Time was when I would visit El Paso a trip across the Rio Grande to Ciudad Juarez would be standard fare. That was long ago, when my friend, Rene, with whom I was visiting and I were both much younger.
As a matter of fact, Juarez seemed to provide little to no fascination for Rene, who is Mexican-American and whose summers as a youth included stays at his family’s ranch in the Chihuahuan interior. The pace of life in El Paso’s twin city seemed to have become too much for my laid-back old friend from our Navy days in Mississippi. Since I spent most of my life in East or Central Texas though, the bustling neighbor of El Paso to this day interests me.
Juarez, of course, has all the Mexican border town kitsch. I can once remember seeing a jackass, painted with black stripes like a zebra, with a cart it was pulling parked along a street. Trust me when I say, it wasn’t a zebroid. And donkeys have their own perverse connotation in Mexican border towns, but I won’t tread there. There were the cab drivers offering to take young males off to an adventure at a whore house or who knows where. There was all that is bad about border towns in Juarez that is bad and all that is bad about border towns that is good.
Also to be found in Juarez was the elegant, the storied and even the historical. Some spots were all three such as the Kentucky Club. A trip to Juarez wasn’t complete, at least in my eyes, without a stop for a margarita or two at the old bar with its high ceilings and carved wooden fixtures located on Avenida de Juarez. Anyone who was anyone in U.S. history during the last half of the 20th century had stopped by for a drink. Maybe they thought they needed one after seeing sights like jackasses painted as zebras!
In all during the visits I made there in the last 30 years, most while I was accompanied by a fluent Spanish speaker, I didn’t feel particularly threatened. Young, foolish and bullet-proof, a cousin of Rene’s and I once partied somewhere a good distance from the heart of the border area of Juarez. Exhausting most of our money we were forced to hoof it back to the border. We walked through some areas that, well, were probably dangerous then but we made it back safe to near the crossing where we each ate a burrito then had to borrow two cents from the lady at the taqueria to get through the turnstile to enter the U.S. side.
I even visited during my last trip to El Paso, which was on business, some six years ago when the city had begun to become more violent. Now, I am thinking of flying out to see Rene sometime this spring. I know he probably will not want to cross the border and with all the violence there — some 2,500 murders in Juarez last year and about 800 something already this year — neither will I.
The most recent episode of carnage to catch the Norteamericanos’ eyes, that is after the 15 teens were killed in January — are the killings of three people with connections to or who were employed by the U.S. Consulate in Juarez. Two children of one of the victims were also wounded in the attack.
It is a shame and unbelievable how out of control things have become in Juarez and in Mexico in general. What is at the root of it? Drugs? Well, the root of it like the so-called “root of all evil” is the love of money. Add in the lack of money, power, and if people are stupid enough to use in excess the drugs that they sell, a bundle of wired machismo and you got yourself one hell of a problem. That is exactly where the Mexicans find themselves now, to the point where walking for days with little food and water through the Chihuahuan Desert to illegally attempt a better life in el Norte doesn’t sound all that bad does it?
Our perfectly coiffed Gov. Rick Perry wants the Pentagon to send Predator drones to patrol the border. Great. Maybe the unmanned planes will be armed and can cause a lot of things to go “boom” in the South. That is what probably a lot of the unthinking crowd feel would solve the problem.
But this is a problem that is beyond the grasp of our air-headed Texas governor. It is about, at the very least, a hemispheric economy and what kind of Mexico will be our future neighbors. Will they become a socialist state or one ruled by a dictator as in Mexico’s past? Will they become a failed state? Or will they maintain their course as one of the world’s emerging markets after getting past all the violence?
Whatever the answer, it sure seems the status quo isn’t working out.
