wants
drug treatment for her young teenaged son, but she cannot afford the
facilities in the United States, so she checks him into a clinic in Juárez.
A few days, later, he is back in the United States and housed in the
very hospital where the Mexican comandante who survived
assassination was briefly housed. The boy has been raped and has a
torn rectum.
Then the tale erases itself from consciousness.
Jane Fonda cares, so does Sally Field, and so both have been to
Juárez to protest the murder of women. The Vagina Monologues has
been staged here, also. Over the past ten years or so, four hundred
women have been found murdered, the majority of them victims of
husbands and lovers and hardly mysterious cases. This number
represents 10 or 12 percent of the official kill rate. Two movies have
been made about the dead women. Focusing on the dead women
enables Americans to ignore the dead men, and ignoring the dead
men enables the United States to ignore the failure of its free-trade
schemes, which in Juárez are producing poor people and dead
people faster than any other product. Of course, the murders of the
women in Juárez are hardly investigated or solved. Murders in Juárez
are hardly ever investigated, and so in death, women finally receive the
same treatment as dead men. At least eight prosecutors have claimed
to tackle the murders. Last year, a forensics team from Argentina
showed up to straighten things out. The team was state-of-the-art,
thanks to Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s that disappeared ten
thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thousand people—no one really
knows the tally. The Argentineans had also worked in El Salvador,
another country rich with mass graves. But none of this training
prepared them for Juárez. They came to solve the mystery of murdered
women in Juárez. They found the reality of the city.
They found heads sitting on the floor of the morgue, bodies without
heads, bodies tossed willy-nilly into mass graves. DNA also failed
them at times because the local forensic talent had boiled some of the
bodies of the girls, a cooking technique that destroys DNA. At least
three families, they discovered, had gotten the bodies of their loved
ones back, had buried them, and now had to be told they’d been given
the bodies of strangers.
But then, the local authorities can be a bit of a problem. The former
police chief was busted in January 2008 for setting up a dope deal in
El Paso. Two cops disappeared a week ago. Four days later, a
vagrant discovered a shopping bag downtown with the uniform of one
of the cops—it had his name, blood stains, and bits of duct tape, this
latter being a favored shackling device of locals when they execute
people. So apparently, there is a naked policeman wandering the city.
And then, there is the tale of Miss Sinaloa. She goes to a party with
police, and then after the fun, the police bring her to the crazy place. A
fair-skinned woman is a treat for street cops. When the girls began
vanishing from Juárez in 1993 and then reappearing at times as raped
corpses or simply bones, the local cops referred to them as las
morenitas—the little dark ones—because the favored prey came from
the poor barrios where young women who slave in American-owned
factories for next to nothing live. Miss Sinaloa hails from a different
world.
 But there is always one enduring fact in Juárez: There are no facts.
The memories keep shifting. Miss Sinaloa is a beauty who comes to
party in Juárez and is raped. Miss Sinaloa is a beauty who comes to
party in Juárez and consumes enormous amounts of cocaine and
whiskey and becomes crazy, so loca, that the people call the police
and the cops come and take Miss Sinaloa away and they rape her for
days and then dump her at the crazy place in the desert. She has long
hair and is beautiful, and a doctor examines her and there is no
question about the rapes. She has bruises on her arms and legs and
ribs.
She is now almost a native of the city.
 Dead Reporter Driving

There is a man driving fast down the dirt road leading to the border.
A rooster tail of dust marks his passage. He is very frightened, and his
fourteen-year-old son sits beside him in silence. The boy is that way—
very bright, yet very quiet. They are unusually close. The father has
raised him as a single parent since he was four after the relationship
with the mother did not work out.
Now, father and son are fleeing to the United States. Back in their
hometown of Ascensión, Chihuahua, men with automatic rifles are
searching for them. These men are soldiers in the Mexican army and
intend to kill the father, and perhaps the son, too. As the man drives
toward the U.S. port of entry, they are ransacking his house. No one in
the town will dare to lift a hand. The newspaper will not cover this event.
The man knows these facts absolutely.
His name is Emilio Gutierrez Soto, and he is the reporter covering
this part of Mexico and that is why he is a dead man driving. He
passes an ejido, one of the collective villages created by the Mexican
revolution as the answer to the land hunger of the poor. Once, the army
came here, beat up a bunch of peasants, and terrorized the community
under the guise of fighting a war on drugs. The peasants never filed
any complaints, because they are tied to the land and could not flee if
there were reprisals for their protests. They also knew that any
complaints would be ignored by their government. This is the kind of
thing the reporter knows but does not write and publish. Like the
peasants, he knows his place in the system.
 It is June 16, 2008, and in two days, the man will have his forty-fifth
birthday, should he live that long.
The military has flooded across Mexico since President Felipe
Calderón assumed office in December 2006 with a margin so razor
thin that many Mexicans think he is an illegitimate president. His first
act was to declare a war on the nation’s thriving drug industry and his
favorite tool was the Mexican army. Now over 40,000 soldiers are
marauding all over the country in this war against the nation’s drug
organizations. In 2008, between 5,000 and 6,000 Mexicans died in the
violence, a larger loss than what the United States has endured during
the entire Iraq war. Since the year 2000, 24 reporters have been
officially recorded as murdered in Mexico, 7 more have vanished, and
an unknown number have fled into the United States. But all numbers in
Mexico are slippery because people have a way of disappearing and
not being reported. The entire police force of Palomas, Chihuahua,
fled in 2008, with the police chief seeking shelter in the United States,
the rest of the cops simply hiding in Mexico. Between July and October
2008, at a minimum 63 people—Mexican cops, reporters, and
businesspeople—sought political asylum at crossings in West Texas
and New Mexico. In all of 2008, 312 Mexicans filed credible fear
claims at U.S. ports of entry, up from 179 in 2007. Many more simply
blended into U.S. communities. This is the wave of blood and terror
suffocating the man as he heads north.
The reporter has tried to live his life in an effort to avoid this harsh
reality. He has been careful in his work. His publisher has told him it is
better to lose a story than to take a big risk. He does not look too
closely into things. If someone is murdered, he prints what the police
tell him and lets it go at that. If people sell drugs in his town or
warehouse drugs in his town, he ignores this information. Nor does he
inquire about who controls the drug industry in his town or anywhere
else.
The man driving is terrified of hitting an army checkpoint. They are
random and they are everywhere. The entire Mexican north has
become a killing field. In Palomas, a border town of maybe three
thousand souls, forty men have already been executed this very year,
and another seventeen people have vanished in kidnappings. Some of
these murders are by drug cartels. Some of these murders are by
state and federal police. Some of these murders are by the Mexican
army. There are now many ways to die.
The high desert is beautiful, a pan of creosote with lenses of grass
in moist low spots. Here and there, volcanic remnants make black
marks on the earth, and to the north and west, sierras rise. There is
almost no water. Almost all the rivers flowing from the Sierra Madre die
in the desert. But it is home, the place he has spent his life.
The reporter may die for committing a simple error. He wrote an
accurate news story. He did not know this was dangerous, because he
thought the story was very small and unimportant. He was wrong and
that was the beginning of all his trouble.
This is because there are two Mexicos.
There is the one reported by the U.S. press, a place where the
Mexican president is fighting a valiant war against the evil forces of the
drug world and using the incorruptible Mexican army as his warriors.
This Mexico has newspapers, courts, and laws and is seen by the U.S.
government as a sister republic.
It does not exist.
There is a second Mexico, where the war is for drugs, for the
enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the
military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the
murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where
the line between government and the drug world has never existed.
The reporter lives in this second Mexico.
Until very recently, he liked it just fine. In fact, he loved it because he
loves Mexico and has never thought of leaving. Even though he lives
near the border, he has not bothered to cross for almost ten years.
But now, things have changed. He has researched the humanitarian
treaties signed by the United States, and he thinks, given these
commitments by the American government, he and his boy will be
given asylum. He has decided to tell the authorities nothing but the
truth. His research has failed to uncover one little fact: No Mexican
reporter has ever been given political asylum by the United States of
America.
Suddenly, he sees a checkpoint ahead, and there is no way to
escape it.
Men in uniforms pull him over.
He is frightened but discovers to his relief that this checkpoint is run
by the Mexican migration service and so, maybe, they will not give him
up to the army.
“Why are you driving so fast?”
“I am afraid. There are people trying to kill me.”
“The narcos?”
“No, the soldiers.”
“Who are you?”
He hands over his press pass.
“Oh, you are the one, they searched your house.”
“I have had problems.”
“Those sons of bitches do whatever they want. Go ahead. Good
luck.”
He roars away. When he stops at the port of entry at Antelope Wells
in the boot-heel of New Mexico, U.S. Customs asks, as they always
do, what he is bringing from Mexico.
He says, “We bring fear.”
There is a phantom living in Juárez, and his name is on everyone’s
lips: la gente. He is the collective unconsciousness of the city, a
hoodoo conjured up out of murder, rape, poverty, corruption, and
deceit. Everyone in the city—man, woman, and child, professor and
street alcoholic—knows what la gente thinks. Just as I have never met
or interviewed an American politician who did not know what “the little
people” think, nor have I met this army of phantom dwarfs that allegedly
dominate my own nation or heard so much as a whisper from another
domestic band, the Silent Majority. In the same way, I must listen to
drivel about la gente.
In politer circles, la gente gives way to a different phantom, a thing
called civil society. Of course, neither la gente nor civil society exists,
just as in the United States there are no little people nor a Silent
Majority. All these terms are useful for two reasons: They allow people
to talk about things they do not know, and they allow people to pretend
there is an understanding about life that does not exist. Oh, and there
is a final bonus: They allow newspaper columnists to discuss people
they have never met and say knowingly what the people they have
never met actually think.
In Juárez, la gente—this collective mind that is wise and knowing—
is a necessary crutch because the police are corrupt, the government
is corrupt, the army is corrupt, and the economy functions by paying
third-world wages and charging first-world prices. The Mexican
newspapers dance around truth because, one, corrupt people who are
rich and powerful dominate what can be printed and, two, any reporter
honest enough to publish the truth dies.
And so we are left, those of us who actually entertain the possibility
that facts exist and that facts matter, with rumor and this phantom
called la gente. Of course, this means we have no one to talk to and
can only console ourselves with the dead, their bodies leaking blood
out those neat holes made by machine guns, because the dead are
past lying and the dead know one real fact: Someone killed them. They
often do not know who killed them. Nor do they know why they were
killed. But at least they know they have been killed and are now dead.
 This is more than civil society and la gente know because the
television news and the newspapers do not always report murders and
if they report murders they do not always give the names and if they
give the names, they almost never follow up on the murders.
You live.
You die.
You vanish from public records.
And you become the talk of the phantom called la gente.

Juárez is pioneering the future again, and this is a city of

achievements. It claims the invention of the margarita, it is the
birthplace of the zoot suit, of velvet paintings, of the border factory era,
of the most innovative and modern drug cartel, of world-class murder
of women and also of men. In the short month of February alone, 1,063
cars are stolen in the city—around 36 a day. Here a vehicle is worth a
hundred dollars to a junkie—the price a chop shop pays before the
machine is butchered and shipped to China for the metal.
There are explanations for all this. A favorite is that it is all because
of the drug world, especially a current battle the authorities claim is
going on between cartels for control of the crossing into El Paso.
Some blame the massive migration of the poor to the city to work in
the factories. Others, especially those who focus on the murder of the
girls, sense a serial killer is prowling the lonely dark lanes. Finally,
some simply see the state as waning here and the violence as a new
order supplanting the fading state with criminal organizations.
I am in a tiny minority on this matter. I see no new order emerging
but rather a new way of life, one beyond our imagination and the code
words we use to protect ourselves from life and violence. In this new
way of life, no one is really in charge and we are all in play. The state
still exists—there are police, a president, congress, agencies with
names studded across the buildings. Still, something has changed,
and I feel this change in my bones.
 The violence has crossed class lines. The violence is everywhere.
The violence is greater. And the violence has no apparent and simple
source. It is like the dust in the air, part of life itself.
Government here and in my own country increasingly pretends to be
in charge and then calls it a day. The United States beefs up the
border, calls in high-tech towers, and tosses up walls, and still, all the
drugs arrive on time and all the illegal people make it into the fabled
heartland and work themselves into a future.
People tell me there are murders in Detroit, women are raped in
Washington, D.C., the cops are on the take in Chicago, drugs are
everywhere in Dallas, the government is a flop in New Orleans. And
Baghdad is not safe, mortars arc through the desert sky there into the
American womb of the Green Zone. People tell me Los Angeles is a
jungle of gangs, that we have our own revered mafia. And that drugs
flood Mexico and Juárez because of the wicked, vice-ridden ways of
the United States. All of these assertions are ways to ignore the
deaths on the killing ground.
According to the Mexican government and the DEA, the violence in
Juárez results from a battle between various drug cartels. This makes
perfect sense, except that the war fails to kill cartel members. With
over two hundred fresh corpses in ninety days, there is hardly a body
connected to the cartels. Nor can the Mexican army seem to locate any
of the leaders of the cartels, men who have lived in the city for years.
The other problem with this cartel war theory is that the Mexican army
in Juárez continues to seize tons of marijuana but only a few kilos of
cocaine, this in a city with thousands of retail cocaine outlets.
There are two ways to lose your sanity in Juárez. One is to believe
that the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to
understand what is behind each murder. The only certain thing is that
various groups—gangs, the army, the city police, the state police, the
federal police—are killing people in Juárez as a part of a war for drug
profits. So a person never knows exactly why he or she is killed but is
absolutely certain that death comes because of the enormous profits
attached to drug sales.
 Every time I walk across the pay bridge from downtown El Paso to
Juárez, I see a big portrait of Che Guevara on the concrete banks that
channel the original flow of the Rio Grande. Sometimes the paint has
faded, but when moments get very bad in Juárez, someone magically
appears and touches up the portrait. There is also a statement in
Spanish that my president is a terrorist and another message that no
one is illegal and that Border Patrol are killers, and there are a fistful of
revolutionary heroes whose faces scamper across a map of South
America and Mexico. Such statements also insist on order because
that is the ground where heroes flourish.
Often, down below on the dry soil of the river, there is a crazy man.
He shouts in English, “Welcome! Hello America!” And he holds a cup
in his hand for catching tossed coins.
When I cross back, often late in the night, he is on the other side of
the bridge, but now he begs in Spanish.
Behind the loony, a bunch of crosses were painted on a wall to
symbolize the dead girls of Juárez. The simple message in Spanish
says they were actually killed by capitalism incubating in the American-
owned maquiladoras, the border factories of such renown in the
parlors where wine is sipped to toast the global economy.
Every day in Juárez, at least two hundred thousand people get out of
bed to pull a shift in the maquilas. The number varies—right now
probably twenty thousand jobs have vanished in Juárez as a chill
sweeps through the global economy. Within a year, eighty to one
hundred thousand jobs will vanish. Just after the millennium, about one
hundred thousand maquila jobs left the city for mainland China,
because as Forbes magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four
times the wages of the Chinese. A fair point. The greedy Mexicans
were taking home sixty, maybe seventy dollars a week from the plants
in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the
United States. Turnover in these plants runs from 100 to 200 percent a
year. The managers say this is because of the abundant opportunities
of the city. Labor is still a bargain here—but so is death. Four years
ago, the Chihuahua State Police were doing contract murders. They
supplied their own guns and bullets with the full knowledge of the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security.
But we must not talk about such matters. Juárez officially has almost
no unemployment. The factories gleam in industrial parks sculpted by
the local rich. The city grows. There is talk of even building a new city
off to the west, where the giant white horse watches over the desert
flats. That is why I like to go there.
I sit on the sand in the desert under the giant white horse by the
place of the crazy people and I think of Miss Sinaloa.
She understands. And soon I think I will if I am given enough time on
the killing ground.

I insist on getting out of the truck even though I know everyone in the
narco neighborhood is watching me. I suck in the dusty air, feel the
warmth of the sun. Across the street, a large German shepherd barks
through the iron fence. He stares me down and does his work of
guarding a world where only large, angry dogs go about unarmed.

There are a few basic rules about the Mexican army. If you see them,
flee, because they famously disappear people. If you are part of them,
desert, because they famously pay little. In the 1990s, President
Ernesto Zedillo formed a new, pure force to fight drugs and had them
trained by the United States. They were paid a pittance—a friend of
mine in the DEA grew close to them because his agency instantly put
them on the payroll and he was their pay-master. By 2000, the special
antidrug force had joined the Gulf cartel and became known as the
Zetas, U.S.-trained military killers with discipline and skill with
weapons. The original Zetas are mainly dead, but their style—
decapitations, military precision in attacks—spread and now they are
the model for killers in many cartels. They are also an inspiration and a
constant lure for Mexican soldiers who desert for the cartels—over a
hundred thousand troops fled the army and joined criminal
organizations in the first decade of the new century. The pay is better
and so is the sense of power.
In 2000, the election of Vicente Fox ended the seventy-year reign of
the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The drug industry ceased
to be controlled by the central government, many independents
entered the business, domestic drug use skyrocketed, and federal
control of the nation grew ever more feeble. The razor-thin election of
Felipe Calderón in 2006 brought the very legitimacy of the president
into question. He responded by unleashing the army against the drug
industry ten days after his election as a show of force. And that is when
the killing began to spiral to previously unimagined levels. First, he
sent twenty thousand troops to his home state of Michoacan. Then, the
military mission grew to thirty thousand nationally, and eventually forty-
five to fifty thousand. With each escalation, the number of murdered
Mexicans exploded. At about the same time, the United States began
mumbling about Plan Mexico, a billion and a half dollars to help our
neighbors to the south fight the good fight, with the lion’s share going
to the army. Put simply, the United States took a Mexican institution
with long ties to the drug industry—the army was a partner in the huge
marijuana plantation in Chihuahua, Rancho Bufalo, of the mid-1980s,
and it was a Mexican general who became the drug czar in 1997 until
it was discovered he worked for the Juárez cartel—and bankrolled it to
fight the drug industry.
And so in Juárez tonight, the army does the killing, the United States
gloats over a battle against the cartels, the president of Mexico beams
as Plan Mexico comes close to his grasp. And the street soldiers of
the drug industry either duck down or die—the kills in Juárez are
largely of nobodies or of their local cop allies. And the Zetas, the
thousands they have trained, and their imitators get friskier. They have
training camps in northern Mexico—they killed four cops from Nuevo
Laredo in such a camp and then burned them in barrels. They have
heavy arms, grenades, rockets, good morale, and high pay. Desertion
is not an option.
By the late 1990s, the cartel in Juárez was said to have rockets. And
was hiring former Green Berets to make sure its communications
systems were up to snuff. But as the bodies mount in Juárez, the
capos are not the ones with bullet holes. In fact, there is no evidence
they are even concerned by this military exercise. It is a mystery.
During this season of gore, Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, the
former head of the Tijuana cartel, was released in El Paso in early
March after doing about ten years in Mexican and U.S. prisons. He
crossed the bridge into what the DEA claims is enemy territory, the turf
of the Juárez cartel. By all reports, he expressed no concern as he
made his way to the airport.

I sit on the patio drinking wine in a barrio named after Emiliano

Zapata. The city has a statue of the murdered revolutionary hero, and
he looks spindly as he holds an extended rifle with one hand.
Originally, Zapata pointed his weapon toward neighboring El Paso, but
then one mayor thought this impolite and turned the dead hero around.
About a hundred and fifty yards away runs the drainage canal for
floods in the city, a conduit that also doubles as a kind of freeway into
the poor barrios that coat this hillside.
At around noon on March 10, Juán Carlos Rocha, thirty-eight, stands
on an island in this freeway peddling P.M., the afternoon tabloid that
features murders and sells to working-class people. Two men
approach and shoot him in the head. No one sees anything except that
they are armed, wear masks, and move like commandos. They walk
away from the killing. A city cop lives facing the murder site.
A crowd gathers and watches police clean up the murder scene.
Rocha, the people in the barrio say, sold more than P.M. He also
offered cocaine at four to six dollars a packet. He’d been warned twice
by mysterious strangers to cease this activity. He did not listen.
He allegedly earned about three hundred dollars a week as his cut
of the retail cocaine business, more than three times what the
neighboring factory workers, his customers, make. As he lies in a pool
of blood in the bright sunlight, his brown jacket is neatly folded on the
traffic island, his cap on the pavement, where it tumbled from his
shattered skull. A woman in a tube top takes his photograph with her
cell phone while uniformed schoolgirls stand in a pod and watch.
There are more than twenty thousand such retail outlets in this city,
many employing vendors working three shifts a day. Now there is a
battle going on for these small ventures in cutthroat capitalism.
A friend of mine can barely leave anything in his house, because
local addicts rob it the moment he exits. He is on his third large dog.
The previous two were poisoned. He has hopes for the third guard
dog.
The day after the killing, the vendor is the cover story in P.M., the
tabloid he peddled on his traffic island. His street name was El Cala,
The Skull.

On March 27, 2008, the army admits it is taking Juárez by force. In

front of the hotel downtown, a soldier stands with a .50-caliber machine
gun. Over 180 armed and armored vehicles hunt evil on the streets,
plus an air wing that includes a helicopter gunship. Two thousand
troops arrive, or more. Or so the government says, the press repeats,
but no one is ever allowed to make a real count. The soldiers wear
black masks and are short and dark. The officers have lighter skin that
loses pigment steadily as the rank gets higher until there is the rarefied
air of the generals who look like Europeans dropped in some colonial
outpost.
Roadblocks go up everywhere, especially at night, when events are
difficult to see and impossible to monitor. The authorities say this is
necessary because two hundred people have been murdered since
the first of year. There will be ten patrol bases and forty-six roving units.
Night life in Juárez collapses because the local citizens dread hitting a
military checkpoint in the dark.

It is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Semana Santa, Holy Week, a time

for families to reunite and for men to gather and drink themselves
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 GENTLEMEN
Be Seated
Minstrel Program of Pack 18, Prospect Park, Pa.
Tips For Your Pack Minstrels

◆ Program and Publicity: Plan an attractive mimeographed

announcement for your show, and deliver it to parents in advance.
Costumes: Almost anything goes. In some minstrels all actors are
blackface. This appeals to boys, although it presents problems for
the make-up crew. Blackface make-up may be bought at most drug
stores. Burnt cork is an old favorite. In many minstrel shows the cast
remains in white-face with simple costumes, while the end men wear
bright, comic costumes and blackfaces. Either way is good, so take
your choice.... It’s a good idea to have all boys except the end men
dressed alike. If they are to be blackfaced, have each bring a black
sock which can be pulled tight over the head to hide the hair. A
white shirt with a black tie (cloth or paper), black trousers and
socks, and dark shoes complete the costume. It also adds a nice
effect if every boy can wear white gloves. Even white canvas work
gloves will serve nicely.
Stage Setting: If you have a fairly good-sized stage, try to arrange
chairs or benches on different levels so that all performers can be
seen. Decorate the back of the stage with large paper musical notes
pasted on a background of paper, and perhaps a sign reading
“Welcome.”... Footlights and spotlights help the show but are not
necessary for success. You can buy spot bulbs at hardware stores....
Even without a stage, you can arrange your chairs or benches on
different levels so that you have the effect of a stage.
Program: Plan your program so you don’t need the entire Pack at
rehearsals. Features which will be participated in by the entire cast
(for example, opening and closing chorus), can be rehearsed by
each Den, then sung together at the show. Here are some good
numbers for your opening chorus: “Dixie,” “Minstrel Days,” “We’re
Here For Fun” (see page 6, Cub Scout Song Book), “Hello, Hello,
Hello,” “When You Wore A Tulip,” “Down South,” etc.... Each Den can
prepare whatever acts time will allow, and ought to supply at least
two solos, either vocal or instrumental. Solos can be alternated with
the Den stunts. The stunts can include such items as homemade
orchestras, Den chorus, Den tap dance, Den skits, etc.... Much of
the success depends upon the end men. Two or four sit on each side
of the front line and pass jokes and stories back and forth with the
interlocutor. The interlocutor can be either an adult or boy, and it is
his job to keep the show running smoothly and to prompt those who
forget their cues. Most libraries have several books on minstrel
shows, and you will find some good stories in them. Give them a
local twist and they will seem funnier.
Remember: Your minstrel show can succeed without rehearsals of
the entire cast if you plan carefully. It won’t be quite so polished as a
professional minstrel show might be, but your parents and guests
will enjoy it all the same, and will appreciate the fact that you did
not require the boys to go out for special rehearsals.
 MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
UNICORD
A cigar box and four-foot
stick, an “E” string, an old fiddle
bow and a few nails will make it.
Be sure to remove paper from
cigar box so it will sound. Make
a bow out of stick and horse
hair with resin on it, or borrow
an old fiddle bow.
Slide flat metal bar up and
down string to make different
notes.

MUSICAL CANS
Four 2-qt., four 1-qt. and four
1-pt. cans with different
amounts of water to make a
musical scale.
The more water and the larger the can the lower the note. The
less water and the smaller the can, the higher the note.
Put three pieces of sliced cork on the bottom of each can to lift it
above table top. Strike with cork hammer.

MARIMBA STICKS OR SLATS

Dry California Redwood or poplar slats are good. The longer or
thicker they are, the lower the note or pitch. The shorter or thinner
they are, the higher the note or pitch.
 Cut shorter or thin down the
slats until you have a musical
scale.
Lay tuned slats across a
cardboard box.
Sprinkle sawdust on them.
Strike lightly and rapidly in
center. The sawdust will gather
in two places. These are the
spots where there is practically
no vibration. Drive your nails
through these spots in attaching
to ropes.
Hold rope by loop and strike
slats with hammer made from a
stick and a spool padded with
cloth.

BAMBOO PAN PIPES Bamboo

tubes with diameter from ⅜ in.

to ¼ in. 1st tube about 7 in.
long.
Leave joint at bottom to close
it. Grind and cut bamboo tubes
shorter and shorter until you get
the right note when blown.
Another way: Test tubes
bound together and partly filled
with clay will give different
depths and different notes of
the scale.
 I was a Den Dad
By Harold Gifford
Los Angeles, Calif.

◆ Someone asked for volunteers to take over a Den one night at

our Pack 58 meeting. Bewildered and afraid, my wife said she would
try. After all, there were just six youngsters from around our block
and they were all nine years old and anxious to get a start in Cub
Scouting. The man in charge of the Pack meeting said it would be
nice if one of the dads would act as Den Dad, so having three boys
of my own, out went my neck and there I was ... Den Dad of Den 5,
Pack 58.
The boys learned the Cub Scout Law and Promise, and they also
learned that discipline was the first word in the language. In due
time this became a part of their regular activities. They learned fast,
because when they were obedient they were rewarded with special
trips or treats. And because one fellow’s misbehavior penalized all
the others, they learned by living that the “buddy system” really
works.
Our Den meetings always came first. The program was planned so
that each boy could advance within the six month period, and the
achievements were geared into the program so that what we did as
fun also resulted in advancement. And we didn’t have any spoiled
boys at 11½ either, because our program helped them grow into
Scouting.
Our Denners were elected by democratic vote, with ability,
interest, and progress as the prerequisites. Believe me, it worked,
and we never had any real problem with our Denners ... either
before, during, or after they took office.
Yes, our Den had its problems. I remember one boy who just
couldn’t read. His athletic ability was nil but you should have seen
his beautiful art work. Another boy was a bully, but one day one of
the little fellows, who had practiced diligently for weeks, used a swell
one-two punch during a Den parents’ meeting show, and the bully
never gave us any trouble again. In fact, he became one of the
fairest, squarest shooters in the Den. Any personal problem of any of
our boys was handled secretly by the Den Mother, and many a
mother called to express her grateful thanks for help in home
problems involving her son.
We were pretty regular in our recognition for handicrafts and
attendance at the monthly Pack meeting, and our skits and stunts
were mighty good. The highest honor ever given any of us was
when we were invited to present our puppets at the Council Cubbers
Pow Wow. One of the mothers of the Den made puppets as her
hobby, and after a while every boy in the Den was in the act in the
many stories we told with these little acting dolls.
Every one of our boys was taught to mend his clothes and do
simple cooking. He learned a lot of handicrafts, but most of all he
learned to be clean in every sense, and to be courteous and friendly.
All of this happened during the war years ... at a time when most
folks were singing the blues that we couldn’t get leaders ... that we
were too busy to worry about the little fellows ... that we had a war
to win and nothing else counted.
All true stories must come to an end. But my wife and I had our
real thank-you as Den Mother and Den Dad when twelve of our
thirteen Cub Scouts graduated with Webelos Honors into Scouting,
and even the thirteenth, the lad who couldn’t learn to read,
graduated too, though without the added honor of the Arrow of
Light on his uniform. The last time we checked, ten of our boys were
still in Scouting, and four of them will come up for their Eagle Rank
together at the next Court of Honor.
Of course, as Den Dad I did a behind-the-scenes job, but I worked
closely with the Den Mother even though I couldn’t often attend the
afternoon Den meetings.
Yessir, I was a Den Dad. All three of my boys are in Scouting, one
an Eagle Scout with Palms, one a Star Scout, and the third a Wolf
Cub Scout heading for Bear. My wife? She is still a Scout widow as I
continue to be active in our District, but she shares with me the thrill
of seeing her boys receive honor after honor in the best boy
program on earth ... Scouting.
Mister, if YOU want to enjoy life a little more ... be a Den Dad. It’s
fun!!!
 DEN DOINGS

◆ Most of the following Den suggestions come from material

developed by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Starr of Corning, New York. The
material was used as a part of their “Fun With Music” Theme.

Pre-Opening. Play some spirited patriotic records and marches on a

phonograph. Feature a march such as the “Marine Hymn,” and each
Den can make up its own words. This project can extend through all
four Den meetings.
For music during the pre-opening Mrs. Starr recommends Decca
Album number 50, “Patriotic Songs For Children.”

Opening. Use phonograph or piano to accompany the boys in the

“Star Spangled Banner.”
Business Items. Leaders explain Music and Minstrels theme and
discuss Den’s part in minstrel show. This need not be finally
determined until next Den Meeting.

Activities. Pin pictures of musical instruments on boys’ backs. They

ask questions of each other which can be answered “yes” or “no”
until each discovers the name of the instrument he wears.
Practice the song the Pack has chosen for chorus of minstrel show.
Also practice any other general songs to be used in the show.

Closing. Sing again the closing chorus for the minstrel show.

Pre-Opening. Tell the story of some special music or composer such

as Stephen Foster.

Opening. Sing one of the choruses to be used in the Pack minstrel

show.

Business Items. Den Mother leads Den in discussion to decide what

the Den will do at the Pack minstrel show.

Activities. Spend some time working as a group on words for the

song chosen at the first meeting. Try some musical charades. Each
Cub Scout acts out the title of a song while others guess its name.
After the name is guessed the Cub leads his Den in the song.
Rehearse Den’s part in minstrel show.
Closing. Teach the Cub Scouts an old time spiritual such as “Swing
Low Sweet Chariot” and “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” The
Fireside Book of Songs, published by Simon & Schuster, will give Den
Mothers lots of ideas.

Pre-Opening. Pick a simple radio theme song such as the “Duz” song
and let each boy write his own words for the music. Here is what
one Cub Scout in Mr. Starr’s Pack composed:

CUB CUB

Cubs can do most anything

Cubs can stand the test you see.
When you ask them why this is,
They say we’ll try anything.

Opening. All teach their songs to the Den.

Business Items. Den Mother and Den Chief check up on costumes,

properties, etc., for Pack minstrel show.

Activities. Musical Guessing Game. One Cub Scout sings a song

silently in front of the Den while others try to read his lips. As each
Cub Scout guesses the song, he joins the first boy and sings the
song silently with him. When everyone has guessed the song, the
Den sings it aloud. Play another game of your own choice unrelated
to the musical theme. Rehearse the Den’s part for the minstrel show.
It should be really polished this time. Also rehearse the choruses
which are to be sung by the entire cast.

Closing. Sing a quiet song such as “Now the Day Is Over.”

Pre-Opening. Hold a dress rehearsal for the minstrel show. During

the pre-opening, Cub Scouts put on their minstrel show costumes.
Blackface is not necessary for the rehearsal.

Opening. Rather than follow through with the formal Den meeting,
use time to rehearse the Den’s acts for the minstrel show. Teach Cub
Scouts some rounds. Mr. and Mrs. Starr recommend the Blue Book
published by Hall & McCreary Co. Good rounds are: “Scotland’s
Burning,” “Sweetly Sings the Donkey,” “Row Row Row Your Boat,”
“Three Blind Mice” and “Are You Sleeping?”

Closing. Rehearse the Den song which was composed by the boys at
the first Den Meeting.
 CUB SCOUT
TREASURE CHEST

◆ MAGIC KIT AND

PUZZLE KIT
The Supply Service of the Boy
Scouts of America has brought
out two new kits which we think
will be very popular with Cub
Scouts. One of these kits is a
new Cub Scout Magic Box. It’s
filled with material to perform
tricks suitable for boys of Cub
Scout age.
The kit is packed in an attractive Cub Scout box. You can get the
Magic Kit through your Boy Scout dealer. If he doesn’t have it in
stock, your Boy Scout office will order it for you. (Catalog No. 1888,
priced at $2.)
Cub Scouts will also find the Cub Scout Puzzle Box interesting. The
box is filled with the sort of tricks boys can try on their dads. The
Puzzle Kit may also be purchased through your Boy Scout dealer or
ordered through the Boy Scout Office. (Catalog No. 1887, price $2.)
 Both of these Kits would make wonderful Christmas gifts for Cub
Scouts.

GOT A GAME?
A lot of digging goes on before the Cub Scouting section of
Scouting Magazine reaches you each month. We do our best to make
available to you information which will help you in the planning of
your Pack programs. Naturally we cannot give you enough to make it
unnecessary for you to do some thinking too. Our purpose is to give
you just enough information to stimulate your own thinking and
planning.
One of the areas where we need some help is that of games. We
can keep passing games along to you, but we would like to be able
to give you games which other Cub Scout leaders have successfully
used in their Dens and Packs. The only way we can do that is for
you to send us the favorite games of your Den.
Would it help you if we were to start a Favorite Games
Department? Perhaps we could print two or three favorite games
each month. You would know that they were games which had been
successfully used in Cub Scouting in some section of the country.
Would you like such a favorite games column in your Scouting
Magazine? If so, send us your favorite game, and we will consider it
your vote in favor of the Department. Tell us just enough about your
game so that we can understand it. You need not worry about
making it polished writing. We’ll edit it. If the game you send us has
not been used in our literature, and if it’s the type of game we can
use, then we will publish it and give you credit for sending it.
Got a game?
 CUBS OF REGION FOUR
(Tune: The Marine Corps Hymn)

From the shores of blue Lake Erie

To the hills of Kentuckee,
You will see our banner flying,
O’er this great land of the free.

(Chorus)

We’re the Wolf Cubs, Bear Cubs, Lion Cubs

And Akela we adore.
You will always find us on the job,
We’re the Cubs of Region Four.

We work and play, we laugh and sing,

We always do our best.
We give good will whene’er we can,
For Cubs can stand the test.

(Repeat Chorus)

Our uniform is blue and gold

Our shoes are shining bright.
Our health is good, our spirit’s high,
And everything’s all right.

(Repeat Chorus)
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