El Narco (27 page)

Prison itself does not even stop some killers. In Durango state penitentiary, it was uncovered that inmates would actually leave the jail at night, carry out murders, then return to their cells—all with the complicity of prison guards. They even traveled in prison vehicles and used the guards’ guns.
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In other cases, inmates have broken out en masse to join back with their cartel armies. In Zacatecas state prison, a convoy of Jeeps and SUVs pulled up, supported by a helicopter, and busted fifty-three convicts out. In Reynosa, eighty-five inmates simply put up ladders and poured over the wall before dawn. Even Hollywood movies would not tolerate such a simple escape scene.

Gonzalo himself says his old comrades have offered to get him out of jail. But he is not interested.

“My people, my friends, said to me, ‘Let’s sort this out. There are ways to get you out of there.’ But I decided it was better to stay here, to look for peace and tranquillity, to leave the other man behind.

“I know Christ now. I know that he exists, that he is with us. I am not scared. If I am killed, amen. I am ready for whatever comes. For whatever.”

The veteran killer finally wants to be out of the game. A new generation of
sicarios
are replacing the old, the dead, and the imprisoned. And while Gonzalo murdered and tortured to become a rich man, the young bloods take life for peanuts.

Five miles south of the Juárez jail where I talk to Gonzalo is the so-called Juárez School of Improvement—home to thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds. The name is a little ironic, as it is a penitentiary rather than a school and keeps dangerous criminals briefly off the streets rather than leading them to higher education. To drive home this point, the front of the “schoolhouse” is defended by soldiers with machine guns mounted on sandbags, and a series of cages mark the entrance. Behind the bars are dozens of “students” who aspire to be the next generation of drug lords.

Inside it is bare and ordered. In a dining area of stone tables, I find José Antonio, a cheery seventeen-year-old in baggy pants and a loose shirt. José Antonio stands just five feet six and has chocolate-colored skin, earning the classic nickname of the short and brown,
fríjol
, or “bean.” He has a mop of black, curly hair and bad acne, like many seventeen-year-olds you might see banging their heads at alternative-rock concerts in Seattle or Manchester. But despite his harmless demeanor, he has seen more firefights and murders than many soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fríjol came of age in a war zone. When the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel began their paramilitary fighting on the Texas border, he was just twelve years old—and in that year he joined a street gang in his Juárez slum. When Felipe Calderón declared war on drug cartels, Fríjol was fourteen—and already had his hand in armed robberies, drug dealing, and regular gun battles with rival gangs. At sixteen, police nabbed Fríjol for possession of a small arsenal of weapons—including two automatic rifles and an Uzi—and as an accessory to a drug-related murder.

The mass recruitment of Juárez gangbangers by drug cartels is one of the key causes of the bloodbath in the city. It produced a new generation of young, sanguine
sicarios
only loosely controlled by the crime bosses. It put the young people of entire neighborhoods into the line of fire—on their street corners, soccer fields, or house parties. High-school-age kids from Juárez would take part in—and be victims of—massacres that shocked the world.

Fríjol is typical of the Juárez young lured into the ranks of the mafia. His parents hailed from a country village in Veracruz state but joined the wave of immigrants that flocked to work in Juárez assembly plants in the 1990s. They sweated on different production lines making Japanese televisions, American cosmetics, and mannequins for American stores, for an average of $6 a day. It was a step up from growing corn in their village, but it was also a radical change in their lives. Fríjol’s parents still celebrated peasant folk days and macho country values. But he grew up in a sprawling city of 1.3 million
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where he could tune in to American TV channels and see the skyscrapers of El Paso over the river. Contraband goods and guns flooded south, and drugs went north. He was in between markets and in between worlds.

They lived in a huge slum that stretches up a mountain on the west side of Juarez. It is known as Bible Hill because higher up the slope is a message etched into the earth that says CIUDAD JUÁREZ: THE BIBLE IS THE TRUTH. READ IT. Americans can see the message—and the slum—from the comfort of El Paso. The neighborhoods on the hill are physically better than many in Latin America. It is not a shantytown. The homes are made of drab, unpainted cinder blocks. Almost everybody has water and electricity. But Bible Hill’s slums are among the most violent barrios on the continent.

While Fríjol’s parents slaved for long days in the factories, he was left for hours at home alone. He soon found company on the street, in the community of teenagers hanging on the corner. They played soccer, laughed, shared stories, and looked after each other. And merely that—no elaborate initiation ceremony—made him part of a Juárez street gang. These gangs are known as barrios, the very word for “neighborhood.” His barrio was called the Calaberas, or skulls, and had a hundred members, all from a few blocks on the hill.

“The gang becomes like your home, your family. It is a place where you find friendship and people to talk to. It is where you feel part of something. And you know the gang will back you up if you are in trouble.”

The Calaberas were allied with a barrio to the south called El Silencio but bitter enemies of a barrio to the west called Chema 13. This shifting system of gang alliances spread like a confused spiderweb down the mountainside. Each territory bore the mark of its resident gang spray-painted on walls. Fights between rival barrios were common, often leading to deaths. For gang members, it was dangerous to wander into enemy territory. Most of the kids stayed safely within the few blocks of their territory and their people.

These barrios had been in Juárez for decades. New generations filled the ranks while veterans grew out of them. They had always fought—with sticks, stones, knives, and guns. There had always been deaths. I wrote a story on the Juárez barrios in 2004. In that year, police told me that about eighty murders were attributed to this street warfare. That is still a shocking number. But it was nothing compared to the blood that would flow in the streets at the end of the decade. The radical change happened when the barrios were swept up into the wider drug-cartel war.

Fríjol learned to use guns in the Calaberas. Arms moved around Juárez streets freely, and every barrio had its arsenal stashed round the homes of a few members. They would practice shooting in parks or up the mountain, then blood themselves in battles against enemy gangs. Then as the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels began to fight for the city, the mafias went to gangbangers for fresh cannon fodder.

“Men with connections started looking at who knew how to shoot. There was a guy who had been in the barrio a few years before and he was now working with the big people. And he started offering jobs to the youngsters. The first jobs were just as lookouts or guarding
tienditas
[little drug shops]. Then they started paying people to do the big jobs. They started paying people to kill.”

I ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85.

To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society.

To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage
sicarios
are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment.
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“The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.”

As members of Fríjol’s gang began working for the mafia, they were suddenly flush with more powerful weapons. They used to fight their gun battles with 9 mm pistols. Suddenly they had Kalashnikovs and Uzis. Giving an AK-47 to a bloodthirsty fifteen-year-old with no education is a ticket for disaster. Gangbangers killing under the name of cartels were involved in bloody massacres around the city.

Many barrio members were absorbed into two much larger gangs working for the drug cartels. One is the Barrio Azteca, a mob first formed by Chicano inmates in a Texas prison in the 1980s. The Aztecas have since mutated into a huge organization of thugs, drug dealers, and gunslingers in Mexico working for the Juárez Cartel. The other is the Artist Assassins, an organization that grew out of a Juárez street gang and mushroomed as it allied with the Sinaloa Cartel. On the streets, these two organizations are known as crews. As well as bloodthirsty teenagers, their number includes many adults in their twenties, thirties, or older who have grown into career criminals.

One of the founders of the Artist Assassins is a twenty-seven-year-old who goes by the nickname Saik. He is serving a sentence for doing a triple murder for the Sinaloa Cartel. Another gang member shows me a painting that Saik did; these thugs really are artists, hence the name. The morbid painting jumps out at me and keeps me staring hard. The basic idea is simple and common: a helmeted skeletal head smoking a reefer. But something in the depth and personality of this rotting cranium entrances me. It is as though the dark yellow skull stares right back into my eyes with a confident, almost smug expression in his green teeth. He is a mask of death. But the painting also emits a strong personality, showing off cockiness and ghetto panache.

The war between the Double A’s and Aztecas has been catastrophic. Gunmen went into a drug rehab center in Juárez, lined up seventeen recovering addicts, and shot them all in the head. The killers were allegedly Double A members seeking to kill an Azteca leader hidden there. They exterminated everyone, leaving the world in stupefied horror.

In apparent revenge, Aztecas were allegedly behind the horrendous Salvarcar massacre in January 2010 that shook Mexico to the core. According to confesions, the gunmen went to a party to seek out three Double A members. The killers blocked off the entrances to the street and sprayed everyone they could see, murdering thirteen high school students and two adults. Victims included a high school football star and a straight-A student. Most, maybe all, had nothing to do with the drug war.

I ask Fríjol what it is like to be in firefights, to see your friends dead on the street and to be an accessory to a murder. He answers unblinkingly, “Being in shoot-outs in pure adrenaline. But you see dead bodies and you feel nothing. There is killing every day. Some days there are ten executions, others days there are thirty. It is just normal now.”

Perhaps this teenager really is hardened to it. Or maybe he just puts up a shield. But it strikes me that adolescents experiencing such violence must go into adulthood with scars. What kind of man can this make you?

I ask about this to school psychologist Elizabeth Villegas. The teenagers she works with have murdered and raped, I say. How does this hurt them psychologically? She stares back at me as if she hasn’t thought about it before. “They don’t feel anything that they have murdered people,” she replies. “They just don’t understand the pain that they have caused others. Most come from broken families. They don’t recognize rules or limits.”

The teenage
sicarios
know the legal consequences for their crimes cannot be that grave. Under Mexican law, minors can only be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison no matter how many murders, kidnappings, or rapes they have committed.
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If they were over the border in Texas, they could be sentenced for up to forty years or life if they were tried as an adult. Many convicted killers in the school will be back on the streets before they turn twenty. Fríjol himself will be out when he is nineteen.

But the law is the least of their worries; the mafias administer their own justice. Juárez Cartel gunmen went to neighborhoods where gang members had been recruited for the Sinaloans. It didn’t matter that only two or three kids from the barrio had joined the mob. A death sentence was passed on the whole barrio. The Sinaloan mafia returned the favor on barrios that had joined the Juárez Cartel. I went to a neighborhood where twenty teenagers and young men had hung out on a street corner a year ago. Fifteen of them had been gunned down in a spree of shootings, a bar they hung out in torched. A few of the survivors are incarcerated, the rest have fled the city, leaving their old neighborhood looking like a ghost town. Fríjol recognizes that youth prison may be hard, but it is a lot safer than the streets now.