The Road Through San Judas

by Robert Fraga

  SETTLING SAN JUDAS

  “We are not saviors.”

  That is what the ex-nun Lina Sarlat told one journalist. “This is slow, underground work.” She spoke of their crusade to help women in a country that has historically treated females as inferior beings. “It requires patience,” she said. “That’s why we call ourselves Las Hormigas.”

  After their arrival in San Judas, Sarlat and Villalobos, both in their forties, opened a counseling center. Other projects led to the women’s collective restaurant, Las Abejas, which Alfred Von Bachmayr’s team had insulated. The prospects for success were good since the restaurant stood on the main highway passing through San Judas.

  Helping women was the focus of their work. It was a self-evident need. One contributing factor was a shift in the Mexican economy. Traditionally Mexican men worked for pay, while their wives stayed at home performing domestic chores. But low-wage factories sprang up everywhere along the Mexican-U.S. border in the 1990’s, in the wake of the passage of NAFTA. Juárez was no exception. Called maquiladoras—or maquilas for short—these factories generally employed women. So it was the women who became the bread-winners of their families. Denied their traditional macho roles, unemployed husbands stayed home and drank tequila, took drugs, turned violent.

  Men were killed during the last decade of the twentieth century, but it was the murder of women that caught the attention of the media. It even became the subject of 2666, Roberto Bolaño’s celebrated Spanish-language novel.

  Amnesty International did a study of what came to be known as the “femicides” of Juárez. It found that at least 137 of the female victims had been murdered by sexual predators. Many of them had physical similarities: they were slender and pretty and had dark skin and long hair. A criminology professor, Julia Monarrez, commented, “I don’t know if they are drug gangs, crooked policemen, or powerful politicians, but there is definitely a pattern to some of these crimes.” A Mexican weekly listed 727 disappearances between 2010 and 2014. Many more such crimes occurred from the early 1990s onward.

  A cluster of pink crosses erected on a butte overlooking San Judas, the scene of several of the murders, bore witness to the women’s deaths. Nine of them. Their bodies were discovered over a period of time. Residents carried out a grisly search to uncover the corpses, some in shallow graves, most just dumped in ditches. Of some, little remained but a skeleton. One young woman, who had worked in one of the maquiladoras nearby, was identified by the color of her blouse and the white rubber bands that held her pony tail in place.

  Authorities never satisfactorily solved the murders, although they contended otherwise. More often than not, police did not even investigate the crimes. Two bus drivers were arrested in 2001 for serial murders. They were made-to-order scapegoats: Juárez bus drivers had a rotten reputation for their treatment of women. One victim of a sexual assault—one who actually survived—accused a bus driver of the crime. When the driver was apprehended, he implicated four other men. Three of them were bus drivers.

  In August of 2013, a woman wearing a blond wig boarded a downtown bus and shot the driver point-blank. No one seemed to take much notice of the killing. Violence had become pervasive throughout the city. The following morning, however, the blond vigilante struck again, this time after boarding a bus in a different part of the city. Now Juárez perked up its collective ears. “It was floating in the air that these bus drivers had committed sexual aggression,” commented the former head of the local forensics unit, Oscar Maynez, “and she was taking revenge.”

  Not all bus drivers, however, were guilty as charged. Two bus drivers arrested in 2001 confessed to the murder of eight women, all of whose bodies had been found in one small cotton field. The police bragged that their efforts had led to a successful conclusion “to this sad episode.” But burn marks on the two men’s legs and abdomens, clearly visible in newspaper photos, suggested that the confessions had been extracted by torture. One of the bus drivers told a reporter that the cops had crushed lighted cigarettes on his genitals. This was totally untrue, declared the deputy attorney general of Chihuahua: the men had burned themselves while smoking.

  Years later, both drivers were exonerated of the murder of the eight women. In the meantime, even with the bus drivers in detention, the killings went on.

  Domestic violence accounts for a sizeable chunk of the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, as elsewhere in the country. As already noted, women had begun to work in the maquilas of Juárez, while their men folk stayed home, overturning the social structure of the Mexican household. But this does not account for the murders in San Judas or for their sadistic nature. Victims had been raped, their hair pulled out by the roots. They’d been butchered with kitchen knives, burned, stomped on, and sliced up. Why? If there was a motive for the systematic killing of women in the 1990s, it was never uncovered.

  The long and the short of it is that Ciudad Juárez acquired an international reputation for misogyny. Other countries in Latin America also have bad reputations for the way women are savaged. But lest we forget, lest we become too self-righteous about the situation in our own country—the U.S. racks up on average four thousand killings of women every year.

  A march through Juárez on the tenth anniversary of the first of the femicides in the city drew tens of thousands of feminists, including celebrities like Jane Fonda and Sally Field. The protesters marched down Juárez Avenue through the center of Ciudad Juárez to the international bridge that connects downtown Juárez with El Paso. Flanking Fonda and Field, demonstrators held a long red banner that read “until the violence ends” in Spanish and English.

  “One of the horrors is feeling that you don’t matter, that what happens to you and your family has no impact, there are no ripples, you just don’t count,” Fonda told the British newspaper, the Guardian. “Part of our coming here is to show these mothers that we are hearing and we do care.”

  The day of the march culminated in a performance of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues before an audience of four thousand people. The playwright jumped onstage at the conclusion of the play to proclaim before the cheering crowd that Juárez was “the pilot project” for “vagina warriors and vagina-friendly men.”

  “We are about making sure Juárez becomes the new capital of nonviolence towards women around the world,” she said.

  “Let’s think about Juárez as the victory place.”

  San Judas came into existence in the 1970s when a retired civil servant, Luis Molino, received permission from the federal government to start a farming commune on a site to the west of Ciudad Juárez. There was an understanding that the land was federally owned and that Molino would not need to purchase it from private owners. Each of the 170 families who accompanied Molino to settle the area was given two hectares—about five acres—to cultivate. Authorities thought the man was crazy since the area was virtually inaccessible, with no amenities like water and electricity. All it had to offer in those days was a spectacular view of the border country, a nighttime sky of silent stars, and a desert wind that whistled through the tinder-dry sagebrush. Molino laid out a settlement with a grid of unpaved streets. The names came from the federal government. Newcomers used their five acres to sow vegetables, plant fruit trees (if they were willing to risk failure), and pasture farm animals like chickens, pigs, and goats. They surrounded their properties with fencing salvaged from rusty box springs that they found scattered about the mesa.

  Molino petitioned the Institute for Agrarian Reform for titles to the land. These never came. Nor did the Institute do a survey of San Judas to determine whether it was truly the property of the nation. This became the crux of the land dispute that developed three decades later, and which is the focus of this history. Official recognition of the settlers’ right to be in San Judas came in 1975 when then President of Mexico, Luis Echeverria, declared San Judas national property. Title holders were invited to step forward to contest that decree if they chose. There were no takers. At least not fo
r twenty-five years. According to the Mexican constitution, a settler who occupied land for five years had the right to buy that land if no other claim was made to it. The land belonged to those who tilled it. So said the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. Obviously, that was how the colonos in San Judas felt.

  They lived in a dicey neighborhood. Despite their attachment to the land, residents complained that they found themselves in “a nest of drug smugglers” who sped through San Judas in convoys of expensive cars with tinted windows. Coincidently or not, their apparent destination abutted a dumping ground for some of the women’s bodies discovered in the 1980s. Late in the 1990s, settlers reported that there was a clandestine airfield to the west of the colonia. After that disclosure, sinister-looking men threatened their lives and shadowed them. The airstrip was later identified as one belonging to the local drug cartel. Mexican authorities ordered it to be destroyed.

  In the years that followed Molino’s settling of San Judas, Ciudad Juárez expanded in all directions. To the west, it encompassed Molino’s agricultural commune, which was attracting more settlers.

  As the barrio grew, the Mexican Federal Electric Commission added San Judas to its grid. Five years after Molino first appeared on the scene, a primary school was established. It boasted two classrooms separated by a corridor, and it bore the name of a Mexican educator, Alfredo Nava Sahagún. This was a volunteer effort a bit like the work at the restaurant that Alfred Von Bachmayr’s group would insulate three decades later. The school project involved residents of the barrio working under professional supervision. They erected a cinder block structure with a galvanized steel roof. They trucked in materials from other neighborhoods of Ciudad Juárez. The government equipped the two classrooms with chalkboards and child-size tables and chairs. Work was completed in a surprisingly short time—two weeks, from start to finish. This showed the importance that the colonos placed on having such a facility for their children. Although he was barely old enough to begin school in San Judas, José Bernal attended a couple of years there before his family shipped him off to the States.

  A small Catholic chapel also went up. It was a modest adobe structure with air vents high up in the front wall and one triangular window—a symbol of the holy trinity—above the door. The chapel was named after Jesus of Nazareth. This is where Father Joe celebrated mass on Sundays when he was assigned the parish in the late 1990s.

  With amenities, San Judas drew settlers migrating from the south. Twenty years after Molino began his agricultural commune, two hundred families had relocated in the barrio. For the most part, their houses were shacks with tar paper roofs, but some—like Molino’s—were substantial cinder block dwellings. Von Bachmayr’s volunteers put up one of their pallet houses here in the 1990s. Colonos began to acquire what they believed would pass for proof of residence: utility bills and voter IDs. Not that these offered any proof of ownership, at least in the real world of the Mexican borderland.

  A new if precarious life was taking shape for people, some of whom were fleeing the ravages of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that Mexico and the U.S., along with Canada, had signed.

  These were farmers who, like the Bernal family, which had preceded them, emigrated from the south. The provisions of NAFTA drove these farmers into bankruptcy. Subsidized U.S. agricultural produce flooded the Mexican market. Local growers were powerless to compete against the U.S. corn and pork. They abandoned their farms, some to move north in the hope of finding employment in industry, others to slip across the border to take jobs for the agribusinesses that had ruined their livelihoods—adding an insult to an injury.

  “After I killed a pig, I would butcher it to sell the meat,” said one farmer from the province of Veracruz. But with the country flooded with cheap pork from the U.S., that was no longer profitable. “I did what I had to in order to survive, but I could never earn enough. Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed,” he said. “Then it wasn’t. Farm prices kept going down. When we couldn’t afford to pay our electric bill, we would use candles. Everyone was hurting all the time.”

  The farmer’s family had a small herd of cows so that they could give milk to neighbors who came asking for it. “There were people worse off than us.” Eventually the family sold four of its cows and five acres of land to provide enough money to get the farmer and his wife to the north. They settled in San Judas, in fact, where they made do in a one-room shack. It was their intent to look for employment in the factories that were sprouting up all along the border. Not surprisingly it was the farmer’s wife who got a job in a maquila one mile away from San Judas. The farmer stayed home and scraped by on the odd jobs that came along.

  (Maquila, the shortened version of maquiladora, is actually a Spanish word in its own right. It refers to the portion taken by the miller who processes customers’ grain.)

  Some settlers had memories of their past lives that were more nostalgic than the NAFTA-induced heartache. One woman named Estella recalled how she had yearned for the juice and the nectar of the maguey plant. Maguey is the source of the agave syrup that appears in U.S. grocery stores. The plant grew abundantly near Estella’s ancestral home in Zacatecas. Agua miel is what she called the juice that her abuelo (grandfather) used to give her for breakfast. She named the nectar lagrimas (tears) del maguey. It was candy-like and gooey. When drought struck the region, agua miel was just about the only thing to drink. Her grandfather told her that it was healthier than cow’s milk. The juice had to be drunk the day the maguey was milked, because it fermented within twenty-four hours and became pulque. When her abuelo harvested the juice, he was careful not to damage the maguey, so that it would survive what he called its castration.

  Maguey also grows in the north of Mexico, but there it is a runt of a plant, dwarfed by its sculptural cousins further south. So agua miel and pulque were relatively unknown in Ciudad Juárez until recently. When they became available, Estella persuaded her father to take her to a cantina in town so that she could drink some pulque. She expected it to taste like agua miel, since that’s what it came from. Not quite. She spat out her first mouthful, telling her papa that the stuff tasted like pasteurized piss.

  FATHER JOE

  Historically Boston’s North End is home to the city’s Italian community. This is where Joseph Borelli was born. This is where he grew up. His family occupied a walk-up flat not so different from others in the North End. It was furnished with chairs with white cotton stuffing that bulged out at rips in the seams. Crocheted antimacassars covered their arms and backs. These doilies were as white as the cotton stuffing and they were starch-stiff. Glossy renderings of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in peeling frames lined the walls of the bedrooms. An opaque view of the Grand Canal in Venice, like a daguerreotype, hung in the parlor. This was a room that was used only for weddings and funerals. Except for breakfast, which they consumed clustered in front of the fridge, the family ate at a table in the kitchen. On Sundays and special occasions like Christmas, Mrs. Borelli spread a flower print cloth on the linoleum surface of the table.

  Until it closed in 1974, Joe’s father worked in the navy yard in Charleston, across the harbor from Boston. His mother stayed home and did housewifely things, which included all the duties incumbent on raising three lusty boys. Joe was the oldest and the rowdiest.

  Mrs. Borelli spoke English normally, but Italian proverbs—and she knew them all—lost their pungency for her when translated into Yankee speech.

  Dal frutto si conosce l’albero.

  That was one of her favorites. Why Joe’s mother should reprimand Joe for doing anything that reminded her of her own or her husband’s failings was something of a mystery. Joe Sr. had family roots in Sicily. He was a quiet man who divulged little of what he thought about social issues and politics. When he wasn’t working, he spent time with his cronies, drinking abstemious amounts of birra Moretti in a tavern on Hanover Street. Or else he stayed home, reading the sports section in th
e Traveler. That was how Joe would remember his dad: with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his reading glasses sliding down his nose while he checked up on the Red Sox or the Celtics or the Patriots, depending on the season. Joe had his father’s classic good looks. But he was not his father’s son temperamentally. It was from his mother that he seemed to have inherited his assertive personality.

  The family was devoutly Catholic and attended mass every Sunday at St. Leonard’s, the oldest Catholic church in the North End. The Borellis did not have much money, but they saw to it that all of their boys went to St. John School, the school associated with St. Leonard’s, which in keeping with the church itself was the oldest parochial school in the North End. It was located in North Square, at 9 Moon Street, cheek by jowl with Paul Revere’s house. That house and Old North Church were the leading tourist attractions of the North End.

  St. John occupied a severe-looking brick building, where it had been established in the 1880s. When Joe Borelli started going to the school, it was staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Besides the classes that they taught, the sisters also handled the catechism lessons that Joe and all his Catholic classmates were required to attend. Although Vatican II was in session while Joe was learning his catechism, the young Borelli got his instruction from the Baltimore catechism then in use. That meant memorizing the answers to deceptively simple questions.

  Is original sin the only kind of sin?

  Original sin is not the only kind of sin; there is another kind, called actual sin, which we ourselves commit.