By Mark Scheinbaum
American Reporter Correspondent
Do you start with the decapitated heads of police officers found in local ice
cream coolers, the kindergarten kids threatened with mass kidnappings, the
vigilantes who have emailed the media to prove they are serious about murdering
"criminals," or do you just give up explaining it in Ciudad Juàrez, Mexico, a
mile from Interstate 10 and just down the road from El Paso?.
The day before Barack Obama became President, a packed house at the Cinemark
theatre saw the award-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire" with its tale of urban
decay, hope, and incessant violence.
When many of the folks returned to their cars in the parking lot with license
tags from Chihuahua State in Mexico for the ride home, they probably thought
that the film was a local documentary.
"My seven-year-old son watched the inauguration of President Obama in school,
but for me, I just want to get home from work in time to get him home safely,
help with his homework, and stay safely in our house," an El Paso nurse's aide
we'll call "Rosa" told me about her trip back to Juàrez each day.
Tour groups in this cross-border metroplex of 2.4 million people now
emphasize boot and saddle shops and cowboy ghost towns on the Texas side instead
of evening Mexican dining and daylight Emiliano Zapata tours on the Juàrez side.
Families blog in the
El Paso Times about how they have stopped visiting
relatives just across the border, and the cars from Mexico in the huge lot
outside the Super Wal-Mart on Gateway West Blvd. thin out at dusk.
In Spanish, Comando Ciudadano por Juàrez, or CCJ, emailed that local
newspaper yesterday to prove they exist. The plea would be a pathetic Rodney
Dangerfield lack of respect if the issue had not been so deadly.
The
self-proclaimed vigilante group is apparently sick and tired of Chihuahua
Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez saying they don't exist.She keeps telling the
press there is no vigilante movement aimed at retaliating against a drug and
gang culture which killed more than 1,600 people last year, and a federal
government and local police authority which seems part eunuch and part AWOL.
The CCJ said it was setting a July 5, 2009, deadline for some government
action or it would kill a criminal a day: "The government wants to believe that
we don't exist," a line at the end of the CCJ announcement read. "But we are
closer than they think." The 10-point manifesto issued Tuesday was the second
communication from an organization that was unheard of prior to its initial
threat, made on Jan. 15.
"The CCJ declares war on the thieves, kidnappers and extortionists that have
put in risk the rights of citizens and reiterates its plan to terminate the life
of a criminal every 24 hours for the good of all Juarenses," the document stated
in Spanish.
The manifesto, sent via e-mail to the El Paso Times and other media, was
signed by leaders identified only as Comandante Abraham and Sub-Comandante
Gabriel "Durito" (Hard).
If order is not restored by midnight July 5, "the CCJ will take to the
streets with its army of men and women to do what the government could not," the
group stated.
Classes at a pre-kindergarten were canceled Tuesday when a note threatening
the lives of children was posted at the school's entrance, demanding about
$5,000, the
Norte newspaper reported. That seemed like a reprise of a
bizarre attempt by drug cartels to build community support in November, in a
perverse way, but threatening to kill or kidnap young school children if the
local government did not honor promised salary bonuses to school teachers. Maybe
bizarre is too mild a term.
After four frozen heads were apparently found by local residents in ice cream
and ice machine coolers in Juàrez and its suburbs in a little more than a week,
the trend continued at a record pace in the young new year.
The
El Paso Times reported that "the headless body of a man, the
second in as many days, was found Wednesday in a canal in the community of
Juàrez y Reforma. possibly linked to three severed heads left the day before in
an ice chest in Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, police said."
The attorney general told a local radio show Wednesday that the alleged
vigilantes are just locals trying to stir up more trouble and destabilize
legitimate efforts by local, committed public servants to clean up the drug
gangs and narco culture which has swept northern Mexico in recent years.
Just see the headlines pro and con of outgoing President George Bush's
commutation of sentences of two U.S. drug agents involved in a controversial
incident in the region, to feel the international heat on the issue. Yet for
more than 800,000 El Paso residents and perhaps 1.4 million more in Juàrez, it
is day-to-day horror, fear, frustration, and domestic disruption which noone not
living there could fathom;.
The current mayor of Juàrez, José Reyes Ferrìz - who must live with the
knowledge that colleagues in other cities have fled their posts, become puppets
of drug lords, or been assassinated - surveys the daily carjackings, kidnappings
of U.S. factory managers, neighborhood turf wars, and personal violence to
innocent residents, and tells citizens just to "maintain faith in the
authorities."
In the past 48 hours, while asking his constituents to stay cool, calm and
loyal, these things, among others, happened:
The attempted kidnapping of a U.S. "maquiladora" (border factory) manager was
foiled at the last second; a 13-year-old boy was shot and seriously wounded in a
drive-by shooting; three more headless bodies were found in a Juàrez suburb; a
local urban anthropologist says weapons, laundered cash, Colombian, and
Dominican drug dealers all interact sometimes with impunity along the Tex-Mex
border here, and numerous people were carjacked and held for ransom.
Thinking back to the urban plight and breakdown in law and order in the
Indian "Slum Dog" film, I could only think that life mimics art which mimics
life which makes reality so, so, much stranger than fiction.
How else do you rationally explain that in what sounds like a last, desperate
act of frustration to do "something"?: To have its threats taken seriously, the
purported vigilantes - the CCJ in effect are now saying something like "Okay
guys, now, well, now you are pushing us
toooo far! You are forcing our
hand."
If the threat to kill "a criminal a day" by July 5th wasn't serious enough,
the CCJ email said that if authorities don't crack down, they would be forced to
"form a website with information on our group by February 2nd!"
