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CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Returning to the soccer stadium here, I feel like an archaeologist on a dig. Fine brown sand dusts the stadium's concrete steps and concourses. Pigeons roost in the rafters, Pollocking plastic bucket seats that spell out "Indios," the name of the team that no longer plays here, that no longer even exists. Worshiped in their time, the Indios lie dead, entombed in Mexican memories like Moctezuma himself.
In 2010, soccer fans thronged to cheer their Indios, who had been an unlikely success story in deadly Ciudad Juárez in 2008. More Photos »
By ROBERT ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 9, 2012
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Slide Show The Indios, Once the Pride of Ciudad Juárez
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On an early spring afternoon, a torn advertising banner flaps in the wind. A rectangle of grass sits netless and unlined, the groundskeeper let go when the team folded in December.
I climb up to Benito Juárez Olympic Stadium's one luxury box, my sneakers slipping in the dust. The door to the box is unlocked, and the room has been looted. Gone is the cooler that chilled beers and sodas on game days. No glassware remains in the bar — everything of value has been hustled away. Or almost everything.
On one wall still hangs an artifact of some importance. It is a framed photograph of Tomás Campos, an Indios defender I got to know during the season I followed the team. In the photograph, Campos lifts over his head a silver trophy that indicates the Indios had just won a spot in the Primera, Mexico's major soccer league. I know that the photograph was taken in 2008, after a championship game in León. And that the trophy ceremony was the start of the Indios' unlikely moment in the sun.
The improbable miracle run may be the dominant story line in sports. The underdog who wins, the mutt who knocks a pedigreed athlete off the podium. There was Butler coming within a rim shot of a national basketball championship. Of course there was the United States Olympic hockey team icing the Russians in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Here on the border with El Paso, it was a squad of castoffs and career minor leaguers who climbed into the top echelon of Mexican soccer as its city was descending into horrific violence. On the day Campos lifted that trophy in León, thousands of fans in Juárez spilled into the streets to celebrate their team's triumph, defying a warning to stay indoors issued by one of the drug cartels fighting for control of the city, a strategic port of entry into the lucrative United States market.
The Indios' miracle run captivated much of the world. ESPN publicized it, as did newspapers and television outlets in the United States, England, Spain, Argentina and Asia.
This plucky soccer team, it was reported, gave hope to a depressed city, which is another story line common in sports. Think of the New Orleans Saints winning the 2010 Super Bowl after Hurricane Katrina or Japan winning the Women's World Cup last year soon after the tsunami. In 2008, the year the Indios joined the Primera, 1,600 people were murdered in Juárez. The next year, the death toll rose to 2,700, out of a remaining population of maybe a million.
"Indios was the only positive thing about the city," said the former goalie Alonzo Jiménez, a Juárez native. "Indios brought families together, put a smile on many people's faces and made them forget about their problems even though it was only 90 minutes a week."
A Painful Collapse
By the time I moved here, the Indios were no longer quite so positive, or at least they were no longer a Cinderella story. The team was seriously struggling at the top level and appeared doomed to descend back to the minor leagues from which it had so gloriously escaped.
I embedded with the Indios for the spring season of 2010, which turned out to be their last in the Primera. As I followed every home game and practice, and as I traveled with the players to games in Guadalajara, Cancún, Puebla and San Luis Potosí, I watched the team lose and lose. Ultimately the Indios streaked to 29 games without a win, making them officially the worst team ever to play in the Primera.
At first, I was bummed by all the failure — can you guys please get back to your miraculous ways? But as I learned more about Juárez, I recognized in the Indios' struggles a metaphor for the city at large. Things were bad on the border and getting worse. I found two dead bodies in the drive-through lane of a convenience store. A decapitated torso hung from a fence near my local burrito joint. As many as 25 Juarenses were being murdered in a single night. That year, according to government statistics, the body count topped out at 3,951 dead.
I moved back to the United States after a car bomb exploded way too close to a bar where I was watching a game on television. The Indios accepted assignment back in the minors.
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Robert Andrew Powell is the author of the new book "This Love Is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juárez."
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