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PDF versionLow crime, false prosperity in El Paso
by Mario T. García on Mar. 11, 2011
Last week I spent several days in El Paso, Texas, my hometown, giving some talks on my new book Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice (University of North Carolina Press). I'll write about this book in another blog, but what I want to relate in this one is my observations of conditions along this section of the U.S.-Mexico border.
For one, I was reminded of what a huge trans-border metropolitan region the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez area constitutes. El Paso now has a population of more than 700,000 while Juárez has one of close to 2 million.
Since my last visit two years ago, I felt this huge population. El Paso seemed more crowded and with much more traffic especially on the freeway where there is now bumper-to-bumper congestion.
Perhaps the key reason for this increase in population and traffic has to do with thousands of Juárez residents crossing over to live in El Paso in order to get away from the increased and bloody violence on the Mexican side due to the drug wars. Many of these people are middle-class and upper-class who have the means to buy or rent homes in El Paso. Many are also dual citizens, having been born in El Paso but raised in Juárez. It appears that most maintain their businesses and even professions on the Mexican side but live and raise their families in El Paso.
Despite the fear-mongering by many conservatives in the U.S. that we have lost control of our borders and that the drug violence has spilled over to the U.S., the fact is that El Paso has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.
At the same time, I learned from my good friend Msgr. Arturo Bañuelas, the pastor of St. Pius X Church in El Paso, some disturbing information. He told me that many of the drug lords actually live in El Paso and live there with impunity. He has heard stories of some of them going into stores and buying up to $20,000 of goods with their drug money. Who but drug lords have such money to go on such spending sprees? But because El Paso merchants benefit from these questionable sales, they do not report these "consumers" to the police or FBI.
This is unacceptable. We cannot provide a safe haven for these drug lords.
For El Paso, this is a false prosperity built on the destruction of lives on both sides of the border due to the use of illicit drugs and, of course, the murder of thousands on the Mexican side of the border.
I always enjoy returning to my hometown of El Paso, but I came away this time disturbed about such recent changes.
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Thank you, sir, for this
Thank you, sir, for this wonderful insight!
Have you seen the recent Eight Murders A Day documentary?
Hoping to catch the bus to Ciudad Juarez in a few hours for my regular weekend there where a few folk actually tolerate me, folks I need and love.
Always carry a camera but have only the most beautiful people to photograph
try
flickr.com/photos/charlesjscanlon
or something like that for almost eight hundred of them. Last weekend I got a group of evangelicals who pass out food to the homeless every Saturday morning in the ruins of a building on Santos Degollado. Also the usual enthusiastic group of Matachines at the Cathedral, this one including the physically handicapped, a small boy with a walker. And a rather disturbing series of the kidnapping of Bob Esponja. Troubling.
There is a great and explicit demand for me to attend the poetry reading Saturday night. There are regularly presentations of the opera from New York, but who can sit through four hours of Nixon in China when Ciudad Juarez is right outside the door!
I love her cathedral, and Bishop, too. Keeps me Catholic.
I just walk across the Santa Fe bridge into El Paso to hit an ATM when I run out of cash, and immediately walk right back, maybe get some shoes for friends.
El Paso? Too scary, dude!
By the way, reading every day
By the way, reading every day in its hardcopy www.diario.com.mx we learn that several professionals, especially of the medical professions, have fled to El Paso from Ciudad Juarez, because killers do not like people saving the lives of their intended victims, and come into hospitals armed, with the feds and such refusing to provide effective and constant security.
The famous twenty year old police chief from the valley east of Ciudad Juarez, called the bravest woman in the world when she took the job no one else would, is now herself fleeing to El Paso with her family.
So the conservatives are
So the conservatives are right, no? The drug lords are living in our midst with impunity. It's not fear-mongering at all. When drug lords are shopping in our retail outlets, we have lost control of our borders.
I know of other places in
I know of other places in Texas, where some suspicious "suddenly hugely wealthy" people from Mexico, and equally suspicious but from the U.S., buy gorgeous homes in other cities in Texas. Local Hispanic Christians told me the truth about this, but the situation is terrifying to my Hispanic Christian friends.
Lord hear our prayers over this traumatic situation.
False prosperity doesn't
False prosperity doesn't strengthen the country.They are supposed to destroy the country internally.Such a nation with false prosperity cannot becomes the member of the global power.
Baltimore web design
..."Despite the
..."Despite the fear-mongering by many conservatives in the U.S. that we have lost control of our borders and that the drug violence has spilled over to the U.S"..
Webster Definition is (Fear mongering (or scaremongering) is the use of fear to influence the opinions and actions of others towards some specific end. The feared object or subject is sometimes exaggerated, and the pattern of fear mongering is usually one of repetition, in order to continuously reinforce the intended effects of this tactic, sometimes in the form of a vicious circle.)
Thousands of deaths, people fleeing Mexico, $20,000 spent on food, Mexican Drug Lord Mansions...perhaps you should said;
Despite the warning of conservatives in the U.S. that something must be done to control our borders....and that illegal drug lords that have crossed our border to live and plow their heinous trade in the US from their El Paso Mansions; people like myself see no connection with the two!
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