Till Death Came to Her Door

She has turned bones and skulls in her hands, pored over every body dug from the desert. She has worked among crumbling skeletons and charred teeth. Blurred Polaroids of missing children.

In her 47 years, Irma Rodriguez Galarza has been mother and wife, cab driver and dental expert, professor and author, lawyer and forensic detective in the vast Mexican border state of Chihuahua.

She worked for years in Ciudad Juarez, a rambling maze of factories, slums and shining nightclubs across the border from El Paso. This place has been called a laboratory for our globalized, industrialized future. It also has been called the last bastion of the Wild West, a place whose legacy of mayhem runs back to the Mexican Revolution.

It is here that Rodriguez grappled with the riddles of silent, anonymous death. She sought the identities of victims in narco-executions, investigated the infamous slaughter of Juarez women. Day after day, she fought to impose order--until this summer, when death showed up at her front door, made her just another victim.

In the small, black hours of July 25, her daughter and husband were shot dead. Her son was gravely wounded. Speculation spun: an attempt on Irma Rodriguez’s life? A warning? Revenge? No, police say. The gunplay was an accident. Road rage. A drug hit gone wrong. Tragic coincidence.

Word reaches Irma that morning. She is in a Mexico City conference hall, getting ready to give a speech. The theme: human rights on the border.

“Hey, Dr. Rodriguez, did you see the news?”

She squints up, shakes her head no.

“Up in Juarez,” her colleague says. “They shot up the family of some forensic scientist.”

Irma stares at him. The words fall and settle.

“What?”

“Yeah, it was on TV. I just saw it.”

She blinks. “But the only forensic scientist in Ciudad Juarez . . .” Words come slowly. “ . . . is me.”

For a few days, the Rodriguez tragedy dominates headlines in Juarez. But public interest drifts away. After all, shootouts aren’t uncommon here. In a single week in August, six people were gunned down in apparent drug executions. The Rodriguez family took its place in a growing string of victims, in another bloody summer in Ciudad Juarez.

‘This Border Turns Men Into Animals’

When she looks you in the face, she sees not your eyes or smile, but the bones below, and she knows, more or less, what you will look like when you are dead. To Rodriguez, the surface is a language. In it she reads the story of the things that lurk lower.

“Those of us who are ugly,” she says softly, running a finger over a mug shot, “it is because of our bones.” It is a morning in May, two months before the shootings. Rodriguez is studying victim profiles in her cramped office in the massive law enforcement complex here.

She has always known death has its reasons. When she holds the broken pelvises, cracked craniums and gold teeth, she ponders dirt roads, open sewage canals and drug addiction. When she cleans the dust of the dead from her fingernails, she thinks of the erosion of humanity.

“This border,” she says, “turns men into animals.”

At best guess, nearly 2 million people make their home in Juarez, but it is not the same 2 million as last year or the year to come. An estimated 600 pour in every day from the Mexican interior and Central America. An untold number push on, breach the Rio Grande into Texas.

Others stay: tack together a paper shack, drum up work in one of the foreign plants, stamp a road into the dust. This is how slums are born. To call it unplanned growth is to indulge in understatement: This is a city that invents itself as it goes along. There is no such thing as a current street map: Juarez stretches by two city blocks every day. Thousands live without water, lights or pavement.

When the bodies turn up, Irma’s phone rattles, and she drives to the city morgue. Corpses come doused in gasoline and flamed, or blackened by the sun. Sometimes there is nothing left but hair and teeth.

She snaps photographs and X-rays, white laboratory coat flapping behind her. She puffs on an endless procession of cigarettes. She compares pumiced bones with the paper profiles of hundreds of people who had evaporated into the sandy shantytowns and lonesome alleys.

When the days grow old and the mountains stand like crumpled paper, she steers home through bleating traffic, past the factories and train tracks. As she drives, she muses over the dead:

The man who took the bus up from Guadalajara to buy a car. He ended up shot to death in the Chihuahua badlands.

The tiny, sharp-nosed woman with bright eyes and black hair. She lay dead in a desolate wash of sand for two years before anybody found her. Her family thought she’d slipped over the border to look for work.

The little girl whose family refused to claim her bones, insisted this couldn’t be their baby. There must be some mistake, doctor.

She built their faces from putty and stood them beside her desk, and they watched her through painted eyes.

Rodriguez knows that Juarez is ruled by a mysterious alchemy: Things disappear. Cars, money and people dissolve as if they were never there. Hundreds of unsolved cases--creased photographs, dental records, birth certificates--lingered in her files. When she speaks of them, she rubs an eyebrow and sighs, “Oy.”

“There is a great psychological danger in this job,” Irma says that May morning. “If I got too far inside each case, I would end up talking to myself in the streets.”

Tacked to a wall of cinder blocks in her office building, there hangs a Spanish translation of John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Therefore never send to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

A Career Made From the Grit of Desert

She was the daughter of schoolteachers, a serious, Catholic girl of heavy black hair, full lips, a haughty arch of brow. Irma Rodgriguez lived with her parents until she married a soldier descended from Pancho Villa.

In her 27th year, her husband died, and Rodriguez was alone for the first time in her life with two babies and no marketable skill. She found work driving a taxicab through the crowded streets of her hometown, Chihuahua.

The money wasn’t good enough, so Rodriguez turned to the state government for work.

“We want you to be a police agent,” they said. No way, she scoffed. Then she thought again.

A few weeks later, Irma Rodriguez drove the northern trail etched by generations of Mexicans in the second half of the 20th century. She bumped six hours over the dusty plains of Chihuahua. As she drew near the United States border, Ciudad Juarez rose like a steel mirage.

She graduated from the state police academy. As a cop, she traveled the gritty sheets of desert, into forgotten villages where Tarahumara Indian children flock to open-air schools taught by nuns. In her smart police cap and creased slacks, she lectured the girls on self-defense and rape. She blushed then, ashamed to speak of such things in front of the sisters.

One night, her son Vladimir staggered home, breath and belly full of booze. Rodriguez sat him down, forced him to drink tequila until he moaned in his vomit. Her children didn’t come home drunk again.

She roamed the streets undercover for a time--disguised as a used clothing peddler, posed as a maid, slipped into thumping nightclubs. It was a risky bit of theater, but Rodriguez learned just when to pull her badge and gun.

She rounded up scores of petty criminals. Her boss offered her a reward: “You can have a new car,” he said. “Or you can have a scholarship.”

“Cars wear out,” the schoolteachers’ daughter replied. “Education is forever.”

One day, she met another soldier, Sotero Alejandre Ledesma, a man of strong features, dark skin, a hard set of the jaw. “Puro Indio,” Irma thought. Pure Indian. He was divorced, with children of his own. She accepted an invitation to dinner. They dated, moved in together, called themselves husband and wife.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez was rising fast in police ranks. She was the first woman in Chihuahua to be named police commander. She ran the academy for a time, then took over the identification division. She penned a pair of forensic texts and enrolled in law school.

In a hard, mean land, Rodriguez became the law.

Carrying the Weight of a City of Death

Sin and smuggling have simmered on this stretch of the Rio Grande ever since the water was declared an international boundary. When Prohibition banned booze in the United States, the smugglers ran liquor. Nowadays, the money is in drugs. Generations of entrepreneurs have slipped crates of guns over the midnight waters.

These days, a fearsome cartel carves cocaine trails through Chihuahua and into the United States. In this border town, its would-be leaders scrap for power with automatic weapons. Underlings are shot in the head for missteps.

“When we hear about a big drug bust,” Rodriguez says, “we know somebody will be punished. So we know we’ll find some bodies within a few days.”

The young women were a new kind of atrocity altogether. They began to disappear from bus stops and busy streets in the early 1990s. They turned up on sand dunes, in vacant lots and alongside train tracks, raped and strangled. Many of the women worked assembly lines at maquiladoras, the drab plants scattered along the southern bank of the Rio Grande.

Fear shadowed the city; a macabre political circus began. Mothers of the slain waved photographs of their daughters in the streets. Ya basta, they cried. Enough already. Juarez flooded with journalists and well-heeled feminists, international human rights advocates and imported FBI agents.

Throughout the 1990s, activists accused police of shirking their duty. Under hard scrutiny, investigators rounded up and jailed a series of suspects. An Egyptian chemist with a history of rape, a street gang called the Rebels, a band of bus drivers. Still, the death continued.

Animosity was palpable between police and victims. Nevertheless, within the aquamarine walls of police headquarters, Rodriguez remained a trusted figure. “Irma,” says Esther Chavez Cano, founder of the border’s first rape crisis center and a vociferous critic of Juarez police, “is the best professional in the state justice system.”

But Rodriguez is not immune to emotion. She hates to touch the swollen faces of the murdered girls, their Mickey Mouse underpants and bloody factory smocks. The men of Juarez are high, she says, on a devastating cocktail of drugs, hormones and hopelessness.

Her thoughts turn to her own teenage daughter. Street slang is sneaking into Cinthia’s speech. Disquieted, Rodriguez blames the gangs that run wild in their neighborhood. She and Alejandre can’t really afford a stucco house in one of Juarez’s few middle-class neighborhoods, but they buy one anyway.

They dote on Cinthia, her daughter from a previous relationship. “Gorda, la gordita,” they call her fondly--fat girl, little fat girl. In Spanish, her middle name means “dove.”

She tags along with the crew-cut police officers who cruise her neighborhood. She rides with them for fun, poses for photographs, smirking, with their guns. She talks of becoming a cop, just like her mother. “First you finish school, crazy,” Rodriguez says. “Then we’ll think about it.”

That isn’t so far off. In a few weeks, Cinthia is to begin her last year of high school.

To Her Colleagues, Just Another Crime

In panic, Irma Rodriguez tears out of the conference. In the swaddled silence of her Mexico City hotel room, she paces, dials her office.

“Tell me what’s happened.”

“It’s better if you just come home,” a secretary says.

Traffic clashes and clangs. From the airport, she telephones her stepdaughter.

“I need to find Alex,” she says. “I think something’s happened.”

The other woman is crying. “He’s dead,” she blurts, and the rest spills out fast. “And so is Cinthia, and Vladimir is in the hospital, and he’s in very bad shape. You need to come home.”

After the funerals, Rodriguez ships her husband’s body south. His coffin is sunk in the fertile countryside of Michoacan, his childhood home. She has her daughter’s body cremated and pours the ashes into a china urn painted with delicate pink flowers.

Investigators say Irma’s family was shot by mistake. They have yet to find a suspect, or even what investigator Steve Slater calls “a good witness.” The gunfire erupted fast. It was dark. A mysterious truck with Texas plates melted away into the industrial parks and abandoned playing fields.

This is the official explanation: A man, Sergio Rodriguez Gavaldon, is tearing down the street where Rodriguez lives, fleeing unknown pursuers. He ducks through the Rodriguez gate, dashes into the frontyard. Somebody in the street opens fire. Cinthia and Alejandre, standing beside the family Jeep, are mowed down. Vladimir dashes from the house. He too falls to the ground, bloodied.

Sergio Rodriguez--presumably the target of the more than 50 rounds that rained over the gate--suffered only minor wounds in the buttocks.

He told investigators the dispute began with a minor fender bender at a nearby gasoline station.

“I don’t know how credible that is,” Slater says. “It was probably one of those drug trafficking things.”

A former director of the police academy in Santa Fe, N.M., Slater heads Grupo Zeus, an investigation team that probes execution-style slayings in Chihuahua. Just days after the funerals, he says his investigators are unlikely to find the killers.

“Look, we have a lot of these executions, and they’re hard to resolve, OK? Because people are afraid to come forward,” he says. “You can understand why they don’t want to get involved. The people who do these things, they don’t have much respect for human life.”

Irma Rodriguez, meanwhile, is disappointed. “You know how they cover these things up,” she says. “I haven’t heard another word about the tragedy or about the investigation.”

On a low shelf beside her bedroom window, Rodriguez arranges her daughter’s urn, flanked with votive candles, bound by plastic rosary beads.

In the weeks after the funeral, a cop guards the street from behind the tinted windows of his pickup. The truck is unmarked; a pistol handle pokes from the waist of his dungarees.

In her study, Rodriguez sits alone amid her framed degrees. She has a pistol, a pack of Benson and Hedges and a mug of strong coffee. Her hands scuttle like crabs over the yellowing pages of a scrapbook.

“I’m undone.” She drones each sentence like a prayer worn meaningless by repetition. “I hope to God I can overcome this. You can’t live with so much pain in the soul.”

She can’t sleep; passes the dark hours painting a watercolor portrait of Cinthia. She trys sleeping pills, but they leave her woozy and numb.

“She was so cold--so cold--but I couldn’t let go of her body. And now,” Irma’s eyes fall. “I can’t forget the sensation of the cold flesh.”

She wonders how she’ll go back to work in the morgue where she visited her dead family. How she’ll let her eyes linger on another body. “How can I touch a cadaver,” she asks, “without remembering my daughter?”

In a few days, she will quit her job. Pack her things. Call a moving company.

“How can I stay here, always remembering? Everything I see--oh, no, I can’t do it. I want to leave.”

Driven to Escape the Tally of Death

Death wasn’t through yet: Her father fell ill. She perched at the hem of his hospital sheet to wait for his body to give out. On Aug. 18, he died.

Her injured son had already been moved to a hospital in the south, away from the border. Now she orders the exhumation of her mother’s body from a Juarez cemetery. The rest of the family is fleeing this place and Rodriguez can’t bear to leave her mother behind. She’ll have the body cremated and the ashes of her parents scattered near their hometown in Durango. When she goes from this town, she will leave no piece of herself.

It’s been 15 years since she drove north through the badlands to a city of promise and cruelty. Years measured in night classes and homicides and the inches her children grew. Years before she came to hate Juarez; before she fled a hard-won job.

“In truth, here in Juarez we are rotten inside,” she says. “I tell you we’re good and rotten.”

“All you can do is escape.”