REP 0 R T

WHILE YOUWERE SLEEPING

In Juarez, Mexico, photographers exposethe violent realities of free trade

By Charles Bowden

Te white eye of the blank screenwaits in the dark room. A few momentsearlier, Jaime Baillereswas nuzzlinghisthirteenth-month-old child and walk-ing around in the calm of his apart-ment. His wife, Graciela, puttered inthe kitchen, and soft words and laugh-ter floated through the serenity of theirhome. A copy of a work on semioticslay on the coffee table, and the roomswhispered of culture and civility andthe joy of ideas. Outside, the city ofJuarez,Mexico, waited with sharp teethand bloody hungers. Now the lightsare offasJaime Bailleresdances througha carousel of slides.

I am here because of a seventeen-year-old girl named Adriana AvilaGress. The whole thing started verysimply. I was drinking black coffee andreading a Juarez newspaper, and there,tucked away in the back pages, wherethe small crimes of the city bleed for afew inches, I saw her face. She wassmilingat me and wore a straplessgownriding on breasts powered by an upliftbra, and a pair of fancy gloves reachedabove her elbowsalmost to her armpits.The story said she'd disappeared, all1.6 meters of her. I turned to a friendI was having breakfast with and said,"What's this about?"He replied matter-of-factly, "Oh, they disappear all thetime. Guys kidnap them, rape them,

Charles Bowden's last piece for. Harper'sMagazine,"Laughter, Gunfire, and Forget-ting," appeared in the September 1995 is-sue. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/DECEMBER 1996

and kill them." Them? Oh, he contin-ued, you know, the young girls whowork in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned factories, the ones who have toleave for work when it is still dark. Ofcourse, I knew that violence is normalweather in Juarez. As a local fruit ven-dor told an American daily, "Even thedevil is scared of living here."

That's when it started for me. Thephotographers, like Jaime showing mehis slides, are the next logical step tounderstanding the world in whichbeaming seventeen-year-old girls sud-denly vanish. The cities of CiudadJuarez and El Paso, Texas, constitutethe largest border community on earth,but hardly anyone seems to admit thatthe Mexican side exists. Within thisforgotten urban maze stalk some of theboldest photographers still roaming'the streets with 35-mm cameras. Overthe past two years I have become astudent of their work, because I thinkthey are capturing something: the lookof the future. This future is based onthe rich getting richer, the poor gettingpoorer, and industrial growth produc-ing poverty faster than it distributeswealth. We have these models in ourheads about growth, development, in-frastructure. Juarez doesn't look likeany of these images, and so our abili-ty to see this city comes and goes,mainly goes. A narion that has neverhosted a jury trial, that has been dom-inated by one party for most of thiscentury, that is carpeted with corrup-

tion and poverty and pockmarked withbillionaires is perceived as an emergingdemocracy marching toward FirstWorld standing. The snippets of factthat once in a great while percolateup through the Mexican press are ig-nored by the U.S. government and itscitizens. Mexico may be the last greatdrug experience for the Americanpeople, one in which reality gives wayto pretty colors. These photographsliterally give people a picture of aneconomic world they cannot compre-hend. Juarez is not a backwater butthe new City on the Hill, beckoning usall to a grisly state of things.

I've got my feet propped up on acoffeetable, a glassofwine in my hand,and as far as the half-dozen photogra-phers present for the slide show areconcerned this is my first day of schooland they're not sure if I've got what ittakes to be a good student. After all, noone comes here if he has a choice, andabsolutely no one comes to view theirwork. The photographers of Juarezonce put on an exhibition. No one inEl Paso, separated from Mexico by thir-ty feet of river, was interested in hang-ing their work, so they found a smallroom in Juarez and hung big printsthey could not really afford to make.They called their show Nada. Que Ver,"Nothing to See."

Beginning in the early 1980s, pho-tographers began to show up with uni-versity degrees and tattered copies ofthe work of New York's famous street

shooter, Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Atradition of gritty, unsentimental, andloving street shooting that has all butperished in the United States was re-born in juarez, in part because the pa-pers offered a market but mostly be-cause the streets could not be denied.The street shooters of Juarez are main-ly young and almost alwaysbroke. Payat the half-dozen newspapers runs fromfifty to eighty dollars a week, and theymust provide their own cameras. Filmis rationed by their employers. "Weare like firemen," Jaime Bailleres ex-plains, "only here we fight fires withour bare hands."

The slide presenta-tion clicks away. Achild of seven ispinned under a mas-sive beam. He and hisfather were tearingapart a building for itsold bricks when theceiling collapsed.Jaime says that thechild is whimperingand saying he is afraidof death. He lasted afew minutes more.Alfredo Carrillo staresintently at the imagesas Jaime giveshim tipson how to frame dif-·ferent scenes. A handreaches out from un-der a blanket-a copcut down by AK-47sin front of a mansionowned by Amado Car-rillo Fuentes. Carrillois a local businessman.U.S. authorities cal-culate that he moves more than 100tons of cocaine a year across the RioGrande and into EI Paso. He is esti-mated to be grossing $200 million aweek, and to the joy of economists,this business ishard currency and cash-and-carry. To my untrained eye thedimensions of the dope business aresimple: without it the Mexican econ-omy would totally collapse.' A goldring gleams on the cop's dead hand; forBailleres it is a study in the ways of

I Former president Carlos Salinas de Gar-tari figured Mexico's drug cartels net $30billion a year, more than the U.S. bailout ofMexico. In 1995, Salinas fled the countryunder suspicion of ties to the drug cartels.

Photograph by Jaime Bailleres

power. Alfredo says, "All these youngkids dream of being Amado Carrillo."

The competition is rough. Yester-day, Juan Manuel Bueno Duenas,twenty-three, got into a dispute witha drug dealer. Juan belonged to LosHarpys. Today at 4:30 P.M. he wasburied in the municipal cemetery byhis fellow gang members. The camposanto was crowded with people, the af-terflow of the Day of the Dead obser-vance. Carloads of guys from BarrioChico, rivals of Los Harpys, openedfire on the procession. No one is cer-tain how many people were wounded.The gangs of juarez, los pandi/las, kill at

ample, in Mexico you are counted asemployed if you work one hour a week.In 1994, millions of poor Mexicanswalked away from their dying earthand headed north. About one millionmanaged to cross into the UnitedStates. The rest slammed up againstthe fence in places like Juarez. Sincethen this exodus has increased. Juarezis part of the Mexican gulag, the placefor the people no one wants.

Adriana Avila Gress was foundabout a week after her disappearancein a desert tract embracing the city'ssouthern edge, a place called the LateBravo. Adriana worked six days a week

THE CORPSE OF A RAPED AND MURDERED GIRL MUMMIFIED BYTHE DESERT SUN

least 200 people a year. Accepting suchrealities is possible; thinking aboutthem isnot. Survival in] uarez is basedon alcohol, friendships, and laughter,much laughter. But this happens inprivate. The streets are full of peoplewearing masks.

In this city of sleepwalkers, ele-mentary facts, such as the population,are given scant attention. No oneknows how many people live now inJuarez, but the ballpark figure is 2 mil-lion. Since December 1994 Mexico'scurrency has lost over half its value,prices have more than doubled, andjobs have disappeared wholesale.Real numbers hardly exist-for ex-

in a foreign-owned factory making turnsignals for cars like the one you drive.She took home about five dollars aday. In a photo of her body that I sawin the newspaper morgue, her pantieswere down around her ankles as thepolice circled her still form. At least150 girlsdisappeared in the city during1995, and the government said thatmost ran off with boys. When morebodies were found, the police blamedan American serial killer and handily

arrested a suspect. But girls

J continued to disappear.

aime Bailleres has projected abeautiful black carved mask on the

REPORT 45

screen. The head is tilted and the faceissmooth with craftsmanship. The hairis long and black. It takes a moment forme to get past this beauty and realizethat the face isnot a mask. She is a six-teen-year-old girl with a forgottenname. She was found in the park by abridge linking Juarez to El Paso; thepark on both sides of the Rio Grandeis dedicated to friendship betweenthe two nations. The girl's skin hasblackened in the sun, and the facecontracted as it mummified. Shewas kidnapped, raped, murdered.Jaime explains that the newspaperrefused to publish this photograph.The reason for this decision is veryloud. The lips of the girl pull back,revealing her clean white teeth.Sound pours forth from her mouth.She is screaming and screamingand screaming.

"We don't give a damn aboutthe editors," Jaime snaps. "We caneducate people. To look. To watch.We work in a jungle."

The face floats on the screen asmusic purrs through the stereospeakers. No one will ever publishthis photograph, Jaime tells me. Istart to argue with him but soongive up. I can't deny one joltingquality of the image: it isdeafening.

It is after midnight when Jaime'sphoto show breaks up, and I headdowntown. A wind whips acrossJuarez.The city often sprawlsundermoving walls of dust since so littleof it is paved. The whores are out,sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.There is no way to tell if they are full-time prostitutes or factory workersmaking an extra buck. The peso haslost another chunk of its value in thelast day or so.

"How much?" I ask.She leans into the car window and

says the equivalent of fourteen dollars."How long?" I say."How long can you resist me?" she

asks with a laugh.There are ways to measure the deep

movements of an economy that aremore accurate and timely than thebond market and this girl with

her mask of thick makeup"l is one of them.

uarez," photographer JulianCardona explains, "is a sandwich. The

46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 1996

bread is the First Wodd and the ThirdWorld. We are the baloney." Julian,about thirty, is a tall, long-legged,thin man with a deep voice. On thestreet they call him El Cornpas, thecompass. He laughs easily and alwaysseems to be watching. One night atthe newspaper, as I plowed through athick stack of negatives, he watched

CHILDREN PLAY IN THE SHADOW OF A SMELTER

me like a hanging judge. Finally, Iplucked a negative of a cop holding upthe shoe of a dead girl found in thedesert. Cardona looked at it and forthe first time allowed himself a smallsmile. "This is a good image," he said,almost with relief.

Like all the shooters in Juarez,Julianis keenly aware of the seasons. In No-vember and December, there is abumper crop of drug murders as themerchandise moves north and ac-counts are settled. Then around Christ-mas and New Year'speople hang them-selves.The first few months of the newyear bring fires and gas explosions asthe poor try to stay warm. Springmeans battles between neighborhoods(or colonias) over ground for buildingshacks aswell asoutbreaks of disease ina city largelylacking sewagetreatment.

Summer brings water problems to ahead (Juarezwill run completely out ofwater within five years unless some-thing is done), more disease, andbatches of murders by the street gangs.The cool days of fall open a new sea-son of battles between colonias, andthen, with the holidays, the photog-raphers return to the drug killings and

the Christmas suicides. As ManuelSaenz, the photo editor of themorning paper, puts it, "Anythingcan happen here at any time. Itcan blow at any second." That isthe inside of the sandwich.

Julian, like many of the streetshooters, sees his work as a mis-sion. Juarez is the fourth-largestcity in Mexico and is historicallyfamous for vice and violence. Sincethe end of World War I, it has beena place that draws Americans forwomen and dope. Since 1991 thehomicide rate has increased by atleast 100 percent (given crookedcops and crooked government, sol-id numbers are hard to come by).What ishappening in the city isof-ten dismissed by simply saying thatmany cities are violent, that gangsoccur in the United States as well,that strife and dislocation are justthe normal growing pains of a so-ciety industrializing, and so forth.All of these statements make a lotof sense, and all of them are lies.The photographers of Juarez knowthey are lies and believe body andsoul that their work will state the

truth. They say their cameras are moredeadly than AK-47s.

Julian Cardona is on his way homeat 7:00A.M. after twelve hours ofprowl-ing for the blood of the city's night.He glimpses of a small crowd and pullsover. A man has been stabbed thirtytimes, and the arms are frozen in rigormortis. A police technician iscrouchedover the chest, photographing forensic

evidence. Julian shoots a few

S frames.

napshots brieflymake Juarezstandstill. You can run from photographsbut you can't really hide. This factseems to keep the photographers going.A shooter is desperate to get the shotof a man who has cut off his own gen-itals. But by the time the photogra-pher arrives, the mutilated man is in an

Photograph by Manuel Saenz

ambulance and the doors are closed.So the shooter pops open the backdoors and clambers in. The man lyingthere is in shock, his crotch a pool ofgore. He raiseshis head just as the pho-tographer leans forward and goes click.The photographer isno fool; he knowsthis picture will never be printed.

His name isJaime Murrieta, and heis thirty-five years old. He never turnsoff his police scanner. He beats thecops to many crime scenes and oncegot a medal for rescuing someone froma blaze when he arrived ahead of thefiremen. He has photographed over500 murders. Once he crouched overthe bloated body of a girl who hadbeen raped and murdered just as itburst. He sighs when he thinks of thePentax he used. It never worked again.

Now we are in a car moving throughdowntown Juarez at about sixty milesan hour. The streets are clogged withpeople, and we miss hitting them byinches. I feel like I am in a long dollyshot from an Indiana Jones movie. Itis 5:07 in the afternoon, and Murri-eta has just heard of a shooting inColonia Juarez down near the river.He is exploding with sheer joy. "1loveviolence," he tells me.

The other night around eleven, twowomen and a twelve-year-old girldrove a Dodge Ram Charg-er down the streets ofJuarez. Each was shot in thehead with a .45, a caliberfavored by the federal po-lice. Murrieta got some niceshots of them slumped intheir car seats. This morn-ing he covered their funer-al and was beaten by thewomen's relatives, whowere narcotraficantes. Hekeeps changing vehicles sothat the gangs don't recog-nize what he is driving. Re-cently, seven rounds rippedthrough his car and some-how missed him.

"Yes, I am afraid," he ad-mits. "But I love my work. Iam on a mission, and every-thing has its risk. God helpsme." He has this dream ofhis death. Someone is com-ing at him with a gun or aknife, and there is nowhereto run. As they fire at him

Photograph by Julian Cardona

or shove in the blade, he raises hiscamera and gets the ultimate murderphotograph. "I will die happy," he in-sists. At the moment, he's beenwarned that a contract killer is look-ing for him. He is not that easy tofind. It has taken me days to ren-dezvous with him because he comesand goes from the newspaper withoutwarning, and probably lives more inhis car than under any other roof.

In Colonia Juarez, the body we havecome to see sprawls in front of thedoorway of a corner grocery store.Three rounds from a .38 Special wentthrough the head, and five tore up thechest. That was twelve minutes ago.The victim, El Pelon, is also knownas Francisco Javier Hernandez. Ac-cording to optimistic police figures,heis murder number 250 this year inJuarez. At 5:00 P.M. he was twentyyears old. He was a junkie, and he 'al-so sold drugs. He belonged to thepandilla called K-13, a group noted forits arsenal of guns. A crowd of his fel-low gang members stands silently inthe street. Jaime Murrieta leaps out ofthe car and hits the street running. Atfirst the police keep him back, but thenI offer the captain a pack of LuckyStrikes and the officer's face bright-ens. I light one for him-there are

moments when I love Mexico. Whilethe captain and I savor Kentucky to-bacco, Murrieta scurries to the crimescene. His face is absolutely serene ashe crouches over the body. Hernandezwears trousers and boots, but his coatis almost offand the wound in his chestis visible in the good light that all pho-tographers pray for. A pool of brilliantred blood frames his head like a halo.The storefront is pure white, with apainting of Mickey Mouse. A sign overthe doorway saysSiempre Coke. Acrossthe street is a pink house where drugsare sold. A fat girl smiles at the body.Her T-shirt says KISS ME, I'M YOURS.There was a killing at this very cor-ner four months ago.

El Pelon's mother stands a few feetfrom his corpse. Her hair is gray andshe cradles her face in her hands. Sheis angry at her son. Only a week before,LosHarpys tried to kill him and still hedid not take precautions. "This hap-pened," she says, "because he is a pen-deja, a fool."

A twelve-year-old girl strolls downthe sidewalk, drawn by the possibilityof excitement. She has dyed red hairand the smooth, serene face of a child.She pushes through the crowd and seesthe body. It is her brother. The con-tours of her face disintegrate as if she

POLICE PHOTOGRAPH EVIDENCE AT THE SCENE OF A STABBING

REPORT 47

were a plate-glass window throughwhich a rock has suddenly been hurled.Two girls take her arms and hold herup as she slumps toward the ground.

Murrieta stops shooting. He is outof rationed film, but he got what hewanted.

Murrieta is a legend among the oth-er street shooters. They love to tell astory about him. He is in bed with awoman, and his police scanner is on.Murrieta is just about to climax whenhe hears a murder report crackle onthe radio. He gets up and starts to dress.

practically drill the actual wages intosomeone's head, he or she will counterby sayingthat the cost of living ismuchcheaper in Mexico. This is not true.Along the border, Mexican prices onaverage run at 90 percent of U.S.prices. Basically, the only cheap thingin Mexico is flesh, human bodies youcan fornicate with or work to death.What is happening in Mexico betraysour notion of progress, and for thatreason we insist that each ugly littlestatistic is an exception or temporaryor untrue. For example, in the past

ed States and Mexico in 1965 so thatAmericans could exploit cheap Mex-ican labor and yet not pay high Mex-ican tariffs.Although the products thatcome from the factories are counted asexports (and thus figured into GDP),economists figure that only 2 percentof material inputs used in maquila pro-duction come from Mexican suppli-ers. All the parts are shipped to Mex-ico from the United States and othercountries, then the Mexicans assemblethem and ship them back. Two orthree thousand American managers

commute back and forth from EIPaso every day. Juarez is in yourhome when you turn on the mi-crowave, watch television, take inan old film on the VCR, slide in-to a new pair of blue jeans, maketoast in the kitchen, enjoy yourkid playing with that new toytruck on Christmas morning.

Politicians and economistsspeculate about a global economyfueled by free trade. Their spec-ulations are not necessary. InJuarez the future is thirty yearsold, and there are no questionsabout its nature that cannot beanswered here. The maquilashave caused millions of poorpeople to move to the border.Most of the workers are womenand most of the women areyoung. By the late twenties orearly thirties the body slows andcannot keep up the pace of thework. Then, like any used-up

thing, the people are junked. Turnoverin the maquilas runs anywhere from50 to 150 percent a year. It is com-mon for workers to leave for work at4:00 A.M. and spend one or two hoursnavigating the dark city to their jobs.Sometimes they wind up in the LoteBravo. The companies carefully screenthe girls to make sure they are notpregnant. Workers at one plant com-plain of a company rule requiring newfemale hires to present bloody tam-pons for three consecutive months.The workweek is six days. After worksome of the girls go downtown to selltheir bodies for money or food. At least40 percent of Mexicans now live offthe underground economy, whichmeans they stand in the street and tryto sell things, including themselves.

Workers who lose their jobs receive

THE MORNING AFTER A SHANTYTOWN FIRE, A BOY PLAYS AMID THE RUBBLE

The woman asks, "What are youdoing?"

"I must go," he answers. "It is anobligation."

"You'renot going to finish?"

I "No."

n a simple sense the photographscome from cameras, but there isa deep-er point of origin. The floor under thegore of Juarez is an economy of facto-riesowned by foreigners,mainly Amer-icans. I keep having the same experi-ence when I talk with Americansabout the foreign-owned factories inMexico. I'll tell them the wages-three, four, or five dollars a day-andthey'll nod knowingly, and then a fewminutes later I will realize that theyhave unconsciously translated this dai-ly rate into an hourly rate. When I

48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/ DECEMBER 1996

two years wages- in the maquiladorashave risen 50 percent. Fine and good.But inflation in that period iswell over100 percent.

Juarez is an exhibit of the fabledNew World Order in which capitalmoves easily and labor is trapped byborders. There are a total of 350 for-eign-owned factories in Juarez, thehighest concentration in all of Mexi-co, and they employ 150,000 workers.The twin plant system-in Spanish,maquiladoras-was created by the Unit-

2 Figures on pay in these factories are al-most universally exaggerated. In October of1995, Newsweek pegged the average wageat $15 a day. When I showed this issue toMexican reporters, they insisted it must be atypographical error. Wages vary from oneborder city to another, but a fair range isfrom $20 to $35 a week.

Photograph by Gabriel Cardona

essentially no benefits beyond sever-ance pay. Mexico has no safety net.Independent, worker-controlledunions barely exist, and anyone tryingto organize one is fired, or murdered}It is almost impossible to get aheadworking in the maquilas. Real wageshave been falling since the 1970s.And since wages are just a hair abovestarvation level, maquilas contributepractically nothing toward forging aconsumer society. Of course, as ma-quiladora owners and managers pointout, if wages are raised, the factorieswill move to other countries with acheaper labor force.

And so industry is thriving. Half amillion cargo-laden trucks move fromjuarez to El Paso each year. Boxcarsrumble over the railroad bridge. Newindustrial parks are opening up. Laboris virtually limitless, as tens of thou-sands of poverty-stricken people pourinto the city each year. There are fewenvironmental controls and little en-forcement of those that do exist. El Pa-so/Juarez is one of the most pollutedspots in North America. And yet it isa success story. In juarez the econom-ic growth in 1994 it was 6 percent, andlast year it registered 12 percent. Ac-cording to Lucinda Vargas, the Feder-al Reserve economist who tracks Mex-ico's economy, juarez is a "mature"economy. This is as good as it gets.With the passage of NAFT A, narco-traficantes began buying maquiladorasin juarez. They didn't want to miss outon the advantages of free trade.

The street shooters are seldom al-lowed to take photographs inside thefactories. And yet it is impossible totake a photograph in juarez of any-thing without capturing the conse-quences of the maquiladoras. The fac-tory workershave created a new schoolof architecture that is not seriouslystudied by scholars. They build homesout of odd material-cardboard, oldtires, pallets stolen from loading docks.The structures are held together withnails driven through bottle caps-acheap bolt. The designs flow unham-pered by building codes. No school ofaesthetics scolds, no committee votes,

3 Last spring the boss of the big worker-dominated bus company in Mexico City wasfound dead. The government determinedthat he had committed suicide. He had shothimself in the heart. Twice.

Photograph by Gabriel Cardona

no zoning oppresses. Like the fabledPilgrims, the people of the shanty-towns have largely escaped the noticeof their rulers. Electricity isstolen frompower lines. (Jaime Bailleresonce tooka photo of a man upa power pole ille-gally clamping intoa high-voltage line.The man was inept.As Bailleres tookhis picture the manwas electrocuted.)Water is more diffi-cult to acquire, andin many of theshanty communi-ties it must bebought off trucks.Land for housing isalso scarce and isoften stolen. Gab-riel Cardona, another juarez photog-rapher, has recorded a land invasion.It begins when a woman notices thather portrait of Christ isweeping. Soonher colonia has built a shrine out ofscavenged wood, and the painting issurrounded by hundreds of votive can-dles. This miraculous painting inspiresthe local people to invade some vacantland and throw up huts. The next pho-to is of a man returning from amaquiladora to his home. It has beenbulldozed by the police, and he staresat his bed and a bucket and a few oth-er items piled up on the scraped earth.

The two daily newspapers in El Pa-so, the city of half a million that squatsthirty feet from juarez, can go dayswithout a single story about the mil-lions of people living in grinding pover-ty right before everyone's eyes. A re-cent killing sums up this attitude.Someone slaughtered a retired juarezcop, jose Munoz Rubalcava, and two ofhis sons. They tied them with yellowrope and made a yellow bow. Thenthey put them in the trunk of a car,drove to the midpoint of a bridge be-tween El Paso and juarez, and aban-doned the vehicle so that it straddledthe boundary line. The plan worked.Neither country would accept the

responsibility for invest i-~ gating what had happened.

~here is a hesitation when thestreet shooters of juarez mention LaPantera, the Panther. Once he was

one of them. Then he took up the.video camera and went to work for atelevision station. But it is his dedica-tion to his work that gives the streetshooters pause. They feel that he has

gone too far, thathe cannot surviveliving as he does.

Rafael Cora,better known asLaPantera, workstwelvehours a day,seven days a week.He has not misseda tour of his ap-pointed rounds ineight years. Heworks only atnight, and hisname comes fromhis eerie ability toget to murders be-

fore the police do. Sometimes hevideotapes things the police do notwish to have publicized. He is thirty-two years old and has a quiet and re-served manner. His camera has staredat 800 murders. Five times the policehave beaten him and destroyed hisequipment. Narcotraficantes also viewhim with disfavor. La Pantera wears abulletproof vest. Although his face hasnever appeared on television, he issaidto have one of the highest-rated pro-grams in the city.4 His day begins withdarkness and ends with light, and inbetween he roams alone in an oldblack pickup truck; a police scanneralways plugged into his left ear. Heshoots murders, car accidents, suicides,gang fights-all the violence of thenight.

For several yearshe rode with an as-sistant, and then they fell in love andmarried. She continued riding withhim, and one night when she was ninemonths' pregnant the labor pains cameand La Pantera made a brief pit stop atthe hospital so that their daughter couldbe born. Forhis eighty-four-hour work-week he is paid $100. He cannot liveon this, so during the day he is a part-time fumigator. His daughter is nowfour, and sometimes she rideswith him"so she will learn reality."

BLOATED CORPSE PULLED FROM A RIVER

4 Over 90 percent of Mexican families have atelevision. In the barrios, where the housesare cardboard and the electricity is pirated,you will consistently find televisions. Thispart of the fabled globalvillageactually exists.

REPORT 49

La Pantera is convinced that if heshows people what their city is like,then they will change their city. Thatiswhy he left newspapers and still pho-tography: televi-sion, he believed,would reach morepeople with moreforce. He worriesabout being killed,but he cannot seemto stop. Beingaround him has thequality of visitingsomeone on deathrow. In your heart,you know he can'tpossibly make it.Once he came up-on Jaime Murrietabeing pounded bynarcotraficantes in abar. La Panteraleapt in to helphim, and they bothwere beaten almostto death. "I cankeep doing this forever," he insists qui-etly to me. "This is a mission for jus-tice." In his spare time, he and hiswife work with the Red Cross. Peoplecome to him for help in finding themissing. He is a faceless legend. He re-fuses to appear on the air because hedoes not want his personality to getin the way of the stories, the montagesof horror he constructs every night. "Ilike to take the tragedies," he explains,"and make people feel them."

He is very proud of his work, andshelf after shelf in the station sagswiththe results of his nocturnal labor. Heplucks a cassette and insists I watch. Aman is being beaten, blood coursingdown his face, the soft voice of La Pan-tera narrating.

La Pantera silently watches his tapewith the calm pleasure of a connois-seur. He fast-forwards the tape, andthe people shouting and crying soundlike cartoon characters. Then he slowsthe tape and the camera pans a suicide.The man is quite young and wearinga bulky blue sweater. By his feet is afive-gallon bucket. The rope aroundhis neck is tied to a small tree in acity park. His neck is bent, but therope is straight and taut. The cameraframes the man and the tree, thenzooms in to peruse his body, and quick-

lv does a ISO-degree pan around tohis back. Then the camera zooms inagain to one of his feet. It is touchingthe ground. During the hours he

spent hanging herealone, the man'sneck stretched andnow he is firmlyplanted on theearth again.

When I leavethe station, LaPantera walks meout into the 2:00A.M. street. Hetouches my shoul-der and says, "Becareful. This is avery dangerouscity'.Do not stop atany stop signs.They will leap ourand take the car."

Every morningat 7:45 A.M. LaPantera's programruns as a special

eight- to ten-minute part of themorning news. The segment is

called "While You Were

I Sleeping."

n 1991,Nicholas Scheele, the headof the Ford Motor Company in Mexi-co, said in admiration of the govern-ment's control, "But is there any oth-er country in the world wher.e theworking class ... took a hit in their pur-chasing power of in excessof 50 percentover an eight-year period and youdidn't have a social revolution?" Maybeyou get something you don't have todefine as a revolution. There are over200 gangs in juarez. They, not the po-lice, define the borders in the city.They, not the government, representauthority to the human beings in thecolonias. They provide work sellingnarcotics. And they kill and steal all thetime to protect their spheres of power.They are not a progressive force; theyare simply the force that growswhen asociety offers no progress. They haveblossomed over the last three years asseveral factors made them inevitable:the slowdecomposition of the Mexicangovernment created a vacuum; the ex-plosive growth of the drug industry ere-ated a livelihood; the death of the mainbulwark of Mexican culture, the fam-

JUGGLING CLOWNS BEG FOR MONEY

50 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 1996

ily, created a need. For the women, theassembly plants are sometimes liberat-ing, but more marriages and familiescollapse.Mexico had to create one mil-lion jobs last year for young people en-tering the economy. Instead, the coun-try lost one million jobs. And mostimportantly, the fabled pull of the bor-der brought hordes of almost Neolith-ic peasant families to a city where theirskillswere worthless. In Juarez you faceStone Age parents staring helplesslyat Computer Age children. Nothingthe adults know or can provide hasmuch value, and the fabric that hasheld familiesand Mexico together tearsright before your eyes. You can actual-ly hear the tearing. I'll be standing ata murder scene, the shooters will befeeding on a ftesh corpse, and as I makenotes I can hear the gang kids mur-muring about me. When I look up Isee very hard eyes, and I know every-one but me is packing. There is noth-ing to be done about this. I am likeeveryone else here: I simply go aboutmy business as if death were not a fewfeet away disguised as some twelve- orthirteen-year-old with a gun and eyesolder than I can ever hope to be.

This new world makes stabs at beau-ty. Juarez historically is a cultural caul-dron where folk Mexico conftonts andfabricates life out of the hightechnology of its American neighbor.In the 1940s, pachuco culture with itszoot suits exploded out of Juarez. Blackvelvet painting also started here. Thepandillas, like many U.S. gangs, at firstspray-painted signs on walls and thenstarted doing full figure paintings. Ot-to Campbell, a noted Juarez artist, be-came interested in their work and of-fered to teach them. And so he did.

Julian Cardona holds a large photo-graph of a mural painted by thepandilleros on the Puente Negro, theblack railroad bridge linking El Pasoand Juarez. The image is taken fromthe Mexican side. American officialshave erected massive sliding doors onthe bridge to block people from cross-ing, and the pandilleros have paintedthese doors in the style of the old mas-ters from the revolution. Peasants aremarching along the bottom of the mur-al. Above them are the girders and ma-chines of modem industrial life, andblood is spilling from this future.

In the photograph taken by Jaime

Photograph by Julian Cardona

Bailleres, the doors are opening as twoU.S. Customs officialspush them apartto permit a train to enter Mexico. Thelocomotive is blue and huge and withits white beam stares out like a Cy-clops. It looks like the train will moveforward and kill the peasants any sec-ond. Cardona stabs at the photographand tells me, "This is a great image.The hands that can make this painting,

those hands kill 200 people

A in this city every year."

fter several months, things inJuarez begin to haunt me. I try to putmy finger on what exactly is botheringme. I tell myself it is not simply thepoverty-I remember being in deltashacks in the segregated Mississippi ofthe 1960s and people living almostlike animals deep within the bo-som of my own country. When Ilived with these people for weeksand weeks, I ate what they ate-wild greens picked by the road andfried in grease,bootleg liquor madein the thickets by the river. Also,I can remember working on thewest side of Chicago in districtsthat had the look and feel of Berlinin, say, the summer of 1945. ButJuarez is different in a way that ta-bles of wages and economic stud-ies cannot capture: in Juarez youcannot sustain hope ..

In the shadow of a maquilado-ra sprawls a Community for Pub-lic Defense barrio, one of at leasttwenty-six in juarez, The policeare afraid to enter CDP settle-ments. The residents work inmaquilas and sell drugs, guns, andcars stolen from the United States.They also make bricks. It is dusk,and they have fired up their kilnsusing tires for fuel. Black tonguesof smoke lick the shacks. The maindirt lane of the colonia is blocked bya circle of people sitting on buckets.They are having a community meet-ing. This is the order in the new world.

There are other hints of the emerg-ing order. Jaime Bailleres is in a night-club and at his editor's insistence takesa picture of a beautiful woman for thenewspaper's lifestyle section. A manat another table isaccidentally includedin the frame. Suddenly two bodyguardslay their hands on Bailleres. They donot want this picture published, un-

derstand? He wonders: Is this man nowstored somewhere in his camera Ama-do Carrillo? But this thought is dan-gerous. Later, when I mention thename out loud at a bar, he looksaroundquickly to see if anyone has overheard.His eyes for a few seconds show truepanic. Jaime ishardly a coward, but heis certainly not a fool like me.

We all have a deep need to ignoreJuarez. We write off what is going onby saying that it is something ourgrandparents or great-grandparentswent through. We tell ourselves thatthere are gangs and murders in Amer-ican cities. This is true, but it does notdeal with the reality of juarez. We arenot talking about darkness on the edgeof town or a bad neighborhood. Wearetalking about an entire city woven out

shantytown about ten months ago,when three years of drought endedtheir lives in a village in Durango. Ahalf-dozen murdered, mutilated, andraped girls have been found about ahundred yards from their shack, andthis frightens the teenage girls. Eachmorning they rise at 3:30 A.M., cookover bits of wood, and have some cof-fee. After a cold tortilla, they walk outinto the darkness with their few pos-sessions (a pan, a plate, knife, fork,spoon, and cooking oil) and bury themsecretly in a hole; otherwise they willbe stolen while they are gone. They arethe lucky ones: five of them work inAmerican-owned maquiladoras. Thefifteen-year-old girl is a welder at 160pesos a week (about $21.62 at currentexchange rates). Bus fare consumes

Photograph by Jaime Bailleres

U.S. CUSTOMS AGENTS PART THE PUENTE NEGRO MURAL TO LET A TRAIN CROSS THE BORDER

of violence. We tell ourselves that jobsin the maquiladoras are better thannothing. But we ignore the low wages,high turnover, and shacks. Then thereis the silent thought: after all, they areMexicans, not U.s. citizens. This kindof shrug brings to mind Rene Descartesnailing his family dog to a board alive

and cutting it up to deter-

I mine if it had a soul.

am standing by the Carranza sis-ters' cardboard shack in a part of Juarezcalled Anapra. They moved to the

about half her salary. Today, the Car-ranza kids are fixing to plant eight pineseedlings. Tomorrow, they begin theirsix-day weeks at American factories.

The United States begins fiftyyardsaway, where the North Americans areconstructing a steel wall to keep Mex-ico at bay. In fact, the First World is sonear that every few days a band ofAnapra residents gather around 8:00P.M. and walk the short distance to theborder, where an American railroadalmost brushes against the fence. Then,as the bend in the tracks slows the

REPORT 51

train, they expertly crack open a dozenor more boxcars, tossgoodsout to wait-ing hands, and rush back into Mexi-co-ail in less than the two minutes ittakes for cops to arrive. U.S. newspa-pers periodically print stories aboutthese train robberies (600 in the lastthree years) and call the Carranzas'neighbors the new Jesse [ameses.

Jaime Bailleres says, "Sometimes Ifeel like I am in Bosnia." He tells mea story to make sure my feeble gringomind graspswhat he means. The paperwanted a soft feature on the lives of therich, so one Saturday a photographerand his editor strolled through an en-clave of wealth looking for the rightimage. The photographer broughtalong his wife and two children. As arabbit hopped across the lawn of amansion, the camera came up. Sud-denly two bodyguards appeared withAK-47s, and one said, "Give me thatfucking camera and film." They forcedthe photographer facedown on thepavement with the automatic rifles athis head. Then, in front of his wifeand children and editor, they beat himabout his head, ribs, and genitals. Po-lice stood nearby and watched. That isthe end of the story.

None of this matters. It is all a de-tailor an exception or an illusion. Theauthorities announced back in No-vember of 1995 that 520 people haddisappeared in Juarez that year and "animportant percentage of them are fe-male adolescents." By last March, themothers of the missing were demon-strating and demanding justice. Thenin April, the police made a sweep ofthe red-light district, bagged 120 sus-pects, and announced that the slaugh-ter was the work of eight apparentlygregarious sociopaths who hung outin a bar called joe's Place. The next daythe mothers of the accused protestedthe police torture of their sons. And,of course, the killings and disappear-ances continue-though reports ofthem were censored for a while.

Then, in July, one of the Juarezdailies published a front-page list ofmissing girls found dead in the LateBravo over the last year. Adriana Avi-la Gress was not on the list. It doesn'tmatter that I read of her disappear-ance in the same newspaper or readthe account of her body being found inthe same newspaper or examined pho-

52 HARPER'S MAGAZINE! DECEMBER 1996

tographs ofher corpse in the morgue ofthe same newspaper. I can't find herfamily, so I'm hard-pressed to provethat she ever existed.

That same day, an American drugconference takes place at Fort Blissonthe edge of El Paso. The attorney gen-eral, the drug czar, the head of the FBI,and the head of the INS will be there,and for days the newspapers have bub-bled with stories that the next candi-date to make the FBI'smost-wanted listwill be one Amado Carrillo Fuentes.The night before, Iwas taken by a Mexi-can reporter to a man-sion in EI Paso sur-rounded by high wallsand featuring elec-tronic gates and an ar-ray of security sys-tems. I was told thatthe building belongedto a family with seri-ous organized crimeconnections and thatfor the past week Car-rillo had been stayingthere to get somepeace. I can't provethat Carrillo is inside the mansion; Icouldn't do that if [ entered and shack-led him. No one really knows what he

-looks like. Besides, I've gone native.Reality comes and goes for me.

I come and go into Juarez, and thenreturn to a different world where thingsstill seem to work, where payday comesnow and then, and where over a gooddinner what I know and have seen canbe buried. Alive. After all, I wouldrather smile and feel the sun against myface than think about Juarez or all theplaces like juarez-that are growing qui-etly like mold on the skin of the plan-et. When I go to the United States, noone ever mentions this place. It simplyceases to exist, even if I only travel to

EI Paso. I used to wonder

I about this fact.

go back to the glowing screen inthe dark room. I must see that black-ened face again. Soft music calms me,the blackness of the room caressesme,the roar of the fan on the projector isoddly comforting. The beam of thewhite light defines reality now andkeeps it locked up within a rectangle.Jaime Bailleres installs a slide carousel,

and then I hear a click and color ex-plodes. The photographers do notknow whether this is art. It is not forthem to say.Nada Que Ver. I faceagainthe open mouth and clean white teeth.

"Why do you want this picture!"Jaime Bailleres asks me. "You know itwill never be published. No one willprint it."

I have never told him the truth. Ihave never told him that the first nightI saw the girl's face I thought it was acarved wooden mask, something made

by one of those quainttribes far away in theMexican south. Norhave I told him that Ikeep a copy of it in afolder right next towhere I work and thatfrom time to time Iopen the clean mani-la folder and look in-to her face. And thenI close it like the lid ofa coffin. She hauntsme, and [ deal with-this fact by avoidingit. [ have brought a

HOMELESS JUAREZ GIRL pile of photographybooks to Jaime's house to add to thecommunal archive maintained by thestreet shooters of Juarez. They are allhere at this moment, sitting in theroom staring at the screen. Weare ami-gas now. I have rustled up a curio-abottle of wine called NAFT A, withthe label Mexican, the wine U.S., andthe bottle Canadian. Everyone smilesat this farcical vintage. The photogra-phers tell me after we have been drink-ing for hours, "You give us hope." Itmust be the wine.

[. look up at Jaime Bailleres. Thegirl's face is still floating on the screen."Yes," I tell him. "You are right. Noone will ever print this photograph.But I want them to see it whether theyprint it or not."

He sighs, the wayan adult sighsoverthe actions of a child.

[ look up at the girl on the screen. Itell myself that a photograph is wortha thousand words. I tell myself pho-tographs lie. I tell myself there are lies,damned lies, and statistics. I tell myselfI am still sleeping. But she stares at me.The skin is smooth, almost carved andsanded, but much too dark. And thescreams are simply too deafening. _

Photograph by Alfredo Carrillo