House of Death

"It was going to be business as usual, and this whole thing was going to be swept under the rug. And Sandy, I think, made a conscious decision. When he wrote that memo he knew he was putting his career on the line, but he didn't want this thing to go away."

The U.S. Attorney's Office in El Paso did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story; nor did the ICE office in El Paso or the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Antonio. A spokeswoman for DEA administrator Karen Tandy said the agency would have no comment.

The definitive account of what happened at the House of Death may be the report compiled by the Joint Assessment Team, which conducted 44 interviews of U.S. Department of Justice personnel after the House of Death was discovered. To date, the Department of Justice has refused to release this report.

One can speculate, however, that some of the agents who were aware of what was happening at the House of Death allowed it to continue, believing that the end would justify the means. That argument could still be made. Everyone who died at the House of Death was at one time or another involved in drug trafficking. Because of Lalo, Santillan, the boss of the cartel in Juarez, was taken down. Others went into hiding, and the cartel suffered a serious blow. It hasn't been the same since.

Still, none of the killings after the death of Fernando Reyes had to happen, Gonzalez says. Santillan could have been lured to El Paso and arrested after that murder. Why did they wait nine more months to arrest him?

In sworn affidavits, Lalo's handler at ICE, Raul Bencomo; his supervisor, Curtis Compton; and the agent in charge of the El Paso office, Giovanni Gaudioso, all testified that they didn't know about any of the murders that occurred after the first one. Also in a sworn affidavit, Juanita Fielden of the U.S. Attorney's Office in El Paso said she began preparing an indictment against Santillan in November 2003 and that, from that moment, preparations were being made to arrest him.

Gonzalez has problems with this explanation.

"So through August and September and October and almost all of November, they were planning and gathering stuff for this?" Gonzalez says. "See, I don't think so, you know why? Because they didn't indict him for murder, number one. And the dope case they indicted him for had been done months before. So how long does it take them to put a routine case together?"

Gonzalez thinks ICE delayed arresting Santillan because they wanted to keep using Lalo in another case involving a cigarette smuggler out of New Mexico. According to what Gonzalez has heard, ICE had been chasing the suspect for some time and didn't have enough to take him down. So they brought Lalo in with hopes that he could dirty up the smuggler by convincing him to haul cocaine.

"Why was this allowed to go on? That's the question that needs to be asked by a congressional committee or a special prosecutor," Gonzalez says. "These guys have to answer that question. Because there is no good answer. Do you say, 'Well, we're working on this big case and we're trying to penetrate the organization?' The organization's already been penetrated. You've got a top lieutenant and a good dope case and a murder. What more do you want?"

To date, Gonzalez and Weaver have met twice with U.S. Senate staffers, requesting a congressional hearing to look into the matter. So far they have been ignored.

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It is February 2007. Three years have passed since the House of Death was first discovered. Today, the house is abandoned. In place of a doorknob, there is a strand of rusted wire running through an empty hole.

They say the cartel still watches the house, that everywhere you go in Juarez there are little shopkeepers and flower vendors who are paid to be the eyes and ears of the cartel. But others say these are just stories. Yes, Juarez is dangerous, they say, but the violence is contained in the drug world, just like in any other big city.

So yes, it would be fine to go to this house, they tell you. No one is watching it anymore. Just don't stay too long.

On this crisp winter morning, the house is still. The door creaks open easily. The living room where Fernando was killed is covered in dirt and shattered glass. In the kitchen, the clothing of some of the victims remains, as do dusty bags of concrete and lime. The concrete was part of an unfinished plan to cover the backyard in cement so that the bodies would never be discovered.

To this day, the death of one of the men killed here remains a mystery. It is the death of Luis Padilla, the El Paso diesel mechanic who disappeared from his house in January 2004.

So far, every media report that has touched on Padilla's story has concluded that he was an innocent bystander, that he had nothing to do with the drug war. But this is not true.