D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
August 2009
Looking for Refuge
For journalists and bureaucrats alike, Mexico's drug war has long tentacles.
I ran into someone in Palomas a couple months ago who had lived there a few years ago, moved away, and then moved back again. This man had a bit of a background in journalism, and said he knew Emilio Gutierrez back then. He even drove him someplace once for some reason.
Emilio Gutierrez is the journalist in Ascension, an hour south of the border, who was threatened by the army and fled with his son to the US on June 16, 2008. He exited Mexico at the border crossing in the solitary wide-open spaces of Antelope Wells. He was straightforward about his situation and asked for political asylum right then.
The Border Patrol brought him to a detention center in El Paso, where Gutierrez stayed until they suddenly released him in February this year. His son was released earlier to stay with friends.
I called Emilio's lawyer in February to request an interview with Emilio for Desert Exposure, but never got a callback. But there's an article about him in the July Mother Jones that probably could not be surpassed anyway. Anyone interested should read that story. It's practically local news.
What floors me the most in the article is that a general and a colonel in charge of the state of Chihuahua telephoned Gutierrez in February 2005 and asked him to meet them in front of the Miami Hotel ("or we'll come looking for you," they said). The hotel is a relatively upscale place near the center of Ascension.
The officers were accompanied by scores of soldiers and two vans with elite bodyguards in them, completely exposed to gazes of passersby.
Why the officers didn't ask to meet him at the local army barracks, or in a room at the hotel, I don't know. Or why they brought so many soldiers. It's also hard to fathom why Gutierrez didn't flee right afterwards. Instead, it took a couple more incidents and three more years to make him decide to split.
The army called for him because he'd written a brief article for El Diario de Juarez about an incident where soldiers had stolen money and jewels from customers in a seedy hotel-restaurant. He'd also written about two other similar incidents.
The general spat out lurid threats studded with foul language, telling him not to write any more about such things. Gutierrez left them feeling stunned and frightened.
Gutierrez, his son, and their El Paso immigration lawyer are now all living in hiding.
I admit I didn't know that this level of army violence existed in Northern Mexico. I knew one young man in a pharmacy who used to tell me that drunken soldiers would sometimes kill people in Palomas, but it wasn't intentional violence.
Gutierrez is requesting political asylum in the United States, but it's not clear where he could find any safe place. The drug cartels are relentless and sophisticated. Another Mexican journalist who was granted asylum in Canada was nervous even giving an interview in a Toronto hotel.
Almost 900 Mexicans applied for asylum between January and April this year, with very little chance of success. The problem is that the categories listed in the Refugee Act of 1980 don't fit the drug war easily. The Act provides for protection from persecution due to "race, religion, nationality, political opinion or social group."
Lawyers are trying to stretch the "social group" category to include those in a common profession, like businessmen, lawyers, journalists and policemen, who have all been targeted by cartel gunmen.
At least one lawyer in Seattle has used the UN Convention Against Torture, which normally applies only to persecution by governments. The lawyer argued that cartel members had taken over the local government in the border town of Matamoros, so they were the de facto government, and won the case.
Emilio Gutierrez's case stands out with clarity as one that deserves support through letters or phone calls to congressmen.
A few weeks ago I went to talk to a bureaucrat in Palomas whom I'd spoken to last year. I had been impressed by some honest outbursts of feeling from him — for example, when he admitted, "Yes, I'm afraid sometimes!," and when, in a very feet-on-the ground way, he said that, if he were ever threatened, he'd pack up his bags to leave and take his family with him.
So I hoped I might talk to him again and get an inside story or some background material on what was going on in Palomas and in Mexico as a whole.
I sat with my notebook and asked a few questions I'd written down, but he appeared less willing than before to open up. His answers seemed contradictory at times. For some basic facts he said I'd have to go to Juarez and do some research.
I felt as if my questions were bouncing back at me unanswered, and my Spanish started feeling wobbly and inadequate.
An awkward silence loomed as he walked me to the door. But when I turned to say good-by, he flattened his face with a look that said that there were lots of things he couldn't say to me, for safety's sake and for his job's sake (if I can judge people's unspoken messages at all well).
I don't know what's going to happen to Palomas. Maybe it will turn into a virtual ghost town in a few years. There may be guided tours pointing out houses of former cartel members with their elaborate white wrought-iron fences, the place where a dealer had a drive-up business to sell drugs, and the spot where one narco escaped the police by helicopter.
But then again maybe the US economy will rebound a bit and the Japanese car parts maquiladora will start up again in January, on a small scale, and American customers may start trickling back to the dentists and pharmacists. Things could go either way.
Next year will be 2010, the centennial of the Mexican Revolution and bicentennial of their War of Independence. There's been a kind of mystical speculation as to whether there'll be another revolution.
I know I write a lot about Maria Lopez, who distributes food in Palomas, but she said something interesting the last time I saw her. Her thought was that there might be a revolution of hungry people stealing food. In Guanajuato and in a few other places in Mexico, poor people living near train tracks this year have stolen corn and other grains off train cars with sacks, shawls and pocket books.
I'm afraid 2010 will bring mainly the same old drug war, with maybe a sub-war involving food bandits. The story will be about plain misery, unfortunately, minus the ideals most revolutions have.
Contributions for people in Palomas can be sent to Maria Lopez/DIF,
c/o Desert Exposure, PO Box 191, Silver City, NM 88062.