My city, my work, my life--a photographer in Juarez

[molly]

I recommend going to the link to see the photographs here:
http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2009/09/14/my-city-my-work-my-life/

Reuters Blogs
Photographers
16:39 September 14th, 2009
My city, my work, my life
Posted by: Alejandro Bringas
Tags: Reuters Photographers, Ciudad Juarez, drugs, Mexico,
photography, violence, war

It was 11:30 at night in Ciudad Juarez just south of the U.S. border
when we reporters heard on the police frequency that a man had been
left hanging on the chainlink fence of the Seven & Seven bar, the same
place where a few days earlier 11 people had been gunned down.

Once we were sure that the information was real, we approached the bar
only after coordinating between ourselves via walkie-talkie. We
arrived at the chilling scene, nervous about covering such an
incident, and noticed several cars cruising the area around us.

We managed to work from a distance for a short time until the police
sealed off the area, blocking our access. I managed to take several
photos of the Dantesque scene in which I could see a man’s body with
his hands handcuffed to the fence in the form of a crucifixion. We
stayed nearby until they removed the body to be taken to the morgue.

Military and forensic experts inspect the body of a man who was killed
outside a nightclub in the border city of Ciudad Juarez August 31,
2009. A man was handcuffed to a fence and shot several times by drug
hitmen outside a nightclub, according to local media. The assailants
also left a warning message, known as “narcomanta”, at the site of the
shooting. REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas

Violence in Ciudad Juarez increases from day to day, in spite of the
war against narcotraffic being waged by the city, state and federal
governments. That war simply doesn’t work, and the number of dead has
continued to increase since 2008, hitting a new monthly record high of
248 murders last July, the majority related to contract killings
within organized crime.

This wave of violence has been increasing ever since President Felipe
Calderon launched his “crusade” called Operation Chihuahua, which
instead of reducing the violence, death and drug trafficking has seen
them increase.

The death and violence has affected me as I capture the murders and
executions of civilians and police with my camera. What moves me to
cover this, in spite of the great personal risk, is the chance to show
others what I live daily and reflect on it through a photograph.

Two women hug as forensic workers inspect a crime scene in the border
city of Ciudad Juarez July 30, 2009. Local government deputy Claudia
Lorena Pérez Marrufo and her companion were fatally injured after a
drive-by shooting incident. More than 12,300 people have died in
Mexico in a three-way war between rival cartels and the army since
President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of troops against the
cartels in December 2006. REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas

One cold night in November 2007, marked the beginning of the war
between cartels. We still didn’t know anything about the rivals as we
listened on the radio to an exchange of threats between La Linea,
cartel of the Carrillo Fuentes family, and Los Chapitos, cartel of
Sinaloa. They played narcocorridos (folk music that glorifies the
feats of drug bandits) over the police frequency to announce an
execution, and I remember the incredulous looks of the police agents
to learn that their frequency had been intervened. They seemed to ask
themselves, “Who will be the next to fall, gunned down, dead, where,
when….?” This was after a “narco-list” had appeared with the names of
agents targeted to be assassinated.

This violence in which I live now, incomparable to any time in the
past, began to escalate with the 2008 arrest of former police chief
Saulo Reyes Gamboa by agents from the U.S. and Mexico, when he tried
to bribe an agent to smuggle five tonnes of marijuana into the U.S.
Nobody expected such a violent reaction, neither local officials nor
journalists. We never imagined what was to come - murders and
executions in a war that never ends.

A relative reacts after arriving at a crime scene where 17 patients
were killed at a rehabilitation center in the border city of Ciudad
Juarez September 2, 2009. About a dozen hooded gunmen burst into a
Mexican rehabilitation clinic near the U.S. border on Wednesday,
lining up patients before killing 17 of them. The attack was one of
the deadliest in President Felipe Calderon’s three-year war against
drug cartels, despite the presence of 10,000 troops and federal police
in Ciudad Juarez who constantly patrol the city’s streets. REUTERS/
Alejandro Bringas

I remember that the first to fall dead were local policemen on duty.
The image of a bullet-riddled patrol car with a dead sergeant draped
over a bloodied steering wheel, his bulletproof vest perforated by
high caliber bullets from an AK47 assault rifle, nicknamed the “goat’s
horn” for its curved magazine, was the first in a long succession of
images to begin the criminal unleashing never before seen in my city.

The days in which the war is at its peak are days of insomnia during
which I go out before dawn to document rival narcos left crucified
only a few meters from police stations, “narcomantas” (a large cloth
with a threatening message written on it) left as wrapping to a bloody
head, or mutilated bodies, and return home after midnight to my
waiting family worried about my work and the risks I take.

Police investigators work at a crime scene where seven bodies were
found gunned down in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, northern
Mexico, November 25, 2008. The bodies of seven men with signs of
torture and bullet wounds were found along side three banners, also
called “narcomantas,” threatening rival gangs, according to local
media. More than 4,300 people have been killed in drug violence this
year as cartels from Sinaloa state try to dominate the Mexican drug
trade, fighting rivals and the security forces. REUTERS/Alejandro
Bringas

Many times my wife and my parents, tormented by the daily news, begged
me to leave the newspaper, to look for another job, but my passion is
greater. They now understand what I do and support me, but pray to God
to watch over me each time they hear my radio sound.

It gets worse when we hear radio threats against specific policemen,
“Mendez you’re next…you’re on the list….don’t run, we’re waiting for
you..” When we hear a narcocorrido we know that minutes later there
will be an execution someplace in the city. We know it’s happening,
and just wait for the police to confirm.

We reporters aren’t free from the threats. Killers’ radio alerts often
include the advice, “…to all the media and the Red Cross we warn you
not to approach the injured, wait until they are dead, because if not
we will kill you along with them if you pick them up still alive….” It
is chilling to hear that on the radio.

But even our passion for journalism isn’t enough to take us too close
the place where there is a “54 by a 66″ (death by firearm). On many
occasions we would see people destroyed by the bullets from a goat’s
horn. We’d often arrive before the police because they were afraid to
get close, arriving in caravans with from five to 20 agents to seal
the area. Then from less than a kilometer away would come the sad,
raucous and piercing sound of bullets.

Forensic investigators inspect the body of a fugitive U.S. marshal, as
soldiers gather around the crime scene, at a canal in the border city
of Ciudad Juarez March 25, 2009. Mexican police have found the
decomposing and badly beaten body in Ciudad Juarez, the main
battleground in Mexico’s drug war. Picture taken March 25, 2009.
REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas

When I return home in the early morning to my waiting family, after
having received threats and seen the results of at least ten
executions on my shift, I would see the streets desolate, no police
patrols, only reporters heading home at the end of our shift, and
others beginning theirs. The police would be in their barracks, afraid
to leave even to attend a call for help. The support between
colleagues, reporters, photographers, editors, is mutual. We watch
over each other via radio, inform each other where we’re going and if
we’ve arrived home safely. “Hey buddy ray, just reaching my 16 (home),
everything 9 (fine)….where you headed, animal?”

The threatening narcomantas weren’t sent only to cartel rivals but
also to high-ranking officials, Governor Jose Reyes Baeza, district
attorney Patricia Gonzalez, Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, commander of the
Army’s Fifth Zone Felipe Jesus Espitia, and even to the president
himself. One of them was placed at the scene of a massacre of seven
men who were themselves accused of executions, extortion and
kidnappings in the city.

Other narcomantas were placed on the bodies of different victims,
including one on a victim whose decapitated body was placed with his
muzzled head shrouded in a pig’s mask. Another body was found inside a
pot used for boiling pork. They even make fun of some of them by
putting Santa Claus hats on them.

A man lies dead among evidence markers at a crime scene in the border
city of Ciudad Juarez July 13, 2009. More than 12,300 people have died
in Mexico in a three-way war between rival cartels and the army since
President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of troops against the
cartels in December 2006. REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas

Several times when I was taking my daughter Enya to school I had to
rush to one of these scenes, whether a shootout, execution or even a
prison riot, with her beside me as there was no other safe place
nearby to leave her. Enya was around five when she first began to
understand my work. She would ask me where I was going and if there
was an execution. I began to leave her in the car so she wouldn’t see
the raw scenes.

Death threats are the norm rather than the exception among
journalists. One colleague, Armando “El Choco” Rodriguez, was
assassinated at the door of his house as he left to take his small
daughter to school. Neither local nor federal police have been able to
find El Choco’s killers, despite the repeated demands from guild
leaders. This happened a few days after contract killers left a body
hanging from an important bridge in Ciudad Juarez. The head from that
body had been placed at the base of a monument named “Freedom of
Expression” in Journalist Square.

Police investigators remove the body of reporter Armando Rodriguez
from his car in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, northern Mexico
November 13, 2008. Suspected drug gangs shot dead Rodriguez, a Mexican
crime reporter who worked for El Diario de Ciudad Juarez, near the
U.S. border on Thursday, the latest journalist victim of a brutal drug
war in which traffickers are targeting the media. REUTERS/Alejandro
Bringas

The wave of violence has altered my life, and that of thousands of
Juarenses, in every way. Nightlife has been the most affected as bars,
cantinas and restaurants remain deserted. Anyone who goes out at night
does so at great risk.

Once, a group of contract killers arrived at a seafood restaurant
looking for members of a rival band. They found them in a corner
table, called out, “This is it, mothers..”, before opening fire on the
nine of them, all of them youths. The scene caused a nervous crisis
among all those present, customers and staff.

Killers sometimes will firebomb cantinas without worrying about who is
inside. Life continues here but it will never be the same. We ask
ourselves when it will reach its limit and then get better. In the
meantime I have to keep working.

Sometimes it’s necessary to reach nearby towns like Samalayuca in the
Chihuahua Desert, or Villa Ahumada where last February soldiers and
contract killers had a shootout that ended with 21 dead - the scene
was of the dead lying on snow, frozen cadavers with guns in their
hands and bullet holes in their heads.

Policemen and soldiers carry one of 21 bodies after a shootout between
drug hitmen and soldiers in the town of Villa Ahumada, some 130 km
(80.7 miles) away from the border city of Ciudad Juarez February 10,
2009. Mexican drug gang violence near the U.S. border ended in a
shootout with the army on Tuesday and killed 21 people. The killing
spree began in the early hours of Tuesday when around a dozen
suspected drug hitmen drove into the farming town of Villa Ahumada in
SUVs and dragged nine people, including several police officers, out
of their houses, sources close to the attorney general’s office told
Reuters. REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas

These deplorable events that I live and relive daily happen in spite
of the massive presence of the military and Federal Police
participating in Operation Chihuahua. All the dead, including police
and civilians, some of them innocent victims of circumstance of crimes
that are sanguinary, unimaginable and inhuman, have been happening in
what has been called “Mexico’s best border town….Ciudad Juarez,” a
town that wants out of this war. Juarez doesn’t want to be owner of
the war but it is simply immersed in it. The population is tired, we
want to return to our normal life and not ask ourselves, “How many
deaths did the sun rise to today?”

Every day I wake up thinking that this has to stop, and that in this
city I will raise my children and try to give them the best life
possible.

Bystanders look at a crime scene where a man was gunned down in the
border city of Ciudad Juarez June 30, 2009. A massive army surge has
failed to calm raging drug gang violence in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican
city on the U.S. border that is at the heart of President Felipe
Calderon’s drug war. REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas