Fri May 18, 2012
AP Images
Relatives of police woman Anagustina Nevarez Soto grieve over her coffin in Ciudad Juarez (Northern Mexico).
“We Die in the Field”
By Karol Gil – Ciudad Juarez – June 2010
It had been a difficult season for the Villas de Salvarcar Jaguars. But after a heart-pounding playoff, the high school football team pulled off a victory and won the interstate league championship for the second consecutive year. Gathering at a small house to celebrate their win, teammates and friends shared hot dogs, sodas and chips.
Villas de Salvarcar is a blue collar neighborhood that borders the downtown city of Ciudad Juarez, a city that has earned a notorious reputation of violent crime over the last 20 years. At around midnight two SUV’s, pulled up and parked outside the small house. Seven gunmen carrying M-13s and AK-47s got out of the car and entered the home demanding that a drug dealer they presumed to be hidden inside come out.
Frightened, the ballplayers said they knew nothing about the drug dealer and in fear began to run for their lives. Some of the kids managed to escape while others were not so lucky. Sixteen teenagers were shot and killed. The news shocked the country and made major headlines around the world. The football team’s winning slogan, “we die in the field” seemed to offer an ominous elegy for those ballplayers gunned down.
While in Japan, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said these unfortunate deaths were likely related to a quarrel among drug traffickers or gang members. The President seemed to believe it was nothing more than a matter of kids having chosen a path of delinquency. Outraged, their parents countered, saying their children were good boys – most 10th grade students in good standing.
Further investigation into the massacre revealed that none of the ballplayers were linked to any criminal organization or to drug traffickers. Detectives at the scene found no evidence of alcohol or cigarettes in the house where the celebration was being held.
Calderon paid a visit to Ciudad Juarez to extend his condolences and apologize to the parents. Members of his contingent arranged an exclusive town meeting with residents and the mourning parents. In the middle of the meeting, a mother who had lost two children in the tragedy vented her frustration, telling Calderon before international press, “I cannot say, Mr. President, [that] you are welcome here because for me you are not. In the past two years so many things have happened – assassinations and massacres – and no one has done anything not just for my two dead children but for all the children of Juarez.”
It’s been four years and Calderon’s “war on drugs” doesn’t seem to be working. Juarez is one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico – the 16 innocent teenagers representing the collateral damage.
It’s true that foreign investment helped Juarez become a growing industrial city where the maquiladora (factory) provided work for locals and immigrants who have moved there from rural areas. But in addition to providing work, this demographic explosion has also challenged the economic and environmental infrastructure.
One need only walk through the impoverished communities inhabited by maquilidora workers to see acute poverty. Many of these workers are migrants from agricultural states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Veracruz, a region that failed to attract foreign investment.
Without revenue people have been people off the farms to find more lucrative work in Mexican border towns where industrial development has become a magnet attracting the unemployed. Nonetheless, maquiladora jobs are characterized by low wages and precarious working conditions. These conditions have shaped the development of poor and dangerous colonias—many of them within walking distance from El Paso (TX). An absence of electricity, sewage management, schools, and paved roads in these colonias helped make these communities havens for illicit activity.
It’s true that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which passed in 1994, stimulated job creation. Yet an unintended byproduct of this agreement seems to have produced a soaring murder rate – this despite the U.S. Merida Initiative that provided $400 million in financial aid to the Mexican government which did nothing to decrease drug trade.
Over the last 10 years, 600 women were murdered and 3000 others have gone mysteriously missing. More than 15,000 people were killed in the last three years. In March, 2009 over 4500 soldiers and federal police were sent to Juarez to establish law and order, but to no avail. Last August, the city had the highest murder rate in the world.
But drug trafficking is the tip of the iceberg. Not an isolated problem as mainstream media would have us believe, it has underpinnings in a weak economic and political structure that has been tolerated for years.
In fact, the situation that exists in Juarez has evolved over the past 20 years – promoted by free trade and a market-driven economic policy that ironically was intended to help protect social and political institutions in Mexico. And it is this infrastructural demise that has contributed to income inequality and social dislocation that has produced this underworld activity.
More than 50 million Mexicans live in patrimonial poverty – approximately 47.4 percent of the entire Mexican population. This percentage increased five percent between 2006 and 2008 leaving too many people with insufficient income to satisfy basic needs – health, education, food, housing, clothing, and public transportation.
The Mexican middle class – representing approximately 16 percent of the population – live behind fenced-in neighborhoods that protect their five- room houses and brand new cars. Their incomes, ranging between $42,000 and 50,000, buy them a good life, a “dignified” job that demands particular skills they have developed from attending expensive higher education schools.
For some opportunity exists in Mexico. Indeed, one of the richest people in the world is Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu, worth $53.5 billion. Helu, who made his fortune by purchasing state-owned telephone enterprise Telmex in 1990, ranked number one on Forbes’ list of the richest people in the world this year above Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
While some argue that Helu is a model of what the Mexican “entrepreneurship” system can create, the Mexican people know better. This kind of wealth is concentrated in a very few hands.
As such, drug trafficking has emerged as a free trade opportunity for those deprived of institutional opportunities. Mexican drug traffickers produce and export marihuana and crystal meth that supplies a ready source of consumers in United States. Likewise, the Columbian drug traffickers produce cocaine that is shipped to Mexico where it is passed through the U.S. border by Mexican traffickers.
In fact, drug trafficking has filled a void of employment opportunities, becoming an organized institutional network of sophisticated international linkages that produce and transport drugs primarily to poor communities in the U.S. There a young, typically minority population, primarily African Americans and Hispanics sell the drugs mostly to middle and upper class consumers who are able and willing to pay the high prices.
Drug trafficking is not just Mexico’s problem, or Columbia’s problem. It is a problem that connects the developing world with the developed world making everyone in the network culpable for the increasing violence and expansion of organized crime on Mexico’s streets as well as the increasing consumption in both the United States and in Mexico.
Mexican soldiers, police agents and the Drug Enforcement detectives, as well as the U.S. border patrols cannot combat this burgeoning activity alone. Rather than focusing on cooperative efforts devoted to security issues, the United States and Mexico should direct their attention to fostering the institutions that protect people from the negative consequences of free-market capitalism – unemployment, poverty and crime – by providing education to develop needed skills which will enable people to get jobs in such things as the reconstruction of the colonias’ infrastructure including schools, roads, electricity installment, and environmental cleaning.
Further, the US government must help stop the flow of illegal drugs crossing the border. Together the Mexican government along with the US government must develop extensive educational programs that deter drug consumption so that the vicious cycle associated with it – poverty and illegal activity – is broken. Instead of pouring more money into the purchase of bigger and more deadly guns and training soldiers, these countries’ governments must invest in the reconstruction of Mexico’s colonias and the US inner cities. Surely if nothing is done, there will be many thousands more ballplayers and other innocent people gunned down even as they are celebrating life.
The reporter thanks Ilya Sedykh and Xuan Pham for their input with this article.
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