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

Marisela would not be stopped. And steadily, as they saw her standing up, other mothers began to come out into the streets to join her, holding aloft their own pictures of their own daughters. They walked all day, through the deadliest city in the world, refusing to accept that this is how things would always be. She said in a speech: “It is only a few 4 of us that are gathered here, but there are plenty more waiting at home, crying . . . We ask you: How many more will it be? How many victims? . . . We stand alone in this struggle. Please join and support us.” Everywhere they went, people would shout “Keep on going!” and “We’re with you!”
    She was approached by rival cartel members who said they could deal with Sergio if she wanted. Some of her family were tempted—but Marisela refused. She believed in justice, not violence.
    She went to interview everybody who had ever known Sergio, to beg them for information—and finally, somebody gave her an address in Fresno, a city nine hundred miles away.
    Almost as soon as she arrived on the block, somebody fired bullets into the air, to scare her off. She refused to run. She rented a house nearby, and then—one day—she saw him, in the street, just as she had expected.
    She was perfectly still. She didn’t want him dead; she wanted him brought to justice.
    Years after this, in a shack in Juárez, I asked her best friend Bertha Alicia Garcia—weren’t you afraid? “We are always afraid,” she said, “but sometimes, the love of your children is stronger than fear itself.”
    Marisela called the police and told them everything. They sent three cops, who arrived noisily at the front of the house—while Sergio escaped out the back.
    They let him get away. Again.
    Was this incompetence? Corruption? Fear?
    Marisela tried to follow his trail, asking questions in the surrounding small towns, but this area was totally controlled by the Zetas, and they don’t like people asking questions. So Marisela decided to walk from Juárez to Mexico City—a journey of more than a thousand miles—to beg the president himself to act. In terms of distance, this is like walking from Paris to Kosovo, or from Los Angeles to Denver. It was the last option she had left.
    So Marisela began her long march through the desert. In this heat, animals burrow into the ground and only come out at sunset. Marisela walked through it all, across sand dunes, and mountains, and dust storms. She had spent her life savings by now. Some days she and the other mothers marching with her went hungry; some days they ate only bread smeared with mayonnaise. They slept where they could. Sometimes people let them into their homes, or allowed them to lie down in their trucks.
    The heat on these roads 5 is so intense that it looks as though the tarmac in front of you has melted into shimmering black pools. The dust and the glare were so bad that her son Juan’s eyes became infected, and for two days he was blind; he walked holding his mother’s shoulder.
    It was as if she thought she could outpace her grief. Everybody in the country was watching and asking—If a nurse with no resources and no money can find a murderer, how come the police can’t find him, with everything they’ve got? What is happening to our country?
    When after three months of walking she made it to Mexico City, President Calderon refused to see her. In the video clips from this time, you can see her face becoming slowly misshapen by grief.
    That is when Marisela heard rumors that started to make it possible to make sense of this whole story. Sergio, she was told, is a Zeta. That is why the police would not touch him. That is why he kept escaping. When Marisela got her final lead on where Sergio was, the police were finally honest with her. “If he’s with the Zetas, we’re not going to be able to do anything, because they run the state,” they told her. “If we do a bust, it’s because they allow us to do it. We don’t bust