Mexicans Pay in Blood for America’s War on Drugs, Part I
Editors note: This article was published by the Phoenix New Times in July. With their permission, News Taco is reprinting it in five installments throughout the week to inspire debate about the ongoing war on drugs that has killed tens of thousands of Mexicans since 2006.
By Charles Bowden & Molly Molloy, Phoenix New Times
Children play in the pool, hamburgers and hot dogs sizzle on the grill. The exiles will be here shortly after their year in flight from a house full of dead people. Everyone at the party has dead people murdered in Mexico by the Mexican government with the silent consent of the U.S. government. There are 100,000 slaughtered Mexicans now. These gatherings will grow larger.
Carlos Spector hosts this fiesta. He is an American immigration lawyer in El Paso, but in the past four years his practice has been taken over by seekers of political asylum, Mexicans with no money fleeing a Mexican government that wants to kill them. He also is a product of Mexico and spent a lot of his childhood on the other side of the Rio Grande. Now he cannot go there, because the Mexican army would like to kill him, too.
Like everyone here, he had planned a different life. His father came down from New York, fell in love with a Mexican girl, and raised a family across the river, in the village of Guadalupe. When Carlos left the U.S. Air Force, he studied sociology, but gave that up because “it was too slow. I didn’t want to study the state, I wanted to smash it.”
An old woman sits silently at the party. Sara Salazar, matriarch of the Reyes Salazar clan, is about 80 years old and from Guadalupe. Carlos Spector knew her people as a child. They killed some of her grown sons — one, two, three, just like that — and two daughters, also.
The woman in the blue blouse with the bangs and the ponytail worked as the police secretary in Guadalupe “before they killed everyone,” she notes. The man in the green shirt — he was a city councilman before he fled for his life. The man with the sober face — he is the sole surviving son. He was a baker before the killing got bad. Then they burned the house down; the family library of 3,000 books perished in the flames. In his bakery, he always had someone reading out loud while everyone worked. The same day the house burned, the crosses vanished from the graves of murdered family members and were deposited against the Mexican army barracks in Guadalupe. In their little town of 3,000 people, 250 have been murdered.
Saul, the baker, the surviving brother, says, “Sometimes I start to cry. I lost half my family, my job. What more can I lose? Sometimes I worry even here in El Paso, but if I am murdered here, at least it will be investigated.”
He has a book where he has carefully written down the names and dates of all the dead because he thinks someone should remember what has happened to his town and his nation and someday tell it, lest the lies become the history. Martha Gellhorn, the fearless novelist and reporter portrayed by Nicole Kidman in the recent HBO series Hemingway & Gellhorn, came out of her wars and wrote, “If nobody puts it down on the record anywhere, then the monsters win totally.”
At last the exiles arrive: Miguel Angel López Solana, 32, his wife, Vanessa, younger. People came and killed Miguel’s father and his mother and brother. For months, he and his wife bounced between their home in Veracruz, Mexico City, and the border. Finally, they fled to Corpus Christi, Texas, and waited for a chance to return to Mexico. Then in May of this year, four more people from their circle were slaughtered, and they knew that a return home was impossible. They called Carlos Spector.
(Part 2 on Tuesday, Aug. 28)
(Photo by Miguel Angel Lozano Lopez for the Phoenix News Times)
Charles Bowden is the author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. Molly Molloy is a researcher for Latin America and the border at New Mexico State University.
