The war in Juárez

Ciudad Juárez is a sea of streets. They’re baked hard and gritty by a relentless glaring sun, and middle-aged Nora Moreno knows them and their reputation for violence—the latter better than most. Two years ago she knelt on a patch of pavement to cradle her son’s head as blood seeped from a trio of bullet wounds. It was a Thursday evening, and Adrian, 21, had just left their home to go to the tienda for some lettuce. That’s when Moreno heard a gunshot, then more in quick succession. She ran outside and found Adrian’s body stretched out on the ground.

As if she’d prepared for such a moment, Moreno quickly bent near her son’s ear and pleaded with him to ask God for forgiveness and mercy. “Go in peace,” she whispered as he struggled. “I’ll be OK.” That’s when she felt Adrian’s body relax, and he left this world, adding yet another murder to Juárez’s 2020 total. It went on to top 1,600. That same year, neighboring city El Paso, Texas, about half the size of its Mexican counterpart, had 28.

Nora Moreno Photo by Kim Henderson

When you talk to people who live along this border about whether or not Ciudad Juárez is safe, many refer to a decade ago as the “bad years.” That’s when drug cartel killings and crimes spiraled out of control, landing Juárez on a list of the most dangerous cities in the world. During that brutal wave of violence, Adrian Moreno was just a boy, a future murder statistic to be recorded in 2020, a year when the city could point to at least five days on the calendar that passed without a homicide. A time when things had “improved” in Juárez.

Nora Moreno doesn’t mention any of that when she speaks of her son’s death. Instead, she pauses to allow our American translator to catch up, and her round face goes blank, impossible to read. Raising six children in a dangerous place requires a tough exterior, and Moreno has had to be tougher than most. Just four months before Adrian’s death, she witnessed the stabbing of another of her sons. Unlike his brother, he survived.

That both attacks on Moreno’s sons happened in broad daylight should be surprising, but it’s not. The majority of murders in Juárez are brazen public displays. So are the murders of Mexican journalists—15 so far this year—many right outside their own front doors. Residents living in the shadow of such killings fear Mexico’s war on drugs has morphed into a war on truth, an attempt to stifle news reports and investigations that would drag evil deeds into the light. For Nora and other Christians, though, the war in Juárez has never really been about cartels and corruption. For them it’s a battle for souls, and they’re waging it in a culture where too many think life is cheap.

Pastor Raul Torres leads a worship service at Iglesia Bautista Pacto de Gracia. Photo by Kim Henderson

STILL, THE THREAT of physical violence lurks in the background, an ever-present reminder of the unseen spiritual war. And churches and their pastors are not immune. Raul Torres heads Iglesia Bautista Pacto de Gracia, or Covenant of Grace Baptist Church, in Juárez. The 33-year-old native of Mexico’s capital has never faced extortion threats, but he knows fellow pastors who have: “Five years ago, it was very common for churches to have to pay a monthly fee to get the cartels, and sometimes the police, to leave them alone. If they didn’t pay, the cartel might kidnap one of the pastor’s relatives. Churches had to take drastic measures. Some pastors left.”

Some still leave, but for now, Torres is planted. He talks about violence with resignation, almost like it’s not there, but it is. Just recently, assailants in Juárez firebombed a funeral home, riddled a busy Denny’s with bullets, and turned a family gathering into a mass ­murder. During that attack, shooters burst into a home and killed five adults, even as they spared the lives of two children. In a poll taken in advance of last year’s national and local elections, Mexican voters cited crimes like those as their top concern and corruption as a close second. Even so, most Pacto de Gracia members shrug when I ask about the effect of crime on their community. They’re focused on God ruling their lives, not the disturbing absence of the rule of law in their land. Maybe their indifference to headlines is strategic.

But indifference isn’t immunity. Two years ago, when Torres heard that Nora Moreno’s son was lying dead in a nearby street, he rushed to the scene to comfort her. Torres remembers Moreno was remarkably calm. “A lot of her relatives were just desperate, but she wasn’t, not only at that moment, but in the weeks after,” he says. “Her faith—what she knew about her Lord and Savior—really brought her peace.”

Much of Mexico’s violence can be traced back to the root of all kinds of evil—the love of money. It’s a problem U.S. officials try to address economically, a strategy Jerry Pacheco knows well. When Pacheco walked out of the University of New Mexico 30 years ago with an MBA in international management, New Mexico Gov. Bruce King handed him a sizable assignment: help open a border crossing that would enable their state to capitalize on Mexico’s booming maquiladora, or foreign-­owned factory, industry.

Builders completed the Santa Teresa Port of Entry in 1993, and it still stands alone and important in a vast landscape of scrubby brush and occasional mesquite trees just west of Juárez. The United States now has more than 300 automotive, electronics, and medical parts factories in Juárez. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the port’s northbound traffic lanes saw more than 150,000 commercial crossings last year.

Pacheco has worked around the Santa Teresa industrial base for his entire career, and he describes the maquiladoras as a three-way symbiosis between foreign companies, Mexican laborers, and U.S. suppliers. He believes it’s a win-win-win that produces enough economic boon to keep criminals at bay, even when violence in Juárez was at its worst between 2008 and 2012: “There’s almost an unspoken thing, that the cartels leave them alone. We have thousands of U.S. managers, technicians, and engineers who cross the border every day to work in plants in Juárez. I cannot think of a ­single instance when one has been accosted or killed.”

That’s not true for local workers, though. Maquiladoras have been in the spotlight for several years as Juárez sought answers to its tragic femicide—three decades of unsolved murders that have claimed the lives of nearly 400 women. I saw haunting reminders of this national grief as I drove past telephone poles bearing white crosses painted by activists throughout the city. Many of the victims were teenagers who came to Juárez to work in the maquiladoras. Many went missing on their way to or from shifts. The connection between the crimes and the factories apparently stops there, but sexual assault and torture connect the crimes themselves. As recently as January, authorities discovered the remains of four more women, their dismembered body parts packed in garbage bags and left along Juárez roadways.

Those trying to escape the country must also navigate a gauntlet of violence. It’s not uncommon these days for law enforcement officers to find undergarments scattered on branches lining trails taken by human ­traffickers. The “rape trees” are meant to serve as a warning to others following behind them: Be on notice. Do as you’re told.

Pacheco had hoped Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who campaigned in 2018 on a “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets) platform, would make good on his promise to fight crime. So far, Pacheco is disappointed. “I’m not saying the U.S. is lily white clean, but corruption is a major issue in Mexico, and keeping the Mexican economy healthy, keeping Mexicans employed in good-paying jobs, is in the United States’ best interest, and not just jobwise. It helps to curb illegal immigration.”

José Compean Photo by Kim Henderson

BUT GOOD-PAYING maquiladora jobs with wages of $10 to $15 a day can be a hard sell when cartel members driving Escalades roll into neighborhoods and offer potential recruits 10 times that much. Where once only two major drug trafficking organizations ruled in Mexico—the Gulf Cartel and the Guadalajara Cartel—at least a dozen splinter groups now operate, each vying for a piece of the pie. Many have decided to supplement their take through extortion, kidnapping, and human smuggling.

Pastor José Compean knows cartels, and he’s spent the better part of his life preparing young people for encounters with them. At 67, he’s a man who can talk easily—even profusely—about La Misión, a Christian oasis of music lessons, art classes, and medical services he helped build on what was once an illegal dump. The thing he has trouble talking about is what happened 12 years ago, back when a Juárez citizen was 30 times more likely to be murdered than someone living in war-torn Afghanistan.

During those dark days, Compean learned his name was on a kidnap list. He and his family had to abandon their home and seek refuge with believers across the border. For three months, they spent their days in Juárez and their nights in New Mexico. “There was an atmosphere of fear then. The young people governed and older people failed to exercise authority. It was so rough that I call it the Lost Generation, because we lost so many youngsters to violence,” he says quietly. By the time it was safe to return, Compean’s children had ­scattered. Some settled in the United States, and his youn­gest daughter was too traumatized to move back into their former home. They had to start fresh.

In the midst of that transition, a friend asked Compean and his wife to participate in a Bible distribution program. When he realized they’d be going into police stations and army posts, Compean says, he almost backed out. “I wasn’t happy about the way the authorities had treated us. I asked God, ‘Are You really telling me to go to them?’” But the pastor and his wife did go. They got up at 5:30 in the morning, with a box of Bibles and plans to pray, and made it to a police station just in time for shift change. Compean remembers some of the ­captains were especially supportive. “In time they even asked us to go with them to some of the most difficult places, because they were targets as well.” Compean also conducted Bible distributions at schools and malls, and he remembers no one turned him away. “With the situation so sensitive, everybody was looking for answers.”

NORA MORENO FOUND her answers in Christ. That was four years ago, and her kids, including Adrian, noticed. “I wasn’t an alcoholic, and I didn’t do drugs, but I had never talked to them about God before,” she says. “When I started doing that, they knew something was different.” Moreno’s faith has helped her accept Adrian’s death, but some of her children are flailing. She believes they’ve been affected by violent ideology even though cartels never physically came courting. As proof, she points to her oldest child’s promise to find the guy who killed Adrian and cut him into pieces.

Nora wants to avoid any more trouble, so she hasn’t told that son what she knows: His brother got into trouble with the wrong people, and the “wrong people” were related to his girlfriend. That’s how it goes in Juárez. The consequences of bad choices can be almost incomparably harsh, and, with little provocation, even innocent people get swept up in the vortex. Meanwhile, the scope of damage swells. Other forms of violent behavior, like domestic and sexual abuse, tend to increase alongside organized crime.

But despite the disorder swirling around it, Pacto de Gracia—Moreno’s church—thrives. Members meet in a borrowed gymnasium tucked away on a surprisingly large and shady lot in the colonia Felipe Ángeles, a neighborhood on Juárez’s western edge. Within the gym’s unfinished walls, young, boisterous families ­worship alongside teenagers and widows and married men who work at the maquiladoras.

When I ask Pastor Torres about the challenges of leading a church in this city, he doesn’t list violence, but he does bring up that troublesome root. “We know that being prosperous and being poor can be two sides of struggle in the Christian life, so on our side, I would say that a lot of our families struggle with their economy.” Torres goes on to explain that the men in his church struggle to find jobs that feed their families each week, and they must decide to be honest, hard workers in jobs that don’t pay well. For the women, Torres believes the challenge is being satisfied with what they have, the ­lifestyle God has given them.

Contentment is a Biblical command, and it has particular application in cultures like theirs—and ours—where some are willing to sell their souls for a pair of Nikes. Still, it’s not what I expected Torres to say. I thought he’d focus on fear. A desire for justice. Instead, he reiterates: Contentment is the main struggle for his people. “But we face it, and we try to teach and to preach from the pulpit the good news in a way that makes it very practical for our lives today, now.”

During one week this summer, their evangelism efforts extended into the area surrounding the church, where homes, no matter how humble, are surrounded by fences and gates and menacing dogs. Even so, most of the residents are open to the church’s attempt to canvas the neighborhood with vacation Bible school flyers.

Nora Moreno is on the VBS team. She’s taken time away from her housecleaning business to spend mornings helping first and second graders learn to sing “Fuerte y Dulce Jesús” (“Jesus, Strong and Kind”). During snack time, I watch as she forgoes the lemonade and cookies and opts instead to sit next to a fidgety boy who needs to review Hebrews 12:2, his memory verse. There is a weightiness to this VBS, an urgency that Moreno understands. So does everyone else in Juárez who has seen life cut short inexplicably, tragically, ­violently. And that’s what the team is really teaching. That each participant matters. That they are image bearers of God.

When Pastor Torres looks out across the crowd of 74 children singing about the Lord’s faithfulness and being able to run to Him day and night, he sees fertile ground. “We’re convinced this is an investment not only in their souls, but in our community. Children here will hear the gospel and hopefully one day be born again. As a result, they’ll become good men and women for their generation.”

Nora Moreno helps lead a VBS rotation at Iglesia Bautista Pacto de Gracia in July. Photo by Kim Henderson

Achilles’ heel

An estimated 98 percent of all violent crimes in Mexico go unsolved. Arturo Sarukhán, former Mexican ambassador to the United States, has called the weak rule of law “one of Mexico’s Achilles’ heels.”

The victims in one high-profile 2019 massacre were women and children associated with a Mormon community in northern Mexico. They died when gunmen ambushed their vehicles on a rural dirt road, showering them with a storm of bullets. The victims’ families sought justice in Mexico, but found acknowledgment north of the border. In July of this year, a federal judge in North Dakota ruled a Mexican drug cartel accused in the killings, though not represented at trial, must pay $1.5 billion to the families. The award is automatically tripled under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act.

Kenny Miller, who lost his daughter-in-law and grandchildren in the tragedy, spoke to Fox News about what it’s like to live in fear of the cartels. Comparing them to terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, Miller added a caveat indicating cartels are worse: “These are right on the doorstep of America.” True enough. Ligaments belonging to Mexico’s Achilles’ heel connect directly to a shared 2,000-mile border with 55 active land ports of entry.

Since 2008, the U.S. government has spent $3.3 ­billion to better equip Mexico’s police, prosecutors, and judges to combat transnational organized crime and strengthen their rule of law. But has it worked? Attorney Jonathan Adams, a church deacon and former missionary kid living in Mexico City, helps international clients comply with Mexico’s legal ethical standards. It’s a job that has him rubbing shoulders with prosecutors who tell him the legal system there not only needs more resources, it needs reform. “Many Mexicans and foreigners alike assume that the low levels of punishment for crimes are due mostly to corruption,” Adams says. “But I’ve grown to believe a lot of it has to do with the laws and the way that they are designed to protect the accused.”

While it’s important to uphold the rights of the accused, Adams says it can be demoralizing when something as small as a missing seal on a document sets a criminal free. “At the end of the day, only the gospel truly changes hearts, and that’s what’s really needed, but I do think that a lot of people working through organizations, whether governmental or nongovernmental, can make a real difference if they follow God’s design for justice.”

For example, some of Adams’ clients have established strict rules on expenditures to make sure no one can pay off government officials by using vague descriptions in expense reports. They also set standards for engaging vendors so it’s harder to use third parties to pay off anyone. This prevents employees from registering “shell” companies with fake addresses and false names. He says the key is moving from a passive approach to demonstrating accountability and law-keeping. “In this way, regardless of whether the authorities are doing their jobs, civil society becomes more law-abiding and more accountable through ­transparency.” —K.H.