Dr. Rodríguez had been working the cases of the murdered young women since the mid-1990s. A woman of about forty with a cherubic face and short styled hair, she had a direct, forthright manner that brimmed with efficiency. She had been summoned to dozens of crime scenes, including that of Ramona Morales's daughter, Silvia. Back then, the state's crime lab had not been as sophisticated, and the families were made to view the actual decaying body parts of their murdered children. In many cases, recovered skulls were in such advanced states of decomposition that they looked like scary Halloween goblins, with their mouths open wide as if they were screaming in fear, hardly a comforting image for a grieving relative. Worse, the field rats that roam the desert have a predilection for nasal and auditory cartilage and often devour them from the faces of the victims within twenty-four hours.
Advances in forensic technology had now made it possible for experts to reconstruct a face from skeletal remains. Once the body was received at the morgue, Rodríguez and her team evaluated all the facial characteristics in order to implement the technique of facial reproduction, or what experts in the field call "giving a semblance of a face." She kept meticulous records of the crime scenes in a binder with explicit drawings and notes about the forensic examinations of the bodies and the state in which they were found.
Sagrario González's image had been reconstructed from odontological profiling. The new technology was also making it possible to identify some of the more decomposed bodies through photographs of the facial reproductions published in the city's newspapers.
Ramona Morales's thirteen-year-old neighbor, Celia "Lupita" Guadalupe, had been identified after the girl's mother recognized the child from a photo of one of Dr. Rodríguez's facial reproductions in the city's newspaper
El Diario de Juárez.
Authorities believed the teen was abducted while walking home from school one December afternoon in 1997. Her family had intended to pick her up that day, as they normally did, but her grandmother arrived late to find the child had already started out on foot.
Lupita's remains indicated she had been beaten so savagely that the examination of them brought the medical examiner to tears. The young girl's body was in such a state of decomposition that it had been impossible to determine if she had been raped, but the fact that she had been found naked from the waist up led Dr. Rodríguez to believe that indeed a sexual assault had preceded the child's murder. That the forensics expert was able to help the family identify their missing daughter was her only consolation.
Sagrario González's brother knew little about the method of facial reconstruction. Standing in the crime lab that Friday, he carefully studied the replica being presented as his sister's, troubled over the appearance of the teeth. They looked much bigger than they had been when she was alive. But Juan, like many of the country's poor, was too fearful to question authorities about the discrepancy.
His reservations were not uncommon. Many of the victims' families shared the young man's confusion over the protruding teeth and jaw of the reconstructions, unaware that without the surrounding soft tissue, they appear larger than they had in real life. While the technique of facial reproduction was state-of-the-art, it was limited in its capability to accurately portray the fleshy parts of a human being, especially the areas around the gums and teeth. Dr. Rodríguez felt she was sparing the next of kin the horror of viewing the actual skeletal remains of their loved one, yet the families of the dead were complaining about the state's policy of substituting a facial reconstruction for the purposes of identification. Many of the relatives were suspicious of the practice, convinced that authorities were hiding important information by using the lifelike models.
Paula González knew from her son's face that the news was not good. Tears streamed down her face, some embedding themselves inside the deep wrinkles that time and suffering had left, as she watched Juan Francisco descend the cement steps and stride toward her. She listened as he delicately assured her that the clothing police had shown him belonged to Sagrario.
The young man, however, had chosen not to tell his mother of his doubts about the size of his sister's teeth. Only later did he disclose his incredulity.
As if the day weren't difficult enough, Paula González grew even more upset that afternoon when police claimed that Sagrario had been killed while living a secret life. Officers told the family the teenager had been earning a second salary as a prostitute, selling her body to the men of Juárez.
The pronouncement enraged Sagrario's older sister, Guillermina, who found it unbelievable that investigators would make such a statement. The two girls were especially close, even wearing each other's clothes. Furious, Guillermina fought with officers, vowing to disprove their claims and to keep her sister's case in the headlines.
Her mother, meanwhile, was unable to contain her emotions. Upon learning the news, Paula González collapsed in the street outside police headquarters that day.
"Murderers!" she shouted at the uniformed officers entering and exiting the building. "You are all murderers!"
Sagrario would have turned eighteen on July 31, just three months after her brutal murder.
The González family was too poor to afford a casket or a headstone for Sagrario; a proper burial cost $150 in Mexico. Instead, they laid the young girl to rest in a desert cemetery reachable by a one-lane road of serpentine curves and harrowing switchbacks that led into the mountains behind their home. A mound of brown dirt and dozens of colorful plastic flowers marked the gravesite, which sat amid rows of above-ground tombs adorned with the plastic bouquets. Few flowers grow in the Sororan desert. Plastic reproductions are used in their place.
Crouching down, Paula caressed the ground, as if touching her lost daughter. Closing her eyes, she rocked back and forth.
"żEres tú, mi reina?"
she whispered in a gentle tone. "Is this you, my queen? Is this you buried here, my Sagrario, my daughter?"
An audible sob filled the air, followed by a flood of tears. Paula González was not convinced that the body that lay in the ground was, in fact, Sagrario.
In the months after Sagrario's death, authorities notified the family that a DNA test performed on the body had come back with negative results. Officials promised a retest, and Paula and Jesús were anxiously awaiting news.
Nevertheless, the circumstances surrounding her disappearance prompted Sagrario's elder sister to take precautions. Fearing for her life, Guillermina quit her factory job just two weeks after her sister's body was found to become a shampoo girl at a local Supercuts hair salon. But her fright didn't stop her from challenging authorities' mishandling of her sister's case or the cases of other murdered girls.
Guillermina would go on to found a small, grassroots organization she named Voces Sin Eco, Voices Without Echo, to seek justice for Sagrario and other murdered women of Juárez. The group was comprised of just six families, fifteen members in total. Its goal was to keep the killings in the headlines, through candlelight vigils, the erection of crosses throughout the city, and bimonthly searches for clues and evidence police may have overlooked. Among the members was Irma Pérez, the mother of slain shoe store worker Olga Alicia.
Over time, Guillermina would also become an outspoken activist for justice and a public critic of both local and state authorities.
Still, she refused to pray in the little white church that sat on the hill above the family's dwelling in Lomas de Poleo. The house of worship had been Sagrario's home away from home. She had spent hour upon hour there, rehearsing with her choir group and attending mass. She'd even tried to get the priest to allow guitar accompaniment at Sunday mass to give it a more modern beat.
Guillermina was now suspicious of everyone, including a priest who had befriended her sister and then disappeared soon after Sagrario's murder. She wanted to return to the cathedral in the family's hometown of Durango to pray for her slain sister. Since the murder, she had told her mother that she no longer believed that God was in Juárez.
"The devil is in Juárez," Guillermina insisted.
Chapter Five
Changing of the Guard
It's impossible for a vote to be worth more than a life.
SAMIRA IZAGUIRRE, CIUDAD JUáREZ RADIO HOST
IN ADDITION TO THE MURDERS of the city's young women, Ciudad Juárez was also experiencing a rise in drug-related violence. Since the late 1980s, Mexico had been the main transit route for South American cocaine and a major source of marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamines.
Drug smuggling had steadily increased after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, according to law enforcement officials patrolling the U.S.-Mexican border. In fact, a study conducted in 1998 by members of state and federal border patrol agents and obtained by the
Wall Street Journal
found that the free trade agreement was actually making it easier for drug smugglers to transport their goods into the United States, with dealers consulting with professionals in the foreign exchange trade on ways to operate under the NAFTA procedures. Many of the illegal drug shipments were being smuggled in secret compartments of trucks, trains, and even cargo planes.
Authorities reported that by 1998, there were some 450 known gangs in Juárez, most of them involved in drugs. Score settling among rival
narcotraficantes
had become expected and even commonplace in the border city. Officials in Juárez reported eighty drug-related killings and seventy disappearances related to the illegal drug trade from 1994 to 1998.
Juárez, after all, was home to the leader of Mexico's biggest drug cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Officials believed Carrillo was responsible for importing as much as 70 percent of the cocaine that entered the United States annually. Carrillo favored shipping the narcotics through the JuárezEl Paso area, using Interstate 10 and Interstate 25, according to authorities.
Once primarily limited to intergang violence, the bloodshed of the city's drug trade began spilling onto the streets of the border city in July 1997, when, at the age of forty-two, Amado Carrillo Fuentes died during a botched cosmetic surgery procedure in Mexico City, supposedly designed to change his appearance to evade law enforcement. Word of Carrillo's death sparked a fierce turf war for control of the country's lucrative drug trade, with warring factions using areas of Juárez as a backdrop for their battle for supremacy.
It had been widely reported that the notorious kingpin had been managing and mediating among the country's five major drug cartels for years. Once he was out of the picture, the situation quickly erupted into a fierce battle for supremacy. Within weeks of Carrillo's death, more than eighteen drug-related killings were reported in Ciudad Juárez, with executions now occurring in the streets in broad daylight.
The situation grew even more volatile in August 1999, when four armed gunmen burst into the popular downtown restaurant Max Fim and opened fire, emptying 130 rounds as terrified patrons screamed in horror. Remarkably, only six people were killed and four others wounded in the bloody drug hit that day.
News of the dinnertime massacre sent a wave of panic through the city. The message was clear. With Carrillo's passing, the drug war had escalated to a level not seen before in Juárez. In the past, the killings had been confined to individuals involved in the trade. Now innocent bystanders were being picked off if they got in the way.
Many residents were terrified to travel the streets of the downtown area, where much of the violence was occurring. Officials were reporting that drug-related murders appeared restricted to the two square miles where most of the city's commercial and tourism businesses operated, just steps from the Cordova International Bridge to El Paso. Warnings were being issued to Americans thinking of crossing the border for a night of fun or a day of shopping the tourist boutiques.
Residents took to the streets calling for the violence to stop. More than three thousand demonstrators marched through the city that September. Their angry cries for action against the escalating violence added yet another layer to the already volatile situation. Now the state attorney general's office was being bombarded from all sides, facing angry demonstrations both by the families of the murdered women and by local residents fearful of the warring
narcotraficantes.
Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez likely got little sleep that night. After facing three thousand protestors, he learned that four more people had been gunned down in a local bar and that four doctors from hospitals in the nation's capital had been tortured, strangled, and left in a heap in a public park in Mexico City. It is not clear if the slaughtered doctors were members of the team that performed the bungled cosmetic surgery on Amado Fuentes Carrillo, but their grisly executions heightened anxieties in the capital city.
Four months after the billionaire trafficker's death, authorities announced murder charges against three of the surgeons who had operated on Carrillo. Interestingly, at the time of the announcement, two of the doctors were already dead. Their bodies had been found several days earlier encased in cement in sealed drums along a roadside, according to Mexican authorities. One forensic scientist told the
