City Hall Fights Back

Ciudad Jurez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, sit across a fence from one another, a guarded border crossing allowing movement back and forth. Just a few years ago, Americans looking to spend time in sin city crossed from El Paso to Jurez by the thousands every day. Today, traffic has slowed to a crawl. Jurez’s streets lie empty of tourists, vendors, and visitors.

Every day, a man named Jos Reyes Ferriz crosses the border. From his office in the Mexican city, in fact, he can see back to El Paso, his home in exile. One cannot imagine this can be an ordinary border, he says. Not with the largest drug-consuming market just across.

Jurez is embroiled in a war — 230 people died in the streets in February alone — and Reyes commands the front line. Rival drug cartels are battling for territorial hegemony in the city, while Mexican police officers and troops try to stop the drug trafficking and tamp down the cartels. Reyes, as Jurez’s mayor, has escalated the conflict in an attempt to rout the narcotraficantes and win his city back.

I arrive at town hall to meet Reyes, passing through metal detectors to enter the building; a heavily armed four-person security team guards the mayor’s door. As the man entrusted with protecting the town, he’s at the very top of the narcogangs’ hit list.

I expect to meet a rough-hewn warrior, brave or careless enough to declare war on the cartels and transform Jurez into a slaughterhouse. Instead, I meet a university professor with a public law degree. Reyes, 47, exudes an urbane and learned sensibility. He grew up in a wealthy family, studied at the University of Notre Dame’s London campus, and traveled through Europe. At 30, he moved back to Mexico to work at a university, but became fascinated by politics. He decided to follow in the footsteps of his father, Jurez’s mayor in the 1970s.

From day one, Reyes recognized corruption and the narcotraficantes as his top challenge. It was obvious that the main problem was corruption within the police ranks reaching unacceptable levels, he says. The armed forces did not trust us, kept checking policemen, and throwing them in jail when they found drugs in patrol cars.

Last summer, Reyes started Operacin Limpieza (Operation Cleanup) to flush compromised officers out of the system. The crux of the program was a reliability screening test administered by federal agents from Mexico City using interrogations and lie detector tests. Out of 1,600 police officers, 220 quit when asked to be screened, 150 did not bring the appropriate documentation, and 334 failed the test. It was an earthquake, Reyes says. The narcotraficantes had nearly half of the city’s police force on their payroll or under their influence.

So, he and his newly appointed police chief — Roberto Ordua Cruz, a former Army major with an impeccable record — started a new enlistment program in June 2008. Now, the mayor says, our police today are trusted by the local population. It’s not totally clean, of course. There are still people that should not be there. Way less, though.

He describes cleaning out the police force as if he were failing 10 students at an exam session. Yet the anticorruption program was a near-suicidal decision for Reyes.

He started rooting out corruption without military backup; he felt abandoned he says. This is a city where the local government has way less money than the narcos. And when ‘El Chapo’ Guzmn from Sinaloa — billionaire Joaqun Guzmn Loera, the most infamous drug lord in Mexico — attacked the Jurez cartel, the city was overwhelmed. We could do nothing about it.

The escalating violence between the two cartels had deeply affected the city, with the mayor and his allies in the drug lords’ cross hairs. First came the threats against the chief of police, Roberto Ordua Cruz. A handwritten sign appeared on a wall downtown: If you do not resign we will kill a cop every 48 hours. Ordua did not resign, and the narcotraficantes kept their promise. Within a day, they killed his second in command and three other policemen. Next, two more cops died in a hailstorm of bullets, outside their homes.

I thought, the mayor says, it was pure terrorism. But nevertheless, I asked Ordua Cruz not to give up.

The police chief felt wracked with guilt over the mortal threat against his officers. Word reached the mayor’s office that the police were ready to mutiny if Ordua did not resign. I didn’t want to give up, Reyes says. But Ordua Cruz told me, ‘If the policemen are no longer with us, the narcotraficantes will win. But if we strategically withdraw, without leaving the terrain, we will win in the end, ‘ speaking like the Army major he once was. I thought about it. There was just one way out: to accept his resignation and ask the central government to directly appoint the new police chief without territorial connections.

So, Reyes accepted Ordua’s resignation. Like the mayor, the former police chief moved across the border, to El Paso, to protect his family. And the police force kept working, despite increasing violence. Police officers continued to be gunned down in the streets. Three heads appeared along a downtown street. Twelve corpses showed up on the grass in front of a school in east Jurez. The cartels killed and crucified a young man, putting a pig mask over his face.

And the danger to the mayor’s own life has only increased. Recently, the cartels placed a sign, written in the same style as the one threatening the police chief, in downtown Jurez. It told Jos Reyes Ferriz to give up his initiatives, or else he and his family would be beheaded — even across the border.

The mayor held strong. He increased his security detail but continued to open new roads, attend funerals, and make plans for the city’s development. It’s his way of telling the drug traffickers they have not won.

Of course I feel the weight of the limitations imposed on my family, he admits; drug cartels infamously have executed the families of those who dare to challenge them. But he remains upbeat. Most of all, I dream of walking freely with [my family] on the streets of my town.

I ask him how his family feels about being targets of Mexico’s most murderous gang. He smiles and says: I fly small planes as a hobby. When the situation was different, I usually left home on a plane with my family for the weekend. One Sunday, we were returning home. We hit a storm, and, to make matters worse, we were also preparing for landing. I was really scared. I was totally focused on my maneuvers, and I felt guilty and responsible for bringing my family in such a dangerous situation.

I was tormented; I couldn’t even speak. I was able to turn in the cockpit and look at them only when I was rolling on the tarmac. They were all sleeping! He smiles at me again. They always trust me.