The outpouring of support for Gustavo de la Rosa saved his job. Following a tense meeting in Juárez with municipal, state, and federal representatives, including the army, he was allowed to continue working out of El Paso and Juárez, as dictated by the state of his personal security. Two state ministerial police were assigned to protect him, and a panic button was installed in his Juárez office. The latter de la Rosa found laughable. There was obviously a deep split between de la Rosa and the state human rights commissioner. “He hasn’t even bothered to call me,” de la Rosa complained. But de la Rosa left the meeting with an agreement signed by the army and the federal government in which they vowed to ensure the security of him and his family. De la Rosa was officially reinstalled in his position.
. . .
Gustavo de la Rosa was described as a “civic treasure” in the border region for his activism and work on behalf of those whose rights were trampled by the authorities. A report titled “Defending Human Rights: Caught between Commitment and Risk,” by the Mexico office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, described de la Rosa as “an example of the perilous situation faced by human rights activists in this country.” The head of the Mexican Academy of Human Rights protested that the government was vilifying the work of human rights defenders. De la Rosa had become a cause célèbre.
The human rights activist had taken to sleeping in El Paso every night. On October 16, 2009, following a meeting in Juárez, he was making his way back across the Santa Fe Bridge into El Paso when a U.S. border official asked him if he feared for his life. De la Rosa answered in the affirmative, thinking he was acknowledging the obvious. But American officials decided to take the human rights activist into custody “for his own protection,” taking him to a detention center in El Paso for undocumented immigrants and people seeking asylum. De la Rosa immediately contacted his attorney in El Paso, who within hours had filed a protest with U.S. Homeland Security authorities. The latter claimed that, under U.S. law, foreign nationals who declared that they were in fear for their lives in their country of origin were immediately treated as individuals seeking asylum. The problem was that de la Rosa had been explicit about the fact that he was not seeking asylum; he had merely stated that he felt fear regarding his safety. “He entered the United States legally and he has committed no crimes or violated U.S. law,” his attorney, Carlos Spector, said. De la Rosa was in the U.S. legally under his SENTRI permit.
U.S. officials appeared defensive and flatfooted. “If someone arrives at a port of entry and makes it known that they are in fear, they are detained,” a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told El Paso’s KFOX news. Gustavo de la Rosa was once again on the front pages, and his supporters launched a furious international campaign to secure his release. Perhaps the declaration that he was temporarily fleeing Juárez because of death threats had placed de la Rosa in uncharted legal territory as far as the American authorities were concerned, given that he had made it clear in repeated press interviews that he was in El Paso out of fear that he would be executed in Juárez. He wasn’t a mere tourist, in other words. A more conspiratorial thesis suggested that the U.S. government, in collusion with the Mexican federal authorities, was trying to silence the human rights activist. This theory suggested that given that congressional support of the Mérida Initiative had become entangled in Congress because of the human rights issues, and given that Gustavo de la Rosa had become a voice of protest regarding Mexico’s human rights shortcomings, both the U.S. and Mexican governments were finding de la Rosa to be a thorn in their sides. Whatever the reasons or motives, de la Rosa was released from the El Paso detention center after five days and permitted to continue using his SENTRI pass to enter the U.S. at will.
Note
1. Mexico has one of the smallest armed forces per capita in the Western Hemisphere.
CHAPTER 23
Villas de Salvárcar
Villas de Salvárcar, a working-class enclave in southeastern Juárez, is entirely surrounded by assembly plants and only accessible via two streets. The homes were government subsidized and are quite small, resting on narrow plots backing up onto each other. Many have no yards. Though modest, most are clean and well maintained, and some are brightly painted. The subdivision had been built ten years earlier and there were families that had been living there since the beginning. Quite a few had come to Juárez from other towns and cities in Chihuahua, and most of the adults worked in the nearby maquiladora plants.
The evening of January 30, 2010, a Saturday, was cool and crisp and an episodic wind blew up through the desert, raking across the city, gripping it in a deep winter chill. The moon was brilliant and large; the night before it had been full. On Villa del Portal Street people were out, and the atmosphere was festive despite the cold. A kid named Jesús Enríquez was celebrating his eighteenth birthday, and most of the high-school and college-aged kids in the neighborhood were coming to the party. Villas de Salvárcar was close in that way. The people who lived on Villa del Portal Street were especially close; their children had grown up together.
The colonia had many vacant houses at the time. Massive unemployment, a product of the American recession and the city’s violence, had driven many residents back to where they’d come from prior to migrating to Juárez to work in the maquiladoras. Others had fled across the border to El Paso. One of the vacant houses was in the middle of the 1300 block of Villa del Portal. The family had moved to El Paso, but entrusted the neighbor across the street with the house keys. The neighbor had agreed to let the teenagers hold the birthday party in the empty house, as she’d done numerous times in the past. “We were happy not to have the kids going off into the city at night,” one of the parents would later tell me. “With so much violence, we preferred to have them celebrating the birthday here in the neighborhood.”
Alonso Encina, a man with a gentle face and sad eyes, was one of the parents happy to have the party in the neighborhood. A wiry man with silver-rimmed glasses, a moustache, and dark, short-cropped hair, Encina spent his adolescence as a gangbanger until he was saved by art. He always had a talent for drawing and sketching, mostly self-taught although over the years he’d taken a few classes and participated in the occasional workshop. He started drawing and painting as an adolescent and found something in it that helped him transcend the circumstances of a poor young man from a small town with a limited education.
At the age of twenty-one, Encina moved to Juárez from Torreón, Coahuila, a city in the neighboring state to the southeast. He came looking for opportunities, but his heart remained in his native Torreón: “It’s a beautiful city!” he exclaimed spontaneously at the mention of it. “The people work hard, and it’s very forward-thinking.” It was obvious that Encina was still nostalgic for his hometown.
Alonso Encina had painted murals all over Juárez. Some were part of collective efforts sponsored by government programs, others simply inspired by the fact that he’d encountered an available wall—his version of the current-day “graff” man. Encina and his wife and kids had lived in a poor colonia named Independencia prior to moving to Villas de Salvárcar. He’d painted murals on his own in the old neighborhood and was especially proud of some of them. Showing me a photo album containing his work, he drew my attention to several images where he was posing in front of the murals with his family. One of them had been torn down within days of completion. “The authorities didn’t like the content,” he told me. It included a Catholic bishop wearing a miter that was decorated with dollar signs and greedy industrialists ravaging the landscape. The style and content reminded me of the work of David Álfaro Siqueiros or Diego Rivera. Encina’s other murals had survived longer, but most had been torn down. Others might still exist, he thought, but he was reluctant to take me to see them, saying it was too dangerous because the neighborhood was rife with gangs.
One of the more stunning murals he showed me had been painted on a solitary wall in the old, run-down Independencia neighborhood. The
mural was titled in English, Light and Shadow, and the center of the piece consisted of three identical images of the face of a young cholo gangbanger wearing a red headscarf. One of the images was looking straight at the viewer, and the other two were looking left and right. Above these faces were the two Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, with the smiling mask above the word “Light,” and the grimacing mask, with a distinctive tear running down its cheek, above the word “Shadow.” Above the masks was an all-knowing eye from which two beams emanated, bathing the “Light” side in a shaft of white light and the “Shadow” side in blood-red. On the “Light” side of the mural, the face oriented to the left was connected to a chain that led to a woman holding a child in her arms and a little boy with angel wings pulling on the chain, attempting to bring the cholo dad closer to the family circle. The face oriented to the right had a chain that was being pulled in the opposite direction by a devilish creature, above whom were tormented, tattooed men imprisoned by dripping needles with the caption (in Spanish) “False Time” (“That’s drug time,” Encina told me). The upper two-thirds of the mural was supported from below by an enormous eagle, the emblem found on the Mexican flag, except that rather than devouring a snake the eagle was devouring a chain, like the chains that were tearing the young cholo apart. The psychological complexity of the mural was gripping; it was apparent that Alonso Encina knew something about the human condition.
In November of 1990, with his wife eight months pregnant, Encina took a maquila job, working at the COCLISA assembly plant, making radiators and condensers for Ford vehicles so as to have insurance to cover the delivery. His art took a back seat to the practical necessities of supporting a family, although he continued doing what he could. The Encina children were born at two-year intervals: Ángel Alonso was born in 1990, followed by José Adrián in 1992, and Oscar Alan in 1994. The boys were close, and by the time the family moved to Villas de Salvárcar they were old enough to be all over the neighborhood. There was never concern or worry about their safety. The neighborhood was the village, and the children were in and out of people’s houses or playing in the street every day. Villa del Portal Street was as close to communal life as it gets in Mexico.
Alonso Encina had been successful beyond his dreams as far as his art was concerned. At the age of twenty-two he’d won a statewide contest and his prize was the opportunity to exhibit some of his pieces in Mexico City. He had never been to the Mexican capital before. He visited museums, he saw art, and he met fellow artists. “It was an amazing exchange of ideas,” he told me. In 1993, after he’d begun working at the assembly plant, he was selected to be one of the artists representing contemporary Mexican folk art at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC. It was exhilarating, and, to his surprise, the maquiladora gave him time off and helped pay his travel expenses.
Alonso Encina took night courses and eventually managed to get himself promoted to the position of coordinator of quality control, which was easier work and better paid. He says that the maquila was supportive of his art and allowed him to sell his pieces to fellow employees at the plant. These were not conceptual pieces in the spirit of his Light and Shadow mural. Reflections on the human condition aren’t that marketable. These were kitschy little trinkets with sayings like “You and Me” painted over a red heart for Valentines Day. The Virgin of Guadalupe was always a big seller.
By 2009, though, Alonso Encina was unemployed. Years of dedicated service had amounted to nothing when it came to laying off workers under the press of the economic recession that was grinding Juárez down to a nub. Presently, Encina was eking out a living as best he could selling his trinkets and small paintings on wood or plastic—things he could mass-produce at a workbench in his covered carport. He and his father-in-law, who had a shaved-ice cart, made their way to the nearby high school every day, where they sold his wares and his father-in-law’s ices at recess and after school. Occasionally, Alonso made it to fairs and markets in the city to sell his things, but it all added up to a meager income with which to support a family. Adrián, his middle son, was encouraging him to go back to Torreón and find a job so that the family could follow. They were all worn out by the city’s violence and eager for a life outside of the inferno, Alonso Encina told me.
. . .
The Encinas lived right in the middle of the block on Villa del Portal Street, almost directly across from the house where the birthday party was to be held. Alonso Jr. had just turned twenty and was at university, Adrián was seventeen and in high school, and Oscar Alan, fifteen, was in junior high. All of them were dedicated students. Adrián was especially promising. Just a few weeks earlier he’d been named to the prestigious Governor’s Excellence List for the second consecutive year, and he had his sights set on studying either engineering or medicine when he got to college. Adrián was well liked among the friends at the party, some of whom attended the CBTIS-128 technical school and played on the school’s football team, Los Jaguares, which was part of Juárez’s high-school AA League.
That Saturday night, as the kids made their way over to the party (many from the neighborhood, others school chums from other colonias), Alonso arranged his art supplies on the workbench and started painting the pieces he’d be peddling that coming week. It was nearing eleven thirty and from the carport he could see the house at 3010 Villa del Portal, where the party was taking place. All three of his sons were there, and the sounds of the party floated across the street as kids came and went. It was cold, but as teenagers are wont to do, most kids were dressed lightly in jeans and hoodies or sweaters. Alonso’s wife poked her head out of the front door and said, “It’s after eleven, let’s get the kids and go to bed.”
Just as Alonso was about to walk across the street, he heard the roar of vehicles round the corner to his right, coming hard and fast before stopping directly in front of his house. There were four SUVs and every instinct told Alonso that something nightmarish was about to take place. A wave of fear swept over him as he saw some two dozen sicarios pouring out of their vehicles, all armed with assault weapons. While a few remained posted at the SUVs, the rest rushed into the house where some thirty kids were celebrating the birthday. Immediately, the fusillade brought screams and cries from within the small house, where the attendees were trapped, like fish in a bucket. Some neighbors initially thought that the reports were palomitas (a popular Mexican firecracker) being set off at the party, but that illusion was momentary, quickly displaced by the awareness that something horrific was taking place.
Alonso Encina heard the shots and the screams and his only thought was that his three sons were in that house. He exited the carport intending to cross the street but was immediately confronted by a sicario who put an AK-47 to his head. “This is an operativo, steer clear,” said a cold, disembodied voice. Just then, a neighbor exited her house and ran across the street. She was gunned down on the spot. Alonso retreated to his carport; he was helpless, there was nothing he could do but look on in a state of shock and terror.
Inside the party house there was pandemonium. The rat-tat-tat of the assault weapons seemed eternal, and it was entwined with cries of desperation that saturated the space and broadcast from it out into the surround. Anguish, fear, and the smell of gunpowder and death infused the scene. In the confusion, some of the kids tried to exit through a back patio and jump over a wall but they were cut down.
Three students fled to a neighboring house, where the woman who lived there closed the door behind them and attempted to lock it. A sicario followed them, kicking in the door. In the meantime, the woman awoke her husband, alerting him to the presence of men with guns. He emerged from the bedroom in his boxer shorts to find an agitated sicario waving his assault weapon, shouting almost incoherently, “We’ve been looking for you!” It was senseless; the man worked at a maquiladora. Before he could respond the sicario shot him dead and shot the three students, two boys and a girl, huddling behind him.
The sicarios appeared to be on a rampage. They were
wild and crazed, lost in a frenzy of death. The owners of the next house over ran a little store out of their home from which they sold candies, sodas, and bolis (small plastic bags of flavored chipped ice that they sold for $2.50 pesos, less than an American quarter). A couple on a motorcycle had pulled up to purchase sodas just moments before the commando unit arrived. They were shot dead, as was the owner of the makeshift store. The owner’s wife was critically wounded.
The agony of the operativo, spasmodic and full of the perpetrators’ shouts and the victims’ terrified screams, ended in a span of fifteen minutes. The sicarios then boarded their vehicles and, in an eerily slow procession, drove down Villa del Portal to the corner, where they turned right and made their way out of the Villas de Salvárcar neighborhood. Behind them they left the gruesome carnage of the dead and wounded. As soon as they cleared the block, Alonso ran across the street and into the house. What he found there was ghoulish. The flow of blood was so profuse that it was difficult to hold one’s footing on the thick, viscous fluid covering the floor in large pools. A woody, humid odor permeated the house, along with the sharp, acrid smell of gunpowder. Smoke from the extended fusillade hung motionless, suspended in the middle of the room, equidistant from the ceiling and the floor, giving the scene an infernal cast.
“I entered the house shouting for my three sons,” Alonso said. There were bodies everywhere. “No! No! No!” he shouted. In the hallway beyond the small living room area he came upon a mound of bodies, clutched together, as if the victims had sought sanctuary within one another. Then he recognized Adrián, lying face down. “I turned him over. His eyes, his lips . . . I knew he was dead,” he told me, full of grief. Adrián had been shot in the head at close range.
The Fight to Save Juárez Page 26