'Union' thugs of Juarez fighting over drug distribution

Times:

Alejandro Saenz takes a seat behind the shabby prison desk with the confident air of a CEO. Tall and thin with gelled hair, he looks like a conceited teenager. He is actually 30, a killer, and has been imprisoned in the Ciudad Juárez jail for ten years.

“We are very good people,” said his colleague Nicolas Sosa, and it is hard to tell if he is joking. Slick and muscled, with patterns shaved into his beard and wearing a tight white t-shirt and cowboy boots, Sosa’s looks are marred only by his nose, which is bent to one side. “I am here because I killed two cops,” he said. “I was mad — they stopped me and took my money, and I had a gun.”

Sosa and Saenz are two senior members of the Artist Assassins, a drug gang working in Ciudad Juárez, the most violent city in the world. The 600 Artist Assassins and 1,200 Mexicles, another local gang, are employed by the Sinaloa Cartel — run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the country’s most wanted man — to control the drug traffic passing through Juárez.

But the Artist Assassins and the Mexicles are in the middle of a war with the Aztecas. With 7,000 members the Aztecas are the most powerful drug gang in Juárez and work for the rival Juárez Cartel. The leaders of these cartels are businessmen in hiding and the gangs act as their enforcers on the streets. “The Aztecas have a very different way of thinking to us,” Sosa said. “We live and work very closely. We have values: respect, and the liberty to choose. They don’t. They kill our families, our friends, our kids.

“We’re not a gang — we’re a union. The difference is you can get out if you want to. You don’t have to stay.”

Sosa is soliciting a little too much sympathy. “Those guys are mean criminals,” said the Mayor of Juárez, José Reyes Ferriz, who accompanied The Times on a visit to the prison this week. “The Artistas Asesinos feel that killing is an art form.”

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Each gang has its own style, from their clothes and tattoos to their expressions. While the Artist Assassins are groomed and eloquent, the Aztecas are pallid, wear oversized jeans and padded jackets and seem slightly crazed. The Mexicles are perhaps the most normal-looking and are reserved and polite.

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Ciudad Juárez owes its murder rate — an average of six dead a day — to this rivalry. The gangs have decapitated bodies and hung them from bridges, killed children, pregnant women and, in February, 15 teenagers. They regularly kidnap for ransom and they extort nearly every business in Juárez. When one funeral home refused to pay it was burnt down and its owners shot.

Only 200 of the murders in Juárez last year were civilians. Three quarters of the dead were gang members between the ages of 14 and 24, and were identified by their tattoos.

Tattoos have become the mark of the gangster in Juárez — the 400 foreign-owned factories in the city refuse to employ anyone with one. “You have tattoos on your body, you won’t get a job,” Saenz said.

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The tattoos must be their own "union label." The criminal insurgency in Juarez has developed its own culture of murder, much of it ritualistic. There seems to be a contest to terrorize one another without much effect.

The US conducted a raid on Aztecas in El Paso where many of them reside arresting at least 50 after the murder of the American consular officials. What they will learn from the suspects is not clear.

I am surprised that the killing goes on even after the end of the smuggling operations. Perhaps it has taken a life of its own, or the authorities are missing the current distribution effort.