Menno Moto

by Cameron Dueck

  I felt sorry for them. The elders said they were rebelling against God, against the faith itself, but it was more complicated than that. I knew this myself, from my own experience. Their embittered rebellion was against the Mennonite leaders and the control of the community, against the very separation that made them who they were. Against being told that if you wanted to be part of the safe, wealthy, and comfortable community, you had to live a certain way, in a certain place, play a role even when it didn’t feel right. I knew their feeling of being caged, frustrated, and bored, but scared of the outside world and of the reaction of their family if they were to try a different way of life. If they were unsure if the Mennonite way of life was right for them, they lacked opportunities to find out what the options were. Some would be happy and content with that life, some would always feel like misfits in their community. Some would leave, as I had done. But for now they were just off ya fallja, embracing the things they were told to shun, because it was the only way they could push back.

  The threats to the Mennonite way of life did not all come from outside. The simple lifestyle and honourable name the Mennonites enjoyed had inspired a dark business. When the Mennonites spoke about “the drug problem” they weren’t speaking about drug use, but rather the business of being drug mules and laundering money.

  The Mennonites, with their piousness and separateness, were perfectly positioned to be used by the drug trade. Mennonite communities across the Americas remain strongly connected, with constant travel between Mexico, Belize, Bolivia, Canada, and the United States, and there is a reticence among Mennonites to turn their relatives or neighbours over to the police.

  Many of them hold Canadian citizenship through their parents and grandparents, even if they were not born in Canada themselves. At one point the Canadian government required overseas Canadians with citizenship obtained through their parents and grandparents to spend one year in Canada before their twenty-eighth birthday. This spawned a steady trickle of young Mexican and Bolivian Mennonites coming north for a year’s work in the agricultural and manufacturing industries of southern Manitoba and Ontario. Then they went back…and forth and back again.

  Many Mennonites drive rather than fly on their regular trips between Canada and Mexico or Central America. Whether it’s because their large numbers of children make flying too expensive or because driving makes them feel more independent, Mennonites make a lot of trans-America road trips. US and Canadian border guards are well accustomed to seeing heavily loaded vehicles carrying Mennonites coming north to work a seasonal fruit harvest or to spend a year working in an uncle’s schmiede. Some are simply visiting far-flung relatives. Mennonites might overstay a visa or try crossing a border without the correct documents, but for a long time no one suspected them of smuggling.

  The cartels began to recruit Mennonite drug mules in the 1990s, and soon there were plenty of stories about Mennonites busted for drug smuggling. The stories all had familiar components. Mennonite men, who had grown up moving between Canada and Mexico, were recruited by the cartels to drive trucks packed with marijuana and cocaine north across the border into the United States and Canada.

  They were helped by the fact that business conducted on the colonies produced significant flows of hard cash, often in foreign currency. One popular ruse had Mennonites buying used agricultural machinery in the United States with the money they had earned running drugs north. The machinery was moved into Mexico, where it was sold and the cash was put to work on the colony. Some of it appeared in new houses, shiny trucks and business start-ups that were mysteriously well funded. Drug smuggling had become an accepted fact of life on the colony.

  I was in a bookstore on Manitoba Colony, when the shopkeeper began lamenting the social damage caused by the smuggling.

  “It’s rotting the community from the inside. They see the new trucks and the cash, and the young guys want to get into smuggling too.”

  Just as he was taking a breath to pitch into another tirade, the bell above the door chimed and in walked a skinny, frightened-looking man.

  “Here, talk to this guy, he knows everything there is to know about drugs!” shouted the shopkeeper, pointing at the man. The man did not look comfortable having his expertise being so loudly advertised.

  “We were just talking about the drug problem around here,” I said.

  “I see. And your name?” he asked.

  I introduced myself. His name was Jacob Harms.

  “You should sit down and have a good visit with this man. He has stories to tell,” the shopkeeper interjected.

  It was hard to resist the pressure, so Jacob and I made plans to meet at his house later in the afternoon. I scribbled the directions to his place onto a scrap of paper and left Jacob at the mercy of the shopkeeper.

  A few hours later I stopped my bike on his driveway and he came out to shake my hand. Jacob was around forty, with a hesitant laugh and twitchy manner. His tired, sad eyes peered from underneath a red baseball cap. His jeans and yellow polo shirt were baggy on his thin frame. Jacob lived near the centre of Manitoba Colony in a comfortable home next to a new steel shed, where he ran a small business making picture frames and dried flower arrangements.

  Jacob led me to his office, a small room off an attached garage that was cluttered with dried-flower arrangements, stacks of paper, and pictures of his family. He had taught himself how to make architectural blueprints for houses and he hoped to create an architecture and home design business, although he had no formal training in either.

  “Down here they like some of those designs of the houses they see in the States, and I know a bit about computers, so I learned how to use this program to make drawings for the houses. Here in Mexico they’re not so particular if you have the license or not,” he said as he turned on his computer to show me plans for a large suburban-style home.

  Most of Jacob’s time was spent trying to move on from his past. I prompted him several times, asking how he had become involved in the drug trade, but Jacob waved my questions off. He rocked back in a leather office chair, arms crossed behind his head, and tried to return the conversation to more mundane matters.

  “So, you said you were from Manitoba? I have a brother there, a welder in Rosenort,” he said.

  “Really? So do I.”

  We had brothers working in the same manufacturing plant. Jacob flashed a wide, toothy smile, which appeared and disappeared so fast I doubted I’d seen it at all.

  “Ya, we probably know lots of the same people,” Jacob said, warming up to the Mennonite Game. “I know lots of Mexican Mennonites who have moved to Manitoba.”

  “Oh, I probably don’t know them. I’ve been away for a long time.”

  In Canada, the Mennonites from down south were a subject of ridicule. It was always the most conservative, radical groups that moved ever farther from civilization, whether to Mexico, Belize, or Bolivia. Then they’d come back to Canada wearing outmoded clothing, either too skinny or too fat, with bad teeth and greasy hair. They also had too many children. Whole swarms of little Mennonites would pour from the back of their battered Econoline vans and covered pickup trucks when they arrived in Canada. Invariably they were road weary and broke when they showed up at the door of an unsuspecting distant relative who felt obligated to find them shelter. It didn’t help that they came north for the simple jobs, taking unskilled factory jobs, butchering chickens and picking eggs, scraping together enough hourly wage between father and grown sons and daughters to pay the bills. They were smart—not book smart, but learn-the-job-and-work-your-ass-off smart—and those who stayed in Canada soon pulled themselves out of poverty and opened their own small welding shops and farms.

  But they were coarse. We called them Mexa, the same derogatory term that they themselves used to describe Spanish Mexicans. It seemed more often than not that when they arrived the wife needed cancer treatments and a sick child needed to go to the h
ospital. It was wrong to fly the Maple Leaf, but it was okay to return to the den of sin to collect on some state-supplied medical treatment. They’d collect the monthly child support payments without a thank-you, cashing in on that Canadian passport in their pocket. We resented them.

  In the 1980s and ’90s Mennonites who had lived in Mexico and Bolivia for a generation or more began returning to Canada in large groups. Mexican violence was becoming too great a threat, and some felt the Mennonite communities had become too modern and integrated with broader society. They moved to remote communities in Alberta and Saskatchewan, as well as to provinces in the east. That gave their young men another reason to travel, often returning to colonies in the south to find a bride.

  Jacob, like many of the smugglers, had grown up as an Old Colony Mennonite in Mexico. In his early twenties he left the ultra-conservative community and was working on a farm in Kansas. He enjoyed his freedom and adventure away from the colony, but he was lonely, as there were few other Mennonites in his area. So he returned to Mexico in hope of finding a Mennonite wife.

  But his experience of living in the United States had put a bit of swagger in his step that was hard to maintain back on the colony, and he soon fell in with the wrong crowd in Mexico. His new friends had connections with the drug cartels, and he joined them in driving vehicles full of marijuana across the border into the US. He was paid US $6,000 per trip.

  “I took six loads and each time there were different amounts of drugs in different hiding spots in the car, and I did not know exactly where the drugs were. We could carry about a hundred pounds in the gas tank and about forty pounds in a tire. If you hide it in a side panel of the car the weight can vary a lot.”

  “I wasn’t used to having money. The first time I had even $1,000 in my hand, I didn’t know what to do with it. I went and bought nice clothes and shoes, no more cheap stuff. All the money I earned with marijuana I spent very fast, and then I generated debt on top of it. It caused me a lot of problems.”

  In 1997 Jacob was caught at the border, his first offence. His partners bailed him out, the charges didn’t stick, and he walked free. But the experience scared him straight. He found a wife on the colony and planned a move back to Kansas, where his old employer offered him a job. But Jacob was too cash-strapped to make the move.

  His old smuggling friends suggested he take one more run north. His cash problems would be solved, and he’d be in the United States, ready to start his new job and married life. Jacob agreed, and he and his wife made it across the border at Juárez before making a brief stop in El Paso to change a flat tire.

  “I said nothing, but I felt relief. We’d made it through, I thought.”

  Then they came to another highway checkpoint several miles inside Texas. The border guards asked Jacob to take off his dark sunglasses and his nervous eyes gave him away.

  “They bored into the side of the car with a drill, and when the bit came out there was weed on it. My wife knew nothing, I hadn’t told her anything. I just told her we were moving to Kansas.”

  “The people who hired me said they’d put a hundred pounds in the car, but the DEA recorded, for the court, that there was seventy-four pounds. So someone stole about twenty-five pounds of it for himself. But I kept quiet, because if they hadn’t stolen some they would have found a larger amount and I’d have been locked up for even longer.”

  Jacob expected his partners to show up and somehow solve this problem. They had promised to bail him out, back him up, and support his wife of four months, who was pregnant with their first child, if he was caught. But he heard nothing, so he resigned himself to prison life, where he felt intimidated by the mostly black and Hispanic prisoners.

  “They called me white bread, but they didn’t know I understood Spanish. ‘What’s this white bread doing in here?’ they would joke. I didn’t say anything for a long time, even though they kept teasing me. And then one day I said, ‘I came here to find out what the toasted bread was up to.’ The whole place got quiet then they all bust out laughing.”

  He kept to himself and stayed out of trouble, earning a reduction on his sentence for good behaviour. He walked free after eleven months.

  “When I got out, they deported me to Mexico. I’ve never gone back to the US. I would like to go back, because I have relatives in Kansas. I wanted to be rich and have nice things like the other smugglers. That didn’t work out.”

  When he got out of prison, he knocked on the doors of the men who had hired him to carry their drugs.

  “They had told me they would give me money if I didn’t give up their names. So when I was out I went to them and asked for my money, but they said they didn’t have any money,” Jacob said, the disappointment still visible in his face. “They said they would give me work here in Mexico, carrying marijuana to Juárez. I said no. I had some land and cattle, and I wanted to farm. I just needed the money they’d promised me to get started. They said no.”

  Jacob went into construction, where he got his idea to start drawing up housing blueprints. But the bitterness of his experience, and knowing which of his neighbours had been, or still were in the trade, gnawed at him.

  “There are a lot of Old Colony people around who I know were doing it, but also from other Mennonite groups. I can go to a church now and see many people who I know used to smuggle but who were never caught, so they never paid for it.”

  He fell silent, staring at his sneakered foot, tapping at thin air with a steady vengeance. His mouth tightened and puckered sour, his eyes narrowed. His neighbours knew that he knew which ones had done what and got away with it. They were able to hold their heads high in church because they got away with it, but he had to hang his head in shame because he got caught. Those Mennonite neighbours had come to visit him once, spinning circles on his yard with a pickup truck to intimidate him before telling him to keep his mouth shut. He showed me photographs of the tire marks on his yard, his hands shaking as he held them out to me. I felt sorry for him. The fear and capitulation came off him like the stench of sweat.

  “I just want to be left alone now. If they leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone,” he said. I asked if he could point out the homes of the smugglers.

  “Sure,” he said with a dry laugh. “But I won’t. They’re here, close by, just down the road, some of them. Just look for the nice houses, and then you’ll know. In the last while there have been fewer smugglers from around here. It’s become a bit more dangerous, there’s a lot of shootings here, and a lot of Mennonites are getting scared of it,” he said. “There were a lot of people who got out of the business and left the country because they knew if they stayed here, they wouldn’t be able to get away from it.”

  There were too many stories of pickup trucks abandoned beside an empty highway, bodies strewn on the road, bloody and bullet-holed. Others had seen and heard the shootings, by masked men with guns. So far the shootouts hadn’t involved Mennonites, but it was just a matter of time. The drug cartels treated everyone the same, Mennonite or weltmensch, and sooner or later things would go wrong and the guns would be aimed at the Mennonites.

  “Around here each person would say the marijuana trade is wrong, that we shouldn’t do it. But the money covers it up and makes it okay. The money; there’s so much, it’s so comfortable, so it’s easy to get into it again. A lot of people here know what’s going on, maybe not the exact details, but it’s easy to fib a bit. The money says a lot. If I wanted to buy farm machinery in the States the smugglers would say, ‘Oh, if you’re buying a tractor there, I’ll pay for it with cash in the US, and you can pay me back in Mexico. That way you don’t need to send money to US to pay for it.’ That’s how they launder the money, and that still happens.”

  Jacob was teaching his children English in the hope that the whole family would move to Canada someday, but he didn’t know if or when that would happen with his criminal record.

  “I have bro
thers and sisters in Canada. They warned me not to get involved in it, and now I know they’re right.”

  I could hear Jacob’s family in the house; the shout of a child, the thump of furniture being moved across a floor.

  “How much do they know about all of this?” I asked, nodding towards the sounds. I hadn’t met Jacob’s wife, and he hadn’t offered to introduce her. In the framed photos in his office, and the screensaver on his computer, she looked like a good Mennonite wife. Demure and honest-faced, hair pulled back from her face and tucked into a small head covering.

  “Ya, she knows it all. I’m very lucky she took me back and forgave me. I thank God for that, and for her, every day. The kids…” He was silent. “I told them that Daddy did some bad things, and that he was in jail. They know that much. But I didn’t tell them more. I told them that was the old Daddy, that he doesn’t do that anymore.”

  Jacob had had a religious conversion while in prison, though he’d gone back to drinking for several years after his release before sobering up for good. Now, he said, his heart and soul were committed to helping others. He hoped others could learn from him.

  “I go sing in the jail now, with people from church, and I’m still a bit…” Jacob theatrically peered over his shoulder, widening his eyes in mock fear. “Even though I know I can get out again.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Belize

  Pacifists

  Belize is an odd stepchild in the Central American family. There is an absence of the Spanish Catholicism that so defines the rest of the region, and Belize does not share its neighbours’ history of grinding guerrilla warfare.