D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April
2009
Less Money, More Peace
Without the narcos, Palomas is calmer but poorer.
About 8,500 new army troops and 2,300 federal officers have moved into Juarez. They've taken over the Police Department and the prisons. In Palomas, where it's relatively peaceful, there are no new troops.
From Juarez press reports and from what I hear in Palomas, the reaction from the man in the street is mostly positive. The number of killings in Juarez has apparently gone way down, from eight a day in February to two a day. The armed commandos who roamed Juarez streets freely have basically vaporized, for the time being. People are relieved.
But human-rights people, academics and politicians on both sides of the border warn of abuses by the army and their tendency to be drawn into collusion with the drug dealers.
It's a frightening development for people who were feeling good about Mexico's nascent democracy. The "surge" on the border is violating the Mexican constitution, which says the army can't take over the police department.
But these are extraordinary circumstances. They are fighting an actual army that is better armed and trained than they are.
Jorge Luis Aguirre, the editor of the online news source La Polaka who fled Juarez after a death threat, testified before Congress on March 17 and asked for US help combating Mexico's cartels. He said, "It's not enough what the U.S. is doing. . . . We want what Felipe Calderon is doing to be reinforced [i.e., by the US]."
For those of us who remember how the US aligned itself with Latin American generals during the "dirty wars" of the Seventies and Eighties, it makes you want to pinch yourself. La Polaka is a rip-roaring news source that takes potshots against the powerful.
The Green Party is campaigning in Mexico to reinstate the death penalty, right when it's being abolished in New Mexico. You want to give yourself another pinch.
As predicted, in Palomas the food situation is even worse than it was last fall, because fieldworkers have no work now and the auto-parts maquiladora has closed down because of the world economy's tailspin. I heard that some of the workers were crying when it was shut down. Many of these young people were the only regular breadwinners in their families.
At the Super Del Real grocery store in southwest Palomas, Rosa Chavez said they're now selling less than half of what they sold last fall. A guy from Casas Grandes delivering snacks at another tienda de abarrotes claimed that before the tightening of the border and the narco-violence, there were 35 grocery stores in Palomas and now there are 20, with a lot less business.
There is, frankly, less passion right now to help the hungry in Palomas, it seems to me. The situation is so hopeless and long-lasting that one tends to turn to one's own private happiness amid this invisible, shapeless kind of suffering.
After a wonderful response a few months ago, donations via this column have dropped down to almost nothing, but they're still needed. Checks for $5 or $10 would go a long way if 50 people sent them.
What people in Palomas need, of course, is jobs. About a month ago someone from El Paso went to Palomas City Hall and said he could offer agricultural jobs in New Mexico to 1,000 people in town. Prospective workers had to pay $50 up front. It seemed like the miracle Palomas needed, until employees at City Hall went to work and discovered that the addresses on the application form didn't exist. It was a scam. By Mexican law it's illegal to have to pay before you get a foreign job, anyway.
A young man holding his grinning one-year-old son in front of a friend's house said he's just working a day here and a day there. "Sin narcos, no hay dinero" ("Without narcos, there's no money"), he told me. I think this saying is on its way to becoming another quaint dicho to express Mexicans' life philosophy.
Poor Palomas — with the pretty name and the ugly face. She is Palomas polvoriento (dusty Palomas) to some, or Palomas la fea (ugly Palomas), like the "Ugly Betty" show on TV that was derived from the Colombian telenovela called Betty la fea. There are so many towns in Mexico more appealing than she is.
People in Palomas know this. I remember a farmworker from Guerrero who told me once, standing in front of the Saguaro supermarket, "Where I come from, there are trees" (in contrast to the barren scene before us).
When I first moved to Deming, I got involved mostly with farmworkers on this side of the border, and I almost never got to know people in Palomas. I heard from the beginning that there were lots of prostitutes and drug dealers in town. I knew almost nothing about either sector of the population, but felt it was something you could physically smell in the air, like toxic vapors — propane, or something more venomous.
But Palomas is a changed town. I tell Palomenses that it's like a country town now, and they agree. It's sweeter and calmer. There's less dust in the air and less fumes from cars.
A couple of kids about 13 years old were recently playing cards in a grocery store, and one of them said he thought the violence was all over. Most other people are not so sure. But as one customer in another store said, "Hay menos dinero, pero es mas pacifico" (There's less money, but it's more peaceful).
I had a talk with a fresh-faced, smiling woman who makes and sells coronas, or funeral wreathes, and has her young daughter make single flowers to sell. "Before, with the human traffickers and narcos, there was more money, but more evil, too," she said.
When I was in a conversation like this at a grocery store, the delivery guy I mentioned threw his hands down at his sides and squared his legs as if reciting something in school: "Somos una gente buena y sana" ("We're a good and wholesome people"), and we all cracked up.
Now I'm meeting so many sane, sober people who look you in the eye when they talk to you and care about what's happening to Palomas. I'm seeing them everywhere.
They were there all along. Why didn't I see them before? I somehow couldn't see the trees for the woods.
I hear most people in Palomas saying they hope things will change for the better. One woman sincerely told me, "We have faith in God." But Rosa Chavez said, "I think if things continue like this, everyone will go away." She's young and says she might go someplace else to get an education.
I think the future hangs in a very delicate balance.
Contributions for the hungry 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.