Narco Americano

OR THE MEXICAN D1

AR: TWO AMERICA'

U.S-. CONSULAT

AND HER HI3SBAND-

BRUTALLY ASSASSINATED TN THE

MIDDLE OFjn

E MESSAGE FROM THE CARTELS? MORE

VIOLENCE IS COMING, AND NO ONE IS SAF

TAKE PLACE IN A CROWDED AREA IN

Ciudadjuarez, Mexico, mid-afternoon.

A white Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates is chased by two vehicles one block from the border with the United States, near the Rio Grande. The driver of the Toyota is a man, age 34. His wife, next to him in the passenger seat, is 35; she is four months pregnant. In the back, a seven-month-old baby is strapped into a car seat.

A black SUV and another vehicle occu­pied by armed gunmen pull alongside the Toyota. The man driving the Toyota tries to escape; he maneuvers desperately through traffic toward the Paso del Norte Bridge, the border crossing to El Paso, Texas. From the black SUV, gunmen open fire, strafing the side of the Toyota. The driver is hit; the car veers wildly out of control, collides with other automobiles and comes to a halt alongside the curb.

The woman passenger screams in ter­ror. Professional assassins step out of their car. Dressed commando style in all black, they open fire on the woman and her husband, finishing the job.

After the fusillade subsides, the assassins approach the vehicle. Some members of the hit team cordon off the area. Although they are less than a block from the border, where dozens of Mexican customs officials and armed military personnel are stationed, no cops approach the murder scene.

The gunmen check to make sure the man and woman are dead. Ignoring the crying baby in the backseat, they gather up spent shell casings and other evidence, then leave the scene. No one chases after them.

Once the killers are gone, military police descend. The couple in the front seat are history. In the backseat, the baby screams amid shattered glass and splat­tered blood but is miraculously okay. A policewoman reaches in, grabs the baby and clutches her to her chest.

The killings should be shocking. Even in Juarez, called the deadliest city in the world, where the war against narco traf­fickers has given rise to a staggering body count, this double murder—which takes place in the middle of the day in front of dozens of onlookers—is outrageous.

Even so, the flagrant brutality of the hit might be absorbed into the body pol­itic of Juarez, a city under siege, were it not for a simple fact: The victims are not only American citizens but government employees. The female victim, Lesley Enriquez, worked at the U.S. consulate in Juarez. Her husband, Arthur Redelfs, was a corrections officer at the El Paso County Sheriff's Office, across the bor­der in El Paso.

The killings take place on March 13, 2010. At roughly the same time as the Enriquez-Redelfs hit, elsewhere in Juarez another assassination takes place. Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, the husband of a U.S. consulate worker, leaving the same children's birthday party attended by Enriquez and Redelfs, in a similar white SUV, is also gunned down by a professional hit squad.

The killings have all the earmarks of drug cartels, which have been slaughter­ing people in Juarez, and all of Mexico, at an ungodly rate. The presidents of Mexico and the U.S. condemn the kill­ings, with a spokesman for the National Security Council referring to them as "brutal murders." Secretary of State

Hillary Clinton expresses regret and denounces the cartels, saying, "There is no question that they are fighting against both of our governments."

If there was doubt before, there is no longer: The killings represent a tipping point. What was viewed by some U.S. citizens and public officials as mostly a Mexican problem is now an American problem, with American victims. No one is immune. And no one is safe.

"In all my years in law enforcement, I never imagined it would get this bad," says Phil Jordan, a 31-year vet­eran of the DEA who in the mid-1990s was promoted to director of the El Paso Intelligence Center, or EPIC, the agency's eyes and ears on the border­land and the international drug trade. Although he is now retired, Jordan maintains a network of law enforcement contacts, and he is frequently quoted on narco-related subjects in the press. His interests are professional but also personal. In 1995 his younger brother, Lionel Brunojordan, was shot dead in a Kmart parking lot in El Paso. A 13-year-

old hood from Juarez was eventually arrested and prosecuted for the homi­cide; the official story was that it was a carjacking gone wrong. But Jordan remains convinced the cartels tar­geted his brother because of his career

in the DEA. A version of Jor­dan's story is chronicled in the 2002 book

Down by the River by Charles Bowden.

"What you are seeing in Mexico now," says Jordan, "is a new low. The cartels have become like Al Qaeda. They have learned from Al Qaeda."

Jordan is referring specifically to the cartels' use of beheadings to deliver a message. Cartel rivals and other ene­mies are kidnapped and, on occasion, videotaped being beheaded or dismem­bered, with the savagery broadcast on YouTube and popular internet sites such as El Blog del Narco.

Then there are the remote-control car bombings that, throughout the summer of 2010, became increasingly common­place. The entire country has morphed into a perverse version of the traditional

Mexican celebration El Dia de los Muertos ("the Day of the Dead").

The numbers are shocking. Since December 2006 there have been nearly 30,000 narco-related murders in Mexico. The violence has taken place all around the country, from large municipalities such as Mexico City and Guadalajara to tourist enclaves such as Acapulco and the Yucatan Peninsula. Mass graves, sev­ered heads and limbs, mutilated bodies left on display in the town plaza with threatening notes have become a near-daily occurrence.

"These are the techniques of terror­ists," says Jordan.

His observations are echoed by Sec­retary Clinton, who compared what is happening in Mexico to an "insur­gency," with the cartels attempting to take over sectors of the government and whole regions of the country.

Much of the mayhem is facilitated by corruption, with federates, munici­pal police and elected officials on the take. The temptation of narco dollars is seductive, and the threat of violence is persuasive. Public officials and aver­age citizens are often coerced into the narco trade by the drug organizations, which make them an offer: plata o plomo, silver or lead. Either you take the car­tels' money and cooperate, or you will be shot dead.

Corruption is sometimes a two-way street. Although the U.S. does not have the deeply entrenched institutional cor­ruption that permeates Mexican society, the drug trade is sometimes facilitated by dirty U.S. border patrol agents, law enforcement personnel and other gov­ernment officials on the take.

The killings of the consulate worker and her husband are a case in point. In July, Mexican authorities arrested a local Mexican member of the infamous Barrio Azteca gang, which operates on both sides of the border (in Mexico it is known as Los Aztecas). According to the Mexican federal police, this

gangster—Jesus Ernesto Chavez Cas­tillo—claims that the target of the hit was Lesley Enriquez, the U.S. consul­ate employee. Chavez says he was the organizer of the assassination, which was ordered by the Juarez drug car­tel because Enriquez was corrupt: She was helping to supply a rival gang with visas and had to die. The other victim, in the other white SUV, was murdered simply because the hit men weren't sure which car belonged to their target, so

they decided, just in case, to ambush both vehicles.

The FBI office in El Paso publicly expresses doubt about the explanation for the killings, stating it has no evidence Enriquez was corrupt. Over the follow­ing months many theories about the killings appear in the press. This spec­ulation takes place against a backdrop of further killings, bombings, kidnap­pings and extortion that have turned the narco war in Mexico into a killing field unlike anything else currently tak­ing place on the planet.

The narcosphere is a battlefield with­out borders: Politicians, businessmen, lawmen, bankers, drug lords, gangsters and poor Mexican and American citi­zens all have a role to play in an illicit business that generates, according to some estimates, up to $23 billion annu­ally from the U.S. alone. It is difficult to pinpoint the narcosphere's central nervous system, but in terms of vio­lence, the central war zone is Mexico's northern borderland—encompassing the state of Chihuahua and its largest city, Juarez—which produces more vic­tims of narco-terrorism than anywhere else in the country.

Howard Campbell, professor of sociol­ogy and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, refers to the phenome­non as "partly an accident of geography." Campbell is author of the 2009 book Drug War Zone, a fascinating oral history that explores the Juarez—El Paso narco-economy from myriad perspectives.

For nearly a century, going back to the days of Prohibition and before, America's southwestern borderland has been a storied smuggling route. Some of this history, particularly as it relates to the narco trade, is glorified in narcocorridos—melodramatic musical ballads that celebrate drug smuggling, usually sung in the norteno style in a wavering falsetto accompanied by accor­dions and heavy brass. The narcocorridos have become the soundtrack to the cur­rent war. In 2008, when a drug lord from a cartel began a violent offensive to take over drug operations in Juarez,

police radio frequencies were hacked to broadcast a narcocorrido that glorified his organization. To police in Juarez, it was a warning: We are everywhere. Join our cartel, or you will die.

Says Campbell, 'Juarez has become a drug war zone primarily because of its proximity to the world's largest market­place for narcotics—the United States."

The professor's comments are an alternative phrasing of the famous observation of Porfirio Diaz, Mexican president in the late 19th century. Said Diaz, "Poor Mexico. So far from God and so close to the United States."

Diaz was talking about the entire country, but his words resonate with the force of a shotgun blast in Juarez. Since 2008, when the U.S. government signed the Merida Initiative—an agreement by which the U.S. Congress earmarked $1.3 billion in training, equipment and intelligence to facilitate the Mexi­can narco war—there have been close to 7,000 murders in Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people. (By comparison, New York, a city of more than 8 million, had fewer than 500 murders in 2009.) Pres­ident Felipe (continued on page 119)

NARCO

(continued from page 44) Calderon and others in the Mexican gov­ernment have claimed that these murders are mostly a consequence of cartel gangsters killing other gangsters. In fact, the victims comprise a broad swath of Mexican society— women, children, policemen, businessmen, public officials and journalists—leading some observers to note that what is happening in Juarez as a result of the drug war is the full-scale disintegration of civic society.

I arrive at the border crossing on the El Paso side on a hot August morning at six a.m. My guide is an hombre we shall call Christopher. Although Christopher is a gringo, he knows Juarez like the back of his hand. For seven years, from 1997 to 2004, Christopher lived as a heroin addict in one of Juarez's tough­est colonias, or slums, situated on the hillside overlooking downtown and across the Rio Grande into El Paso.

My intention is to get a visual sense of the colonia known as Felipe Angeles, believed to be a home base of the Azteca gang, which has been identified as the culprit behind the murders of Enriquez, Redelfs and Salcido. My guide tells me, "We must go early, before most people are awake, like the Comanche used to do it."

We cross through the checkpoint on foot, passing over the brackish, bone-dry Rio Grande, then grab a bus in downtown Juarez. The bus rumbles through the mostly deserted streets of downtown, along Avenida 16 de Septiembre toward Felipe Angeles. After 10 minutes we exit the bus and walk the rest of the way, up a steep hill into el barrio.

We pass a police station, where half a dozen municipal cops are arriving for work. They look at us, two gringos walking alone through el barrio before the sun has risen, as if we must be escapees from a mental insti­tution. Curiosity becomes hostility; we are outside the norm and therefore suspicious. A few minutes later I notice a police jeep following us at a distance.

"We are being clocked," I tell Chris.

"No big deal," he says. "The way we're going, they won't be able to follow."

Chris leads me off the streets to nar­row gravel pathways, up rocky cliffs and down hills that no car or jeep could tra­verse, on our way to find an old friend of his by the name of Chavito. At this hour the only inhabitants are goats, mangy dogs and runaway chickens.

We find Chavito, whose home is more like a garage than a house. In the yard is the shell of an abandoned ambulance. We rustle Chavito out of bed. He and Chris embrace.

Chavito is around 50 years old, grizzled, with many missing teeth and a sweet dispo­sition. His stomach is alarmingly distended, he says, from a recent surgery gone wrong. He occasionally winces in pain.

Chris and Chavito talk about old times. Excitedly, Chavito tells a story that is both shocking and familiar:

When Chavito and Chris were at the rehab clinic down the street, they became friendly

with two recovering addicts named Carlos and Juan Pablo. Eventually, Carlos and Juan Pablo left and organized their own rehab clinic, a converted house in downtown Juarez that they named El Aliviane. Eventually, Car­los relapsed and again started using heroin; he also became a member of the Aztecas.

The Aztecas have a rule about dope: You can sell it, but if you become a user yourself, oftentimes you are killed. Carlos was targeted for execution. According to Chavito, Juan Pablo met with leaders of the gang and said, "Please don't kill Carlos. In fact, your policy of killing the addicts among you is wrong. It is inhumane. Please let me take in the Azteca dope addicts and I will show you that they can be cured. They can be saved."

The Azteca leadership agreed. A number of gang members, including Carlos, were allowed to stay at El Aliviane, which supplied a mat­tress, a place to sleep and a roof overhead.

The problem was that a rival drug organi­zation caught wind of the fact that a number of Aztecas were now residing at El Alivi­ane. One night in early September 2009, the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is engaged in a turf war with the Juarez cartel for con­trol of drug distribution routes, sent a team of sicarios, or assassins, to the clinic. Wear­ing hoods and carrying submachine guns, they busted down doors and stormed the house. Although only five or six of the 20 people present were Azteca gang members, the assassins did not discriminate. They rounded up the rehab patients—including Carlos—and made them line up against a wall, then slaughtered them with staccato blasts of machine-gun fire.

Chavito fights back tears as he says, "Most of the victims were innocent. They were not vatos locos [gang brothers]. They were addicts trying to get better. They did not deserve to die."

As we ride the bus out of Felipe Ange­les back toward the border crossing to the U.S., Christopher tells me he is saddened but not entirely surprised by Carlos's death. "I always had the feeling he needed to be part of a group, to belong to something," he says. "He was big on group identity and group loyalty."

The Barrio Azteca gang, like most street-level criminal organizations, was founded on the concept of group loyalty and identity. Its origins are on the U.S. side of the border, in the Texas state prison system, where, in the mid-1980s, the Aztecas formed as an amal­gam of various street gangs. As vatos were paroled or completed their sentences and returned to the streets, they became promi­nent in neighborhoods in El Paso and other cities in Texas and parts of New Mexico. Some of the gang members were Mexican nationals who, upon release from prison in the U.S., were deported to Mexico, where they formed Azteca chapters in Felipe Ange­les and other barrios, as well as in the prison systems in Juarez and elsewhere in the state of Chihuahua.

"The gang spread like a virus," says David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI's El Paso Division. "In a short time they became the dominant street organization that sold narcotics in El Paso and conducted

other criminal activity such as collecting cuota ["tax"] from nonaffiliated drug dealers."

Given the gang's cross-border affiliations, it was natural that the Barrio Azteca would be absorbed into the preeminent cartel in Juarez, led at the time by the ambitious drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Carrillo died on the operating table in 1997 while under­going plastic surgery to alter his appearance. While he was alive, Carrillo put the gang to work as street enforcers and contract killers. If anything, the role of the Aztecas under the cartel's current overlord, Amado's brother Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, has grown. The gang organizes and carries out most of the cartel's major hits and also plays a key role in narcotics distribution and sales.

"If you think of the cartel as a corpora­tion," says Cuthbertson, "with a CEO and directors overseeing different aspects like logistics, production, transportation and so forth, then the Barrio Azteca represents the security wing. Structurally they are more in the nature of a paramilitary organization, with capos, sergeants and foot soldiers. They serve as contractors for the corporation, but they also do things on their own; they are not obliged to do crimes only on behalf of the corporation."

Many Barrio Azteca gang members on the U.S. side of the border have a distinguishing tattoo: Stenciled somewhere on their body are the numerals 2 and /, representing the second and first letters of the alphabet, B and A, which stand for Barrio Azteca. Others may bear Aztec symbols on their skin.

As with most street gangs of any ethnic­ity, the quickest way to rise within the Azteca structure is through acts of criminal daring and violence.

One person whose pathway into the gang and ascension within its ranks followed the usual pattern is Jesiis Ernesto Chavez Cas­tillo, whose nickname is El Camello, the Camel. Chavez was born in 1969 in Juarez but moved to El Paso with his family when he was 17. An early brush with the law came in 1995 when he was arrested attempting to sell marijuana to undercover officers from the El Paso Police Department. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and was given probation. Later, in 2001, Chavez was charged with "intoxicated assault"; he

was driving drunk when he crashed into another vehicle, seriously injuring four peo­ple. Again, he pleaded guilty, but this time he was deported from the U.S. to Mexico.

Chavez seems to have moved back and forth between Juarez and El Paso on a semi-regular basis. He had two marriages in the U.S. and fathered three children. In Febru­ary 2003 he was detained on the U.S. side of the border. When he lied to border patrol agents about his status—a federal offense— he was charged with illegal reentry.

Chavez's lawyer at the time was Carlos Spector, a renowned El Paso immigration attorney who recently represented several Mexican journalists seeking asylum in the U.S. on the grounds that their lives had been threatened not only by gangsters but by members of the Mexican military. Spec-tor remembers Chavez as "a tough hombre, obviously a guy from the streets" but not a high-ranking or connected member of any cartel or gang. The manner by which Chavez, a lowly street thug, became the noto­rious El Camello is a tale that Spector says could be called "the making of a sicario."

After being found guilty of illegal reen­try, Chavez received a mandatory sentence of 20 years. He was sent to the notorious La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution, ruled from within by the Barrio Azteca. By the time Chavez was released after serving five years, he was a hardened gangster with crim­inal contacts on both sides of the border.

A spokesman for the Mexican Federal Police in Juarez says that Chavez con­fessed not only to his role in the killing of Enriquez, Redelfs and Salcido in March but also to the January slaughter of 15 people, including 11 teenagers, at a birthday party in the Villas del Salvarcar barrio of Juarez. That killing, authorities say, was a case of mistaken identity; Chavez participated in the slaughter believing the students were members of a rival gang known as Artistas Asesinos ("Artist Assassins").

Since his arrest, Chavez has been paraded on Mexican television, and his confession is cited as a major victory for the forces of the law. But for some who follow the narco scene in Mexico, the confession has a bad smell. It is not uncommon, they say, for a mem­ber of the Barrio Azteca to step up and take

the fall for a crime he may or may not have committed, simply to satisfy the demands of the system. It is an arrangement designed to benefit both law enforcement and the gang: Government authorities get to parade the "perpetrator" before the public, and in return the investigation goes no further.

The gang member who is put forth to take one for the team goes off to prison, which is, in fact, the central base of operations of the Barrio Azteca. He enters prison revered by his fellow gang members for having sacri­ficed his freedom, and he leaves prison an even higher-ranking member of the gang than he was before he went in.

FBI special agent Samantha Mikeska, who heads a special unit devoted solely to inves­tigating the Barrio Azteca gang, is aware of the quandary. Like many cops and agents working the borderland, Mikeska has a per­sonal as well as professional imperative. In 2002, while participating in a sting against thieves who targeted cargo trains at the border, Mikeska and another agent were brutally assaulted with sticks, rocks and a baseball bat until a fellow agent arrived and opened fire, chasing the gangsters away. Mikeska suffered a fractured cheekbone, a fractured orbital bone of the left eye, reti­nal hemorrhaging, a fractured vertebra, a ruptured cervical disk and wounds to her face and body. When she returned to work six weeks later, it was with seven plates and two pins in her left eye area and a plate and four screws in her neck.

"I got my butt kicked," she says. "After­ward there were psychological issues, physical issues, but you have to learn to separate what happened from the respon­sibilities of your job. This is what I do; I'm sworn to try and make the world a better place. You adapt and overcome."

In 2008 Mikeska was part of a task force that arrested and successfully prosecuted six Barrio Azteca leaders and associates on RICO charges. "To be honest," she says, "I sometimes think we made them stronger. We basically put them in the same area, where they are not 100 percent monitored. At least when they were out on the street, we could monitor them; we knew what they were up to. Prison commingles them into one big unit, and they have access to smuggled

telephones, letters, phone privileges; they have a line of communications within the prison system that is strong."

Since the 2008 convictions, Mikeska and her unit have been on the hunt for one Azteca in particular, Eduardo "Tablas" Ravelo, believed to be the gang's boss on the Juarez side of the border. Ravelo is cur­rently on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. There is a warrant out for his arrest in both the U.S. and Mexico. "He is a thug and a ruthless killer," says Mikeska. "His power is based partly on the fact that he has a lot of law enforcement in his pocket. As we all know, there is some corrupt law enforce­ment over there. Things are not investigated to the fullest."

Given the nature of corruption in Mexico, I ask Mikeska if she is able to share informa­tion with her counterparts across the border. She looks at her supervisor, who has been sitting in on our interview, and asks, "How do I answer that?"

"Carefully," says the supervisor.

Mikeska smiles ruefully and says, "I don't share anything with the Mexican gov­ernment. I really don't. I have not been successful in gathering information from that side. A lot of the investigation I do is strictly in the U.S. Ravelo's name comes up; we know he is in Juarez. The names come up, but to actually go over and pur­sue investigative techniques in Mexico is pretty much impossible. Does that answer your question?"

In the narcosphere, things are not always what they appear to be. Four months after the killing of the U.S. consulate worker and her husband, an incident occurs in Juarez that, at the time, represents a new downward demarcation in the narco war. On Avenida 16 de Septiembre a car bomb is detonated, killing four people and injuring 11 others. It is the first use of a car bomb in Mexico's drug war, evoking the tactics of Iraqi insur­gents and the narco-terrorism that wracked Colombia in the 1990s.

The bombing is the result of a diabolical deception. Earlier that day, gangsters affili­ated with the Juarez cartel kidnap the owner of an auto repair shop, dress him in a police uniform and then shoot him—not to kill him but to fill him with bullet holes so he bleeds profusely. They then leave him incapacitated near Avenida 16 de Septiembre and Bolivia Street. A doctor in a nearby office hears the man screaming for help and responds to the scene. A policeman also responds, arriving to aid what appears to be a fellow officer in distress. What they do not know is that the gangsters placed a call to emergency services to bring officials into the trap and that they have planted 22 kilos of C-4 explosives in a nearby car, which they detonate via cell phone. The doctor, policeman, rescue worker and a bystander are blown to smithereens.

Almost immediately, Mexico's federal police issue a statement that the ambush was perpetrated by La linea, a wing of the Juarez cartel, in retaliation for the arrest days ear­lier of a prominent cartel leader. Soon after, a statement—understood to be from La Linea—appears pinned to the fence of a local primary school. It claims responsibility for the

incident but states it was in response to cor­rupt Chihuahua police intelligence officials acting in consort with La Linea's main rival, the Sinaloa cartel. The statement reads, "FBI and DEA, start investigating officials who give support to the Sinaloa cartel, because if not, we will use more car bombs [against] those federal agents."

For those who closely follow the narco war, La Linea's accusations of corruption have a familiar ring. Ever since President Calderon unleashed the Mexican military to become more directly involved in the conflict, La Linea and the Juarez cartel have been taking a beating at the hands of the Sinaloa car­tel. Led by Joaqufn "El Chapo" Guzman—a ruthless drug lord who, according to Forbes magazine, is one of the wealthiest men in the world—the Sinaloa cartel has emerged as the most powerful criminal organization in all of Mexico. Compared with the Juarez cartel, it has experienced remarkably few crackdowns at the hands of Mexican mili­tary police. The Sinaloa cartel appears to be operating with near impunity.

Some in the press—including National Public Radio, which broadcast an investi­gative report in May—have suggested that the Calderon administration has formed an alliance with the Sinaloa cartel. A benign interpretation of the theory is that by estab­lishing hegemony in the narco trade, officials feel one cartel in charge will cause less may­hem and murder across the land. Calderon's administration has denied the accusation.

The car bombing in Juarez is followed by events that seem to be aimed at U.S. inter­ests in Mexico. A series of threats forces the closing of the U.S. consulate in the city for periods of three and four days throughout the summer. After La Linea's demand that the U.S. government investigate connections between corrupt Mexican officials and the Sinaloa cartel or by a specified date there will be a massive bombing, the U.S. con­sulate closes. When the date passes without incident, the consulate reopens.

The question arises: Why is the Juarez cartel and its security arm La Linea focusing their wrath on the U.S. government?

One organization that is very interested in this question is Stratfor, an Austin-based company whose team of intelligence profes­sionals analyzes world events for business leaders, investors, law enforcement officials and government agencies. In August, in an internal report entitled "Mexico's Juarez Cartel Gets Desperate," Stratfor notes that the actions of the Juarez cartel appear designed to prevent the Sinaloa cartel from taking over "the Plaza."

In Mexican narcospeak, the Plaza refers to a cartel stronghold, secured by the com­plex set of relationships among traffickers, law enforcement agencies and local gov­ernments that makes it possible for an organization to control the narco trade in a given region. Whoever controls the Plaza by paying off police and public officials—and through extortion, intimidation and mur­der of the civilian population—reigns as the supreme overlord of crime in that area.

"As we noted some months back," states the Stratfor report, "there have been persis­tent rumors that the Mexican government has favored the Sinaloa cartel.... Whether

or not such charges are true, it is quite evi­dent that the Juarez cartel believes them to be so, and has acted accordingly." In a reference to Jesiis Ernesto Chavez Castillo, alleged mastermind of the Enriquez-Redelfs hit, the report adds, "According to El Diario [a daily newspaper published in Juarez], the arrested Azteca member said that a decision was made by leaders in the Barrio Azteca gang and Juarez cartel to attack U.S. citi­zens in the Juarez area in an effort to force the U.S. government to intervene in the Mexican government's war against the car­tels and act as a 'neutral referee,' thereby helping to counter the Mexican govern­ment's favoritism toward El Chapo and the Sinaloa Federation."

The Stratfor conclusions resonate throughout U.S. law enforcement; many

agents I interview tell me it is a "solid theory." It is also an advanced state-of-war strategy in which lives are cruelly sacrificed for a larger objective and events are pre­sented in the public domain in a way that is often a deliberate obfuscation of the manipulations and maneuverings for control that lie below the surface.

It is a sweltering afternoon, and I am back in Juarez. This time my guide is Jose Mario San­chez Soledad, a former assistant to the mayor of Juarez and former head of the city planning commission who is now a proud mem­ber of the Juarez city council. Sanchez is erudite and pas­sionate. Along with his career in poli­tics, he is an opera singer and the owner of a modest-size

furniture-manufacturing business.

Like many people born in Juarez, Sanchez grew up on both sides of the bor­der. "I used to tell people I was very lucky. I grew up in two cultures: the strong fam­ily life of Mexican culture and, on the other side, the economic and educational opportunities of the United States." In the borderland it is common for families and family businesses to exist in a binational universe, but with the narco terror have come drastic changes. According to Alfredo Corchado, who covers the border beat for The Dallas Morning News, Ciudad Juarez has lost more than 10,000 private busi­nesses in recent years. Many have closed or moved across the border to El Paso due to extortion and kidnappings by gang­sters. The climate of violence has brought

about a mass exodus; the civilian popula­tion has decreased by about 200,000 since late 2007.

"It is heartbreaking," says Sanchez. "We can feel our city slipping through our fingers, and there is nothing we can do about it."

The devotion that Sanchez feels for Juarez is infectious; he begins his tour downtown, near the Mission de Guadalupe, with a treatise on the historical forces that shaped what has traditionally been Mexico's most unique and thriving border culture. It is the middle of a workday afternoon. Traf­fic on the streets, which used to crawl with migrant comerciantes ("merchants") from all over Mexico, as well as with U.S. tourists and soldiers from Fort Bliss across the bor­der in El Paso, has slowed to a trickle. Fort Bliss discourages its soldiers from crossing

the border. The reasons for this were made clear in October when a soldier from the Texas National Guard, Private First Class Jose Gil Hernandez Ramirez, 22, was shot dead on a street in south Juarez. The rea­sons for his killing are being investigated but remain unknown.

Unsolved murders contribute to a mood of fear, which descends over Juarez as the day wears on, with people hustling to take care of business and cross over to the U.S. side before nightfall. After dark, the sound of gun­fire is not uncommon; the bodies of murder victims are dumped in streets, in parks or on the dusty banks of the Rio Grande.

Pointing out the sites of narco murders, body disposals and other criminal atroci­ties is a familiar parlor game in Juarez. In Sanchez's car, as we drive along Avenida 16

de Septiembre, my guide casually points out the location where, three weeks earlier, La Linea detonated its car bomb. The side­walk has been blown away, and the wall of a nearby building is pockmarked with shrap­nel from the explosion. It looks like exactly what it is: an urban street corner that has been hit by a bomb.

We head out of the city into the desert. Sanchez wants to show me the maquilado-ras, the massive factories that expanded exponentially in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sanchez is not entirely critical of the factories; he acknowledges that right now they are the only form of steady employment in the area. But he notes that they have sucked the economic life out of the city center. The working population has been lured

into the desert by multinational cor­porations to work the assembly lines and manufacturing plants for wages as low as $4.21 a day. The multinationals pay low taxes and are provided cheap labor. Business is good. In the last year and a half, the Juarez maquiladora industry has added more than 22,000 new jobs.

Meanwhile, back in Juarez, the manu­facturing base of the city has been gut­ted. Into the breach have stepped drug lords and gangsters who shoot it out with one another, as well as with munici­pal police, federates and the military, on a nightly basis.

"The city has been left to die," says Sanchez. "There is no movement toward urban planning or commercial develop­ment. Is there any wonder that those

who are left behind in the city turn to illegal activities? The illegal activities in Juarez are thriving, while legal commercial employment is going away."

Even more depressing than the hulk­ing factories in the desert is the tract housing that has been constructed for the maquiladora employees. Squat, confining, monotonous by design, the desert projects are a crass form of human warehousing. In the city, colonias like Felipe Angeles are poverty-ridden and perilously unsanitary, but at least they feel like communities com­pared with the maquiladora industrial parks, where company buses pick workers up for their shift and take them to the fac­tory and back in a soul-destroying cycle of cheap labor and subsistence.

(concluded on page 126)

NARCO

(continued from page 123)

Of the desert housing complexes, Sanchez says, "Many of these projects have become prime locations for recruitment by gangs like the Aztecas and Artistas Asesinos."

We continue farther into the desert. It is Sanchez's intention to show me the flimsy, near-comical border fence, which runs for a few miles and then abruptly ends in the middle of the desert. He points out surveil­lance posts and border patrol checkpoints, where vehicles are routinely stopped and searched for illegal contraband. As we drive along through fields of brown desert soil and sagebrush, I ask Sanchez about living with the fear and threat of violence that is so prevalent in the area.

"Most of all," he says, "we worry for our children."

He tells me a story: One night, his two teenage sons attended a birthday party out­side the city, not far from where we are now driving. The party was held at a friend's house. There were close to two dozen guests, all of them teenagers. Two of the attend­ees, friends of Sanchez's sons, left the party early—around nine p.m.—to return home. As they were driving back through the des­ert, they were forced off the road by another car. Gunmen got out of the car, pulled the two teenagers from their car and executed them along the side of the road. Like many killings in Juarez, it made no sense: It is believed that the murders were a case of mistaken identity.

"It was horrifying," says Sanchez. "My sons were in shock."

As he remembers these events and relates them to me, Sanchez beings to cry. He is a grown man, driving through the desert with a recent acquaintance, and he is weeping uncontrollably. The sense of tragedy is overwhelming.

Sanchez gathers himself, wipes the wet­ness from his eyes and says, "I want you to know, I am not crying for myself or even for my children. I am crying for my city. I am crying for Mexico."

After two weeks of investigation in Juarez, I am not satisfied. The Mexican authori­ties' acceptance of Chavez's explanation that Lesley Enriquez was murdered because she was corrupt is typical, part of a dubious pattern. In Mexico, when a prominent person is murdered, authori­ties often present to the public that the victim was in cahoots with the cartels and therefore his or her death was perhaps inevitable. I speak with Redelfs's former partner, a corrections officer in El Paso named Mike Hernandez, who worked alongside Redelfs for five years. "He was a total professional," Hernandez says of his murdered partner. "He was a good fam­ily man and great all-around guy. What [authorities in Mexico] have said about him is bullshit."

A memorial service for Redelfs and his wife is held at a Mormon church. Redelfs was active in the church (Enriquez was not a member) and the couple appeared squeaky clean, according to those who knew them.

I am prepared to believe they are innocent victims who have been slandered in death, but then I hear from a source in the DEA who has agreed to pass along the results of an internal investigation. He is an active spe­cial agent currently on the job; I am not able to use his name because he is not authorized to communicate with me.

Of Enriquez and Redelfs, in three sim­ple words the DEA source says, "They were dirty." I ask for more details, which he declines to divulge, saying only that a federal law enforcement investigation in the U.S. confirms what the Mexican authorities

have alleged: that Lesley Enriquez and her husband were on the take.

I speak with Phil Jordan, the retired DEA director who spent more than 30 years investigating drug trafficking. I tell him I am still having a hard time accepting Enriquez and Redelfs as having been in bed with the narcotraficantes when, by all outward appearances, they were, as one source told me, "goody two-shoes."

"Well," Jordan says, "don't you think that if you were involved in corrupt activities with narcos, to present yourself as upstanding cit­izens and religious people might be the best possible cover?"

By fall 2010 their murders are no longer a major news item. A story that had initially riled the righteous indignation of U.S. offi­cials, including the president, a story of innocent U.S. citizens and federal employ­ees gunned down for no good reason, has evolved into something far more complex and disillusioning. As is often the case in the war on drugs, it turns out that corruption was the heart of the matter after all.

The shocking level of violence has accel­erated. In late July eight severed heads of murder victims are found neatly lined up along a highway in the state of Durango. No one knows how they got there. In that same month it is reported that the warden of a Durango prison allowed inmates to leave the prison, carry out murders for the local cartel and then return safely to their cells. This story is presented as a positive devel­opment, seeing as the warden was arrested for the crime. In late August the bodies of 72 people who were attempting to enter the U.S. are found in a mass grave, one of numerous such sites discovered in the des­ert in the past year. This particular massacre is attributed to Los Zetas, a fearsome cartel composed of former members of the Mexi­can military who were originally trained by the U.S. military.

In late November, Mexican authorities arrest a man they claim is the leader of the Azteca gang in Juarez. The suspect allegedly tells federal police that he is responsible for 80 percent of the city's killings since August 2009. This is given major play in the press, including The New York Times, even though U.S. agents say this man's name does not appear anywhere in their records of known Azteca leaders.

A victory for the forces of the law or a cheap PR stunt? It is hard to know. Mean­while, the cycle of violence continues to escalate, partly because the governments of Mexico and the U.S. have committed themselves to a strategy of all-out war from which they say they will never back down. In the public domain, the fog of war hov­ers along with the pollution and dust that sometimes engulf Ciudad Juarez. When atrocities occur, key details are omitted from news reports, public officials put forth versions of events that are incom­plete or outright lies, people are terrified and afraid to tell anyone what they have seen or what they know. There appears to be no end in sight.

Welcome to the narcosphere.

PLATA O PLOMO, SILVER OR LEAD. EITHER YOU TAKE THE CARTELS' MONEY AND COOPERATE. OR YOU WILL BE SHOT DEAD.

"POOR MEXICO. SO FAR FROM GOD AND SO CLOSE TO, THE