On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  Juárez is infamous for achieving the 2010 world record for violent homicides: 3,622 shootings, stabbings, lynchings, and deaths by torture. “Don’t go there,” people said in El Paso. Yet it’s next door, and the murder rate had dropped to less than Chicago’s 468 homicides in 2016. When the wind is southerly, the risen dust of Juárez can make you sneeze in El Paso. Juárez’s cityscape twinkles at night; by day it is tawny brown and low-lying, scattered along the south bank of the Rio Grande, visible from its sister city across the river as a set of low, treeless hills and dense colonias. You can hear its honking horns on the Texas side, and in its year of mass murder the rat-tat of gunshots was easily audible. Some bullets fired in Juárez poked holes in the bricks and stucco of El Paso’s buildings.

  In an uncommon move, a young US Border Patrol officer in El Paso, Francisco Cantú, disenchanted with his job, quit to become an activist on border abuses. In The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, his 2018 account of his conversion, he describes working in El Paso at the periphery of anarchy in the most violent years: “The insecurity in Juárez drifted through the air like the memory of a shattering dream. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, the city was perpetually presented as a landscape of maquiladoras, narcos, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, massacres, shootings, turf wars, mass graves, corruption, decay, and erosion—a laboratory of social and economic horror.”

  The river is theoretical here, just a cement culvert tagged with indignant graffiti, a trickle of sour shallow water rippling through, like a dry riverbed you might see in drought-stricken Syria, the surrounding hills just as sun-baked, sandy, and Syrian. The contour of the culvert marks the frontera, which, with the crime rate, had been much in the news.

  On a day of dazzling sunlight, I crossed the international bridge to the city of the wicked superlatives.

  In contrast to peaceful and salubrious El Paso, Juárez is nearly all one-story dwellings, small cement bungalows, flat-roofed and ruinous huts, and jacales (rough shanties) on an immense grid of broken stony roads—1.5 million people, roughly a quarter of them employed in the maquiladoras, most of them US-owned. The Mexican employees generally work ten-hour factory shifts, for an average daily pay of $6 (the grim details of their employment were elaborated by Alana Semuels in “Upheavals in the Factories of Juárez,” in the Atlantic, January 21, 2016). In spite of the hoopla about NAFTA, this does not translate to a living wage. Juárez is hard-up, crumbling, and bleak, with an air of pervasive sadness that seemed to me a border mood—the anxious melancholy of poverty and danger.

  In the bewildering short story “Paso del Norte,” by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo (author of one of Mexico’s best-known novels, Pedro Páramo), a man asks his son, who is headed for Ciudad Juárez, “And what the hell will you do in El Norte?”

  “Well, make money,” the son replies. “You saw, Carmelo came back rich, even brought a gramophone and charges five cents a song . . . and he makes good money and people even line up to listen. So you see; you just need to go and come back. So I’m goin’.”

  In the tradition of border ballads and border short stories, this one ends badly. The son pays a coyote to help him and some others across the border. They are fired upon, and all are killed except the son, who, when he arrives back in his Mexican village, finds his wife has left him.

  I had arranged to meet Julián Cardona at the café El Coyote Inválido, next to the Kentucky Club, a once boisterous and thriving bar, these days thinly visited and subdued.

  “Maybe you’re the only gringo all week,” Julián said over coffee, and he laughed. “Maybe all month!”

  Gringos don’t go to Juárez anymore, he said. They don’t go to Nuevo Laredo, or Ciudad Acuña, or Reynosa, or Matamoros, or many other border towns.

  “They used to come over for women, for drugs, for dinner, or to get their cars fixed at the body shops,” he said. “And up to about 1993, Mexicans used to pay two dollars to float across in an inflatable raft below the Avenida Juárez to go to work—women to clean houses, men to work in construction.”

  In the 1990s the casual, porous border became much more formal and heavily policed, first as a series of security measures and then as a consequence of NAFTA, which had the effect of turning the Mexican side of the border into a plantation, a stable supply of cheap labor, and the workers’ confinement behind the border fence was considered essential.

  “And gringos gradually stopped coming across,” Julián said. “The city had changed from its emphasis on tourism to manufacturing.”

  This was the border city with the largest number of maquiladoras, he said—auto parts, computers, electrical appliances, and many other manufacturers. “We were making TVs before China.” These factories employed over 275,000 workers. Their workers live in gritty neighborhoods.

  “Half a million people live in this colonia,” he said.

  We were driving in his pickup truck in a community of dirt roads and flat-roofed houses of cement blocks. They were obviously do-it-yourself homes, poorly put together, the masonry asymmetrical, the wood framing uneven, clumps of electrical wires hanging from the eaves, and the sight of women carrying buckets spoke of no running water.

  “There is one high school.”

  In the period of massacres, he said, there had been twenty-five killings in one day; ten homicides a day had been the average.

  “You’d be driving and there’d be a body on the ground, sometimes several.” He had slowed his truck to allow a skinny three-legged dog to hop-limp across the stony road. He said, “The soldiers were doing most of the killing and the torture. They and the police were behind the violence. This happens even now. Everywhere they send the soldiers, there are house burnings, torture, killings—this violence promotes the narrative that it’s a cartel war.”

  “But surely the cartels are also doing a lot of the killing, as they fight for control over a territory,” I said.

  “Yes, no question,” Julián said, “but if you send ten thousand soldiers to Juárez, you get massacres. Juárez’s bad reputation is well deserved, but you have to understand the reason why.”

  He showed me a video on his cell phone that happened to be circulating in Mexico that week, of a woman in Guerrero state being tortured by soldiers, a plastic bag tightened over her head as she was being interrogated. “Do you remember now?” a torturer in an army uniform kept repeating.

  The woman choked as she was suffocated, and the man removed the bag only long enough to demand answers.

  Tell me, the man says, or do you want the bag again?

  The woman, who is tied up, continues to cry and say she knows nothing as the soldier pulls the bag down so hard, the woman sucks it into her mouth and silently gags and struggles.

  “See his uniform? He is in the federal police,” Julián said. “This also happened in Juárez. This happens every day in Mexico.”

  Soon after this video went viral, the Mexican government apologized for the criminal aggression of the police.

  Over lunch at El Coyote Inválido, Julián talked about border culture.

  Border music, he said, was not just the narcocorridos, the drug ballads celebrating the frontier exploits of the Mexican cartels, but norteño music, northern border ballads. This music was given its peculiar flavor through the use of a border vocabulary that has grown up on both sides. And the cultural mix occurs on the American side, too, much of which is saturated with the jolly vida mexicana, as well as the odious narco cultura.

  The proof that criminals the world over are in love with euphemism shows in the use of piedra (stone) or foco (headlight) as words for crystal meth, perico (parrot) for cocaine, choncha, mota, mostaza (mustard), or café for marijuana, and agua de chango (monkey water) for a strong but cheap liquid high. Montada is the Spanish word for being mounted, as on a horse, but it is the border word for torture, usually by the Mexican military. Albergue, the word for a traditional inn, is
used on the border for a rough shelter made by a migrant.

  It was Juan Cordero who told me the border word gabacho, which most Spanish speakers would recognize as “frog,” the slur in Spain for a French person. But on the border—and it has traveled deeper into Mexico—gabacho is an insulting word for a gringo. Border gringos return the compliment, with the much more offensive “beaner” or “frijolero.” El Gabacho can also refer to the United States as a whole, as in Mi hermano se fue al Gabacho. (My brother went to the States.)

  A punto is a place for buying drugs—punto meaning “point,” as in “point of sale.” Picadero (picar means to jab or prod) is the word for a heroin house. Another common word, puchador, is derived from the English word “pusher.” And if you were robbed, there was an odd locution not used elsewhere in Mexico: Me hicieron—They did me. One way they might do you was to engage in a housejacking: the English term was used by border Mexicans to mean being burgled in a specific way, the villains breaking into your house to steal your documents, your passport, your visa—the papers you needed to cross the border.

  “I’m sure you saw halcones along the border,” Julián said. This word for falcons is the border term for lookout or spy, and many have an Artful Dodger jauntiness. Yes, I told him, I saw them on the hills near the Comedor at Nogales, standing on the hillsides, scoping out migrants likely to need the services of a coyote or a cartel pollero, who were always in search of clients willing to pay to be led across the border.

  “Border cities are immigrant cities,” Julián said. “They’re populated by people from all over. You can talk to anyone.” From San Ysidro in the west (across from Tijuana) to Brownsville in the east (across from Matamoros), the spillover means a non-Spanish-speaking American is at a distinct disadvantage when shopping, buying gas, eating in many US border restaurants, and fraternizing with workers. “It’s not like Mexico City or Chihuahua, where there are hierarchies. There’s no rigid class system here.”

  That was the reason he was staying in Juárez, he said. He had a house, and as a photographer and journalist—one of a diminishing number here—he could be an eyewitness to whatever happened next in this desperate city.

  He seemed to me an example of great resolve, because he had a visa to cross the border, and at any time of day or night he could look across the culvert that holds the greenish residue of the Rio Grande and see the booming city of El Paso. The irony was that much of El Paso’s prosperity was based on immigrant labor and the profits from sweatshops in Juárez.

  The day I left El Paso, I fell into conversation with a Texan in a restaurant—a man with a book in his hand I took to be someone I might have something in common with, and so it turned out. He was a reader, the book was a collection of poems, the man himself wrote poems, and he was glad to talk over coffee at the Good Luck Café, which served home-style Mexican food. We could see Juárez from where we sat, and so my natural question was, if he was so enthusiastic about comida mexicana, wouldn’t the best meals be found over there?

  “Maybe,” he said, and pointed with his face, the half mile to the border. “God, I haven’t been over there in years.”

  The valley of the Rio Grande on the Texas side was irrigated farmland—stony Chihuahuan Desert on the far side.* And then I was back amid the beauties of Big Bend and the high desert, descending to Box Canyon and Amistad and Del Rio, Texas, where a quarter of the working population lived over the border, filing across the bridge every day to mop floors, trim gardens, or go shopping. I had lunch in Del Rio, served by Myrta, who told me she crossed to the US every day to cook Mexican food in this restaurant.

  “They make car parts and safety belts there now,” Myrta said. “But workers earn seventy-five pesos a day [about $4.00]. I’d rather commute to Del Rio and make tacos.”

  Many of those Del Rio workers were American citizens who lived over the river in the once raunchy and roistering but now hollow-eyed Mexican town of Ciudad Acuña. A garage mechanic I met in Del Rio said he commuted every day from Ciudad Acuña, where his rented house cost him $100 a month. “A similar house would cost between five and eight hundred here.” Food was cheaper across the border, and it took only ten minutes to cross.

  “I bought a house in Ciudad Acuña for less than twenty grand,” Roy, another car mechanic, told me in Del Rio. I heard this same tale many times. “I cross every day.”

  Del Rio’s prosperity was based on its nearness to Laughlin Air Force Base, eight miles away, and the base’s need for civilian workers. Ciudad Acuña had survived by having attracted sixty-three factories in five industrial parks, making auto parts, air bags, and Oster appliances (blenders, toasters, coffee machines, microwaves), and was about to conclude a deal for a car assembly plant. The Mexican factory workers I spoke with were reluctant to give details, but they confirmed that the starting salary was the equivalent of about $4.00 a day, rising to $7.50 a day. And most maquiladoras ran two shifts, 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. There are about fifty thousand workers in Ciudad Acuña, which is greater than the entire population of Del Rio. Because Acuña boasted of its aversion to labor unions, American companies were still relocating there, attracted by the promise of being able to pay factory workers less than $8 a day.

  “They’re glad to have those jobs,” an American consular official had said to me in Nogales, rebutting my skepticism.

  Maybe so, but desperation is often a rationale for exploitation, and it was clear to me on my short walk across the border to Acuña that it was a city of poor housing and low spirits, of people living in the hovels Mexicans call jacales—workers’ quarters, like plantation housing—and that none of the workers in the Oster factory had in their shack one of the coffee machines they toiled to make.

  When tourism had dominated Ciudad Acuña, there had been concerts and dances and weekend bullfights.

  “Bullfighters came from Spain and Mexico City,” Jesús Rubén told me in his souvenir shop. “Lots of gringos came to see them. A local man, Señor Ramón, supplied the bulls. This town was lively!” He pointed to the empty main street, Calle Hidalgo, and the unvisited curio shops, boot sellers, hat shops, and faded postcards. “People everywhere!”

  Gringos drove down from Houston for the restaurants, and the air force men from Laughlin had come across to get drunk and chase women at the Boys’ Town at the edge of the city. But this was no longer the case. There were saloons signposted LADIES BAR—“where you could find a lady to take home,” Jesús said—but these bars were boarded up. And the Plaza de Toros had become a market square.

  Route 277 out of Del Rio to Eagle Pass followed the contour of the border, which was the meander of the Rio Grande, sparkling in morning sunlight, slow-moving, and easily swimmable. With meadows and low green hills, pecan farms and fruit orchards, this part of Texas owes its lushness to its proximity to the river and to irrigation. Its harvesting it owes to migrants.

  Eagle Pass seemed a town in decline. Its decorous colonnaded mansions spoke of a prosperous past, its faded bungalows of a moribund present. But it had a good-sized golf course. I walked across the low bridge to Piedras Negras and strolled to the large and newish Plaza de las Culturas, and I was struck—as I had been in some other Mexican border towns—by the number of families with children on outings—playing in parks, eating ice cream, kicking soccer balls. The sight of these families gave color and vitality to the towns south of the border, and while there was a large museum in Piedras Negras and a substantial public library, there was nothing comparable on the US side.

  The Museo de la Frontera Norte in Piedras Negras stated as its purpose, “impressing, preserving and fortifying the identity of the people of Coahuila.” To that end, the history of the town and the state was explained in maps, documents, tools, weapons, and paintings. (No mention, though, that nachos were invented in Piedras Negras by Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, who in the 1940s combined a dish of tortilla chips, jalapeños, and melted cheese at the Victory Club in town, for gringos from Eagle Pass.) The library on the
ground floor was busy with browsers and borrowers and readers, and the motto of Sala Gabriel García Márquez—note the name of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—was Leer para vivir mejor—Read to live better.

  And perhaps the reason was simple. Piedras Negras was another town where factory workers were stuck in low-wage jobs. A population with a small income, without television or video games, unable to afford a car, spends its leisure hours in parks and museums, and borrows books from libraries.

  “In the States, the kids are playing with their Xboxes,” Mike Smith said to me in Laredo, half a day’s drive through farmland from Eagle Pass. Mike was with the Holding Institute, promoting adult literacy and welfare for the underserved in Laredo. “Over the border, they go on outings and picnics. The families tend to create their own activities.”

  But the bright streets, the newness and efficiency of Laredo, and my days in the pleasant Hotel Posada, on the old plaza, made Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican side look positively horrific—an effect, as in Juárez, of the cartels battling each other and the Mexican military battling the cartels. Laredo, Texas, was a city of museums and colleges—Texas A&M International among them—of sports stadiums and schools. Its stores were thronged with shoppers from over the border, who were so numerous on the bridge that, while crossing from the US to Mexico was a ten-minute walk, a crossing from south to north might take an hour or two, as the line narrowed and was slowed at US immigration. These border crossers were in general holders of visas or work permits.

  I knew from experience that it had once been very different. Forty years before, as a restless young man, energized by long overland trips through exotic cultures, I had decided to travel by train from Boston to Patagonia, roughly thirteen thousand miles, a journey of many months. I arrived in Laredo on a train from Fort Worth, to travel south, a trip I described in The Old Patagonian Express. I had stayed the night in Laredo, which I found quiet but well lit. “All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.” The city had a population of about eighty thousand (it is now three times that size); it was a place of churches and shops, sedate and small, and after dark not much moved. No traffic, no pedestrians.