Ciudad Juárez: Difference between revisions

First of all, the man that he works for, Gomez of El Paso, a man of Shakespearean-wit-brevity and marquetry-chronometer-collection fame, was more of a kind of concept to Ray than anything resembling an actual human, and other than posing a threat to his corporeal existence, Ray had no real idea what the man did for a living. To Ray’s way of thinking, Gomez laundered money, while running Ray ragged, and frequently down, to supplement his apparently limitless ego, though he is in fact the Treasurer and CFO for the massive-cash balance sheet of the Juárez Cartel, under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, or maybe it was Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, or Vicente Carrillo Leyva, or José Luis Fratello, a man who in fact runs the Cartel’s sicarios, a word that goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slitting of Roman throats using sicae, meaning daggers, though the Cartel’s assassins are known as La Linea, a word that goes back to the “firing line” for cannons, or perhaps it was Rafael Munoz Talavera, who unbeknownst to Raymond has been dead for ten years, found time-travelling backwards through the streets of Juárez in the left rear seat of an armored Jeep Cherokee, with his mind fixed firmly on the rearview mirror, and his bullet-riddled head double-doggie-bagged in plastic, or then again it might as well be Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, known by his nickname, “El Azul,” a word that goes back, via Arabic and Persian, to all the Throne-of-God sky-shades of lapis lazuli, from powder blue to azure to a deep midnight indigo, though calling a born killer such a celestial shade of something would seem to defy all predicate logic, and most conventional color theories with regard to human flesh tones; the truth is, even if we skipped the etymonics, Raymond wouldn’t even know the rudimentary basics here, like who the hell was running his own brigade, or who reported to who with all these psycho Cartel warlords, and as to where the battle lines were drawn, or whose side was whose in War Zone Juárez, he had no better idea than did the DEA or ICE, and they didn’t have enough between the two of them to constitute so much as a whisper of a clue. Ray thought this over, searching for clues, among the baffling contradictions he’d read in the papers, and sort of threw up his hands, metaphorically speaking, since strictly speaking, he could barely fucking move: if he wanted to get out of this jam he was in, he was going to have to give this a whole lot more thought. While it might be educational to listen in on Raymond’s thoughts, regarding the drug war battle lines in Ciudad Juárez, as a massive dose of a tramadol-hydrochloride opioid analgesic slowly eases its way through the blood-brain barrier, and makes itself at home, metaeuphorically speaking, among the opiate receptors of Ray’s human head, we need to keep in mind that Raymond himself barely knows the names of the people in question; just because a man is really and truly high doesn’t mean he’s some sort of paronomasial claircognizant. We’d probably be better off, once the Tramadol takes hold, having a little chat with some of those plump pink cherubs that are about to show up on Raymond’s powder-blue walls.

Hazard it this way. It had probably started out simply enough, with the Juárez Cartel attempting to defend its own home turf and eponymous plaza, the shipping lanes north via the Port of El Paso into the mood-enhanced States of Operation Dime Bag, against an all-out assault from the Gulf Cartel, of Matamoras, Mexico, in the northeastern corner of the state of Tamaulipas, with its mosquito-infested coastal swamps, and its out-of-the-way plaza, via Highway 2, into Brownsville, Laredo, and McAllen, Texas, and its death-squad army of merciless mercenaries that didn’t much care for the rules of polite society, much less hanging around in a dump like Matamoros, waiting for some sort of calligraphic-invite to the drug-plaza party along the whole U.S. border. If we want to get a handle on this war in Juárez, we’re going to have to come to grips with these merciless mercenaries, as their anti-anodyne methods became the standard of care for every last patient ever touched by the drug war. Los Zetas, as they were known, after the police-band code name of their original founder, were NATO-armed-and-disciplined paramilitary types, with particular expertise in communications and savagery, that the Gulf had recruited, using U.S. currency, out of the Mexican Army, specifically the elite Airborne Special Forces, following training at Fort Bragg and the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia; with their terrorize-the-enemy approach to the human body, and their counter-insurgency training in high-tech munitions, and their unfathomable nicknames, like “El Winnie the Pooh,’’ the Zetas were a little different, that’s all there was to it; the Zetas were innovators, true battlespace visionaries, and the cartels of the ’90s were still fighting the last war. If you pictured a man dressed in dead-of-night black, wearing jungle-warfare facepaint, and spit-shined jump boots, making a minor adjustment to the heterodyning generator on a Stinger Surface-to-Air Missile’s focal plane array, while testing the utility of a hickory-handled framing hammer for removing the genitalia from some grave disappointment, you’d have a pretty good picture of the paradigmatic Zeta, and all the more reason to stop fighting the last war. Ray’s whole approach to dealing with the Zetas was based on a strategy of situational avoidance, like if a situation arose where the Zetas were present, Ray double-checked to make sure that he was absent. This particular methodology, with its redundancy algorithm, doesn’t, admittedly, sound altogether rational: why would a man have to check twice to make a clear determination as to his presence or absence? A man’s either there, facing a situation, or he’s somewhere else, and a quick visual check of his immediate surroundings should more than suffice to resolve any questions. It’s not like a man can be two places at once; we’re talking about a human being here, not some sort of introspective quantum automata; the cartels of the ’90s were a little low-tech, but the Zetas were still years from having quantum computers, using Schrodinger superposition in qubit arrays, where a bit may be set at either zero or one, or both zero and one simultaneously; a man, needless to say, is either present or absent, and he can’t be both at the exact same instant; this sort of living-dead moment may be fine for Schrodinger’s cat, but its no way to deal with an ordinary human. Since Raymond himself was more or less rational, and this part of the war was supposed to be simple, something’s gone wrong here; we must not quite be getting the full picture. Ray had his truck, an aging and rust-eaten K-series long-box, parked on a little knoll, above a streambed ravine, out in the scrub-brush of the empty Chihuahuan desert; three guys in black pulled a fourth from behind the wheel of a green and white taxi that could maybe use a paint job, removed his straw hat, his wallet, and watch, and gave Ray a brief but impressive demonstration of the Zetas’ unique approach to the presence-absence paradox, and it had nothing at all to do with quantum automata. By the time his GMC had driven itself home, quite possibly over the bottom of the bone-dry Rio, Ray found himself doing a quick double-check, feeling around for his face-bones, and searching for his watch-face, not altogether sure, right at the moment, that his head, hands, and watch were even in the same time zone. By now, of course, this where-am-I demonstration is a common occurrence in every war zone in Mexico, but it’s based on a trademarked Zeta innovation: the severed, but still living, missing human head. For all you know, for a few moments at least, you could be staring straight up at the blue Chihuahua sky, just kicking back, sort of watching the crows fly, at a 40-foot remove from the rest of your body. It’s not like Ray started wandering around Juárez, double-checking his math on Schrodinger’s equation; when it came to the Zetas, however, you were far better off being slightly redundant than finding yourself staring straight up at the sky, not so much, at this point, double-checking your watch-face, as doing a slow fade on some serious second-guessing. So when word filtered down that peace was at hand, and that the Gulf, Zetas, and Juárez Cartel were now on the same side, joining forces in the battle against the Sinaloa Cartel, supposedly headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Ray basically shrugged, and took a “wait and see” attitude toward his immediate situation, like wait in El Paso, at pre-checked coordinates, and see if the Zetas started crossing the border.