phr
Bluelighter
In the first six months of this year, nearly 500 people have been murdered in the border city of Juárez, Mexico: An unprecedented streak of gore that has claimed police and shop owners, cocaine users and innocent bystanders. But if you think it’s just the cartels and crooked cops doing all the killing, you don’t know half the story. Charles Bowden visits the front line of Mexico’s bloody new war on drugs
--------
There was a time when death made sense in Juárez. You died because you had a drug load or because you lost a drug load. You died because you tried to do a deal or because you were a snitch, or because you were a poor woman and it was dark and someone thought it might be fun to rape and kill you. There was a pleasant order to death, a ritual of cartel thugs or corrupt 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 carne asada, a barbecue. Life made sense then, even in death. But those were, of course, the good old days, when murders averaged two or three hundred per year.
Now the world has changed. Since January, El Paso, the sister city of Juárez, just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, has had just five murders. In the first 160-odd days of 2008, Juárez has had nearly 500—no one knows the exact number, except that it just goes up and up and up. The killings have the cold feeling of butchery in a slaughterhouse, and they are everywhere: done in broad daylight, on streets, in markets, at homes, and even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Women, children, guilty, innocent—no one is safe.
These are red, endless days.
she came to Juárez from Sinaloa, the state on the Pacific that is the mother of almost all the major players in the Mexican drug industry, probably to visit her sister who works in the city. She was very beautiful—her hair hung down to her ass and her skin was oh so white. They called her Miss Sinaloa. I know this because when Elvira, who works at an asylum on the outskirts of Juárez, starts talking about her, she includes this Miss part. Yes, Miss Sinaloa, a beauty queen who came to Juárez. “Once,” Elvira says with pride, “we had a very beautiful woman—Miss Sinaloa. The police brought her here; she was 24 years old.”
The city cops claimed they had found her wandering on the street one morning, but Miss Sinaloa had actually been at a party. No one knows how she left the party—in Juárez there are many versions of every event—but everyone agrees on what happened after: The police took her and then raped her for three days. Eight policemen, in turn, over and over. In the mid-1990s, when girls from Juárez first began vanishing and then reappearing in the desert as corpses, the cops referred to them as morenitas, the little dark ones, because they came from the darker-skinned barrios where the women who slave in American-owned factories live. But Miss Sinaloa hailed from a different world: She was fair-skinned, middle-class, a beauty queen. And a fair-skinned woman is a special treat for street cops. By the time she got to the asylum, Miss Sinaloa’s buttocks bore the handprints of many men. There were bite marks all over her breasts.
I have been coming to Juárez for thirteen years, and like everyone here, I have an investment in the dead. And the living. Miss Sinaloa is a story, and like all stories, for a moment it tantalizes. Then it vanishes—swept up into one of the many theories that attempt to account for all the violence happening in Juárez. Some blame the massive migration of the poor to the city to work in the factories; another favorite theory has it that the violence is because of the drug world. Those who focus on the murder of the girls sense a serial killer prowling the lonely dark lanes. Others simply see the state waning in border towns like Juárez, the violence a new order replacing the fading state with criminal organizations.
But I am a tiny minority on this matter. I see no new order emerging but a new way of life, one beyond our imagination and beyond the code words we use to protect ourselves from the horror of violence. In this new way of life, no one is really in charge—and no one is safe. The violence has crossed class lines. The violence is everywhere. It has no apparent and simple source. It is like the dust in the air, part of life itself.
So I sit on the sand outside the asylum and think of Miss Sinaloa. She understands what is happening in Juárez. And soon I think I will, too, if I am given enough time on the killing ground.
*****
victor alejandro gomez marquez, 23
d. march 16, 2008
In January 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, including one belonging to Victor Alejandro Gomez Marquez. No one knows who is responsible for the list, but a few days later, four cops on it are killed
In March, Marquez tells his mother he has fifteen days to live. A week later, he comes over to his mother’s house again and sits with a friend as they drink a liter of whiskey. That time he tells his mother he has eight days to live, at best. “Be positive,” she tells him. “Christ’s blood is covering you and protecting you.”
On the morning of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, Victor Marquez rides in a police convoy through the quiet of Juárez when his car is pinned at a light by a car in front. Another car pulls alongside and machine-guns his vehicle. He is now done with living.
By the end of April, ninety Juárez cops have left the force, and those who remain have announced they will no longer be leaving their station houses. In late May, another list goes up. Beneath the names of marked men and women, it reads: thank you for waiting.
***
In december 2006, Felipe Calderón, the incoming president of Mexico, unleashed the nation’s army to attack the multibillion-dollar drug industry, which had flourished during the later years of Vicente Fox’s administration and was beginning to rival the government in scale and influence. Organized crime was close to gaining complete control of certain Mexican states, Calderón said; it had to be stopped. And besides, after having barely won his seat as president, it seemed like a smart idea to do something popular—such as hunt the cartels—so Calderón gave the army a pay raise and sent 30,000 soldiers out among the people.
At first, Calderón’s gambit was sold as a resounding success. In just four months of the operation, the government claimed to have apprehended the leader of a major drug gang and to have captured more than 1,102 drug dealers and 630 cars, fifteen boats, and two airplanes used to transport drugs. “We have managed…to calm people’s fears and let them know that government is here for them,” the president said.
For most of 2007, things remained quiet, or at least relatively so—a few murders, some disappearances, nothing unusual.
But when I arrive in Juárez in January, something is stirring. That month, the violence explodes—one, two, sometimes more people die per day, and many more go missing. Forty are killed in Juárez and hundreds across Mexico, and the numbers only go up from there. (By the time I sit down to write, in June, roughly 2,500 have died in Mexico this year.) In early May, the director of Calderón’s national drug-enforcement agency is gunned down in his own home—he dies asking, “Who sent you?”—and later the government determines the hit was done by the Sinaloa cartel, with the killers reportedly led by a former agent of the director’s own force.
Suddenly, it seems Calderón’s war may be hurting the Mexican people more than it hampers the drug trade.
When it comes to explaining the causes of all this carnage, the DEA, the U.S. Border Patrol, and America’s media and government leaders claim that it stems from a battle between various drug cartels, made increasingly desperate as Calderón’s army puts on the squeeze. This is a perfectly plausible explanation, except for the fact that the violence is failing to kill cartel members. After several months, there is hardly a body in Juárez that can be 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. A rumor is everywhere in Juárez about what happened at Aroma, a café on a plush avenue next to an area of mansions and a country club. The rumor is that on May 17, fifty heavily armed men arrived here, took the cell phones of the customers, and told people they could not leave. Then Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel, swept in, dined, and left around 2 a.m. while out in the street Calderón’s army guarded the serenity of the establishment. Guzmán paid everyone’s tab. He is a man with a $5 million bounty on his head who is said to be at war with the Juárez cartel, yet everyone in the city seems to know of his visit to Aroma and to believe it.
That weekend at least ten people are murdered as El Chapo dines in peace.
The other problem with the cartel theory is that Calderón’s army has seized tons of marijuana in Juárez but only a few kilos of cocaine—the main stream of cartel revenue. The Mexican government itself has estimated that 60 percent of the killings are gang violence over street drug sales, and less than 10 percent are assigned to organized crime, meaning the cartels.
And yet it is the cartel-war story that appears on the pages of newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times and tumbles from the tight smile of Lou Dobbs. It is apparently easiest on the nerves when the main victims of the slaughter in Mexico are drug lords—bad men who get what they deserve.
*****
juan carlos rocha, 38
d. march 10, 2008
He stands on a freeway island peddling P.M., a tabloid that features murders and sells to working-class people. Two men approach and shoot him in the head. The killers walk away from the killing. No one sees anything except that they are armed, wear masks, and move like commandos.
A crowd gathers to watch the police clean up. Rocha, the people say, sold more than P.M. He also offered cocaine at $4 to $6 a packet and allegedly earned about $300 a week as his cut—about four times what the neighboring factory workers, his customers, make. He’d been warned twice by mysterious strangers to cease this activity.
He did not listen.
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. The next day, the vendor is the cover story of P.M. His street name was El Cala. This man who sold newspapers and little packets of cocaine: the Skull.
***
Palomas feels empty even though its church is full of flowers from a big expensive wedding. Padre José Abel Retana stands with his vestments as the bride and groom beam on the church steps, a mariachi band strumming them into their new lives. The padre is a short, solid man. He looks a lot like El Chapo Guzmán, who is credited with many of the murders going on in this small community about a hundred miles west of Juárez, on the border just below Columbus, New Mexico.
“Yes,” he softly smiles when I point out the likeness, “people tell me that. Let me change into my jeans so I look handsome.”
Padre Abel’s flock is now a bloody mess. So far this year, his town of 8,000 has witnessed more than forty murders. Seventeen more have vanished. During one week this spring, Padre Abel held funeral Masses for nine people. Two of the slain were a father and son slaughtered on a Friday; five more were men killed leaving the father and son’s wake on Sunday. Calderón’s army stood by at the burial ceremonies, since follow-up murders at the cemetery are a real possibility in the current climate of Mexico.
For decades an old system kept Palomas in order. The town fed off tourists and the drug trade—when Padre Abel arrived five years ago, he remembers, each week a shipment of three to five tons of marijuana would roll through and pass, without a problem, right into the United States. In the late ’90s, human smuggling boomed: The town exploded with motels, big units thrown up for storing people for shipment. But as the border tightened in recent years, the drug and people smuggling moved away. The motels emptied out; there was no way to make money, and so Palomas starved. The old order disappeared. And then the killing started.
In a town this small, killers and slain know each other, and Padre Abel tends to them all. I’ve come to visit the padre because he recently gave a sermon against the killings—naming names in the drug industry—saying, This must stop. A newspaper account of his sermon noted everything he said but did not print the names that he announced in the pulpit; such disclosures are generally fatal for reporters. But Padre Abel is not worried. He says that no one will kill a priest and insists the naming thing was overblown—that he mentioned only a few, and everyone already knew who they were.
“It started last April,” the padre says, “and then it got calm. Until this January. We are not just talking about dead people but the disappeared—a lot of people. They just take them away.”
He seems to sink into himself as he rolls through the history and nature of the drug business, how each town or city or state has a man in charge, how that man controls all the smuggling and killing, how it has always been that way—and yet this tidal wave of blood is without any precedent, so something must have changed.
“I think the government is causing more insecurity—because the army does nothing,” he says. “There is a shoot-out, and the army does not come because they say they don’t have orders to get close. I don’t know if the army is doing the killing or the hit men—but whoever it is, we think the government is behind it.”
Since the army began patrolling down the road in Juárez, dozens of city cops have been busted by soldiers—many claim to have been beaten—and two female police officers are found blindfolded and stripped to their underwear. They are rumored to have been raped. The cops fear the army, and the army is ill-equipped to police the streets, so law and order breaks down. There have always been little gangs besides the major cartels, and these little gangs now flourish because drugs are everywhere and drug use has exploded as people seek ways to endure the strife of normal life. Without the cops or the cartels to keep them in line, the gangs fight for the corner, scrambling for a cut of the small-scale action. And after a while, the killing takes on a life of its own—a final contact high for those with no future. The padre sees this chaos even in tiny Palomas.
“The plaza,” he offers, “belongs to the Juárez cartel, and it seems like Chapo Guzmán wants this area. The army drives around, but the soldiers don’t do anything. There are a few cops here, but when the hit men come, it is like 1,000 against ten.…”
He suddenly becomes animated and imitates the burst of an AK-47. He is fumbling now, reaching out for conventional explanations—a cartel war, the army, hit men—theories that worked in the past.
He is okay, for the moment: He is convinced that no one will kill a priest.
But what if the old rules that allow him to believe this no longer apply?
A week after our conversation, a man from Palomas crawls into the U.S. port of entry at Columbus. His body is covered in burns. Someone has spent a week pouring acid on his skin and applying hot irons.
This was apparently happening as the padre and I spoke softly of the slaughter.
*****
alexia moreno, 12
d. june 9, 2008
She is 12 years old and scared of the killings. She wants to go live with her mother in El Paso, but she does not get out in time. She is sitting in a park with two girlfriends when some guys in a nice new Chevy Tahoe snatch them—the guys are being trailed by killers and want the girls as human shields. The girls make a break for it; two get away. Alexia doesn’t. She is shot in the head. The killers take the guys in the Tahoe and disappear. No one has seen them since.
***
--------
There was a time when death made sense in Juárez. You died because you had a drug load or because you lost a drug load. You died because you tried to do a deal or because you were a snitch, or because you were a poor woman and it was dark and someone thought it might be fun to rape and kill you. There was a pleasant order to death, a ritual of cartel thugs or corrupt 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 carne asada, a barbecue. Life made sense then, even in death. But those were, of course, the good old days, when murders averaged two or three hundred per year.
Now the world has changed. Since January, El Paso, the sister city of Juárez, just across the remnants of the Rio Grande, has had just five murders. In the first 160-odd days of 2008, Juárez has had nearly 500—no one knows the exact number, except that it just goes up and up and up. The killings have the cold feeling of butchery in a slaughterhouse, and they are everywhere: done in broad daylight, on streets, in markets, at homes, and even in Wal-Mart parking lots. Women, children, guilty, innocent—no one is safe.
These are red, endless days.
she came to Juárez from Sinaloa, the state on the Pacific that is the mother of almost all the major players in the Mexican drug industry, probably to visit her sister who works in the city. She was very beautiful—her hair hung down to her ass and her skin was oh so white. They called her Miss Sinaloa. I know this because when Elvira, who works at an asylum on the outskirts of Juárez, starts talking about her, she includes this Miss part. Yes, Miss Sinaloa, a beauty queen who came to Juárez. “Once,” Elvira says with pride, “we had a very beautiful woman—Miss Sinaloa. The police brought her here; she was 24 years old.”
The city cops claimed they had found her wandering on the street one morning, but Miss Sinaloa had actually been at a party. No one knows how she left the party—in Juárez there are many versions of every event—but everyone agrees on what happened after: The police took her and then raped her for three days. Eight policemen, in turn, over and over. In the mid-1990s, when girls from Juárez first began vanishing and then reappearing in the desert as corpses, the cops referred to them as morenitas, the little dark ones, because they came from the darker-skinned barrios where the women who slave in American-owned factories live. But Miss Sinaloa hailed from a different world: She was fair-skinned, middle-class, a beauty queen. And a fair-skinned woman is a special treat for street cops. By the time she got to the asylum, Miss Sinaloa’s buttocks bore the handprints of many men. There were bite marks all over her breasts.
I have been coming to Juárez for thirteen years, and like everyone here, I have an investment in the dead. And the living. Miss Sinaloa is a story, and like all stories, for a moment it tantalizes. Then it vanishes—swept up into one of the many theories that attempt to account for all the violence happening in Juárez. Some blame the massive migration of the poor to the city to work in the factories; another favorite theory has it that the violence is because of the drug world. Those who focus on the murder of the girls sense a serial killer prowling the lonely dark lanes. Others simply see the state waning in border towns like Juárez, the violence a new order replacing the fading state with criminal organizations.
But I am a tiny minority on this matter. I see no new order emerging but a new way of life, one beyond our imagination and beyond the code words we use to protect ourselves from the horror of violence. In this new way of life, no one is really in charge—and no one is safe. The violence has crossed class lines. The violence is everywhere. It has no apparent and simple source. It is like the dust in the air, part of life itself.
So I sit on the sand outside the asylum and think of Miss Sinaloa. She understands what is happening in Juárez. And soon I think I will, too, if I am given enough time on the killing ground.
*****
victor alejandro gomez marquez, 23
d. march 16, 2008
In January 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, including one belonging to Victor Alejandro Gomez Marquez. No one knows who is responsible for the list, but a few days later, four cops on it are killed
In March, Marquez tells his mother he has fifteen days to live. A week later, he comes over to his mother’s house again and sits with a friend as they drink a liter of whiskey. That time he tells his mother he has eight days to live, at best. “Be positive,” she tells him. “Christ’s blood is covering you and protecting you.”
On the morning of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, Victor Marquez rides in a police convoy through the quiet of Juárez when his car is pinned at a light by a car in front. Another car pulls alongside and machine-guns his vehicle. He is now done with living.
By the end of April, ninety Juárez cops have left the force, and those who remain have announced they will no longer be leaving their station houses. In late May, another list goes up. Beneath the names of marked men and women, it reads: thank you for waiting.
***
In december 2006, Felipe Calderón, the incoming president of Mexico, unleashed the nation’s army to attack the multibillion-dollar drug industry, which had flourished during the later years of Vicente Fox’s administration and was beginning to rival the government in scale and influence. Organized crime was close to gaining complete control of certain Mexican states, Calderón said; it had to be stopped. And besides, after having barely won his seat as president, it seemed like a smart idea to do something popular—such as hunt the cartels—so Calderón gave the army a pay raise and sent 30,000 soldiers out among the people.
At first, Calderón’s gambit was sold as a resounding success. In just four months of the operation, the government claimed to have apprehended the leader of a major drug gang and to have captured more than 1,102 drug dealers and 630 cars, fifteen boats, and two airplanes used to transport drugs. “We have managed…to calm people’s fears and let them know that government is here for them,” the president said.
For most of 2007, things remained quiet, or at least relatively so—a few murders, some disappearances, nothing unusual.
But when I arrive in Juárez in January, something is stirring. That month, the violence explodes—one, two, sometimes more people die per day, and many more go missing. Forty are killed in Juárez and hundreds across Mexico, and the numbers only go up from there. (By the time I sit down to write, in June, roughly 2,500 have died in Mexico this year.) In early May, the director of Calderón’s national drug-enforcement agency is gunned down in his own home—he dies asking, “Who sent you?”—and later the government determines the hit was done by the Sinaloa cartel, with the killers reportedly led by a former agent of the director’s own force.
Suddenly, it seems Calderón’s war may be hurting the Mexican people more than it hampers the drug trade.
When it comes to explaining the causes of all this carnage, the DEA, the U.S. Border Patrol, and America’s media and government leaders claim that it stems from a battle between various drug cartels, made increasingly desperate as Calderón’s army puts on the squeeze. This is a perfectly plausible explanation, except for the fact that the violence is failing to kill cartel members. After several months, there is hardly a body in Juárez that can be 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. A rumor is everywhere in Juárez about what happened at Aroma, a café on a plush avenue next to an area of mansions and a country club. The rumor is that on May 17, fifty heavily armed men arrived here, took the cell phones of the customers, and told people they could not leave. Then Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel, swept in, dined, and left around 2 a.m. while out in the street Calderón’s army guarded the serenity of the establishment. Guzmán paid everyone’s tab. He is a man with a $5 million bounty on his head who is said to be at war with the Juárez cartel, yet everyone in the city seems to know of his visit to Aroma and to believe it.
That weekend at least ten people are murdered as El Chapo dines in peace.
The other problem with the cartel theory is that Calderón’s army has seized tons of marijuana in Juárez but only a few kilos of cocaine—the main stream of cartel revenue. The Mexican government itself has estimated that 60 percent of the killings are gang violence over street drug sales, and less than 10 percent are assigned to organized crime, meaning the cartels.
And yet it is the cartel-war story that appears on the pages of newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times and tumbles from the tight smile of Lou Dobbs. It is apparently easiest on the nerves when the main victims of the slaughter in Mexico are drug lords—bad men who get what they deserve.
*****
juan carlos rocha, 38
d. march 10, 2008
He stands on a freeway island peddling P.M., a tabloid that features murders and sells to working-class people. Two men approach and shoot him in the head. The killers walk away from the killing. No one sees anything except that they are armed, wear masks, and move like commandos.
A crowd gathers to watch the police clean up. Rocha, the people say, sold more than P.M. He also offered cocaine at $4 to $6 a packet and allegedly earned about $300 a week as his cut—about four times what the neighboring factory workers, his customers, make. He’d been warned twice by mysterious strangers to cease this activity.
He did not listen.
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. The next day, the vendor is the cover story of P.M. His street name was El Cala. This man who sold newspapers and little packets of cocaine: the Skull.
***
Palomas feels empty even though its church is full of flowers from a big expensive wedding. Padre José Abel Retana stands with his vestments as the bride and groom beam on the church steps, a mariachi band strumming them into their new lives. The padre is a short, solid man. He looks a lot like El Chapo Guzmán, who is credited with many of the murders going on in this small community about a hundred miles west of Juárez, on the border just below Columbus, New Mexico.
“Yes,” he softly smiles when I point out the likeness, “people tell me that. Let me change into my jeans so I look handsome.”
Padre Abel’s flock is now a bloody mess. So far this year, his town of 8,000 has witnessed more than forty murders. Seventeen more have vanished. During one week this spring, Padre Abel held funeral Masses for nine people. Two of the slain were a father and son slaughtered on a Friday; five more were men killed leaving the father and son’s wake on Sunday. Calderón’s army stood by at the burial ceremonies, since follow-up murders at the cemetery are a real possibility in the current climate of Mexico.
For decades an old system kept Palomas in order. The town fed off tourists and the drug trade—when Padre Abel arrived five years ago, he remembers, each week a shipment of three to five tons of marijuana would roll through and pass, without a problem, right into the United States. In the late ’90s, human smuggling boomed: The town exploded with motels, big units thrown up for storing people for shipment. But as the border tightened in recent years, the drug and people smuggling moved away. The motels emptied out; there was no way to make money, and so Palomas starved. The old order disappeared. And then the killing started.
In a town this small, killers and slain know each other, and Padre Abel tends to them all. I’ve come to visit the padre because he recently gave a sermon against the killings—naming names in the drug industry—saying, This must stop. A newspaper account of his sermon noted everything he said but did not print the names that he announced in the pulpit; such disclosures are generally fatal for reporters. But Padre Abel is not worried. He says that no one will kill a priest and insists the naming thing was overblown—that he mentioned only a few, and everyone already knew who they were.
“It started last April,” the padre says, “and then it got calm. Until this January. We are not just talking about dead people but the disappeared—a lot of people. They just take them away.”
He seems to sink into himself as he rolls through the history and nature of the drug business, how each town or city or state has a man in charge, how that man controls all the smuggling and killing, how it has always been that way—and yet this tidal wave of blood is without any precedent, so something must have changed.
“I think the government is causing more insecurity—because the army does nothing,” he says. “There is a shoot-out, and the army does not come because they say they don’t have orders to get close. I don’t know if the army is doing the killing or the hit men—but whoever it is, we think the government is behind it.”
Since the army began patrolling down the road in Juárez, dozens of city cops have been busted by soldiers—many claim to have been beaten—and two female police officers are found blindfolded and stripped to their underwear. They are rumored to have been raped. The cops fear the army, and the army is ill-equipped to police the streets, so law and order breaks down. There have always been little gangs besides the major cartels, and these little gangs now flourish because drugs are everywhere and drug use has exploded as people seek ways to endure the strife of normal life. Without the cops or the cartels to keep them in line, the gangs fight for the corner, scrambling for a cut of the small-scale action. And after a while, the killing takes on a life of its own—a final contact high for those with no future. The padre sees this chaos even in tiny Palomas.
“The plaza,” he offers, “belongs to the Juárez cartel, and it seems like Chapo Guzmán wants this area. The army drives around, but the soldiers don’t do anything. There are a few cops here, but when the hit men come, it is like 1,000 against ten.…”
He suddenly becomes animated and imitates the burst of an AK-47. He is fumbling now, reaching out for conventional explanations—a cartel war, the army, hit men—theories that worked in the past.
He is okay, for the moment: He is convinced that no one will kill a priest.
But what if the old rules that allow him to believe this no longer apply?
A week after our conversation, a man from Palomas crawls into the U.S. port of entry at Columbus. His body is covered in burns. Someone has spent a week pouring acid on his skin and applying hot irons.
This was apparently happening as the padre and I spoke softly of the slaughter.
*****
alexia moreno, 12
d. june 9, 2008
She is 12 years old and scared of the killings. She wants to go live with her mother in El Paso, but she does not get out in time. She is sitting in a park with two girlfriends when some guys in a nice new Chevy Tahoe snatch them—the guys are being trailed by killers and want the girls as human shields. The girls make a break for it; two get away. Alexia doesn’t. She is shot in the head. The killers take the guys in the Tahoe and disappear. No one has seen them since.
***
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
They really need to clean up a little bit, all these dealers need to be working together and trying to get the cocaine up to me in MN. haha, but seriously this is really a problem and something needs to be done.
