D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
November
2008
Day of the Dead
The people of Palomas have a "heart glow" that the drug dealers and killers can't take away.
A couple months ago in Palomas I went checking at various levels of law-enforcement for information about the drug scene, and ended up speaking with some of the Policia Ministerial, the state police investigators.
This was in the summer, in the midst of the lull in violence that started in May.
Their offices were in a rented private home, a pretty affluent-looking one. This may sound frivolous, but it was an interesting cross-cultural experience.
The director, Ricardo Rubalcaba, let me in, and we walked down a hall where on either side there were doors through which you could see expensive-looking bedsteads. The floor and walls were of white faux marble and there were elegant upholstered sofas against the walls with spindly legs and carved wood. For a second or two I thought it might be a high-class house of prostitution.
But it was a real police office. These investigators lived and slept in the house, and the director's office was at the end of the hall.
I felt suspicious of Mexican police because you hear so many are corrupt. But when we hunkered down to talk I found that I respected them. It was nice to talk to educated people, and they seemed to be surprisingly open about what they knew. They were also in risk of their lives, which is not something to sniff at.
Rubalcaba didn't seem to think the lull in the violence was significant. In fact, I've talked with law-enforcement agents on both sides of the border, and not one thought the summer's peace was a hopeful sign. Another agent at the office in Palomas even saw it as a "dangerous tranquility." He thought it gave the narcos a chance to regroup and strengthen themselves.
Palomas passed the summer with almost no violence. From mid-May I was hopeful that the town would recuperate from the devastation of the dozens of murders in the spring.
Then, in early October I went to visit my friend Mayra in Deming. She'd just been down to visit her father in Palomas and had heard about another levanton, or kidnapping, that had happened. Someone had given her a little scrap of paper with the names of eight people who'd been dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night. I couldn't quite grasp it at first.
Mayra said some people had heard women weeping in the streets. Some of the families of the disappeared were threatened by the perpetrators and fled town.
I then went to visit Amalia, another farmworker friend, who lived nearby. She'd also heard about the disappearances, but thought there were 14. What apparently happened was that the next morning about five more people were kidnapped, and she was combining the figures. It's still not clear what the exact numbers were.
Then on Tuesday the 21st I drove to Palomas, and I heard from a social worker, Maria, the grisliest of all stories. In Ascension, the town an hour south of Palomas, four human heads had been delivered to the local police station in an ice chest.
I'm sure the murderers get a lurid satisfaction from the publicity given to these crimes, so I'm not going to give details for people to feed on. I wouldn't be surprised if the perpetrators thought of this as a kind of sick joke for the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) on Nov. 2.
I don't know anything about the teeth-gnashing or tears going on within the homes in Palomas. I'm sure there were many. The volunteer women of DIF, a social-service organization, did not want to sell their burritos in the central plaza as they usually do, because they were afraid of getting caught in the middle of some battle.
But a lot of people are still living life as normally as possible. These killings truly almost always occur in the madrugada (from about 1-3 a.m.), and the drug dealers themselves are really almost the only people killed, people tell me.
There are differences of opinion and perspectives in town.
A guy at one of the farmacias, with his arms crossed, refused to show me the newspaper sitting on a shelf with the article about the severed heads. He told me straight out he didn't want me to write about this stuff. It's death to businesses.
At Del Rio, the manager I usually talk to said, "Esta cosa es mala, mala, mala." ("This thing is bad, bad, bad.") But he said I should write about it.
I'm not writing this in some kind of chic despair. I'm writing it very reluctantly. At this moment there seems to be no hope or direction for Palomas to go in. Residents are still leaving town.
There are people who've traveled a lot, or who just know Palomas, for whom it's not a big deal to cross the border. They know they have as much chance of being hit by a stray bullet as they have of winning the Mega Millions lottery. Other people are just not the type to cross the border under these conditions.
I think anyone who is the type should do their business in Palomas as usual, whether it's buying Christmas presents or getting their teeth fixed. I go there and hardly think about the violence.
Shopping there would benefit not only you, with the low prices, but the people who clean the houses of the business owners or professionals or repair their cars. There's a ripple effect.
A few years ago I saw the cemetery in Palomas right after the Dia de los Muertos. There were coronas (wreathes), hearts, bouquets and crosses made of fake flowers arranged on individual gravesites or in lavishly decorated family pantheons, glowing in hot pink, sunny yellow, fuschia, lavender, sky blue and green as if illuminated from within. Flames of life and affection bloomed everywhere.
If I know anything about Mexican culture, I know this heart glow is something that's not going to go away. It will persist like a weed, no matter how black the hearts of the drug dealers are.
Maria Lopez told me a few days ago that Rita from Columbus helped her feed five families who hadn't eaten in three days.
Unlike her volunteers in DIF, Maria says she's not afraid to go around at night to bring food to people who need it. She says that because she's doing a good thing, God is taking care of her. "What I'm afraid of," she says, "is that a child will die because I didn't get to him on time."
Donations to DIF (see last month's column) are still very important, and may be sent payable to Maria Lopez/DIF in care of Desert Exposure, PO Box 191, Silver City, NM 88062.
Borderlines columnist Marjorie Lilly lives in Deming.