Since 1993, the city of Juárez, Mexico, has been infamous for the murders of young female maquila workers. During the past two decades, the bodies of hundreds of young women were found in the deserts outside of town, and hundreds more went missing. Though women are still murdered in Juárez, the city today is known instead as the murder capital of the world because of the drug cartel war. That war has been waged since December 2006, when the then-president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, declared war on the country’s drug cartels.
As a major corridor for the transportation of illegal narcotics and marijuana, the city of Juárez, Mexico (estimated population: 1.3 million), has been at the heart of the war from its beginning. Lashing out against everyday citizens, not just the competition or the government, the cartels have grown increasingly bold. In 2008, the drug-related death toll in Juárez reached about 1,600. In 2009, it reached nearly 2,600. And in 2010, drug-related deaths in Juárez came to a staggering 3,000 by December. Despite predictions that deaths would increase to 5,000 the following year, the violence slackened in 2011.
In the midst of the narco war, of course, live ordinary families like Fito Avitia’s. Fito and his wife are raising two daughters—three and six years old—in Juárez. Though an estimated 30,000 Juarenses—primarily professionals—have fled for life in El Paso, Texas, the city just across the border, the Avitias have chosen to stay put. “This is my home,” Fito explains when asked why he’s stayed. “It is my city. If everybody good leaves, what happens then?”
MY WIFE VERO and I live with our family in Juárez, Mexico, known since 2008 as the most violent city in the world. We are raising our daughters in a war zone. They are three and six.
Our wake-up call came in 2008. Vero and I were on a date. We left our toddler Berenice with my mother and took off to a movie. At the first stoplight, we pulled up next to a police car. Then we started seeing flares and we heard the sounds of cracking.
Today gunfire is so common that people in Juárez immediately recognize the sound. They’re scared. They drop to the ground. But we weren’t used to it then.
“Are those fireworks?” Vero asked.
“No!” I said. “Gunfire!”
We slid down the front seats to take cover. We were too shocked to be afraid. We couldn’t believe this was happening.
The police car beside us was the target, getting hit by 200 bullets. It sounded like someone next to our car was welding. Next we heard the screeching tires of two or three vehicles racing away. Then—an incredible silence.
In the quietness, I remembered something my father told me. My dad was a professor at the university and a respected civil engineer in our city. He was a proclaimed atheist, disgusted with the hypocrisy of traditional religion. But when I was a teenager, my mom became a Christian and then my dad reconciled with God. Before Dad died in 1996, he gave money for a rehab center in a poor Juárez neighborhood and helped open a feeding center for children. He had the compassion and clarity of a pastor, so everyone called him Pastor. His advice meant a lot to me, and I remembered him saying that a human soul remains near the body for a few minutes at the moment of death, and the soul can still hear. So even if someone is dead, we should still encourage the person to get right with God.
“Honey, are you OK?” I asked Vero.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Then hold on,” I said. “I’ve got to go to those men.”
I don’t know if I’d do the same thing today. I’d certainly feel a lot more cautious because of reports that people who try to help sometimes get shot too. But in that early high-impact killing at the beginning of the drug cartel war in Mexico, I ran to the patrol car. The engine was still running, the headlights still on. Inside, the bodies of the two officers were smashed and splattered like watermelons tossed onto the sidewalk from a roof. I could not believe what a machine gun could do to someone’s head. The stench was so strong that for the next two weeks, everything I ate tasted like gunpowder and smelled like blood.
I knew there was no hope the men could return to their bodies, but I tried to encourage their souls to repent and turn to God. A passing news reporter took my picture while I was at the car praying for them. I know people say they were corrupt cops. It doesn’t matter. They were two souls that needed hope.
After that, going to a movie felt improper. Vero and I drove back to my mom’s, and we hugged our little Berenice. And we wondered what was happening. We couldn’t see the big picture we see now. Things like this had happened before, but only once or twice a year. We didn’t imagine that this was the beginning of an almost daily slaughter.
From 2006 through September 2011, according to a report from President Felipe Calderon, this drug war between the government and competing drug cartels has claimed 47,515 lives in Mexico. In the last four years–a December 27, 2011, article in the National Post News reported—10,000 of these drug-war-related deaths occurred in our bloody border city alone. And it is believed that for each assassination a household with at least three children was directly affected. Juan Martin Perez Garcia, the executive director of the Mexican Children’s Rights Network, reports that in the last four years, over 1,000 children and teens were gunned down and between 10,000 and 30,000 children lost one or both parents.
In many Western countries, adults are concerned about the long-term effects of bombarding children with violent imagery in TV shows, movies, music and computer games. Juárez children are innocent witnesses of real-life cruelty. Cartels humiliate their rivals by killing and leaving them hanging from bridges, trees and fences. They put masks on the corpses’ heads or leave them in eerie or obscene positions. They mutilate and dismember them, sometimes deliberately leaving body parts—a severed head, a bloody torso—in front of an elementary school or preschool. In newspapers, on TV and in the streets, children see corpses and body parts.
The drug cartels do this to terrorize people and to show the world who is boss. Therefore, it has been impossible to protect children in certain parts of the city from witnessing these things. In some neighborhoods, children have experienced what only someone like an American SEAL combat officer would experience on duty overseas.
Children become involved directly in the violence as kidnap victims held for ransom, as victims of cartel retribution against entire families and as innocent bystanders. In January 2010, seventeen young people were massacred at a birthday party. Ten months later, in Horizontes del Sur, it happened again. According to news reports, parents held a party for their fourteen-year-old son. The boy’s mother was in the patio with her eight-month-old baby in a stroller. She was surrounded by celebrating teenagers when a man dressed as a gang member came to the gate. “Where is ‘El Raton?’” he asked.
Nobody knew who he was talking about.
“Nobody is going to talk?” he yelled. “OK! Finish them all!” He began firing a gun and other gunmen joined him.
The father of the birthday teen was inside the house entertaining several young children with movies on a DVD player. When he heard gunfire and screams, he shoved some of the children into a closet. Other children hid under a bed. The killers entered the house, found the children under the bed and pulled them out. They were screaming for their lives like little kittens in distress.
Then, unexpectedly, the gunmen fled. The children were crying in terror. The baby was covered in her mother’s blood. In all, the gunmen killed fourteen teenagers and several adults, including the mother of the birthday teen. Eleven children lost a parent. A murdered twenty-two-year-old woman had a five-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy. The little girl hasn’t cried at all. She blocked the loss, although she often mentions that her mom is in heaven. The toddler refused to eat for a while and still seems depressed. The children are being raised by their aunts.
Some children are attracted to the power of the gangs. In Juárez schools, children on the playground play make-believe kidnapper. They pretend to be sicarios (hit men) and extort other children for their lunch money. Not a few of these children become pawns of the cartels. In September 2010, four prison guards took two gang leaders from the county jail in Juárez to the General Hospital. On their way, at a busy traffic light, two thirteen-year-olds with automatic guns killed three of the prison guards and released the two gang leaders. The thirteen-year-olds were cold, sharp, experienced. Cartels are recruiting children by the hundreds.
Fear weighs down the lives of Juárez children because social and economic conditions have produced a working class unable to take care of their youngsters during work hours. A young relative of ours named Juan is a bright nine-year-old whose divorced mother works in a hospital. Two years ago, his older cousin Lupita disappeared and was found dead on an unpaved street—an unsolved crime, one disappeared young woman among thousands in the city. Recently, one block from Juan’s house, a grocery store owner was killed. Also around the block, federal police detained a man who had a human head in his refrigerator. Juan knew all these stories and carried the burden of all these tragedies in his young head.
Like many children in Juárez, Juan was often by himself in the house during some of his mother’s work shifts. One day a criminal specializing in extortion phoned. He told Juan, “I am the one who beheads many in the city. If you don’t pay attention to me, I will do the same to you and all your family.”
The man threatened and cursed, and Juan was terrified. He felt hopeless and alone. When the intimidating voice asked him for his dad’s phone number, he gave it. Later his father received a threatening demand for money at the drugstore he ran.
Over the next couple days, Juan’s mother noticed that her son seemed frightened whenever he heard the phone ring. Finally, she was able to get him to tell her why. Today Juan has trouble sleeping, and he cannot tell his story without stuttering.
“Children in Juárez are experiencing wounds that will not easily heal,” says Claudia Sierra Renteria, director of the Juárez Children’s Defense government program. “They are breathing hatred to life; they are being killed morally. They are victims, and they are constantly afraid. Children who breathe and see violence, they get used to it and end up generating violence, repeating the actions that in the beginning produce in them fear. And it is worse for those that have become orphans in the cartel war. Their feeling of abandonment and resentment is so strong that they mention their desire to take vengeance for their parents. It is very common for therapists to report young eight-year-old victims saying, ‘I want to kill the ones who did this to my mom.’”
In the last four years, many frightened families have fled the city. Some areas of Juárez look like a ghost town now, full of abandoned houses. A lot of the remaining parents construct strongholds for their kids, building tall fences and walls around their neighborhoods and houses. In poor neighborhoods, many parents lock all their doors, with the children imprisoned inside their own dwellings for safety.
Our second daughter was born several months after Vero and I got caught in gunfire at the stoplight. It is challenging to raise children in the middle of a brutal war. We try to be very careful with what they see and hear so as not to disrupt their innocence and their right to grow as happy children without fear. We isolate them from local news and restrict TV watching to educational programs. The girls see children’s movies on the computer. We have agreed together not to allow our children to be around any conversations about the atrocities in Mexico. When we visit family and friends, we ask them to respect this agreement. We want to raise our daughters with hope, not fear.
We do take them out, because we do not want our home to be a prison. We choose parks where we are less likely to be caught in the middle of a shooting. We want them to run and play with no worries. They fly kites, ride their tricycles and watch ducks in a pond. The city has festivals and events to change the grim atmosphere, and we sometimes take them. It’s a risk, but we want them to be normal kids. Our girls are children, and they need to feel the sun and experience the world outside. We treasure the joy we see on their faces, even more so in a city at war.
Of course, we want our daughters to know what is wrong and right, evil and good. We always tell them, using words they can understand, to be careful and watch out for “bad people.” And I play a special game with my girls. “Get down!” I call, and they obey immediately and enthusiastically. They get flat on the ground and stay until I tell them to get up. I’ve never told them it is a game to prepare them for being caught in gunfire. I don’t want to contaminate their minds with fear. But some day, our game could save their lives. Vero and I always stay alert to our surroundings during family expeditions, yet we realize nobody has control over what could happen. Therefore there is a constant prayer on our lips: “God, protect our little girls and thank you for this moment that you grant us!”
Like most people in Juárez, I know people who died in this war. In fact, I have witnessed the killing of good friends of mine. We have known deep pain, great sorrow, personal danger and deadly threats to the dearest people in our lives.
My darkest moment came in January 2010. The phone rang. When I answered a man said, “If you don’t pay, we’ll take off your head.”
I hung up. The phone rang again, but I did not answer. It rang and rang. I looked out the window and saw a gray pickup truck with the motor running. The phone rang for two long minutes more. When it quit, the truck suddenly took off with tires screeching.
“Vero,” I told my wife, “in twenty minutes, we have to leave. Take all the important papers and picture albums, and let’s go!”
Vero dressed the little ones and started gathering things. Suddenly I saw Berenice staring at us in distress, and I realized we had to calm down for her sake.
“Honey, come,” I told my wife. “We need to pray.”
“Bere,” I said to my little girl with the gentlest voice I could manage, “we need to go to your grandmother’s to be safe. Some bad guys want to come into our house, so we need to leave. Let’s pray together, okay?”
We all prayed. “God,” Bere piped, “please put angels around our car and around Daddy, Mommy, Evelyn and me. And make the bad guys go away!”
We gathered essentials and drove out of our neighborhood. These were the longest moments of my life. When we arrived at my mother’s house, I wanted to cry. I felt like I’d become a refugee in my own country. But we were safe and Bere was all smiles. In her mind, her prayer had been enough. Our efforts to control our fears had helped guard our daughter’s mind.
We stayed out of the apartment for three weeks, trying not to discuss the situation around our two little treasures. At that point, I wondered if we would make it. But we were fortunate. It was only a threat, an attempt to extort money from us. Everyone in Juárez knows, though, to take such threats seriously. Many people have been killed by angry extortionists who failed to receive the money they requested. The extortionists started four years ago with rich businessmen, but now anybody can be victimized. Extortionists have killed doctors, lawyers, hamburger stand owners, grocery store staff, bus drivers, junkyard administrators and even newspaper stand owners.
Some people have criticized us for not taking our children and leaving Juárez. As a teacher who can speak English, I could have obtained a visa and applied for work in the U.S. People were always coming to me with news: “Dallas needs teachers. Houston needs teachers.” Vero has been working on a doctorate in materials science, researching the use of nanotechnology to cure cancer. She could apply for graduate school internationally.
But 2011 was a life-changing year for us. We moved from fear to hope. We sense change coming to Juárez now—good change—and we want to be part of it.
In the first three years, we saw people fearful and numb. They left the city or tried to build fortresses and isolate themselves. Then the government promised to help and that encouraged people. But the government would start to help and then some government officials would lose focus and move on to other things. So people were discouraged even more. But then some began to realize, If we don’t do anything, it will get worse and become hopeless. They saw death all around them and started to think, If I’m going to die anyway, it’s better to do something helpful.
People realized the violence in Juárez flows not only from the drug cartels but from social issues of injustice and poverty. So a movement started of people fighting back with love, with serving and helping. Someone would say, “I have a little money. I can open a dining center.” They’d open up for ten in a poor neighborhood and get a hundred. So others start helping them. My mom helps women come out of the prostitution life. They are getting decent jobs, decent houses. Churches are coming together to do these things, and non-religious people want to help. People use the Internet to alert others to these programs, but so much is happening so fast, they can’t keep up all the web pages.
Foundations like Amor por Juárez began funding a cultural, spiritual and artistic movement to bring healing and a transformation of values for a better city. Inside Out provided an exhibit of huge photographs of Juárez people along the river. They took pictures of me, my wife and each of our daughters and posted them on walls together with another 2,000 faces.
Several foundations and sponsors joined together to bring the musician Emmanuel Jal to the city to perform and bring a message of motivation and peace to middle and high school students. As a child, Jal was forcibly recruited to be a child soldier in Sudan’s civil war, just as many Juárez children and teens are being pressed into service by drug cartels. Fundacíon Tu Contacto Global y Terratour (Terratour Global) is planning a number of musical and artistic projects globally and in Juárez for 2012 with motivational messages of hope, love and justice. Terratour established their headquarters in Juárez because they believe that hope and global transformation could explode from a city like Juárez: if Juárez changes, the world can change.
My pastor is president of a foundation that worked with the state government to build a children’s museum (Museo del Niños la Rodadora) with science exhibits designed to teach children that their city and their planet are amazing gifts, that their lives are worth living, and that people need to appreciate and respect the lives of others. The building is finished, and we are raising funds to complete the exhibits.
As a family, we are participating in these movements. We take part in activities like Inside Out. I am a member of Terratour Global, and my wife and I are also involved with Amor por Juárez. We see people making a difference. So Vero and I made a decision to stay. We think the best place for us to be right now is in Juárez.
Several weeks ago, the board of directors at a children’s home located in a poor neighborhood asked us to come as a family to help at the home. The home provides a safe place for abused, neglected and abandoned children and young teens in Juárez. Vero and I decided it is an incredible opportunity to do something for the most hurt, the most fragile, the most vulnerable people in our city—the children. In a few years, there will be consequences if we don’t work with these children now. (And this is not just a problem in Mexico or Juárez—it is a global time bomb.) So Vero is taking a yearlong leave from her doctoral research. By the time this is published, our family should be moved and settled in the orphanage.
Some people consider our city to be one of the worst in the world. We think that means it is the best place in the world for transformation.