Mexicans Pay in Blood for America’s War on Drugs, Part 3
Editors note: This article was published by the Phoenix New Times in July. With their permission, News Taco is reprinting it in five installments throughout the week to inspire debate about the war on drugs that has killed tens of thousands of Mexicans since 2006. The first part of this article was published Monday, the second part on Tuesday.
By Charles Bowden & Molly Molloy, Phoenix New Times
The call comes at 6 a.m. from a fellow photographer at the paper, Gabriel Huge, a man who survived a bad accident and rides a scooter to crime scenes and walks with a cane. He is also a man who does not back down: Miguel has photographs of a swarm of federal police in flak jackets surrounding him for taking pictures without their permission. In the images, his face looks fierce and empty of fear.
Gabriel says, “You need to come to the house. Something has happened.”
When he arrives, the city police have taped off the residence.
Gabriel says, “They have killed your father, mother, and brother.”
Miguel walks up the stairs to the second floor. His mother is outside the door of the bedroom, face down in a pool of blood. His father is propped in a sitting position on the bed, his face destroyed by bullets. Down the hall, his brother Misael, known as el gordo in the family because of his weight, is face down in blood. He is wearing yellow shorts his mother had made for him because it was hard to find clothes in his size. He has three rounds in the back of his neck and head. Miguel thinks of all the times he has come here early in the morning or late at night and tiptoed down the hall lest he wake anyone. He goes back into his parents’ room, sits down in front of their bodies and says goodbye. He is weeping now.
The police ask, “Is there any electronic surveillance or closed-circuit TV at this house?”
He says, “No.”
Miguel knows what the question means: If there is a security camera, they want to know so they can destroy the evidence.
He helps carry out the bodies. First, his mother wrapped in sheets. Then his father — he remembers thinking as he carries him of reproaching him for not having any security measures in the house. And, finally, his brother, el gordo, the fat one, is wrapped in an old red bedspread. It is very hard to get him down the stairs. Miguel breaks down sobbing. He asks himself, “What happened here?” His family has just been annihilated by 35 gunshots fired at close range. While the state police are still at the house, they tell him they will send a special team of bodyguards.
No one asks him for a statement.
At the funeral home, Miguel makes arrangements. A reporter from La Jornada, a major left-of-center Mexico City daily that both he and his father had done work for, tells him he must get out of Veracruz if he wants to live. He remains at the funeral home all day, and just before dawn, makes a quick trip to his parents’ house with Vanessa, then his fiancée, to get some clothes. The bodyguards ride with them. On the way back to the funeral home, a taxi follows them for 15 blocks. The guard draws his gun, tells Miguel to speed through a red light at a roundabout, and they manage to lose the tail. They get back to the funeral home, and it is under 24-hour guard by Mexican Navy troops wearing ski masks and Veracruz state police. At the funeral, he writes down later, “A neighbor told me that he had seen three trucks and two people who had gone into my parents’ house. Another neighbor told me she had heard shots and that for about a week before, she had seen a group of people on motorcycles who seemed to be watching . . . She had heard them talking on their radios, saying, “We are already here guarding the spot.”
None of these neighbors gives a statement to the police.
Officials are at the graveside, the caskets lowered into the sand that is Veracruz. Navy vehicles escort the cortege. State dignitaries promise an investigation, justice, and punishment. The ceremony is surrounded by soldiers. This does not make Miguel feel safe.
The day after the funeral, the security detail escorts him and Vanessa to the airport and they flee the city where his father is famous, where he has spent his entire life. Miguel ponders the military precision he saw at the crime scene and the neighbors’ whispered accounts of the killings.
He remembers opening the door to his brother’s room that morning and wanting to say, “Wake up! Wake up!”
Miguel goes to the Mexico City headquarters of La Jornada. The editors give him a desk job because they do not think it is safe for him to be out on the street. Simply leaving Veracruz cannot protect him.
Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, Milo Vela’s reporting partner, is found at 4 a.m. July 26, 2011. For the past month, she had been investigating Milo Vela’s murder and had gone missing two days earlier. The body is dumped outside another Veracruz newspaper, Imagen, the head cut off. A message left with the corpse advises, “Friends can also betray you.” The attorney general of Veracruz announces that this “unusual assassination was due to the fact that the woman and single mother maintained links with criminal gangs.” He asserts her murder has nothing to do with her work as a journalist.
Miguel and Vanessa are paralyzed. For three days, they cannot leave their Mexico City apartment. They have entered a new phase of exile. First, they lose their native state. Now, they feel their nation slipping away. In Veracruz, 15 crime reporters flee the city. Gabriel Huge gets a call informing him he will be killed. He flees, also.
Miguel had tasted threats before, as had his father. But things began to change in 2006, when the new president, Felipe Calderón, announced that he was hurling the Mexican army against drug organizations. Strange criminals suddenly appeared in Veracruz, guys who did not even know the streets, their reckless driving causing more car accidents. And killings. Miguel is covering a crime scene or accident, and someone shoves a gun in his mouth and lectures him on how he should do his job. Death threats mount.
One night in May 2010, a cop pulls Miguel over. Vanessa is riding along. The cop is hostile but allows Miguel to drive on. A few minutes later, the street is blocked by guys with AR-15s wearing federal police uniforms. They tell him, “Right now you are going to get really fucked up.” (“Vas a ver, hijo de la chingada.”) They take him, leaving the girl behind. They go behind a hotel, beating him all the way there.
At least four more vehicles arrive, and a man with one glass eye and the look of the boss gets out and tells him that what he was doing could get him killed. Miguel asks the man whether he is a Zeta and he nods. He asks Miguel if he wants to die and Miguel says no. The man says, well, you can go this time, but the next time, we will kill you. They dump him where he originally was snatched. He calls his father, who advises him not to report the incident.
Miguel explains, “In Mexico, you learn to live with fear. You see bodies decapitated; you see police covered in blood. The fear just gets bigger and bigger. You see the decay of everything.”
(Follow this story in the fourth installment to be published Thursday, Aug. 31)
Read Part 1: HERE
Read Part 2: HERE
Charles Bowden is the author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. Molly Molloy is a researcher for Latin America and the border at New Mexico State University.
