D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February 2012
Divided Characters
Pancho Villa and Juarez' controversial top cop.
I think Villa is more alive now than he was when he roamed this part of the world during the Mexican Revolution.
His image is stamped in tourist leaflets, newspapers, in stores in Palomas, and in Columbus where there's a state park named after him.
His face in photos — rounded like the earthenware mugs you buy on the streets of Palomas — is as vivid and clear-cut as it ever was. I feel as if I know him.
It may have been an especially vivid face, as this quote from Friedrich Katz's book The Life and Times of Pancho Villa describes: "He has the most remarkable pair of prominent brown eyes I have ever seen. They seem to look through you, he talks with them, and all of his expressions are heralded and dominated by them first." This was written by an American doctor who knew him well.
When I first moved here 16 years ago, my main frame of reference for Latin American politics was Guatemala of the 1980s. Pancho Villa had a reputation for brutality, and I shied away from reading anything about him. To me he wasn't any different from a Guatemalan general.
But there's a lot to like and respect in Pancho Villa.
In 1914, before the raid on Columbus, reporters in Deming wrote cheerfully about Villa's visit to the Harvey House, where he ate ice cream while they scribbled notes.
He had an engaging smile and sounded like a college graduate in the many letters he wrote, though he had no formal education.
He had a genuine heart for the poor, and would send a butchered steer to a town that was starving. Writer John Reed, who knew Villa, said he would see some kids in the street and say, "Let's put a school there."
He was the Mexican everyman. He grew up as a poor sharecropper on an hacienda in Durango, but he grew to be a giant on the world scene.
I've seen people that look like him among farmworkers in Deming. I've sat across from him in a wobbly chair with no back that was graciously offered me by a worker. I can feel his magnanimous handshake.
But Villa was capable of enormous cruelty, to the point of insanity.
To me the worst example of this is when in the town of Camargo, Chihuahua, he shot point-blank a woman who was pleading for her husband's life. He then killed a total of 90 other women soldaderas who were supporting his enemy Carranza, because he feared they might complain about this incident. For that alone he could have had a multiple-lifetime jail sentence.
Juarez's murder toll of 2,086 last year represented a drop of about 40% from what it was in 2010, when it was the highest ever — 3,622. But the rate still is almost seven times higher than it was in 2007, when only 320 people were killed.
Police Chief Julian Leyzaola is a name associated with the decline, but absolutely no one agrees about whether he's responsible for it.
He's controversial. He's been linked with human rights abuses since he was the police chief in Tijuana, but there's also a site on Facebook called "Become a Fan of Julian Leyzaola."
In November, according to witnesses, a young man named Jorge Padilla was beaten to death by Leyzaola, who then ordered that the body be dumped by a highway. The mother of the man went to the attorney general's office on Jan. 3 to lodge a complaint. Less than a week later, four men came to her house and machine-gunned two of her other sons, aged 14 and 20, and then set the house on fire.
The mother has stopped pursuing the case so her remaining five children won't be killed. "The police to me are like an epidemic," she said.
Shohn Huckabee of El Paso, released in early December after being in prison in Juarez for two years on trumped-up drug charges, said he witnessed Leyzaola beating several prisoners with a 2x4 board during a prison riot last July.
Some people on the online border news service I subscribe to think Leyzaola couldn't possibly be a force for improving the situation in Juarez because of the abuses he's apparently committed. But I'm not at all sure that's the way things work.
I don't know who's responsible for the drop in numbers. It could have been a joint effort by law enforcement, or it could even have been a pact between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels, as some suggest.
But the atrocities Leyzaola or others may have committed, as outrageous as they are, don't, unfortunately, rule out the possibility that he could actually be helping rein in the power of the cartels at the same time.
The fact is that people are made up of a complicated bundle of motives and qualities that are in many cases amazingly contradictory. Pancho Villa is a perfect example of this.
It's reported that Leyzaola started a project in November whereby anybody can call him up on his personal cell phone or the phone of local police stations, to report extortionists. He claims they've had 900 responses that have led to the arrests of 12 to 15 extortionists.
Businessmen in Juarez must be positively starving for law enforcement like this in a city where possibly 40% of the killings are of people who have been extorted, according to one educated observer who didn't want to be identified. (He also thinks 20% of the killings are from crossfire.)
If the allegations about Leyzaola's rights abuses are true, he should be put in prison. It would be a dramatic boost for human rights in Juarez, and I'd be thrilled to see it. But if he has been promoting the drop in violence, maybe he should also be given a medal. He can keep it polished and hang it on his wall in his cell.
I wish the conflict going on in Mexico were a clear-cut conflict between the police and the "people," or between the rich and the poor. But it's nothing as simple as that.
I wish I could say the continuing violence, which is still increasing across Mexico, was all the fault of President Calderón and the US, or of the drug cartels. But it's a complicated situation where I think both sides are to blame for the suffering of civilians.
Leyzaola has not anywhere near the stature of Villa, but he may be as divided a character.
Pancho Villa's 1916 raid on Columbus will be commemorated and celebrated on Camp Furlong Day, March 10, at Pancho Villa State Park.
Borderlines columnist Marjorie Lilly lives in Deming.