The Road Through San Judas

by Robert Fraga

  It was a terrifying experience. I found it strange that there were women with the guards. They were tough-looking, female versions of the male gang members. They seemed to be hiding in the guardroom beside the gate. I guess that if the guards decided to assault the women in the forum, it would look better if other women came to beat us up rather than the men.

  Again the police were present. Again they refused to intervene. They were there to ensure that there were no altercations, they said. That was all.

  Willivaldo Delgadillo, an activist who attended the forum, commented that “Juárez is world-famous for its murdered women, but now it’s going to become famous for its concentration camp at San Judas.” Delgadillo said of the forum:

  We were not allowed to go in, and the residents were not allowed to come out, so we set up the forum at the fence, one group of people inside the barbed wire and the other group outside.

  “Our city is being divided up by powerful developers,” he added. “The question from now on is going to be ‘What side of the fence are you on?’”

  A local historian, David Romo, wrote that some property values in the area had increased twenty-six-fold. Unsolicited buyers had come by, offering close to $40 thousand for a sliver of a sand dune. “I don’t know what to do or think,” he quoted one man as saying. “It seems strange to me that they are offering so much money just for a small property.”

  Undeterred by the fracas generated by the first San Judas forum, well-intentioned Las Cruces activists tried a second time. This time, the participants from New Mexico did not make it to the fence surrounding San Judas. Several of the MS-13 cholos, armed with baseball bats and accompanied by snarling dogs—one of them a pit bull held on a leash by the leader of the Schmidt goons—blocked the road about a quarter of a mile from the concentration camp.

  “The people who live here have free access,” said a Schmidt family rep. “But those who come to create conflict can’t enter. We don’t see any reason for them to be here.” The activists from Las Cruces clustered a few feet away from the jeering guards. They had planned to set up a tent and a microphone for the participants in the forum: speakers, poets, and musicians. But Mara Salvatrucha thwarted their arrangements.

  Once again the organizers of the forum asked the police to dismantle the barricade separating them from the gate leading into San Judas. Once again, the police demurred. Only their superior could order them to do that, they said, and he wasn’t around. The forum attendees retreated to reconvene several feet farther down the road where they pitched their tent. There they stood, ankle-deep in sand, to denounce the injustice, the hatred, and the hostility to which they had come to bear witness.

  Father Joe did not attend the disrupted forums at San Judas. How could he since he had been banished to El Paso by the Mexican immigration authorities? But no one could accuse him of laxness in the defense of his parishioners. His efforts on their behalf earned him no rebuke from his superiors in Pennsylvania, but he was careful about how he acted. Nothing he did was illegal—even in the narrowest sense of the word—and when he spoke, he eschewed language that could be viewed as anti-Catholic. The subject of liberation theology, for example, had never come up in his dealings with parishioners.

  The suspicion generated in the Church by liberation theologians’ use of Marxist terminology eased under Pope Francis, but contrary to what some people chose to believe about him, the pope who made gestures on behalf of the poor and who criticized the greed of the wealthy was not a liberal Protestant in a white skull cap. He held strong views about the sanctity of the priesthood, and he stopped short of endorsing revolutionary violence or any Marxist tenets.

  “We pledge to work harder so that our Latin American and Caribbean Church may continue to accompany our poorest brothers on their journey even to martyrdom,” he said. He later moved to accelerate the promotion of Bishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador—who was gunned down as he said mass in 1980—to the status of “blessed.” This move had been stymied for years by Church reactionaries leery of Romero’s leftist politics.

  “Romero is a man of God,” Francis said. “There are no doctrinal problems, and it is very important that the beatification be done quickly.” (In fact it was done in Rome in 2018.)

  The news rang as an angelic hymn in Father Joe’s ears as he sat in his room at the Spiritan House in El Paso. The room, lighted solely by an old-fashioned desk lamp, was bereft of decoration. Only a crucifix hung above an iron frame bed. The crucifix, made of twisted rebar, tinfoil, and discarded lumber, had been a gift from a San Judas resident. As simple as it was, Father Joe’s room was like an apartment in the Vatican in comparison to the shack that he had occupied in San Judas.

  During his 2016 visit to Mexico, Pope Francis visited Chiapas. He prayed before the tomb of Bishop Samuel Ruiz in the Cathedral of San Cristóbal de las Casas. The bishop had died in 2011. The pope couldn’t visit Chiapas without acknowledging the legacy of Samuel Ruiz. This, at least, was the opinion of Gaspar Morquecho, the journalist who had lost a night’s sleep, so excited had he been at the Zapatistas’ takeover of San Critóbal in 1994. “We’re talking easily of a half century of social ministry work,” said Morquecho, “and, starting in the ’60s, having a preferential option for the poor.” Among other acts of solidarity with the local community, Francis had reversed a ban on the ordination of indigenous deacons imposed after Ruiz retired.

  At an open-air mass in the city’s sports arena, attended by tens of thousands of people attired in brilliant Indian shawls and skirts, Pope Francis issued a ringing endorsement of indigenous rights.

  “Some have considered your values, cultures, and traditions inferior,” he intoned. “Others, dizzy with power, money, and the laws of the market, have stripped you of your lands and then contaminated them.”

  The pope paused for several long, long seconds before saying: “Sorry, brothers.”

  Local musicians played marimbas. The mass included readings in three native languages. And the pope’s miter was emblazoned with a traditional Chiapas design.

  Francis’ appeal was a clear echo of liberation theology, and a call—like Leonardo Boff’s—to build the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. “The Pope came to tell us that the Mexican state should apologize, the way he did,” one indigenous activist told the press. “It is an important action in a country where most Mexicans, as well as the political class and the majority of the Church, do not want to look at indigenous people.”

  Francis’ action was an affirmation of Father Joe’s own deeply ingrained opinions: the pope had enunciated the views of a humble priest who had worked tirelessly to protect his own impoverished flock on a windswept mesa of northern Mexico.

  THE WRAP-UP

  Manny wore a shirt with fading blue stripes. He was still a ruggedly handsome man. His pencil-thin mustache had blossomed into a luxuriant bush. He was unshaven. I had come to know him when he worked on insulating the restaurant funded by Las Hormigas. This was the project that Alfred von Bachmayr had directed. He looked older now, stockier and sadder. His days as the village gallant were clearly behind him, little more now than a half-forgotten memory. Manny’s daughter Sophia, eight years old, with tangles of black hair framing her face and the eyes of an attentive doe, sat beside him. A motherless child, she was wearing a short sleeve flowered dress. She said nothing until the very end of the interview.

  “They are one family, one son and his mother, and they have destroyed the lives of 250 families.

  “There have been deaths here. You know that.

  “The papers are saying that this highway of theirs was made for the Santa Theresa bridge. It cost 250 million pesos.

  “They’ve put up a sign by the gate to San Judas. It says ‘Private Property.’ How can San Judas be private property if the land is in dispute?

  “My father was one of the first settlers here. One day this land will be my daughter’s. It was paid for in blood. It’s ours and we must defend it.”

  “Do you want to leave?
” he asks his daughter.

  She shakes her head “no.”

  “We can get another house,” he baits her.

  “No,” she says. “I grew up here.”

  “Her mom is no longer with us,” Manny says. “There are only memories. That’s all that’s left.”

  To his daughter: “You’re not afraid?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m used to it. And I have my Dad.”

  She buries her face in his shoulder.

  Lucy Carrillo’s patio was a patch of prettiness in the midst of a wasteland. It was filled with pots of red geraniums and purple-blue lavender. I could imagine being back in the southwest of France. The house was an austere structure of adobe and salvaged wood pallets. The corridor faced east. From there, you could see the traffic from the bridge at Santa Theresa that choked the highway. It was less than two miles away. Lucy’s friends had helped her build an earthenware oven, because she liked to cook, and she was good at it. Here Lucy made her cheese-covered tortillas and crackling every weekend. Saturdays and Sundays were the days when her sons came to visit from the other side of the border.

  On a day in mid-fall 2012, I had returned to San Judas to meet some of the colonos who had stuck it out there—and to eat Lucy’s frijoles, nopales, and rice. Lucy’s guests drank beer chilled with chunks of ice that she had gotten from God knows where. Her guests included Elvia Villalobos and Lina Sarlat. The two ex-nuns were always together. They were like Siamese twins. They never ventured out, it seemed, the one without the other. Maybe that was the enduring influence of their past lives in a convent. Manny was there as well as another of Von Bachmayr’s crew, the once quiet and unassertive Mexican American, José Bernal, known to everyone as Ojos del Lobo. Evaristo and his wife Lara had also come back to the old neighborhood from their relocation site, where they were trying to make a fresh start with their little grocery store. They were active in a San Judas co-op that made pizza and salsa. They were searching for markets, both local and in the U.S., for their products. The co-op was considering branching out to produce more food items. “We’ve formed a co-op so we can get ahead and pay expenses,” Lara explained. “Sometimes some of us don’t work, since we have to be here taking care of a home or a piece of property.”

  From Lucy Carrillo’s patio, we looked out over a flock of scrawny chickens and her few goats nibbling contentedly on kernels of corn that lay on the ground. I noted now what others had noted and commented on, how her eyes were soft and brown and silent as the Aztec ruins.

  “I lived here, off and on, for thirty years of my life,” José Bernal began in English before lapsing into Spanish.

  Everyone grew silent as he spoke.

  “I grew up here, like many of the people I know. And it is here where they wish to remain, where our parents built their houses, erected the school, made the streets, and hauled the water. Why the fuck should we leave this behind?”

  José Bernal came up for air while the women in the group took care of the rest of us. They were anxious that there was enough red chili to keep our plates hot-spiced. The night, after all, was cooling down with a wind off the desert. José went on with his narrative:

  If they wanted this land, why didn’t they just talk to us? No, they threw us to their thugs. And their dogs. They insulted the women and scared the kids. Then they brought in their bulldozers and began pulling down the first houses. There was nothing we could do to stop them.

  José concluded each paragraph, almost each sentence, with a hissing noise, a snakelike kind of laugh. Was he amused or outraged by what he had to say? It was hard to tell. Maybe something in between amusement and outrage, or a combination of the two.

  Subcomandante Marcos had advised his audience in Chiapas to “cultivate a sense of humor, not only for your own mental and physical health, but because without a sense of humor you’re not going to understand, and those who don’t understand, judge, and those who judge, condemn.”

  One year before, José and other colonos had broken through police barricades to approach the man who was then President of Mexico. They demanded that he do something about the situation in San Judas. The president had promised to review the case. Later that year the Federal Executive ordered a high-ranking official in the Department of Agriculture to talk to the settlers. At the first of their meetings, they presented the official with documented proof of their right of possession. They showed him the decree of April 17, 1975, from the Department of Agriculture that stated that the twenty-five thousand hectares on which San Judas stood were federal property on which they were entitled to settle. They complained of the delaying tactics they had encountered at the Agrarian Reform Court. They proposed as an alternative to the court a “Dialogue Table” where not only they but representatives of the Schmidt family would meet face to face. At one of their last encounters with the government official, they laid out a statement signed by U.S. activists, academics, and intellectuals urging a just and dignified resolution of the conflict. The government official offered to act as a mediator, but he did not offer any guarantees for a solution of the problem. The settlers understood. The one thing that they could do was to persevere—and resist.

  “We were warriors and as such we knew our role and our moment.” That is what Marcos said at the end of his career with the Zapatistas as Subcomandante Marcos. He had in mind a transformation, a migration of souls, a shift of personas. “SuperMarcos went from being a spokesperson to being a distraction,” he said. “Those who loved and hated SuperMarcos now know that they have loved and hated a hologram. And we saw that now the hologram was no longer necessary.”

  One day Marcos’s eyes were blue, another day they were green, or brown, or hazel, or black—all depending on who did the interview and took the picture. He was the back-up player of professional soccer teams, an employee in department stores, a chauffeur, a philosopher, a filmmaker, and the et ceteras that can be found in the paid media. There was a Marcos for every occasion.

  At this very minute, in other corners of Mexico and the world, a man, a woman, a little girl, a little boy, an elderly man, an elderly woman—a memory—is beaten cruelly and with impunity, surrounded by the voracious crime that is the system, clubbed, cut, shot, finished off, dragged away among jeers, abandoned, their bodies then collected and mourned, their lives buried.

  This was a speech Marcos delivered shortly after a comrade, a Zapatista teacher named José Luis Solis López, also known as Galeano, had been murdered. “We think,” he offered, “that it is necessary for one of us to die so that Galeano lives. To satisfy the impertinence that is death, in place of Galeano we put another name, so that Galeano lives and death takes not a life but just a name—a few letters empty of any meaning. That is why we have decided that Marcos today ceases to exist.”

  What had Marcos said about future generations?

  Those who were children in January 1994 are now young people who have grown up in the resistance. They have been trained in rebel dignity, lifted up by their elders throughout those twelve years of war. These young people have a political, technical, and cultural training that we who began the Zapatista movement did not have. These youth are now sustaining our troops more and more, as well as assuming leadership positions in the organization.

  Whether Marcos was a hologram or not, whether his eyes were blue or green or brown, whether he was the back-up player of a professional soccer team or an employee in a department store, a chauffeur, a philosopher, or a filmmaker, whatever he was or would be, José had become a committed Zapatista.

  “At last, someone who understood that we were not looking for shepherds to guide us, nor flocks to lead to the promised land,” Marcos had said. “Neither masters nor slaves. Neither leaders nor leaderless masses. We realized that there was already a generation that could look at us face to face, that could listen to us and talk to us without seeking a guide or a leader, without intending to be submissive or becoming followers.”

  Back o
n the patio of Lucy Carrillo’s house, José went on to tell us what he knew of the issues confronting the settlers:

  Listen, I’m a humble man, but I’ve been fortunate enough to get some education, and I believe that if someone wants something that doesn’t belong to him, then he has to ask for it. Shit, this family that is said to help poor people, a family that is on buddy-buddy terms with the bishop of Chihuahua, a family that does all these goody-goody things, this family tries to take San Judas by force. What do you make of that?

  The settlers of San Judas are peaceful people. They went to the law to resolve this mix-up about the land. Remember, they’ve always worked the land. They built chicken coops. They had goats and cows and horses. But this is all gone now that the Schmidt family’s guards have forced so many of them to abandon their land. This was their plan all along, to clear people off this site. They knew beforehand that the authorities were on their side.

  At first they said that these lands were not ours. They belonged to their boss. We went to the police, but it was no use. Patrols of guards went through, time and time again, but the police did not intervene. There were rows, but the police did nothing. Back in March 2004, Mara Salvatrucha circled the neighborhood with barbed wire. A group of men stationed themselves beside the water tower outside San Judas, and they began to watch the settlers’ movements. When men went down into the city to work, the cholos took advantage of their absence to wreck their houses, burn the marraneras, and chop down the trees.

  At this point, Lina Sarlat took up the thread of the colonos’ grievances. “From the beginning of this brawl, San Judas and its residents were subjected to a regime of annoyances. The worst of these were the barbed-wire encirclement of the neighborhood and our sense of isolation.”

  From a cardboard box, Lina drew a packet of papers and crumpled newspaper articles. She spread these out on a table before for us to look at. She smoothed out each article and read the title of each story to make sure that she had them in the right order. One of the articles dealt with the enormous gate that the MS-13 installed at the entrance to the neighborhood. There armed guards controlled the passage into San Judas. They began to search, item by item, what each of the residents of the neighborhood brought into San Judas. Lina said: