Juarez: Descending Dante’s Inferno.

Originally written July 12, 2009

I held my breath as I

crossed the border. Which in retrospect, is not at all what I predicted my reactions to be.  Quite sadistically humorous in fact, since the only other time the split second autonomic reaction had occurred was when childishly scuttling through a graveyard.

 I stuck my head so close to out-the-window, shutting my eye’s tight that it almost seemed straight out of an adventurous Hilary Duff movie.  I wanted to experience transformation, you know, the ones you see in the movies.
 But I opened my eyes to a pseudo-cleaner India, filled with street vendors, buildings that are way to close together and creepy men. Mexico even retained that old dusty smell mixed with too many cheap made in china rip offs. But where was the transformation?
Well, the truth is, it didn’t come while doggedly, and obnoxiously sticking my head out the window. I had let the tourist in me take over too much to experience anything real. But it did eventually hit me.
That day I had traveled with two people from the annunciation house-- whom I later came to know and love, to a solidarity conference on the escalating violence in Juarez. As they ran through the numbers of homicides in the past month: 214,  217, 247… the numbers became mingled with the rising dust on the streets and suddenly made the china rip-offs make sense.

The eerie part about Juarez was not seeing the violence happen in front of you, it was knowing that these homicides happened among the seeming normalness of the city.
At night Juarez changes. It becomes the dark underworld of Mexico. Where anything can happen, anytime to almost anyone, but in the daylight Juarez seems like almost any other bustling city of a third world country.  
The eerie part was that of all the Juarez-raised women I taught in the center, not one would go back unless they had too. And never at night.  Everyone had someone they knew that was either killed or had a family member killed in the escalating violence. The randomness of the murders has allowed it to affect everyone and everything it touched.
In my last weeks at the center, the volunteer teen girl at the front desk didn’t come in for three days. Why? Because someone in her family had been killed in random drug violence. On my third day in Cruces, a UTEP professor, Char told me she taught class to many Juarez students who crossed to border to attend classes at UTEP.  One time a girl called to say she couldn’t make it class that day. Why? Because a human head was hanging outside their front door.

So why do the people of Juarez come out of their homes? Why do they not simply hide in their homes from the sick reality that is Cuidad Juarez? Because they are much braver than we outsiders can perceive at a simple Hillary Duff moment out a car window. We do not realize that the city people knew and loved years ago, no longer exists. And nothing but a descending inferno fills it void.
      Do we as American’s know this? Of course not. We would only know if we took the time to listen to old women sit around and talk about the good ‘ol days and cry over neighborhood deaths. We would only know if went through the countless names of forgotten young girls, murdered and covered up in caked caliche by 1500 new soldiers.
And our blindness makes us cruel in ways we can never perceive. As Juarez descends in to Dante’s inferno, we stand on the outside refusing people asylum into the country, forcing them to sign their children over to extended family—a better life---  on the bridge that is supposed to connect our countries.
Mexico is more complex than textbook diplomacy because it is as simple as the human condition. Mother’s fear for their daughters in a war that is taking over the streets of Jaurez, El Paso’s twin city, yet we are blind to this. We reach our hospitable hands across oceans, but not across a few feet of soil. This is where our blindness has misled us.