by Robert Fraga
Nevertheless, the bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the water rights. Under the terms of the agreement, Verde paid $6.4 million for the right to pump twelve thousand acre-feet and to hold in reserve an additional two thousand acre-feet for nine years. (An acre-foot is the volume of an acre one foot deep.) Doña Ana County—which was Verde’s partner in the proceedings and the county where Verde owned its land on the U.S. side of the border—obtained the right to four to six thousand acre-feet of water.
On the Mexican side of the border, matters proceeded on a parallel track. In December 2005, the mayor of Ciudad Juárez called a meeting ostensibly to discuss (actually, to rubber-stamp) the project to sink wells in the Rabbit Dunes and pipe the water to Ciudad Juárez. Four dozen protestors carrying balloons and posters attended the meeting. An even larger number of the mayor’s people—let’s call them the Rabbiteers—were there, as well. As the evening wore on, things got noisy, and the city councilors decided to vacate the chamber to continue their deliberations in a private chamber. The Rabbiteers started to chant the mayor’s nickname: “Teto! Teto!” The mayor grinned. He turned his thumb up, then he turned it down. That gesture doomed the protestors. As soon as he had left the chamber, the Rabbiteers began shoving and pushing the anti-Dunes protestors, which included people of the cloth—priests and nuns—and teachers.
“They started kicking us, hitting us, knocking us down,” one of the anti-Dunes people said later. “The police were there. They didn’t do anything. They just watched.”
A petition drive mounted by the anti-Dunes faction collected more than fifty thousand signatures. It failed because city officials invalidated a large number of signatures.
Eloy Vallina had the last word, which the press naively attributed to a guilty conscience: “La corrupción somos todos, nadie se salva.” We are all corrupt. There are no exceptions.
CONFLICT
Father Joe had been present at the municipal meeting to discuss the pipeline project from the Rabbit Dunes aquifer to Ciudad Juárez. He and José Bernal had gone together. Like other protestors there, they had both sustained injuries during the brawl that broke out at the end of the meeting. Father Joe’s injuries had been slight: a grazed shin, some black and blue marks on his right arm, a scratch on his left cheek. José got a black eye and a ripped shirt. Father Joe had tried to restrain Ojos del Lobo from mixing it up with the thugs all around them, grabbing him by the collar and pulling him away from the pro-development faction. That, in fact, was how the priest had been hurt. The more lasting damage for both men was psychological: How could this happen in a civic function? Under the noses of the cops who ringed the chamber?
When Padre Borelli got home that night—he was then staying in the shack in front of Casa Amistad that belonged to the Spiritan Order—he had some things to mull over. What most perplexed and annoyed him was the vacant look in the eyes of the police officers and their utterly impassive faces. They looked as if they had all undergone lobotomies. Or were they doing drugs?
Since the beginning of the confrontation between the Schmidt family and the settlers in San Judas, José Bernal had taken to spending more and more time in the neighborhood, staying with friends and family—distant cousins for the most part, since his own parents, first his father, then, years later, his mother, had passed away—and returning to the U.S. infrequently to work on construction projects in California where he had gone to high school and college.
Like many Mexicans who lived near the U.S. border, José was truly bilingual, fluent in both English and Spanish. His plan was to settle down in the U.S. His ex-girlfriend’s father in Los Angeles had been his boss in the construction business. This was the man who had opened doors for José at the beginning of his career. Then the troubles blew up in San Judas. José felt that to leave would be an act of betrayal to kith and kin. So he stayed on. Although he was reserved by nature, he grew more involved in the settlers’ struggle. He developed a close friendship with Father Joe, and he began to read newspapers like La Jornada. Before his departure to the U.S., he had not known the periodical even existed.
The Schmidt family had staked out a claim to much of San Judas. Was it a valid claim? Pablo’s father Emanuel had bought the land from a speculator in the 1960s, or so Pablo asserted. At that time, he claimed, the only living creatures in San Judas were rabbits and rattlesnakes. The purported sale predated the declaration by President Echeverria that the region to the west of Ciudad Juárez, which included San Judas, was federal property where settlers were free to take possession of plots of land, build homes, raise crops, and pasture animals.
The Schmidts went further: they denied that settlement in the area started in 1970. In their version of events, squatters began arriving after that date. Sensing a problem in the making, Emanuel Schmidt had given four hundred acres (or so the family insisted) to the man he identified as the leader of the squatters. This “gift” came with the stipulation that the squatters stay within that parcel of land. It didn’t work. The squatters sold off the four hundred acres to settlers, who each took five acres, fenced off what they believed was their land, and began to build on it.
As his father’s sole heir, Pablo still owned over half the colonia of San Judas, or so he argued. Pablo was able to produce a title to the land, but it was adjudged to be a fake by critics who said that the “seller” did not actually own the land the Schmidt family claimed to have bought from him. It was more than a coincidence, critics—including the settlers in San Judas—observed, that Pablo Schmidt began to press his claim only when it became apparent that the land was strategically valuable. The Mexican government had invited claimants to property in San Judas to come forward to challenge the president’s decree in 1975. Why hadn’t Doña Patricia Schmidt done something then?
The Schmidt clan began to tighten the screws on the residents of the colonia. First, they disrupted the neighborhood’s water supply by preventing water trucks from entering the neighborhood. It was a cruel irony that the water tower that serviced the area to the west of Ciudad Juárez rose on a hillside overlooking San Judas. “The water passes right in front of my house, but I can’t get any,” lamented one resident.
Next came the electricity. Rumors circulated in the colonia during the summer of 2002 that Pablo would try to cut their electricity off. This was a service that had only recently been established. Father Joe tried to calm people’s fears. He assured them that the Federal Electric Commission (CFE were its initials in Spanish) would not undo what it had just put in place.
He was wrong. The Federal Electric Commission issued a statement that it “had made a mistake.” Early one morning in September, the CFE sent a convoy of trucks to San Judas to uproot the electric poles in the barrio. Residents were waiting for them. Piling tires at the entrance to the barrio, they doused them with kerosene and set them alight. Faced with fire and the odor of incinerated rubber, the men from the CFE were not about to proceed. They vowed to return only with a police escort. The trucks from the CFE reversed and sped back down the mesa, swallowed up in clouds of dust. The men of San Judas cheered.
Their celebration was premature. In the spring of 2003, tension in San Judas jumped several notches when Pablo Schmidt sent in a gang of private guards—un grupo de choque—also identified as “White Guards” to make trouble for the settlers. The White Guards were thugs, but not run-of-the-mill cholos, recruited from the masses of unemployed youths milling about in the poor neighborhoods of west Juárez. No, these thugs were something special. They had a name: Mara Salvatrucha, sometimes called MS-13, the “13” because M is the thirteenth letter in the alphabet. The group originated not in Mexico but in the U.S., in Los Angeles to be precise, where it first arose to defend the Salvadoran community.
The group’s initial motivation may have been noble, but MS-13 evolved into something decidedly more sinister as it spread beyond L.A. back into El Salvador, then Honduras, then into Mexico, where members were recruited by one drug cartel to kill workers for a rival car
tel. The vigilantes morphed into criminals of a particularly repugnant stripe, elaborately tattooed mercenaries.
MS-13 gained notoriety for its cruelty, its pitiless revenge on double-crossing squealers who talked to the cops. There were so many knives stuck in the body of one turncoat MS member—ghoulishly photographed and disseminated on the web—that he looked like a human pincushion. These were the choir boys Pablo Schmidt brought in to “protect” the family’s property in San Judas. They showed up early one morning in May 2003 armed with plastic pipes, clubs, even pistols: 9mm handguns and expensive Smith & Wesson models. The residents of San Judas complained about the firepower, but the mayor of Ciudad Juárez claimed that he was powerless to do anything about that, because the lads of MS-13 had gun permits.
What were the colonos to do? They met to plan for their mutual defense. They started to acquire an arsenal of primitive weapons. Fifty yards away, the cholos from MS-13 strutted in the street. They slapped their plastic pipes in their hands and taunted the settlers. They grinned broadly and made the tattoos on their pecs shimmy like Jell-O.
“We’re here to have a go at them,” bragged one of the thugs. “Let’s see what these maricones can do against us.”
The settlers reacted by marching on city hall to demand the removal of the MS-13. Surprisingly they were successful: just before retiring from office, the mayor of Ciudad Juárez declared that San Judas was “under siege.” He ordered the arrest of the MS-13 members patrolling the neighborhood. Police hauled the punks off to jail. The settlers cheered.
But once again, their victory was short-lived. The CFE reissued its demand that electricity to the barrio be cut off. This time, when the crews from the CFE arrived to do their dirty work, they arrived with a police escort. By the end of the day, under the helpless gaze of the inhabitants of the district, the CFE crews toppled eighty electric poles. They loaded a dozen transformers on trucks. They dismantled five kilometers of high-tension wire. They coiled the wire on the ground like a dead snake. Then they hoisted it onto the beds of idling trucks. Finally, they hauled everything away. That night, San Judas, at least that part of the neighborhood coveted by the Schmidt clan, was as dark as the surrounding desert. The next day neither the whirring of ancient fans nor the wheezing of asthmatic refrigerators broke the silence of the barrio. What you heard was animal noises—the clucking of chickens, the forlorn grunting of swine—muffled by the heat of the summer sun.
Nor had the residents of San Judas seen the last of MS-13. In the spring of 2004, the goons were back. This time they brought construction material and equipment. Their first objective was to establish a semi-permanent camp just outside the neighborhood. This meant a cluster of small huts with a shared electric generator and portable toilets. A more menacing construction project, however, was on their agenda. Starting in the middle of the night, the Schmidts’ White Guards erected a barbed-wire fence around the barrio. Concrete posts held the wire in place. This one gesture made a big chunk of San Judas into a concentration camp. No one could enter or leave without the White Guards’ consent. That included supply trucks and city buses. Buses transporting women back from their work at the maquilas now stopped at the gate manned by MS-13 guards. From there, the women groped their way home in the dark.
Casa Amistad and Father Joe’s shack (like the house of the ex-nuns Elvia Villalobos and Lina Sarlat) lay outside the perimeter of the enclosure. But Father Joe’s chapel, the neighborhood’s primary school, and the Sisters of Charity’s clinic, as well as many houses, including Lucy Carrillo’s, were sealed up behind the Berlin Wall of San Judas. Evaristo’s and Lara’s tienda de abarrotes likewise lay inside the enclosed area.
Inhabitants of San Judas, now prisoners in their own neighborhood, tried to tear the barbed-wire fence down. But the cholos from MS-13 took to hurling rocks at them. The cholos feigned charges with unsheathed knives. The police, in the meantime, stood by, passively observing the gathering rumble. Father Joe rushed to the scene of the confrontation. He thought back to the imbroglio at the municipal meeting in which he and several others had been hurt. He saw that a number of the colonos had bloody gashes on their arms and faces where the rocks had struck them.
“What’s happening here? Why are you throwing rocks at these people?” the priest asked the White Guards.
The MS-13 eyed him sullenly. Their fists closed around the rocks they had not hurled. But they were forced to respect a man of God. A couple of them muttered “maricones” under their breath. The settlers, who loved and revered their padre, kept their silence although a few grunted their appreciation of his intervention. To these men, Father Joe said, “Stay calm. They are only doing what they have been ordered to do.”
It took a measure of persuasion, but eventually Father Joe was able to defuse the situation. The settlers backed away from their MS-13 antagonists.
The authorities offered no real help to the colonos in their struggle. For example, the director of the Housing Authority advised the settlers to accept a Schmidt family offer of free land to resettle the colonos. That included free construction material. If the settlers lost their court battle, the director of the Housing Authority pointed out, they would lose everything.
One small and ultimately unfruitful victory did come the way of the settlers. The Federal Consumer Protection Agency ordered the CFE to restore electricity to the barrio. If that were not possible, then the settlers should be reimbursed for what they had spent to have electricity installed in San Judas in the first place.
“It is unheard of and inhuman to strip the electric services to a neighborhood where there are children, elderly, and sick, without first ordering an evacuation,” cried a lawyer representing the colonos.
On the opposing side, the lawyer representing Pablo Schmidt was a pudgy man named Carlos Banda. He looked like an evil teddy bear. He wore granny glasses and impeccably laundered white shirts. His reaction to the court decision to restore electricity to San Judas oozed contempt. Restore the electric poles? “I’ll put back five hundred,” he sneered, “or as many as you want.”
Things had come to such a pass that Father Joe took pen in hand and wrote an appeal to Pablo Schmidt that appeared in El Diario. “Stop the injustice,” he lectured him. “Live according to your Christian faith. Think about your own charities in Ciudad Juárez and the good causes that you support. Unite with the families of San Judas to demonstrate your values, rather than erecting a barbed-wire fence like the ones in Nazi Germany.”
The Schmidt clan was careful to stay in the background while hostilities raged. Rarely did they venture out of the compound of mansions where they resided in an elegant quarter of Juárez. But their influence on the conduct of the battle was never in doubt. One evening in the fall of 2004, a couple of trucks carrying Mara Salvatrucha men roared up to the chapel where Father Joe was accustomed to saying mass on Sundays. A man on horseback accompanied the trucks. He was later identified as Carlos Banda. The men fired shots and warned neighbors not to come close to the chapel. The intruders left but the trucks came back later that night with thugs armed with crowbars and sledgehammers. They jumped out and began demolishing the chapel. Within an hour, there was nothing left of Jesus de Nazareth but a jumble of splintered beams and broken glass.
Father Joe could not at first believe that men who were nominally Catholic would destroy a church. But his eyes disabused him of that naive belief.
“They are trying to demoralize us,” he said to his parishioners. “It won’t work. This Saturday we shall raise our church again, and Sunday we’ll have mass there.”
Good as his word, Father Joe celebrated mass the following Sunday in a new chapel constructed of adobe. Two hundred worshippers attended.
The Bishop of Juárez saw fit to condemn the destruction of the old chapel: “In pagan eyes, this was a small and insignificant place. But even a humble chapel is like a great cathedral in the presence of Christ. Those who destroyed it have committed an unspeakable sacrilege.”
Wou
ld the bishop raise the issue with the Schmidt family, journalists asked him. That apparently was a different matter. “I wouldn’t know what kind of dialogue to engage in with them,” he said to the stupefaction of his interviewers. It was up to the authorities to investigate the matter and to resolve the problem. The bishop went on to unfurl the banner of Church dignity: “I am responsible for all matters dealing with the diocese of Ciudad Juárez, and I will support the authorities in whatever way I can.”
MS-13 retired to their camp, at least for the time being. There they kept the settlers under surveillance, spying on them with binoculars. Some of the thugs had taken to wearing fake leather jackets unzippered to show off the tattoos on their pecs and abs. The back of each jacket pictured the head of a tiger with bared fangs. When Mara Salvatrucha ventured into San Judas, it was to attack the settlers, singling out leaders of the resistance for special treatment.
One of these confrontations occurred between one of the MS-13 hoods and José Bernal. He was now prominent in the demos mounted to protest Pablo Schmidt’s walling off of San Judas. Angry words precipitated a shoving match between the two men. The hood pulled his gun and poked it in José’s chest. José’s grey eyes showed no fear. His face betrayed no emotion of any kind. But he threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender and backed off. After some grumbling and the customary barrage of insults, the set-to petered out. Like so many others, it would live on as only one of the barrio’s history of hostile encounters.