To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (11 page)

I went to the Sinaloa Department of Public Safety the next day at 11:00 a.m. After I waited nearly one hour and was interviewed myself by the Department’s public relations staff, the official came in, greeted me warmly, and invited the PR director and me into his office. He asked how he could be of help. I said that I would like to interview him about the general state of public safety in Sinaloa. He asked if I could write down my questions so that they could work on them and get back to me. I replied that I would prefer to talk and would be willing to come back at any time more convenient for them. The official repeated his request that I leave written questions. I said, of course. “And don’t think I’m taking you for a ride,” he said as we stood up. “We are committed to speaking with you and will stick to that commitment, because we will.” I said thank you and went back into the PR director’s office to leave my questions, which I knew would never be answered, and they weren’t. Froylán Enciso was right. The sober official had no interest in talking.

While leaving my questions however, I thought I would try my luck: “Would it be possible to interview someone inside the prison?”

The PR director called one of her staff into her office. “What do you think about taking him to the prison tomorrow to see Beni?”

“Tomorrow’s perfect,” the staffer responded. “They’ll be doing the burning of the past.”

They then explained to me that there is a drug rehabilitation program inside the prison called ¡Tu Puedes! (You Can Do It!). It is run by a prisoner—Beni—and the inmates in the program volunteer to be locked in a room together for a month and taken twice a day into a sauna in the same small building as the dormitory. Absolutely no drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes are allowed in the room. Anyone caught with any kind of intoxicant is immediately expelled. The manner in which the PR staff stressed and re-stressed that
really
no drugs are able to get in that room revealed a certain tacit official recognition that drugs are easily available everywhere else in the prison
except
that room. The “burning of the past,” they said, is a ceremony in which participants throw an article of their clothing into a fire before they step into the dorm room for the month-long detoxification, leaving their past behind them.

I knew I was walking into a PR trap, a rigorously controlled room in a completely lawless prison where four dead bodies had just been dumped in the trash, but I thought I would surely see something interesting.

The next day on the drive out to the prison, I asked the PR staff what the prison population was. About 2,600. “But there are prisoners who are still here years after their sentences have been completed,” the state employee told me. “They don’t check their case files; their lawyers don’t check their case files. And you can’t expect us to be checking 2,600 case files.”

My custodian accompanied me through security—I was asked to leave my identification and was cursorily frisked—and took me to meet the warden. The PR guy introduced me, “a reporter from California,” and said I was there to learn about the rehab program You Can Do It!

The warden, Carlos Suárez Martínez, is the man who, in theory, would need to explain how four prisoners ended up dead in the trash dump. He would need to explain how the killers got the weapons they used to slit four men’s throats. He would need, in theory, to explain how the killers got access to their victims, killed them, and then carried their bodies out to the trash without any guards noticing and without any of the camera surveillance equipment recording them. On the morning of August 19, 2010, Carlos Suárez Martínez was a man with a lot of explaining to do, and thus a man who was probably not looking forward to being introduced inside the prison to a foreign reporter.

The PR guy stressed several times that I was there for the “burning of the past” and You Can Do It! Carlos Suárez Martínez looked me up and down and before I could say a word said “You Can Do It! Let’s go meet Beni!” He then charged ahead followed by two large guards armed with machine guns.

On the walk through the prison courtyards over to the rehab area the warden stopped several times to point out fruit trees to me: papaya, banana, and avocado growing on small patches of thick mud amidst the sprawl of concrete. The warden plunged onward and stopped again around the corner to point out a mango tree. “This year we had a shitload of mangos,” he said with a big smile, “a whole shitload!”

We ran into Beni, and the warden introduced me to him and excused himself. He had to attend to other matters. While I was at the prison that day Sinaloa Governor Jesús Aguilar Padilla and the warden announced that they would be firing the prison’s two highest-ranking guards Pablo Ursúa Vásquez, chief of guards, and Guadalupe Nevárez Silva, chief of security. Four bodies in the trash and two people fired.

Beni is a tall, imposing figure. His presence commands respect. He was also extremely affable and easygoing when we spoke, a congenial fellow who had managed to turn his life around in the most heinous of situations. He is 40 years old and has been in prison for the past seventeen years. He was born in the tiny ranch of Los Lobitos in Badiraguato; by the age of 16 he was a trafficker and gunman for the Sinaloa Cartel. By age 18 he commanded a unit of fifteen people. Once, in 1991, U.S. undercover informants posing as buyers in the United States tried to bust him on a deal. He shot his way out, killing one of the informants, and fled over the border. Due to political pressure from the United States, the Mexican army and police were looking for him and finally caught him in 1993 at a highway roadblock. When he arrived in prison, he said, he had been using drugs socially—sniffing cocaine at parties, but not frequently. Inside prison, however, he became a heavy addict and a brawler. “I got to a very intense, deteriorated state,” he said. “I was a bully, and I was always in the punishment cells.” Once he spent a three-year-and-two-month stretch in solitary confinement—where, of course, drugs were still readily available through the guards. When he came out, he wanted a change.

In 2000, the Sinaloa state prison started the rehab program You Can Do It! Beni voluntarily entered as part of the first group of inmates to try the method. After making it through the detoxification process he applied himself diligently to the tasks, exercise routines, and classes that comprise the second phase. He showed exemplary discipline and requested to stay in the program. Ten years later, and still a prisoner, he now directs it. He has earned obvious privileges. He wears stylish blue jeans, cowboy boots, a leather belt with a large metal belt buckle, and a freshly pressed white button-down shirt with the You Can Do It! logo stitched on the chest pocket. Those who make it through the detoxification phase can chose to stay in the program, living in an isolated area from the rest of the prison population. Little by little, those who stay with the program and comply with its strict rules earn privileges like Beni’s and can get time knocked off their sentences. Though they will need to keep on top of their own case files.

We went out to the courtyard for the “burning of the past” ceremony. Thirty-nine men and four women stood in four rows facing a large wood pyre. The warden returned and made a quick speech. “We don’t care about the past anymore,” he said, “leave it all behind, start afresh, you can do it.” Then, to my surprise, he said, “We are joined today by a reporter from Los Angeles who is writing down everything we do.” I looked up from my notebook and saw forty-three faces staring at me, some hard, some hostile, some curious, some empty, and one smiling.

Beni gave the order and they took off their T-shirts revealing You Can Do It! T-shirts beneath. They walked up to the pyre and threw their old shirts in; the flames dipped and then rose.

“Look!” Beni shouted out. “See how it stays behind, the past. From today forward we are new. We will turn our backs on the past.
Half turn, hut!
”

Beni then marched them into the small room where the thirty-nine men would spend the next month. The four women would be taken to a separate facility. Inside the room Beni read out the rules and marching orders of the program, most emphatically: no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no fighting, and no stealing. Any infraction whatsoever—no explanations—earns immediate expulsion. As Beni went through the rules I scanned the inmates’ faces. Most appeared to be between 18 and 25 years old; no one in the crowd could have been older than 30. Many of their faces looked hardened and worn; some looked childlike and fresh. Most looked at me with only mild curiosity, a few with open hostility, and one with that strange grin. When the time came for the inmates to say good-bye to family who had come for the ceremony and would not be able to visit for the next ten days, I noticed that the grinning man was alone, so I went up to him and said hello. The man, Gabriel, was smiling because the warden had incorrectly introduced me as a reporter from Los Angeles. Gabriel grew up in Los Angeles. We then spoke in English, in my hope that the state PR guy clinging to me like a shadow would not understand and would start talking to someone else, which he did.

Gabriel was born in Culiacán but moved to LA at age 12 when his parents migrated there for work. He spent seven years in prison in California, both LA County and Folsom. I asked him why and he said “transportation.” I asked again and he replied, “I was taking a thirty-five-pound load of crystal across the border.” He had made many such trips before getting busted, he said. When he finished his sentence in California he was deported. I asked him why he had volunteered for the rehab program. “I don’t have the vice of cocaine, but I do have the vice of smoking cigarettes,” he said, “so I thought I’d quit.” I asked him if the prison was rough. He shrugged his shoulders: “If you walk around like a badass then it can get pretty rough.” Like Folsom, I asked? “No!” he said with a widening of his eyes, “over there it is hard time.”

Later that day I dropped by the offices of the Sinaloa Civic Front to see what Meché Murillo had to say about the recent killings in the prison and the drug rehabilitation program.

“Well sure, they’re showing you the pretty stuff,” she said, “and what’s more they don’t let you walk around freely. Why would you want to see the You Can Do It! program? It’s a bunch of lies. For every twenty young men who go through that program, either all of them will go back to drugs, or maybe one will be saved. The young men go into the You Can Do It! program with the hope that they will have their sentences cut, not to cure themselves of the disease, because drug addiction is a disease. But even so, if four or five of them get off of drugs a year that justifies the program. Also, for the time they are there they detoxify, and that is good, maybe it will stretch out their lives a little.

“The security that they have there in the prison,” she continued, “is among the worst in the world. They have cameras everywhere, but the cameras do not work. There are cameras all over that prison. How is it possible that they can kill people, slit their throats, and no one notices? Today the newspapers are saying that two guards are responsible. How did the weapons get in there? How did the knives get in there? The penitentiary system in Mexico will be the last thing to be reformed, because that is where the poorest people are. So they show you something that has a 5 percent success rate.”

Murillo and her colleagues at the Civic Front spent several years working on a program to stop torture in Mexico’s prisons, she told me. She has been inside every state prison in Sinaloa and spoken at length with prison officials, guards, and inmates. She said that prison wardens always struggle to keep their jobs because it is such good business.

“This I can guarantee you,” she said, “the drugs get in through the front door. They do not get in through tubes or over fences or anything like that. They enter through the door. Weapons enter through the door, whether knives or pistols, they enter through the door.”

Sinaloa recently changed the names of the state prisons from “Centers for Social Re-adaptation” to “Centers for the Implementation of Prison Sentences.” In Spanish, the word for implementation, in this case, is
ejecución
, which also means, of course, execution. Meché said that the name change is accurate.

“There is no death penalty in Mexico, but inside the prisons the death penalty does exist,” she said. “It is an execution center, but execute as in murder, not execute as in fulfill.”

IN THE BATTLE ZONES
of the drug war, where the soldiers sent into the streets to “keep drugs from reaching your children” shoot kids dead, where the cruelest of hired killers is called The Barbie, where the police will tell you that they do not investigate murder cases because they are afraid, the ambulances will not take people with bullet wounds to the hospital for fear that the killers will return to finish their victims off en route, in a place where such incongruity is the norm, perhaps it should not come as a surprise to find, here, a rare sign of hope in the actions of a woman who says she has lost all of hers.

Alma Trinidad Herrera has every reason to give up. She has every reason to go home, shut her windows, lock her door, and grieve. She knows that her quest is more than quixotic; she knows that it is, by every measure of reason, futile. She knows that the entire weight of a global war—the full momentum of a multibillion-dollar industry, the entire architecture of the state, every government office from the local homicide detective to the governor, from the senate to the president, every last one of them—is against her. She knows that her request is impossible, and still she demands it.

This is what hope looks like here: a woman who will not go home and accept impunity as just the way things are; a woman who two years after her son was killed in a daylight massacre of eleven people still goes every two weeks to City Hall to demand progress in her son’s murder investigation. There is no such investigation, of course, and there never will be, and that is what makes Alma Trinidad a lonely foot soldier of hope in a hopeless, desperate war.

The emergency brake on her Ford EcoSport failed when she went to park in the hilly neighborhood of Cañadas in Culiacán, Sinaloa. A few days later, on July 10, 2008, Alma Trinidad was at her office with her two sons when she asked her then 28-year-old son César if he would take her car to the shop.