D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February 2010
What the Cranes Don't See
Beyond the bird's eye view of the troubled border region.
I'm not sure, but I think there are more Sandhill cranes around my house this winter than ever before. There are hundreds and hundreds of them.
They've been bedding down for the night a half-mile from my house and then ascending into the sky about noon. They fly around and reconnoiter while they decide where to go for the afternoon (as if they don't know they are going northeast, as they always do).
Sometimes they hover right over my house a hundred feet up. They circle higher and higher, appearing and disappearing.
They form line after line of letters of movable type. Individuals break off and then form a whole sentence again. Separate groups of them circulate clockwise and counter-clockwise above me, bright stones in a kaleidoscope. Their trills are almost what you'd call deafening.
I sometimes think they're lucky not to know what's going on down here in this populated space about six feet from the ground, called human life.
There's a lot going on in Luna County these days that's not getting reported. Many Mexicans living here have relatives in trouble down in Mexico.
A businessman in Deming had a relative kidnapped in Palomas and another relative paid the ransom to get him back. "He paid a lot," this man said. He knows of a few other similar kidnappings. In all the cases he's aware of, the kidnapped people were returned.
A young Mormon woman working at another business said her father running their farm near Nuevo Casas Grandes had been threatened. She laughed blithely that her father was "huge" and probably scared the criminal off. Her mother and brother are in Las Cruces now.
The details of these stories have to be muffled to protect the people involved.
Some businesses are doing OK in Deming despite the recession, but a lot of them are running at a very slow pace. Some of the hotels almost have the solemnity of museums.
Lots of Mexican immigrants in the area have been put out of construction and mining jobs by the recession and put back in the fields that are overcrowded now, meaning pickers get paid less.
The harvesting of red chile is becoming more and more mechanized due to competition from China and India. Many pickers are working fewer months than ever.
Rafael Hidalgo, hanging out at the Snappy Mart, said he picked chile only through September, after topping onions, and didn't qualify for unemployment because his work days didn't add up. He's living with a girlfriend, so he's not sleeping outside.
Across the border, the estimates of violence in Palomas are contradictory, but there may be hope in the statement by Martin Avila of the Attorney General's office that there were five homicides reported to him in 2009 and eight kidnappings. I'd guess that only about a quarter of the real number were reported to him. But over 40 were reported in 2008.
The violence in Mexico is mostly foot soldiers of the various cartels knocking each other off.
But there are assassinations of human-rights defenders, ecologists and journalists, too. I think some assassins, military or civilian, see this violent time as a window of opportunity to get rid of certain people.
El Universal in Mexico City announced that 12 journalists were killed in 2009, including three in Chihuahua and four in Durango.
Mariano Abarca, who protested pollution from mines in Chiapas, was killed on Dec. 1. Felipe Arreaga Sanchez, a forest defender in Guerrero, was hit by a drunk driver on Sept. 16, Independence Day in Mexico, almost four years to the day after being released from a prison sentence for his activism.
An organizer of street vendors in Juarez named Geminis Ochoa was gunned down in broad daylight in the center of Juarez on July 2. The dreadlocked activist had been put in jail a few times for assault, but had a kind of half-cocked idealism that was rather sweet.
Paz Rodriguez Ortiz was gunned down on Oct. 8 in Nuevo Casas Grandes, and his wife Alicia Salaiz was kidnapped a month later, in early November. For 17 years they ran a human rights organization in Casas Grandes that helped families of disappeared people in towns including Palomas.
Josefina Reyes Salazar was shot and killed in Juarez on Jan. 3, just a little into this year. She had been an activist in different causes for 20 years, and at this time was opposing the military presence in Juarez and calling for investigations.
Esther Chavez, leader of the anti-femicide movement in Juarez, slipped away from this life on Christmas Day. Her colleague Irma Campos died in the middle of a march on Juarez in November. These women weren't murdered; it seems they died of broken hearts over the out-of-control slaughter.
The deaths of these people are like falling leaves of a generation of activists who may not be replaced for a while.
In the past few years the human rights activism in Argentina and Chile has been a little embarrassing to me. It seemed a waste of time to keep on slugging away at the human rights abusers of the dirty wars after so many years.
But now I'm thinking yes. Someone's got to confront the awful impunity for murderers in Latin America. It has to stop.
People in Palomas agree that hunger there is worse this year than last.
I stopped by to visit a friend in Palomas who was living in what might be called a hovel. She has more education than most people there, and we've discussed books sometimes--novels by Alejo Carpentier and Laura Restrepo.
She's living with a boyfriend and his family and can't find a job. She's even worked as a prostitute for a while. When I came there wasn't really any food to speak of in the house. She didn't look healthy.
After talking to her and sizing up the situation, I went out and bought a couple days' food for the family--beans, eggs, chorizo, bananas.
I think I've gotten beyond the feeling of aren't-I-amazingly-unselfish-to-buy-this-stuff and hearing symphonic music commemorating my good deed. It wasn't very much, anyway.
But I felt distinctly that by buying this food, I was feeding myself. Buying food for hungry people knits you up inside.
I would have good arguments for not buying a thing for this family. My teeth need fixing, and my house needs countless repairs.
But by feeding someone who needs it, there's an exact replication of benefits on both sides of the equation. The benefits happen in the same degree and in the same elaborate shape, like two wings sprouting on either side of a spinal column. Your reward shall be on earth. I don't know about heaven.
The suffering in Haiti is apocalyptic. I'm sure a lot of people are giving money to that country. But Palomas is on our doorstep, and it's personal. I just can't dwell on Haiti.
As always, every donation is appreciated. Contributions to help fight hunger in Palomas can be sent to: Maria Lopez/DIF, c/o Desert Exposure, PO Box 191, Silver City, NM 88062.
Borderlines columnist Marjorie Lilly lives in Deming.