This Love Is Not for Cowards (5 page)

Because the Rayados are the defending champions, the first game of the season, even if it is against the Indios, shines in the national spotlight. I discover how bright this spotlight is when I step inside a taqueria near Monterrey's big bus terminal. I order a trio of beef tacos and a bottle of Coca-Cola, which I pour into a squat glass. On a television, a reporter interviews Rayados players as they check in to their hotel. (Home teams, including the Indios when they play in Juárez, commonly stay overnight in a hotel.) Indios players are not interviewed. An analyst uses one of those electronic pens to diagram formations and the probable plays the Rayados will use on corner kicks and penalties. He lists the Rayados' expected starting lineup. The Indios are absent from his discussion. He shares no strategies for stopping Juárez from scoring. In the diagrams and charts, the Indios come across as empty red shirts for the Rayados to dance around.

“Nobody respects us,” Ken-tokey told me on the bus. “Everyone in Mexico hates Juárez. They think it's all maquiladoras, all narcos. They feel about us the way Americans feel about Mexicans!”

I proceed from the taco shop to La Puerta, the clubhouse of the Rayados'
barra brava
. The clubhouse is a bombed-out concrete bunker facing a vacant lot, on the outskirts of the Barrio Antiguo. I head over with about a dozen members of El Kartel, and as we get closer to the clubhouse I start to wonder if we're going to, like, rumble or something.
Barras bravas
are often at war. Postgame rumbles between El Kartel and a team called Santos have devolved into rock-throwing riots. Yet there's no apparent enmity between El Kartel and the Monterrey firm. We're offered beer as soon as we step inside. Everyone wants to hear stories about cadavers and bullets and torsos hanging from bridges. We're respected, it seems, just for living in the world murder capital. And maybe because our team poses no threat.

The clubhouse is furnished with a couple ratty couches. Blue walls host old posters of Rayados greats, none of whom I recognize. A dented VCR unspools last season's championship game. Outside, on a vacant lot, kids in jeans and canvas sneakers kick around a ball. It's a mellow vibe, a lot more laid-back than I'd expected. The adrenaline that had spiked on the way over—it's been quite a while since I was in a street fight—drops back down to baseline. I drink my free Carta Blanca and watch the game on television for a while, wondering what's next on the agenda. When it becomes clear everyone is content to chill, I distribute a round of fist bumps, thank our hosts for the beer, and break away, back to the city.

It's still early evening. The sun has not yet set. I walk down cobblestone streets hemmed in by
colonia
buildings painted rich mangoes and loud pinks. Ornate iron bars protect and perhaps even improve the glass windows of cafés and boutique clothing stores. Bartenders post fliers outside rock clubs still several hours from opening. Lots of towns have a neighborhood like this, several blocks gentrified by artistic types and/or college students. I know an “arts” district doesn't thrive without serious urban planning, but Barrio Antiguo feels more organic than, say, South Street in Philadelphia. It's certainly not a pure tourism ghetto like Old St. Augustine or Key West. I step inside a gallery to find a collection of pop art that I enjoy even if it is a little too similar to Roy Lichtenstein. By the time I step back out the sun has gone down. Yellow streetlights climb up the Sierra Madre foothills, a rising vista of single-family homes that reminds me a bit of Seattle. The air is crisp, an invigorating cool that doesn't make my teeth rattle like they do in January Juárez.

I know there's violence in Monterrey. On the trip from Juárez, at a convenience store El Kartel ransacked just before we slipped into the city, I read a local version of
PM,
a newspaper overflowing with bodies splashed in blood. The television in my room at the sex hotel broadcasts
narcocorrido
music videos celebrating drug-trafficking culture. I suspect that at least a few skyscrapers in downtown Monterrey were erected in part with laundered cocaine profits, as is the case in Miami. “It's a hard-core drug city here, man,” Ken-tokey told me. “Make no mistake.”

Yet Monterrey and Juárez feel nothing alike. I watch executives in suits duck into a bookstore to check out the latest titles. Women in wool coats circle the “Lighthouse of Commerce,” a monument to moneymaking. Monterrey is the rough energy of Mexico smoothed by the waters of business, education, and the arts. It's what a city in the North can be. It's what Juárez could be, in theory: Juárez is all about making money, too. Yet if the violence in Juárez were to magically disappear—which isn't going to happen—the border would never resemble this gleaming state capital. Cities get divided into classes. Even within cities, neighborhoods split into a yin-yang of beauty versus utility. Monterrey is the yin of El Norte. It's where wealthy executives with Ivy League degrees make decisions. Juárez, the yang, is where those decisions are carried out, the products churned out, the money earned in the maquiladoras shuttled back to Monterrey to pay for free meals for professional soccer players and to buy big houses in the nicer neighborhoods where executives would rather live.

I'm no different. I'd rather live here, too.

“THAT WAS THE hardest game I've ever watched in my life,” Marco tells me after the Indios lose to Monterrey by the score of 4–0. “I felt powerless, helpless. It hurt to watch it. It was really painful.”

He tells me this over the phone. Marco didn't play in the game. He wasn't on the bench, either. He didn't even make the trip to Monterrey, a last-minute administrative decision that shocked me as much as him. Marco played a big role in the Indios' rise to the Primera. He performed so well that no less than the
New York Times
lobbied for his call-up to the U.S. men's national team. Yet Pepe Treviño, the new coach who sells smoke, is so unimpressed with the small midfielder he inherited that he left the American back in Juárez.
He left him behind?
I knew Marco was falling out of favor with Pepe, but this is absurd. Marco is in shape, he practices like a professional, and he's still the most experienced defensive midfielder the Indios have. It's a horrible coaching decision, I feel. Then there's the economics: The budget is so tight the team wouldn't even comp Marco a plane ticket and a hotel room so he could watch the game on the bench?

I watched the game at Estadio Tecnológico, on the campus of Monterrey Tech, in the company of El Kartel. I'll admit to being drunk by kickoff, so I remember mostly random details: paying seventy-five cents pregame for a hot dog wrapped in bacon and drenched in both chile and melted cheese; clear sun illuminating the green wrinkles of Monterrey's signature mountain, the Cerro de la Silla. Before we could enter the stadium, police ordered us to remove our belts and leave them on the bus. Those same police incarcerated El Kartel at the far edge of the arena, a line of helmets and flak jackets separating us from the Rayados fans. During the game, as Monterrey began to pull away, two Karteleros ripped out a plank of bleacher and tossed it into the moat ringing the playing field. They were arrested, as was the oldest woman in El Kartel, a chain-smoking and beer-chugging grandmother. She had lifted up her Indios jersey to flash Monterrey's fans, who graded her breasts with chants of
“chicharrón!”
—a stadium snack of wrinkled and fried pork. Mostly I remember emotions. Frustration at the Indios' poor play. Exhaustion from the sun and the
cerveza
. Resignation at the long season ahead.

“They don't have heart—
corazón
,” Ken-tokey mused as we boarded the bus for the ride home. “We get upset when we're taking the bus all this way, eighteen or nineteen hours, and they're flying in a plane and they don't play better for us. You get mad. We'll still support 'em anyway, but if they drop down, we're really gonna be mad at them.”

Marco watched the game back in Juárez, at his house. He spent the ninety minutes slumped on a black leather sectional, alone except for Dany, who gave him his space. Marco usually rooms on the road with Maleno Frías, his best friend, the Indios' starting striker and perhaps the most beloved man in Juárez. Maleno is a big guy, wide and heavy, hulking for a soccer player. He was born in Juárez and grew up in Colonia Altavista, a neighborhood so bloody I've already stopped using a felt-tip pen to mark its murders on a map I've hung in my apartment; in just a month of recordkeeping, Altavista already looks like a red stain on my wall. Maleno has admitted to vague troubles in his past. That he ran with a gang. That he felt compelled, as a teenager, to flee to El Paso. In Texas he found construction work and a spot on the El Paso Patriots, a semi-pro soccer team. He scored so many goals for the Patriots—a striker's glamorous job is simply to score—that Gil Cantú signed him to Indios USA, where he played alongside Marco. One amateur national championship later, Maleno returned to Juárez as the city's new favorite son. He's the starting striker of a team in the Primera, a local boy with a rough past who has made very, very good.

Members of Maleno's family haven't improved their lives so profoundly. His brother remained messed up in drug dealing and gang life—
remained
, past tense. Not long after I moved to Juárez, gunmen shot the brother in the knee, a warning of some kind, a warning he did not heed. The night before the Monterrey fixture, Maleno's brother was shot again, this time terminally.

“Maleno called me right after the game,” Marco shares with me. “I could tell he was upset.”

Maleno learned of his brother's murder while still in the locker room, just a few minutes after the game ended. The timing sticks out to me. I track down an assistant coach and ask him when the coaching staff first learned of the murder. In the morning, the assistant admits. On game day. Well before kickoff.

The trip to Monterrey has been eye-opening. A pleasant discovery. It's hard to believe the two cities are part of the same country. Marco loves Monterrey. I love it, too. The Rayados and the city they represent are Mexico at its best. The Indios can't help but embody the country at its worst. That yin and yang. They are lousy soccer players. They appear doomed to descend back to the minor leagues. Yet Maleno illustrates how the Indios are not merely empty red shirts, laundry for the Rayados to run around. The Indios are
of
Ciudad Juárez. The players live in Juárez. Maleno and his brother were born there and were molded by border culture. The problems better teams face—what formation to use, which striker should take penalty kicks—are the least of the challenges the Indios must overcome.
The coaching staff learned of the murder and carried on with business as usual.
Pepe Treviño held on to the information, sharing it with Maleno only after the final whistle had blown.

“We didn't want to upset him,” the assistant coach tells me. “We didn't want it to affect his play.”

Chapter 3

More Than a Club

I'm driving to chihuahua city with Indios owner Francisco Ibarra. Every few miles I see flowers. They are small and pink and look like poppies, though I'm sure they have a different name and genus out here in the Chihuahuan Desert. There aren't many flowers, which is the reason why I notice them at all. They arrive in tiny patches, or sometimes as a single bloom a few steps off the shoulder. Mostly, endlessly, I see sand. Sand and scrub brush, a vista stretching toward small hills at the end point of our 230-mile journey from Juárez to the state capital. I sit shotgun. Francisco's behind the wheel of his fully armored Ford Explorer, a mobile panic room. Steel plates line every inch of the vehicle. (Almost every inch.
Sicarios
in Juárez have enough experience with armored vehicles by now to have learned that the door locks, the little circles where you stick the key, are vulnerable. If a couple dozen bullets are fired into the keyhole, at least a few of those bullets can reach the driver.) The armor is so heavy that, after I climbed into my seat, I struggled to swing my door closed. The bulletproof windows are too thick to roll down more than an inch. At a toll booth, Francisco can only push his pesos to the attendant, who must stand on her toes to grab the cash. The fuel economy of this tank? Maybe four miles to the gallon. If Francisco presses a button on his keychain, steel bolts shoot through the doors, locking them shut as securely as a bank safe. His bodyguard trails in a second SUV, also armored.

We're headed to the capital to lobby politicians, though that's not the stated purpose for the trip. Officially we're driving a few miles beyond Chihuahua to the small town of Cuauhtémoc, where there are apple orchards, a Mennonite colony transplanted from Manitoba, and a basement-level minor league soccer team Ibarra inherited when he bought the Indios. Ibarra wants to fly the flag, to put in some face time. He'll tell the young players to keep trying, to work hard, and above all not to worry—the Indios aren't going anywhere. From Cuauhtémoc we'll double back to the capital, where Francisco will try, with a sense of desperation, to keep the Indios from going anywhere.

Nothing about Francisco's appearance suggests he's a business leader. There's no corporate in his casual dress. A wrinkled black guayabera embroidered with the Indios logo. Baggy blue jeans. He covers his thin brown hair with an Indios baseball cap, number twelve (Marco's number, though also the number the Indios use to honor their fans, the twelfth man on the field). Francisco is middle-aged, married to a woman he met in grade school. A few extra pounds round his belly and soften the outline of his jaw. If there's anything about his look that indicates authority, it's his beard, a vandyke that gives off a nautical vibe. Put him near water and he could pass for the captain of a shrimp boat. Francisco is nowhere near water, of course. He's in the middle of the desert. He's been here all his life.

“When I was young, I wanted to travel abroad,” he tells me. “I wanted to see more of the world. My mother gave me a card. It had a picture on the front and in the picture there was desert. Nothing but sand. Except for this one flower growing. Where God places you, that's where you must do your work.”

Sand blows across the highway, swirling close to the blacktop like low-lying fog. The windows of the Explorer are heavily tinted, but the glare is still intense, and I'm glad I remembered to bring my sunglasses. I learned the importance of shades when crossing the Chihuahuan Desert with El Kartel on the long return trip from Monterrey. I dreaded that bus ride, but, aside from the painfully bright sun, it turned out to be not so bad. “The ride back is always easier,” advised Mike, the El Kartel capo. “Everybody's tired, nobody has any money left, and the drugs are all gone.”

On that trip back, the bus stopped in Chihuahua city at Carnitas el Entronque, a roadside vendor of deep-fried everything. Pig, cow, chicken, and who knows what else bubbled in giant vats of brown oil. Tripe—cow intestines—bobbed to the top of the vats, poked back into the oil by wooden paddles the size of boat oars. When the flesh crackled with crispness, workers used giant metal tongs to pull the meats from the vats. These body parts were served still oozing hot oil.
No quiero, gracias.
No way, Jose. While El Kartel ate, I checked out Chihuahua. The capital is a lot cleaner than Juárez. It's more modern, too. Expensive cars—BMW, Audi, Acura—sparkle in lots lining the highway. Dealership signs battle American chain restaurants for attention. The city looks so gringo that smugglers paid to slip Guatemalans across the U.S. border have been caught dropping them off in the capital and telling them they'd made it to Texas. On the northern edge of town, a series of banners advertise new houses built by Grupo Yvasa, the Ibarra family construction company.

Francisco Ibarra's father moved to Juárez in the 1950s. He was a young man from the coastal state of Sonora, the owner of nothing more than an engineering degree and a hunger to earn his fortune. Juárez was much smaller back then, a frontier, a place where a hustler could try just about anything. (Which it still is. “Juárez is the second world,” Francisco tells me. “It's not settled, it's not the first world like El Paso or Mexico City. There are more opportunities.”) His father started out selling bread by the side of the road. He saved up enough money to open a food stand, Tacos El Campeón, which remains in the family. He tapped gold when he ventured into construction. His Grupo Yvasa homes are not luxurious accommodations. I spent New Year's Eve in an Yvasa house located in a dirt-road subdivision maybe seven miles from the Indios' practice facility. The house, listed as a two-bedroom with a front yard, looked more like a subdivided studio apartment. A kitchen stove and sink shared a living room with enough space for a couch and a portable television but too small to add even a table. Winter air rushed through gaps between the walls and the ceiling; I've built snow forts that were more substantial. Yet that house and countless houses just like it sold as fast as they could be built. The North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted in 1994, moved Mexico from an agrarian peasant economy to a system dependent upon manufacturing. Jobs harvesting the fields of Michoacán transferred to the maquiladoras along the Texas border. Migrants in search of factory work, hardly wealthy, needed somewhere to live. The poorest squatted in tar-paper shantytowns up in the hills. Those with some means—the house where I partied on New Year's Eve is rented by a nurse from Puebla—moved into the kinds of homes Yvasa slapped together in one subdivision after another. As their business grew, the Ibarras began winning lucrative government contracts to lay highways, pump water, and build still more houses on choice city land.

When Francisco Ibarra was young, his father pushed him to study engineering. Francisco earned a degree, but construction never made his heart thump—not the way a mere sport, soccer, always has. Rather than join Grupo Yvasa, Francisco volunteered with the Cobras, back then the city's new professional team. He broadcast their games over airwaves he rented on a local AM station. Francisco stayed in radio even after the Cobras quickly folded. Grupo Yvasa's fattening bank accounts allowed him to buy a station outright. He diversified from there into television. Francisco anchored sports highlights on the Channel 6 nightly news. He also hosted a weekly sports roundup, then added a show on social issues,
Nuestra Gente
—Our People. Remarkably soon, he found himself managing all of Chihuahua for Televisa, one of the country's big networks. He was encouraged to rise higher, maybe move to Mexico City. He turned the offers down. He had found success in a field for which he had never trained, and had pursued on instinct. He saw no reason not to follow his latest instinct, to bring soccer back to the border.

It wasn't really a business decision, he tells me. Buying a soccer team, like broadcasting, was just something he wanted to do. It was to be his gift to his hometown, which was ready to take the next step in its maturation. Largely because of NAFTA, Juárez had rapidly grown into the fifth-most-populous city in Mexico, yet Juarenses still had to travel all the way to Monterrey to watch the national sport played at its highest level. When Francisco asked his father for money to buy the minor league team that would become the Indios, his father saw no reason not to give it to him. Francisco had a track record of entrepreneurial success. A soccer team looked like a solid investment. Neither man imagined the team might fail.

Everything about the Indios was to be new. Modern. Francisco knew that in a city of migrants, with loyalties forged in other towns, the Indios would start out as everyone's second-favorite team. To create new bonds, he wanted his team to sport a contemporary look. His logo would not feature medieval shields or Olde English lettering. The cartoonish image he chose, in a nod to the native Tarahumara who first inhabited Juárez, was a red bandanna wrapped like a sash around a soccer ball. He really likes the way it looks. Keeping one hand on the wheel as he drives, Francisco points a finger at the patch on his guayabera, showing me how the logo's soccer ball is angled so it looks as if the ball's black squares are the eyes and mouth of a fan screaming support. Below the ball, the Indios' name is spelled out in all caps, the letters slanted, shaded, and futuristic.

“It's fresh, it's new, it's a new positive image even for kids,” he tells me. “It works on so many levels.”

Success on the field didn't arrive immediately. The new team played its first season down in Pachuca, waiting for Ibarra to green Olympic Stadium with new grass imported from Phoenix. The owner replaced aluminum bleachers with individual bucket seats. The upgrades cost serious money, yet Francisco viewed the improvements as mere stopgaps. Only two years after buying the team, as reporters continued to mock his ambitions of rising to the Primera, Francisco announced plans for an entirely
new
Indios home field. A modern stadium, one of the finest in the country. At a press conference, flanked by the mayor of Ciudad Juárez and the governor of Chihuahua, Francisco circulated digital renderings of the new facility. The reporters gawked at a perfect rectangle of natural grass striped with horizontal lines. Some forty thousand individual seats climbing skyward in three tiers. A huge electronic scoreboard to replay game highlights. Two levels of luxury skyboxes provided the truest big-league touch, each box furnished with red leather couches and ottomans, glass coffee tables, flat-screen televisions, and white vases sprouting decorative tufts of green grass. Everything was a go, Francisco announced as the politicians nodded their heads. Blueprints approved. Land acquired, permits issued, funding obtained.

It was February 2008. By the end of the year, some sixteen hundred people in Juárez would be killed, more than five times the murder rate two years before. The economy tanked as well, worldwide. What businesses were left to rent those skyboxes? Who would dare visit Juárez with all the bullets flying? At the proposed stadium site, not a single shovel ever pierced the sandy ground. And yet right then, right when the violence went baroque, that's when the Indios played their way into the Primera. That's when they defeated León and when
la gente
took to the streets to serenade their heroes.

Francisco's advisers encouraged him to sell, immediately. With promotion to the Primera, the club, on paper, was suddenly worth more than $25 million. Ibarra had spent only about $2 million on the Indios to that point, and operationally, day to day, the club was losing money, a cash-flow hemorrhage that would only get worse. The team would start flying to games as far away as the Guatemalan border. Francisco also needed to start paying his players major league salaries. Sell the team, he was told, pocket a once-in-a-lifetime return on investment, and move on. Yet Ibarra refused to sell. As the violence in his hometown grew worse—much worse—he came to see his team less as a professional sports franchise than as a vital social program, the one bright spot in a city growing impossibly dangerous.

“I got in for the soccer,” Ibarra tells me as we crest a hill and the state capital comes into view, “but stayed in for the city, for the people.”

The best teams in Mexican soccer are backed by wealthy companies. Monterrey pays its players with brewery money. Club América and Chivas and Monarcas and Santos are basically flagships for their owners, the big television networks. Most of the smaller teams get by on government aid. Chiapas. San Luis. Atlante used to play in Mexico City until the state of Quintana Roo paid them to relocate to Cancún. Juárez's Mayor Reyes Ferriz believes the Indios deserve public support, too. He's diverted thousands of tax dollars to Francisco's team and has promised to donate thousands more. “Are they a charity?” Reyes Ferriz asked me when I met him in his office overlooking El Paso. “Absolutely. They do more good for this city than almost anyone else.” The governor of Chihuahua, though, sees things differently. “The Indios are not a charity,” the governor has stated, denying repeated requests for financial aid. “They're a business.”

Francisco is driving to Chihuahua city to argue that the team
is
a charity. In interviews, he always calls the Indios a social project. He's hung banners at the stadium—Olympic Stadium, the team's home indefinitely—stating that the Indios are “more than a club.” It's a slogan cribbed from FC Barcelona, the most famous team in the world, a club that cedes the valuable space on the fronts of their jerseys to the charity UNICEF. (Or did for years. The team recently sold out to Qatar.) Francisco doesn't talk about all the money he left on the table when the Indios rose to the Primera—I found that out from someone else in Grupo Yvasa. It's not public knowledge that his father, frustrated by the fiscal bleeding, has withdrawn all of his financial support, leaving Francisco to save the Indios by himself. The owner talks only about why he continues to fight for the team in the face of all economic reason. Indios games, he points out, are the only time Juárez is mentioned on the national news without preceding the word “murder” or “execution” or “bloody.”