Body count soars in Juarez

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico —- The two victims rest at the same 45-degree angle, embraced by seat belts that at this moment seem an odd precaution.

Gunmen had pulled alongside the forest-green Chevy Tahoe on a gritty downtown street and, in broad daylight, fired into the SUV 52 times.

Onlookers, at least 125 of them, press wordlessly against yellow police tape. Mexican soldiers and federal police take up positions around the perimeter.

“That’s 12 today?” a young man standing nearby asks, in the matter-of-fact tone of a baseball fan confirming the number of strikeouts. “Ten,” I answer, meaning that 10 people have been slain in Ciudad Juarez on this chilly Tuesday. It is barely 3 in the afternoon. Seven people will die later, bringing the day’s total to 17 in the city of 1.3 million.

The young man nods.

It is a time of extraordinary violence all over Mexico. Feuding drug-trafficking groups and the federal government’s military crackdown against organized crime have left almost 5,400 dead this year.

Nowhere has the bloodletting been worse than in Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling border city that has recorded more than 1,350 slayings in 2008, about a fourth of the country’s total. The city’s main drug-smuggling group, known as the Juarez cartel, is battling with rivals from the northwestern state of Sinaloa for a piece of the lucrative drug trade into the U.S.

The gangland-style violence has left almost no corner of Ciudad Juarez untouched. Drug-related slayings take place in houses, restaurants and bars, at playgrounds and children’s parties, and in car-to-car ambushes.

The dead, mostly little-known foot soldiers but also innocents caught in the crossfire, make up a ceaseless procession of clients for harried coroner’s workers.

The killings here are carried out in a style best described as baroque, with bodies hung headless from bridges, stuffed upside down in giant stew pots, lined up next to a school’s playing field. Often, they are accompanied by taunting, handwritten messages.

In a country that each month finds new ways to scare itself with violence, Ciudad Juarez has become emblematic of how nasty things can become.

A three-day visit by a pair of Los Angeles Times journalists to the rough-and-tumble factory town, across the border from El Paso, Texas, reveals a fear-struck place where most residents assume —- often correctly —- that the police are crooked and where the government’s control of the streets appears tenuous at best.

In the Ciudad Juarez of 2008, you don’t have to wait long for the next casualty.

Beyond a dreary, low-rise landscape of AutoZone outlets, convenience stores and the boxy assembly factories known as maquiladoras, lie the “laboratories.” Here, in an antiseptic complex of buildings in southeastern Juarez, the results of the city’s daily carnage come home. Bodies and bullets are examined, measured, tallied, matched, bagged and, occasionally, employed to solve crimes.

It is Monday. The man in charge of the state of Chihuahua’s crime analysis and forensics unit here is Hector Hawley Morelos, a 39-year-old investigator with close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair and a black goatee.

Hawley ran a hamburger-and-burrito restaurant for 10 years before spotting a newspaper advertisement offering classes for crime investigation. His training led to a night-shift gig, then to the homicide squad and the forensics post here.

Hawley investigated some of the hundreds of slayings of women that last put Ciudad Juarez on the map as an emblem of brutal violence. More than 300 women were killed and dumped in dusty lots around the city from 1993 to 2006, murders that remain largely a mystery.

The $6 million, high-tech laboratory complex that Hawley oversees is a legacy of those killings. After an outcry over what was widely viewed as a slipshod investigation, international donors chipped in to help Chihuahua build an unusually well-equipped forensics operation, including a morgue capable of storing nearly 100 bodies.

The lab facilities opened a year and a half ago, in time for the unexpected wave of drug killings that has swamped Hawley and the 110 doctors, technicians and investigative specialists, or peritos, who cover Ciudad Juarez and northern Chihuahua state.

Doctors in the coroner’s section this year had performed 2,100 autopsies by late November, including accident victims and others —- nearly twice as many as for all of 2007.

To keep up, Hawley has hired three new physicians, two more autopsy-room technicians and a pair of stretcher-bearers, or camilleros. The city’s tourism economy is tanking and the recession has cut deeply into border trade, but the death industry here is robust.

“It’s the only place where production is going up,” Hawley quipped grimly.

The 24-7 workload isn’t the only toll on his forensics staff. The morgue manager, Dr. Alma Rosa Padilla, says she no longer allows her daughters, ages 8, 9 and 13, to leave home alone. The family’s only diversion these days is a Friday ice cream outing that Padilla cancels if it’s dark by the time she returns home from work.

“You never know when something could happen,” she said.

As she speaks, word comes of a fatal shooting on the southern edge of town. Two people are reported dead. The camilleros, dressed in black windbreakers and khaki pants, clamber into the coroner’s van and race from the compound.

The ride is a 15-minute sprint past pizza outlets, cinder-block taco stands and scratchy tufts of desert scrub that sprout from dusty lots. The scene gets no prettier approaching the crime site: a graffiti-stained section of weed-edged dirt streets and concrete shacks called Tierra Nueva. New Land.

Impoverished neighborhoods such as Tierra Nueva form the city’s expanding fringe as Ciudad Juarez marches steadily into surrounding desert to make room for transplants and migrants. Three thousand families arrive in Juarez each month, city officials say.

Some of the new arrivals seek work in the city’s 284 maquiladoras, assembling televisions, car electronics and lawn mowers for less than $5 a day. Others hope to slip into the United States.

Marcos Rodriguez, a 35-year-old construction worker, moved to Ciudad Juarez 15 years ago and later built one of the tiny concrete houses that today crowd Tierra Nueva.

The neighborhood has only grown bigger and more dangerous. Shootings are no longer a rarity. His Dickies jeans and lace-up boots are Sunday clean; he hasn’t worked for weeks.

Rodriguez is standing at the edge of the crowd near a sundries store when the coroner’s van pulls up. The dead men lie at right angles to each other. One is on his back, blood on his face and left sleeve. The other is face down in the dirt. Leather flip-flops are still on his feet. A third man, wounded, has been taken away.

Fifty or so neighbors mingle in hushed tones behind the police tape as Hawley’s peritos and several municipal police officers pace off the scene, photograph the dead, search the dusty street for shell casings.

Half a dozen soldiers, some of the 3,000 troops that President Felipe Calderon has deployed across Ciudad Juarez, watch the crime zone.

The killing bears many of the hallmarks of the drug hits that have bedeviled Ciudad Juarez this year: a quick ambush, multiple victims, no witnesses.

Rodriguez says the episode is more evidence that his neighborhood, and the rest of Ciudad Juarez, is going over the edge.

“There are shootouts in the streets. You don’t go out on the streets at night, and you don’t let your children out,” he said. “I can’t see a future. I can’t see anything. There is no control over any of it. None at all.”

Mostly young men

The camilleros, Raymundo Grado and Enrique Lopez, zip the bodies into white fabric bags.

At 4:40 p.m., nearly two hours after the call-out, Grado and Lopez bring the bodies into the morgue. The smell of disinfecting chlorine barely masks the odor of decay wafting from three walk-in refrigerators, whose shelves are stacked with 33 bodies.

The latest victims will have to wait to be autopsied. First up is a lean, mustachioed man who appears to be in his 20s. His naked body is covered with tattoos. He had been shot five times, the day’s sixth gunshot victim.

Covering the victim’s chest and arms are designs of eagles and a snake, emblems of pre-Hispanic culture that suggest he belonged to the Aztecas, a street gang that reportedly works as muscle for the Juarez cartel.

Clashes between the Aztecas and another gang, the Mexicles, are said to be responsible for much of the bloodshed convulsing the city. Most victims this year have been young men like this one.

Hints of executions

We take the highway along the border to the other side of town, where the bodies of seven men were found earlier in the morning, next to a school soccer field.

Shoeless, gagged and bound at the wrists, the victims show signs of having been tortured before they were shot and strewn in the tinder-dry grass next to the street. The killers took care to lay a row of rambling, hand-lettered banners at the victims’ feet that suggest the executions were the work of the Sinaloa group led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Hawley’s crew has finished its job by the time we arrive. A length of police tape hanging from a chain-link fence next to the sports field is all that remains of a crime scene. At the school next door, the gate is locked. No one is talking to reporters.

Social fabric decaying

There are places in the world where society simply falls apart: Rebels storm the government radio station; a warlord claims dominion; refugees swarm the border. Mexico is not one of these.

Even in Ciudad Juarez, even these days, residents drop off their kids at school and go to work, streetlights come on at dusk and the trash gets picked up. They were selling Christmas trees at the Home Depot this season.

But all around are signs of social fraying. Menacing notes appear outside schools warning of harm unless teachers hand over their year-end bonuses. The city’s most respected crime reporter, Armando Rodriguez, is dead, sprayed by gunfire two weeks earlier as he sat in his car in front of his home. No corner is off-limits. The Mexican army has turned a water park into a camp for its drug war troops.

All over town, people ask who really rules Juarez. Jose Reyes, the mayor, says the government “has to retake control of the streets.” The unspoken admission is that they are already lost.

 Associated Press

Map locates Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Source: ESRI