Free To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War by John Gibler Page B

one does this because the people in the houses would certainly tell you nothing, though there is always the chance that they would report your snooping around to people who drive around in SUVs with assault rifles.
    We are the first reporters on the scene. There are two police trucks there already and the police are cordoning off the immediate vicinity around the body with yellow caution tape, tying it to a barbed wire fence, stretching it across the road and tying it to a tree on the other side. We duck under the fence and are able to get within feet of the body on that side. The photographers crouch and get to work.
    I begin to write observations in my notebook when a young man walks up to me and asks, “Do you want the name?”
    The young man did not ask if I wanted “his name,” but rather “the name.”
    I say yes and he tells me: Juan Antonio González Zamorra. I say thank you.
    The state forensic team arrives and starts to survey the scene.
    Juan Antonio González’s dead body is face down. His T-shirt has been pulled up over his head, tying up both of his arms in the shirt. On his left side where his shirt has been pulled up you can see two small circular wounds. One of the photographers comments, “The orifices are very small, close range, must have been a cop-killer,” a 5.7x28mm-caliber pistol famed for its ability to pierce body armor. The T-shirt covering his head is filled with blood, still wet, seeping slowly through the fabric and into the ground.
    I notice a man busily walking around the scene talking on a mobile phone. He is all business. He wears dress slacks and a button-down collared shirt both stitched with the word EMAUS . I glance back at the parked vehicles: one is a van with EMAUS painted in huge letters on the side.
    The police take pictures of Juan Antonio González’s dead body. The forensics team locates the bullet casings, notes the body’s position, and measures the distances between the body and the casings. The news photographers walk the perimeter of the scene taking photographs of the police and forensics team working.
    Everything about the scene is routine. Nothing here would lead you to believe that the form on the ground around which everyone’s movements, everyone’s tasks and actions and jobs are oriented, was once a person.
    I walk up to the young man who offered to give me “the name” and strike up a conversation. His name is Jonathan and he works for the Moreh funeral parlor. “I’m the one who’ll be preparing this guy’s body in a bit,” he says.
    I ask about Emaus. They are also a funeral service Jonathan tells me, the competition. I ask how he found out about the body. Moreh has a police radio and monitors the frequency, just as Pepis monitors the Red Cross frequency. It turns out that the first people to arrive at the scene of an execution—a crime scene, one supposes—those who apparently have no fear of returning gunmen, are representatives of Culiacán’s multimillion-dollar funeral parlors. They hear the calls go out on the police radios and rush to the scene. Once there, they will search the body for some form of identification and call the dead person’s name back in to headquarters. The funeral parlor will then dispatch a crew to seek out the dead person’s family. This crew arrives with “the bad news,” as Jonathan puts it, but they soften it up with lies, “so that the family doesn’t get too scared.” They’ll say, “We’re really sorry, but we have information that your beloved was in an accident. We can take you to where it happened.” On the drive the crew will explain that they work for the funeral parlor and will be ready and able to take care of the family’s wake and burial needs.
    “Every day there’s work,” Jonathan says. Indeed, proud of his employer, Jonathan tells me that Moreh was in charge of the funerals for such major capos and their relatives as Nacho Coronel, Arturo Beltrán, and El Chapo’s son Édgar.
    But,