Free Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

of Ciudad Juárez, she was going to become a freelance police force of one.
    She trawled the mountains around the city, looking hour after hour for Rubi’s corpse. Then she headed back to Sergio’s neighborhood to hand out flyers. Finally, one day, a woman told Marisela she knew where Sergio was. I can’t disclose the details of who this woman was, because it might get her killed. But she told Marisela that Sergio was in Fresnillo sixteen hours from Juárez, and gave Marisela his landline number. She took it to the police and . . . still nothing. They refused to act.
    Marisela had been feeling ill for a long time. She assumed it was because of Rubi’s disappearance, but her doctors told her she was wrong. She had breast cancer, and she needed a double mastectomy urgently.
    At this point, most of us would have given up. Marisela did not.
    A few days after the operation, she set off for Fresnillo. She had tubes attached to each breast to drain the fluid and serum that seeped from her into a container.
    And then, in Fresnillo, she found him. The local police finally seized Sergio, and he immediately confessed. Yes, he had smashed Rubi’s skull. He had set her on fire and tossed her body in the area on the outskirts of the city where the local abattoir dumps the bones and grease from the slaughtered pigs. The police started a search back in Juárez. They were only able to recover one third of her body: her arm, a few parts of her head—not even the skull. Just fragments. There were thirty-six bones in total. The investigators told Marisela that normally, when you are burned, your head explodes through your eyes and your ears, but because Rubi’s skull was broken, hers had exploded through the hole in her head.
    Marisela believed there must be more of Rubi left than that. She drove with her eldest son Juan to the abattoir dump. There were thousands and thousands of pig bones, and wheelbarrows dumping more all the time. They started to scramble through the bones and the grease, a pump still attached to each of Marisela’s breasts. “There were maggots and the smell of death and all these bones—we were going through the bones trying to find one piece of her. Trying to find one piece of her,” Rubi’s brother, Juan, remembers. “Of course we didn’t find anything.”
    Angel testified at the trial. He described everything he saw, and he explained that Sergio had threatened to kill him if he ever spoke out about it.
    One day, Sergio turned to Marisela from the dock and said: “I know that I did a big harm that nobody will be able to repair. She already said that she will not forgive me, but I ask your forgiveness, Marisela, because I know that it was a great harm. And it is true what you said—‘Where was God at that moment?’ Unfortunately, I didn’t know God at that moment, but I had the good chance to find God in jail. I don’t have words 2  . . . that’s all.”
    It was obvious he would be convicted—but then everything took a mysterious turn. The judges said they couldn’t accept Sergio’s confession, because the prosecutor has to be present for a confession to be valid. On these grounds alone, they said there was insufficient evidence, and he was acquitted.
    Marisela always believed in doing things the right way. Now, Juan says, “it was like she was betrayed by her own people, because she believed in the authorities.” She announced: “These judges have killed my daughter again.” Nobody understood why this had happened, but they knew it wasn’t unusual: the murder conviction rate in Juarez is just 2 percent. 3
    Angel—the kid who had testified at the trial—was found dead along with his family, just as Sergio had promised.
    Marisela started to walk the streets of Juárez with signs demanding justice for Rubi, holding aloft her picture. She called on all the mothers who had missing daughters to leave their homes and join her. All over the country, people who protested were being murdered, but