The Fight to Save Juárez by Ricardo C. Ainslie

returned home to Juárez to take some classes at UTEP and attend law school at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, where his interest in politics was again rekindled. His father’s successor as mayor was a man named Francisco Barrios Terrazas. Barrios’s party, the Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN, had never before won office in Juárez. Chihuahua, like the rest of Mexico, belonged to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI (in fact, the PRI had run Mexico since the end of the revolution, even though already in other northern states the PAN had begun to mount some successful challenges—the first signs of a budding democratic emergence in Mexico). Francisco Barrios was an engaging, charismatic man who later became the first member of the PAN to win the governorship of Chihuahua as well.
    The PRI’s hegemony had been so complete that Barrios’s win shook the state. José Reyes Ferriz was a member of the PRI youth organization and as a project he set out to try to study how Barrios had won the mayorship by analyzing his campaign. “I came to realize that the Francisco Barrios campaign had followed the blueprint laid out in
The Making of the President
, step by step,” Reyes Ferriz recalled, referring to the Pulitzer Prize–winning and hugely successful Theodore White book about the 1961 campaign to put John F. Kennedy in the White House. Reyes Ferriz then studied political marketing and began consulting on PRI election campaigns.
    Reyes Ferriz’s big break came in 2001, when irregularities led to the nullification of the Juárez mayoral election. It was the state congress’s job to name an interim mayor until new elections could be held, and Reyes Ferriz not only had name recognition and party bona fides with the PRI (which still controlled the state congress), but he had also taught some of the PAN delegates when they were law students, so they knew him. The fact that he had a popular fifteen-minute radio talk show covering the financial markets and other topics of interest to the business community also broadened his support. Three candidates for the interim spot had been placed before the state congress and José Reyes Ferriz thought he was a long shot. “I called my mother and told her they’d put me in as a filler,” Reyes Ferriz recalled. But the evening of the decision, as the clock neared midnight and he sat watching a movie in his pajamas, he received a call from the governor’s representative in Juárez to tell him that he’d won the most votes. It was during that nine-month stint as interim mayor that Reyes Ferriz had inaugurated the Monument to Fallen Police.
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    For José Reyes Ferriz, the memory of the inauguration of the Monument to Fallen Police was just one among a blur of obligatory events that public office imposes on a mayor’s schedule. He had neither been to the monument nor thought about it again for six years until early January 2008, when he’d come to lay a floral wreath as part of an annual event honoring the city’s fallen police officers. Then, just a week later, a group of men exited a dark sedan in the dead of night and crept up to the monument, where they left a “narco-message” written on a white sheet of poster board. The message was simple, divided into two sections: at the top, in the smaller of the two sections, someone had written in neat if uneven Magic Marker calligraphy, “For those who did not believe.” The word “not” was underscored several times with lines of decreasing length that reached a point below the word, forming an inverted triangle and giving the gesture the stylish flair that one might expect from a child in elementary school. Beneath this heading were the last names of five dead Juárez municipal police officers: Cháirez, Romo, Baca, Cháirez, and Ledesma. They were listed chronologically according to when