January 31, 2008
Because of increased drug related violence, the Mexican Army began patrols in Juarez last week, and the United States Army declared the city off limits for troops. So I decided to go over there and look around. They say there are few things in life as satisfying as getting shot at and missed.
The winds that funneled through the canyons of downtown El Paso were fiercer at the top of the bridge. The rent-a-cops rousted the vendors who had followed the dwindling tail of the line of cars onto the U.S. slope of the bridge. I recognized it as a dubious legal proposition, private security pretending that they're peace officers, but the gambit was legitimized by the psychological power of the uniforms and the latently lethal power of the big frame revolvers they had strapped to their hips.
I was wearing a different kind of uniform, Patagonia fleece and Calvins, Merrel shoes and an Invicta watch. Mine was a tribal uniform, definitely as upmarket as the Tommys and Nikes more popular in Mexico, but more subtle.
The strip was relatively deserted. The pharmacy hawkers lounged in their doorways out of the wind, but I avoided eye contact and they ignored me. The taxi drivers offered the bilingual “Taxi?” but I shut them down in Spanish and they didn't pursue their pitch.
Martino's was closed and one of the doors was shuttered with plywood. I guess the weekend was rowdy.
I was in the Kentucky Club a little after six. I was the only customer. The help outnumbered me five to one. The bartender said it was because of the cold weather. Outside it was close to sixty. But it was Monday, and it was January, and even though the only other time I have ever been the only customer in the Kentucky Club was one weekday at eleven in the morning when they'd just unlocked the doors, the slow business could have been attributable to the season and not necessarily to the potential for shootouts.
I thought there might have been some Americans in Juarez, enjoying the last few days of passport-free reentry, but I didn't see any.
A couple of margaritas later two more paying customers had camped at the bar and I didn't feel so bad about leaving.
I walked around the corner to the Arbolito. The Arbolito is my favorite bar, a vintage cantina, seasoned, weathered, and warped, by more than sixty years of spilled drinks and lost weekends. I walked in and reduced the average age of the clientèle by five years, even though I'm not young and five or six men sat drinking at the bar.
The bar got busier. The clientele was a mixed lot. Businessmen, in slacks and jackets. Tradesmen, in cotton jeans and coats stuffed with down or polyester. And the retirees, slouching in sweats, or prim in slacks and button shirts. There was even a banker or a lawyer or a politician in a suit and tie. He was bad news any way you looked at it.
Sergio the owner wore jeans and a long sleeved shirt under a fleece lined cotton vest. It was the kind of rig undercover cops wear to hide their carry pieces. I asked him how was business.
“Slow,” he said. “The weekends are good.”
On weekends the Arbolito fills up with cosmopolitan youngsters lured by the cheap drinks and exotic herbal tinctures.
“The army doesn't drink?” I asked.
“What army?” He was genuinely confused by the question.
“The army,” I said.
“The national army?”
I nodded.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, like it was something he'd read about in last week's paper. “They don't come around here.”
I was hoping for the semblance of martial law, but I wasn't going to find it in downtown Juarez. Even the cops were absent from the streets. I thought I'd seen some hanging out in the light that shown through a doorway, but when I got closer I realized that they were just Domino's delivery drivers, dressed in their dark blue Mexican Domino's shirts, waiting for the call.
“So, Sergio,” I asked, “What about the Mariscal?”
“They want to tear it all down and put up an alameda.” A boulevard. Sergio was drinking a chucho in a disposable plastic cup. “But the city ran out of money.”
I drank a chucho, and an Indio, and talked to the men at the bar about the narco-violence that the El Paso news outlets would have you believe is terrorizing the streets of Juarez. The men were blissfully oblivious.
“You've got to watch out for the juniors,” Henry told me. “They wear the jewelry, the chunky gold bracelets. Here we don't have any problems. We're just a bunch of old men.”
The piano player came in, drank a shot, and fired up the electric keyboards.
“We don't have any drug dealers in here,” Henry told me over the trilling riffs of the synthesized organ. “Or if we do, I'm not aware of it.”
The live music Karaoke commenced, customers singing Mexican standards through the PA, accompanied by the keyboard player.
By then the bar had thirty people in it. Not all drug dealers wear gold bracelets and rope, I thought. But sometimes it's better not to know. I finished my beer, and walked back home.