D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April 2010
Toads and Terror
Mexico's ghosts from the past have been revived.
I know a pistachio farmer in Deming, Bill, whose grandfather bought a gold mine in Mexico (Chihuahua, he thinks) that hadn't been worked since before 1800. Old mud in the mine had "solidified, almost like rock." They dynamited it and when they shoveled the debris they found a bunch of dried-up toads left over. A workman tossed the little toad cadavers into a bucket of water and they miraculously came to life again.
Bill's grandfather told the story over and over to his family, amazed to think the toads could have been a couple hundred years old.
Mexico's ghosts from the past, cadavers all caked in mud and dust, have been revived. The mutilations and torture and massacres of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, and the War of Independence of 1810, have been replicated in the streets of Juarez and all over the map of Mexico. I never expected it to happen.
The state of siege continues. Numbers of murders have gone down in Juarez, from a high point of 316 in August to possibly 200 in March. But other states are crumbling further into a sickening chaos.
In early March the brutality reached an unbelievable level in Reynosa and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, just over the south Texas border. The Gulf cartel and its monster offspring, the Zetas, are slugging it out there openly. Press coverage has been savagely blacked out. Eight journalists there were kidnapped. Two Milenio reporters were returned injured and didn't want to talk about it, another reporter was found dead, and the other five are still missing. Outsiders have no idea yet what the total numbers of killings are.
The raw terror in Reynosa was exposed in a column in the newspaper El Universal by a respected journalist and university professor: "I feel like I'm on a distant island, where no one knows what is going on nor what we have to live through here. PLEASE HELP US!" Her translator comments online: "This style is unusual for her daily column in El Universal."
The US of course fixated on the triple murder on March 13 of two American consulate workers and the Mexican husband of another. But all Mexican border states and Durango have State Department warnings out at this moment because of the increase in crime.
Some people in Deming fear the violence will spill over the border. One friend told me she'd heard a rumor that some gang member in Deming had a big cache of guns hidden. She thought I was trying too hard to see the bright side of things.
I don't think I do. I think what's going on in Mexico represents incredible extremes of evil.
In October, when Mayor Estanislao Garcia of Palomas was assassinated, I shouted in the passion of the moment: "Latin Americans, when are you going to get your heads out of your asses, once and for all? I've already been through all this!" I was in shock.
What I meant by "all this" is things that happened to me when I was in Guatemala in the 1980s. It was at a time of great violence that left an indelible mark on me.
There's no room left for doubt in my mind any more that the kind of violence that's going on is what you'd call "cultural." This is despite the way we chuckled in the Guatemala solidarity group I was part of when we talked about the State Department using the word to describe the violence in Guatemala.
The resemblance between the kind of violence going on in Juarez now and in Guatemala in the 1980s is striking, even down to some of the details — the narco-mantas of today are like the smaller messages left with mutilated bodies in Guatemala. In both cases there was a penchant for kidnappings and grotesque mutilations — hands cut off and placed on peoples' chests, messages carved in flesh.
It's not just the armies and police doing things like this in Mexico, it's the chusma (the rabble), too. It doesn't make me feel very comfortable, after spending a lot of thought and effort defending the poor.
If you know anything about Mexican history, you know that almost all the leaders of their revolutions have been executed, some even by the church. You also know the Aztec and Mayan religions were full of human sacrifice and blood.
In February the Conference of Mexican Bishops in Guanajuato announced the happy news that Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the father of the Mexican independence movement in 1810, was not really excommunicated after all. You sense they still squirm over the fact he was executed by the Catholic Church's own Inquisition and the military in 1811, in Chihuahua City.
Spaniards in Mexico in the mid-1500s saw with their own eyes young Aztec women sacrificed amid ritual dancers with seashell anklets clinking. It wasn't really all that long ago.
In the US, where neither narco-mantas or kidnappings are in style, we have a special knack for backing up this kind of behavior. We're deeply involved in the planning and funding of the drug war and in the training of some Mexican soldiers who later became narco-soldiers, and Mexicans are aware of this.
Juarez is now galvanized for change, especially since the Villas de Salvarcar massacre of 15 people on Jan. 30. I love the university students with their arms locked, slouchy knit caps, and kerchiefs that hide their faces, marching in the streets to protest Caldern's useless, brutal army. And the incredible nerve of Luz Maria Davila, mother of two slain teenagers in Salvarcar, who turned her back on President Caldern in a large auditorium and demanded action, not words, from him. She demanded that he leave.
Mexico needs everything: investment, investigations, education, introspection, and action. I read in a Milenio magazine from last year that indoor basketball courts were being built in Michoacan where teenagers can play at night safely. A Spanish instructor I had in Guatemala liked the idea of the "human relations" course he was taking. Palomas and other towns have a program that gives out the equivalent of GED. certificates in response to the violence. El Diario de Juarez reported full churches on Ash Wednesday. Maybe even sacrifice of lives is requisite. Everything
Lots of Mexicans are already doing what needs to be done, with more courage and commitment than I have. They don't need me to tell them anything.
The end isn't close or even foreseeable, but someday they'll undo all the violence, shake it off, forget about it, drop it, leave it all.
Every comatose toad will be dug up and thrown away. But not for a while.
To help the people of Palomas, you can send a tax-deductible donation to Our Lady of Palomas/Hunger Project, POB 622, Columbus, NM 88029.
Borderlines columnist Marjorie Lilly lives in Deming.