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By Root 1402 0

store, a man is severely beaten in an attack, a man and woman are beaten to death in houses next door to each other, a municipal employee tries to hang himself in a shopping mall, the secretary of public security pleads with the public to care for their children after four cases of child rape in the city, and a drunk is run over in the street yesterday before dawn. Within ten days of the army patrols of the city, forty-seven cops have officially fled the force, thirty-seven cops have been busted by the army, three female police officers are rumored to have been raped, and a silence descends on the community.

The town feels emptied out even though the church is full of flowers from a big, expensive wedding. Padre José Abel Retana stands in his vestments as the bride and groom beam on the church steps, a mariachi band playing them into their new lives. The padre is a short, solid man who looks a lot like El Chapo Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel that is credited with many of the murders going on in the area of Palomas, a dwindling community on the border just below Columbus, New Mexico.

“Yes,” he softly smiles, “many people tell me that. Let me change into my jeans, so I look guapo, handsome.”

And then he disappears to change. His flock is now a bloody mess. In May, Padre Abel held funeral masses for nine murdered men in one week—two for a father and son slaughtered on the main street of town on a Friday, five more for men leaving their wake on a Sunday. At the burial, soldiers stood at arms since more killings at the cemetery are a real possibility in the current climate of Mexico.

For decades, the town fed off tourists who came for cheap dentistry, medicine, glasses, and the drug trade—when Padre Abel arrived five years ago, he remembers how each week, a shipment of three to five tons of marijuana would roll through and pass, without a problem, right into the United States. In the late 1990s, people smuggling boomed, and today, the town is rimmed with ghost motels, big units thrown up for storing people for shipment and now empty. Also, on every street there are houses for sale, and big houses on dirt lanes stand abandoned. As the border tightened, people smuggling moved away and Palomas starved.

But the killing boomed. By late May 2008, this small, broken community had witnessed thirty-seven murders, mainly drug executions, that year, and seventeen more locals had been snatched and disappeared. Now the Mexican army is here, camped on the edge of town.

In a town this small, the killers and the slain know each other. And Padre Abel tends to all of them. He has two churches: an old, small stone one facing the plaza built in 1948, when work meant ranching, and a new, large one with many big stained-glass windows built a half dozen years ago, when work meant drugs, people smuggling, and slaughter.

Padre Abel’s office is in this new church, and that is where we sit.

He is a very serious man. He comes from Jalisco, a drug center in Mexico, and has been a priest for twenty-two years. Before Palomas, he served the migrant community for years in Chicago, a city he loved. The padre out of his clerical clothing looks like the guy you meet in the store on Saturday toting a twelve-pack, after a week of toil, but in his case, the toil is too bitter and harsh for a good Saturday night.

I’m here because on May 11, 2008, he gave a sermon against the killings, naming names in the drug industry and saying this must stop. The newspaper account notes everything in the sermon, but does not print the names. Such announcements are generally fatal for reporters and priests. Padre Abel says that no one will kill a priest and insists the naming thing was overblown, that he mentioned only a few, and that everyone knew who they were and so forth. I can hear the door closing as it often does in Mexico—there is a brief moment of truth, then this is followed by a growing silence, and then the memory of the truth vanishes and is no more.

“It started last year in April,” the padre says softly. In one case, a car with four men drove up to