Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [99]
Dead Reporter Driving
The woman and Emilio collect his son. They stop by his house to get some clothes and then flee to a small ranch about six miles west of Ascensión, where he can hide. He is terrified. Later that night, a friend takes him back to his house once again. He wears a big straw hat, slips low in the seat. He sneaks into his house and gets vital documents. A friend delivers a small black car out at the ranch.
All day Sunday, he tries to think of a way to save his life. He comes up with only one answer: flight. No matter where he goes in Mexico, he will have to find a job and use his identity cards and the army will track him down. He now knows they will never forget his story from 2005, that he cannot be redeemed.
He tells his boy, “We are not going back to our house. The soldiers may kill me, and I don’t want to leave you alone.”
Monday morning, he drives north very fast. He takes all his legal papers so that he can prove who he is. He expects asylum from the government of the United States when he crosses at Antelope Wells, New Mexico.
What he gets is this: He is immediately jailed, as is his son. They are separated. It is a common practice to break up families to crush the will—often jailing men and tossing the women and children back over the fence. He is denied bond, and no hearing is scheduled to handle his case. He is taken to El Paso and placed in a private prison. Had he entered the United States illegally and then asked for asylum, he would have been almost immediately bonded out. But since he entered legally by declaring his identity and legal status at a port of entry and applied for asylum, he is placed in prison because Homeland Security declares that Emilio has failed to prove that “he does not represent a threat to the community.”
It is possible to see his imprisonment as simply the normal by-product of bureaucratic blindness and indifference. But I don’t think that is true. No Mexican reporter has ever been given political asylum, because if the U.S. government honestly faced facts, it would have to admit that Mexico is not a society that respects human rights. Just as the United States would be hard pressed, if it faced facts, to explain to its own citizens how it can justify giving the Mexican army $1.4 billion under Plan Merida, a piece of black humor that is supposed to fight a war on drugs. But then, the American press is the chorus in this comedy since it continues to report that the Mexican army is in a war to the death with the drug cartels. There are two errors in these accounts. One is simple: The war in Mexico is for drugs and the enormous money to be made by supplying American habits, a torrent of cash that the army, the police, the government, and the cartels all lust for. Second, the Mexican army is a government-financed criminal organization, a fact most Mexicans learn as children.
Emilio Gutiérrez becomes a new kind of man, one who has lost his career, failed to protect his son from jail, a man with no clear future. He is deloused, given a blue jumpsuit, and set to work scrubbing floors for a dollar a day or an apple. He has tried to enter the United States legally and now makes less than what the illegal migrants who work in the country make. He also remembers all those bribes, all those sobres, he refused for years. He thinks, “If I had taken bribes, I wouldn’t be here in prison.” And of course, he is right, because if he’d been dutifully corrupt, he’d be safe inside the system and still living and writing in Ascensión, Chihuahua, with his son. Instead, he is surrounded by 1,200 to 1,300 Africans, Middle Easterners, East Indians, Russians, and, of course, Mexicans swept up in the increasing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)