The Road Through San Judas

by Robert Fraga

  Human rights violations are taking place against the residents of the neighborhood with the tacit consent of the local government. The land development driving the displacement of residents is reflected in other areas of the immediate border region, including Segundo Barrio in El Paso, Texas. Rather than being isolated cases of displacement, the cases described in this report appear to be interconnected.

  Raphael Piñon was not the only old man to be molested by the MS-13. There were other incidents. One involved a man of the same age as Piñon. His name was Cruz Reza. Everyone in San Judas called him Don Cruz. Before the troubles began, Don Cruz managed to get by selling the goats that he raised on his little farm. From time to time, his girlfriend would come up to San Judas to visit him. But with Mara Salvatrucha in control of the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the neighborhood, his girlfriend could no longer come and go as she pleased and Don Cruz could not get food for his goats.

  “Sell the damn goats,” the guards told him. “Sell them all. They don’t belong to you, anyway.”

  For some reason, the thought that Don Cruz could sell his goats and keep the money angered the guards. They tied him up, hand and foot, and began slapping him around.

  “Where the fuck is the money for the goats?” they demanded.

  They told the army that Don Cruz was keeping a firearm in his house. Soldiers searched Don Cruz’s house and found his .22 rifle.

  “What the fuck do you want this for?” they asked him.

  “To shoot hares and coyotes,” Don Cruz answered. “Or thieves.”

  The soldiers confiscated the rifle. Don Cruz was left with less and less. His livestock was gone—once upon a time he had possessed 80 goats, 70 pigs, and 180 chickens. He found himself with a single sow—una marrana.

  He was told that none of what he had lost belonged to him. It all belonged to the rightful owners of San Judas, the Schmidt family, who offered to purchase his property for fifty thousand pesos, less than $5 thousand.

  Don Cruz began to live like a hermit. He never ventured out of his house for fear that the White Guards would take advantage of his absence to knock the shack down. Neighbors brought him food and news. Cruz Reza stayed in contact with the outside world with his cell phone. He recharged it with the battery of his pickup truck.

  Put the Mexican state on trial!

  That was how hundreds of people felt, people who gathered in Ciudad Juárez early in 2012 to meet representatives of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (known by its initials in Spanish TPP). The reps from TPP had come to the city to hear firsthand of the abuses inflicted on the country since the last century.

  The TPP was born in the summer of 1974. It was the successor of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal, named after the British philosopher and political activist. That organization had burst upon the world’s media stage when it exposed war crimes committed in Vietnam during the country’s ten-year civil war. Since its birth, the TPP has examined scores of atrocities in a dozen countries. The tribunal agreed to set up a chapter in Mexico in response to a request filed by human rights groups.

  “We have a duty to show what the reality is, and we will do so with complete independence.” That was the comment of a French jurist who was also a member of the Mexico chapter of the TPP. He went on to say:

  Mexico has a relatively good international human rights image, because it has signed all of the treaties and conventions, and the role of the TPP will be to demonstrate whether or not that image reflects reality.

  The organization’s verdicts were nonbinding, although they were based on international law. “That’s the idea of a popular alternative justice that implies the defense of rights,” said one Mexican member of the TPP. For Mexico, the organization brought together eight judges. These included the cofounder of Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza Cinco de Mayo and the daughter of the revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon. The Mexican chapter of the TPP crisscrossed the country collecting testimony. The group eventually incorporated into its findings all that it had documented. Those findings were published in the fall of 2014.

  Of course, the TPP delegation heard plenty about San Judas and the neighborhood’s fight with the Schmidt guards. “For me, it’s a good thing,” one resident said, “because people are coming together to find out what is happening over there and to find out what is happening over here.”

  During its session in Ciudad Juárez, a convoy of Federal Police trucks, packed with black-clad cops, masked and armed to the teeth, circled the hall where the TPP was meeting.

  Undeterred by the cops’ show of muscle, a spokeswoman for the Catholic Church labor ministry said, “This tribunal represents a hope for justice that comes from the people, from the testimonies of the people.” Another local activist told an American reporter that the TPP might start a U.S. chapter, because “the U.S. is a source of terror as well as a source of hope; there are many people in the U.S. who are worried about what is going on in Mexico.”

  The final report of the TPP Mexico chapter came out in the spring of 2015. How can one begin to describe its indictment of criminal practices in the country? The word “scathing” comes to mind. The authors opened their report with the statement:

  In this realm of impunity that is today’s Mexico, there are murders with no murderers, torture with no torturers, sexual violence with no abusers, in a constant abdication of responsibility, in which it would seem that the thousands and thousands of massacres, murders, and systematic violations of the rights of peoples are always isolated acts or marginal situations, rather than true crimes for which the State bears responsibility.

  The report condemned NAFTA, which it characterized as part of a “legal and political web of domination.” (The report included a comment by the opinion editor of La Jornada, a previously cited newspaper: “Mexico is like just one more state of the United States but without their laws or rules.”)

  The TPP jurists put that remark in their assessment of the trade pact. Moreover, they said:

  It is vital that we understand that NAFTA and the other neoliberal institutions are not designed to promote the social good.

  A panel of TPP judges recommended that Mexico withdraw from NAFTA:

  The economy can’t be above the dignity of human life, and the free trade agreement has benefited only a few.

  Page after page, the findings unveiled a litany of scandals. These included the femicides of Ciudad Juárez, environmental degradation, unsolved murders, the intimidation of the press, the muzzling of free speech, slave labor and torture, rape, and the flouting of trade union rights. One telling sentence included a clear reference to San Judas:

  There are allegations of dwellings being destroyed to force families and communities to move in order to free up land for various industrial, mining, tourism, or road infrastructure projects.

  While jurists inside were hearing of the land dispute in San Judas, residents of the colonia were outside the meeting hall, where they had set up a table to sell bottles of their locally produced salsa.

  The TPP report appeared in the immediate aftermath of the abduction and murder of forty-three teacher trainee students in the town of Iguala in the south of the country. They were part of a group of one hundred students from a teachers’ college—the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa—not far from Mexico City. They had planned to protest what they considered to be discriminatory practices on the part of the government in hiring and funding projects. To start off, they commandeered a fleet of buses to take them to Iguala.

  (This was not the first time that had happened: students routinely hijacked their means of transport. After the demonstration they attended was finished, the students routinely returned the buses. The bus company tolerated their behavior without complaint.)

  The students’ goal was to disrupt a meeting held to commemorate the public works undertaken by the wife of the mayor of Iguala. Their escapade started out as a lark. The students were happy and relaxed, chatting amiably with their
drivers. Then local police intercepted the students en route, acting, one can reasonably assume, on orders from the mayor. They fired tear gas and punctured the buses’ tires. “We’re going to kill all of you,” the cops yelled, according to one of the bus drivers. One cop thrust his pistol into the driver’s chest and said, “You too.”

  A firefight ensued. One group of students escaped from a bus and began throwing rocks at a police car. Other students got the convey of buses back en route. Police fired on it. Students hit the floor but told their drivers to keep going. Bullets shattered bus windows. Investigators later found thirty bullet holes in one of the buses. The cops killed several people that night, including one student whose body was uncovered several days later. Accounts of his final moments differ: an autopsy showed that his eyes had been gouged out, facial tissue and muscle had been ripped off, his skull had been fractured, and several of his internal organs ruptured. You can take your pick of the gory details. But regardless what you choose, this showed “the level of atrocities committed that night,” according to one investigator. Shortly after midnight of the day following the clashes with the police, three hooded men jumped out of an SUV and another vehicle and opened fire on an impromptu press conference taking place at the scene of the clash. They killed two students and injured several others.

  Police rounded up surviving students and threw them in the slammer. A local gang called the United Warriors somehow took charge of the students. Details of the transfer were murky. The United Warriors believed that at least some of the students had ties to a rival gang called the Reds, who posed a threat to United Warriors’ control of the region. On the strength of that belief, the Warriors executed all of the students and incinerated their bodies. The fire that consumed the corpses burned into the wee hours of the morning. Gang members then dumped the students’ remains into plastic bags and threw them into the San Juan River. “We turned them into dust and threw their remains in the water,” one of the murderers texted the gang leader. “They will never be found.” A reporter for La Jornada telephoned the mayor of Iguala to find out what happened. The mayor told him, “Nothing happened.”

  More than one month after the students’ abduction, the Mexican attorney general announced that several sacks filled with human remains had been found by a river close to the site where the students’ bodies had been burned. An independent tribunal later issued two reports on the students’ murder, accusing the Mexican government of stonewalling their investigation.

  For its part, the TPP cited the massacre in Iguala in its final report:

  For all its painful impact and the documented connivance of the public authorities and the involvement of their agents, what happened at Ayotzinapa is merely another chapter in the long list of violations of the rights to dignity and life of the people of Mexico. They are a dramatic, real and symbolic expression of the relevance and meaning of the TPP’s proposals.

  Students have taken the brunt of official and corporate wrath in past episodes of Mexican history. An infamous 1968 massacre of students in the part of Mexico City known as Tlatelolco is one example. This was the incident that radicalized the young Comandante Marcos. Subsequently he became active in a Maoist group called National Liberation Forces. Students at Ayotzinapa had plans to ask for financial support to go to Mexico City for a march to mark the anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre.

  What happened in San Judas was on a smaller scale, but it was just as brutal as the massacres in Tlatelolco and Iguala. In 1980, the colonos of San Judas had constructed with their own hands a school named after the Mexican educator Alfredo Nava Sahagún. After Schmidt began his siege of the neighborhood, his henchmen dug trenches—six feet across, six feet deep—around the school to make the building almost impossible to access. The immediate vicinity of the two-classroom edifice looked like a World War I battlefield. Kindergarteners had no choice but to go through MS-13 checkpoints, where the guards ridiculed the kids.

  One fateful morning in the fall of 2005, Maria Casango left her two younger children in her house when she took her older daughter Charlotte to school. She had given both of the younger children their breakfast and told her son Magdaleno, age four, “I’m leaving now, papacito. Look after your sister.”

  Magdaleno’s sister Maria was three years old.

  Mama Casango was on her way back home when her cousin Abigail came running toward her. There was a fire, she said. Maria could see the smoke, then the flame. At first it looked as if the garbage had taken on fire, but then she realized that, no, it was a house. It was her house.

  “You could hear everything crackling inside,” she said later.

  She ran screaming toward the burning house. Abigail Casango and neighbors dragged her back. It was too late. Little Maria was found still in her bed. The body of her brother Magdaleno lay face up, with his back arched and his arms outstretched. He had made it to the tiny hall separating the children’s room from their parents’.

  Maria Casango began to scream. Neighbors had to carry her to Abigail’s house.

  “Why me?” she cried. “Why my children? Why couldn’t I have died with them?”

  The neighbors could commiserate. Like the Chorus in Euripides’ play Medea, they could cry: “Ah! Poor lady, wither wilt thou turn?” Without water, it had been impossible to fight the fire. The police arrived late. The firefighters never came at all.

  Officials reacted with caution to the incident: “We do not want the death of two minors politicized.”

  What the neighbors told Maria was that a couple of young cholos had been seen near the house carrying a plastic gallon jug and spilling a clear liquid from it. Had their boss ordered them to set fire to a house? In any event, they had gotten the wrong house.

  The official verdict was that a short circuit was the cause of the fire. The chief of the fire department explained that “improvised electrical installations create a permanent risk of these kinds of tragedies occurring.”

  Maria’s and Magdaleno’s house had no electricity. Neither did their neighbors. All electricity to San Judas had been cut off months before.

  MOVING TARGETS

  Early in the twenty-first century, Mexico became a dangerous country for reporters. It was not always that way, but things changed. Now Mexico was killing more journalists than Iraq. Little was said or written about it. When a reporter in the state of Guerrero, in the south of the country, was shot in the head, only one national paper, La Jornada, covered the story. The local newspapers wrote nothing at all about the murder.

  When another reporter, Valentin Valdés Espinosa, employed by Zócalo de Saltillo, was killed, a handwritten note left beside his body explained, “This is going to happen to all those who do not comply.” His murderers had dumped the body of the twenty-nine-year-old reporter in front of a motel. Ropes pinioned his arms and legs. His body showed signs of torture. He had been shot not once but over and over again. “We are not going to get mixed up in this,” said Vadés’s editor. “I don’t believe there will be results, so why push?”

  An hour-long shootout in Ciudad Juárez passed without comment in the press.

  El Diario published an editorial saying that it was willing to shape its news coverage to suit the demands of the cartels. It took this extraordinary step in order not to jeopardize its reporters’ lives. “When a cartel comes here to ask us not to publish something, they’re very diplomatic. They’re not violent,” said Pedro Torres Estrada, the editor of the newspaper. “When you have the power, though, you can be this way.”

  Cartels took to hacking email accounts of journalists to find out who their sources were and to track the whereabouts of the reporters themselves. Thugs broke into newsrooms, vandalized equipment, and stole computers. Newspapers routinely omitted reporter bylines and photographer picture credits from crime stories considered sensitive.

  No one blamed Mexican journalists for taking self-protective action (or inaction). The intimidation was overwhelming. Eighty-eight journalists were killed in th
e first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. At the height of the violence against journalists, every ten days saw the murder of a Mexican journalist. One human rights organization reported that 89 percent of the murders of journalists went unpunished.

  The killing came home to El Diario on a November morning in 2008. Armando Rodríguez was the newspaper’s star reporter. He was a bluff, aggressive man. His nickname—Choco—came from a Mexican sweet that has a cream center and a chocolate covering. His colleagues thought that this pastry reflected Rodríguez’s temperament.

  The journalist’s contacts inside the police and the judiciary were legendary. “Armando had better contacts than anyone with the police,” said the executive editor of the newspaper. Fellow reporters used to say that he held unchallenged sway at police headquarters. His jokes were surefire. He could reduce a desk clerk to spasms of laughter one moment, then squeeze an interview out of a police commander the next.

  Rodríguez played by his own rules. He brooked interference from no one. One day he had walked into his new editor’s office, closed the door behind him, and told her, “I have a problem with authority.”

  Armando was the proverbial bull in a china closet. In his case, the china closet was a sprawling, untidy agglomeration called Ciudad Juárez. He was famous for playing the music he liked, and he played it loud and strong. To hell with what the neighbors thought. He was prolific, too, churning out on average four stories a day for the paper.

  One morning in November 2008, Rodríguez was sitting in his car with his eight-year-old daughter. Armando used to drive her to school before beginning his workday at the newspaper. It was cold that morning, and the two of them tried to get warm by huddling over the warm air vent in the dashboard. They never saw the man who walked up to the car from behind and opened fire with a 9mm pistol, first through the driver’s window, then through the windshield. There were six bullet holes, three in the driver’s window, three in the windshield. Police later found a total of ten bullet casings around Rodríguez’s car. The hit man—who was never apprehended—made his getaway in a waiting car.