HOUSE OF DEATH

A Dozen Men Were Tortured, Killed And Buried In A Small House In
Juarez. Three Years Later, The U.S. Government Is Still Trying To
Cover Up What Happened.

There is one chair in the room, and they sit him in it. He pulls out
his wallet. He's looking for a number. A phone number, an address.
That is why he is here. Fernando the lawyer. Fernando the drug
trafficker. He's got a load of marijuana, and they want it.

Fernando thinks he's in the company of friends. He thinks this man
standing in front of him, this Lalo, is going to deliver the
marijuana for him to New York. That's what the numbers are for. They
are contacts. They are the people Lalo will call, the people who are
waiting for the load. But this little room with the blinds drawn and
the light streaming in from the kitchen window, this is a trap.

Fernando doesn't know that two members of the Chihuahua State Police
are here in this house, hiding. He doesn't know that they are here to kill him.

It is August and these white walls are baking. Outside, a thick layer
of dust and smoke hangs over Juarez. It is from the burning garbage
in the slums and the steaming factories down here in the valley and
the smelters belching their chemicals down along the highway.

Someone asks Fernando for some candy, which is narco slang for
personal-use cocaine, and he says, "Of course." And then suddenly,
while Fernando's got his head down, one of the cops emerges from the
back. Fernando doesn't see him coming, doesn't notice the gun until
it is pressed hard up against his face. "No!" he screams. "Why?
Please don't kill me."

There had been some talk of using a gun, but they decided it would be
too loud. They are in a quiet middle-class neighborhood, not far from
a Radisson hotel, and someone would hear the pop of the gun. But he's
screaming now, and they've got to shut him up. The other cop comes
across the room in a flash and begins frantically wrapping the tape
around Fernando's mouth, trying to stifle the screams. Around and
around the tape goes. Now Fernando is fighting with all he's got.
He's kicking and his arms are flailing wildly. So they bring him hard
to the floor and he's thrashing about and they are having a hard time
holding him down, and Lalo, with his little mustache and his double
chin, he's just standing there, leaning against the television stand.
One of them looks up at Lalo with a glare that suggests he better get
down there and help. So Lalo does what he can to keep Fernando's legs
still while one of the cops wraps an extension cord around Fernando's
neck. He's pulling it tight, and the veins in Fernando's neck are
bulging and Fernando's kicking for his life and the cord snaps.

"What now?" the cop asks. Lalo looks around the room and notices a
plastic bag. The cop grabs it and pulls it over Fernando's head. And
then they stand and they watch Fernando kick and twitch and gasp,
until finally, he's lying there motionless and someone says, "Are you
sure he's dead?"

So one of the cops takes a shovel and whacks Fernando in the back of
the neck, and Lalo hears something snap. Maybe they broke his neck.
It doesn't matter; he is dead.

They pick him up and hide him under a staircase. They will bury him
in the backyard later that night.

Lalo crosses the street and finds Santillan at the little convenience
store on the corner. Santillan, known to U.S. intelligence as El
Ingeniero, is one of the top bosses in the Juarez cartel. He has
thinning dark hair and a mustache. When Lalo first met him down in
Guadalajara, he dressed like a cowboy, but now he is a big shot, and
he wears a Rolex with diamonds.

Lalo tells him it is done. Fernando, Santillan's childhood friend, is
dead. They've got his load of marijuana.

Santillan is pleased. He tells Lalo he is now No. 4 in the Juarez
cartel. He takes him to the Big Brother House, which is only for
high-ranking members of the cartel. Here, you can have anything you
want, Lalo is told. Groceries, beer, women, whatever. Soon, you will
meet Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the boss of the cartel.

That evening, Lalo crosses the border into El Paso and tells his
handlers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement what he has seen.
They listen to a recording he made of the murder, and they transcribe
it. They write memos detailing everything Lalo saw, and eventually,
these memos will find their way to Washington.

But they do not arrest him for his part in the murder, or deactivate
him as an informant, or prepare to arrest Santillan, their target.
Instead, they continue with their investigation, and when all is said
and done, there will be 11 more bodies buried in the backyard.

The story of what happened at the House of Death, dubbed as such by
the online publication Narco News, has been told in bits and pieces
since The Dallas Morning News first broke it three years ago, but the
complete story has never been told, at least not by the mainstream press.

In fact, major American media have mostly ignored the story, perhaps
because it happened on the other side of the border. But this is more
than a border story. This is a story that goes all the way to Washington.

"This is a big deal, a very big deal because of the scope and
duration of the activity. For six months, you had members of the U.S.
government who knew that a person on their payroll was engaging in
murder, and they did nothing to stop it," says Bill Weaver, a
University of Texas at El Paso law professor who has closely followed
the case. "As much as they deny it, they had prior knowledge."