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VALOR PARA CAMBIAR LAS QUE SI PUEDO

There are three bullet holes in the floor, and the wall has dribbles of blood and one red palm print. The floor has been mopped, but still, there is the blood on the wall and the blood that has seeped into the grout between the tiles. The flies buzz and buzz.

SABIDURIA PARA DISTINGUIR LA DIFERENCIA

The man from the roof tells me, “I believe the police are scared. Our own people started pulling people into the vans because no one came.”

Yes, amid the noise, the men hurrying to load the vans, everyone is quite alone here. The largest slaughter in the history of the city, and there is no yellow police tape, no visible investigation of the crime scene. A set of clinics for addicts is leaving the city because of terror, but there are no reporters, no cameras. Just silence. And this sense of being alone.

Luis Angel Gonzalez Corral was nineteen years old and a member of Locos 23 and had a habit of sniffing glue—a habit that was getting the best of him. So a week or two ago, he went next door and joined the rehab program. On Wednesday night, his family heard the shooting next door and hid during the fifteen minutes of thundering gunfire. Then emerged and found a dead son.

The yard is dirt with a vine trailing over a leaning fence to the north. Two poles support big sheets of canvas and provide shade for the mourners sitting on old chairs or concrete blocks. They are mainly women, and the oldest is maybe in her forties. The ancients that should be clogging such a wake have been left behind in the country. This is a barrio of people driven off the land, and of people barely surviving in the new world of the city. Only one woman wears a dress. Everyone else is in clean shorts or jeans and T-shirts. Voices are muted, a kind of murmuring floats across the ground. The faces are tired, the eyes glazed. There are few males in attendance: just gang kids come to honor one of their own and two or three older men. It is early afternoon, the men are either at work or looking for work. This is also a barrio where each day is an effort to find some way to provide food. There is no future here, but a constant struggle in the present.

The small house of three little rooms shares a common wall with the abandoned center. The body lies in the kitchen. A sheet blocks the window and has been painted with a message of support from Locos 23. Women sit in a row of folding chairs before the sheet and face the coffin. They are also very tired and pass for the matrons of this street of dust.

One woman lost her son six weeks ago. She says he was twenty-five years old and did work now then as a plasterer or drywall hanger. They came in the night, and she did not see them, she says, because she was in bed. The next day, his body was found. He had been tortured. Neighbors told her he was taken away by the municipal police. Four young men of this area have been executed in the last few months, four who lived within a few blocks of each other. Her voice is soft and flat as she recounts the loss of her son. Little or no emotion colors her tale, perhaps it would be too taxing on the soul. Here, getting killed is part of growing up for young men.

I ask the mother of the dead boy who rests in the glass-topped coffin what he planned to be when he grew up.

She stares at me silently as if slowly digesting the question.

Then, she holds her hands out palms up and shrugs at the implication of such a question. Ambitions do not grow here, and the future does not exist here. At least not in a way recognized by governments. Ambition is displayed on the sheet where Locos 23 states its claim to the dead boy. It is in the eyes of the people at the wake who see death but expect no justice beyond a life lived and ended by slaughter. A girl in tight black pants and a black lacy blouse enters the kitchen, gets a soft drink from the refrigerator, and smiles at friends. She is pregnant with the dead boy’s child, and for a few hours this