D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April
2008
A Spasm of Violence
A crime wave staggers Palomas, spreading fear and the sense that this outbreak of violence may be different.
Palomas has recently been swept by the convulsions of violence afflicting the border this year. In less than a month there were five murders. A former policeman says ordinarily there are only about 12 murders annually.
More than 3,000 drug killings have occurred in all of Mexico so far this year, quashing hopes that President Calderon could curb the drug violence. Juarez has seen more than 150 murders since the first of the year.
But I walked through the streets of Palomas on March 18, a sunny spring-like day, and it was almost as if nothing had happened. A man from Mexico City selling sunglasses on the street, who always comes up to me and respectfully shakes my hand, said, "Es normal, no?" Mexicans in areas with a high level of drug-trafficking have learned to live with violence because they know it's targeted. If you keep your nose clean, you won't have problems.
This is what I've heard from business owners. They've uniformly said the US press unfairly focused on the violence in Palomas last May. It's easy to sympathize with them, because this public perception has been disastrous for their businesses. They say, "When that man and a little girl were shot at the Wal-Mart in Deming, people didn't stop going to Deming," or "A kid got killed in a school in Deming." And they've got a point.
But I now hear more people saying they are afraid. Like a 41-year-old Palomas man who has often worked in the Silver City area who's afraid to go out at night now. Or an owner of a grocery store, who realizes she might get shot by a stray bullet. You get the feeling people are shaken and don't know what to do.
And it's not just people involved in the drug trade who are being killed. A 22-year-old butcher at the Saguaro supermarket was found dead near the border the day before I went down. People don't know why he was killed.
I've been affected by this situation somewhat personally. I drove down from Deming a week ago to see if I could find a man named Demetrio who'd been buying some ads from me for his business. I'd been calling his cell phone, but kept getting a message to call again.
The man's brother told me he'd been "taken" a month earlier and they hadn't heard anything about him since. I didn't understand what he was saying. He got more specific and said Demetrio had been "kidnapped," by people who wanted his money. There were witnesses.
This news was very disconcerting, and I went driving around town for a long time weeping and trying to grasp this totally unexpected news.
I liked selling ads to Demetrio because he was someone whose lips kind of trembled when I made the offer. There aren't a lot of businesses in Palomas that get approached by US publications, and he was in need. He bought three ads, and said he'd seen his business grow in that time span.
Demetrio's someone who's very conscious of "the border thing," the inequality and all that. He was aware (with an ironic smile) that he was in a better economic condition than I was, and kindly paid for his ads in advance. He paid with a handful of cash that I think he got from his house.
What I like best about him is the way he would give me a very odd look when I turned to leave. His face would go blank, and there would be a conscious look of hunger — an impersonal, dark, bear-hunger — which I roughly translated to mean, "Look, we're the same." It came from some point of deep integrity inside him.
Talking to other people, I've heard nothing else but that he's "un hombre bueno."
Just the day after I heard the news about Demetrio, a prominent farmer activist named Armando Villareal Martha was brazenly assassinated in Nuevo Casas Grandes in broad daylight, right next to a secondary school. The farmers in his organization, Agrodinamica Nacional, had been refusing to pay their electricity bills, which are sometimes twice as high as in the US. His followers claim the federal government was responsible for the shootings. The group has members in a dozen Mexican states.
A few months ago I almost wrote an article about Villareal for this paper, and still have his phone number scribbled somewhere. I've talked to his brother and other followers.
I've lived in Deming for 12 years, and have never known a period like this. I'm saying to myself for the first time that Chihuahua is like Guatemala, where I spent a few months in the 1980s. There's really not much difference. Political assassinations, disappearances, exhumations of bodies (48 in the state as of this writing), and drug battles — it's all there.
It's a culture where people can't give their names, and can't say what they know, because danger hangs in the air. I know it all.
One evening early in March, when I was leaving a grocery store in Palomas, I heard singing coming from a church across the street.
It was the Luz del Mundo (Light of the World) church, a branch of one of the largest churches in Mexico and the US, founded in Guadalajara. This was a plain church building with windowpanes colored either yellow or dark green.
There were only female voices when I first heard them. Their singing struck me as being like a Ukrainian women's choir. Although there was only one line of melody at the moment, the music had a minor, liturgical tonality and a rather athletic melody line, like a gymnast on the parallel bars. The quality of voices was a bit like yowling cats.
Later the men joined in, deep and rumbly, with a large gap between the soprano and bass lines of melody. The effect was a little ungainly, but stirring and lovely.
The pastor, who had warm eyes, came out to invite me in. I declined, but he invited me to a peace march on March 14 where they and some other churches from Palomas, Juarez and Deming were going to sing.
Because of a dust storm, I didn't go. But one man told me about 150 people took part, and another man said there were close to a thousand. (Maybe more people joined later in the march.) It was a beautiful event, with lots of candles and singing.
How sweet it is to think of these groups winding their strands of light amid the black shadows of the streets in Palomas.
I hope this spasm of violence is just that, a spasm, and subsides soon — and Palomas can get up from its stagger.