By Abilio Pena,
Inter-ecclesial Commission on Justice and Peace, Colombia / SICSAL
November 2008
Since 1994, more than 5,000 people have died trying to cross the border that separates Mexico from the United States. During the 1990s, the migratory route changed from the border towns to the Arizona desert, as a result of the reinforcement of the border. Each day the vigilance on the border to prevent Latinos from crossing the border is more rigid. Despite these extreme measures, migrants, pressured by unemployment, hunger and violence continue to take risks in search of a better life in this country to the north. Official statistics speak of nearly 40 million immigrants in the United States, the majority of them undocumented.
Their stories are heartrending. Hundreds of single women who have left their children behind to look for work in the United States are sexually abused on their journey and emotionally destroyed. Thousands of men, women and children from Central America latch onto trains going north toward the border, expose themselves to the danger of falling from the trains, as happens many times, and losing life or limb in the fall. Men from Mexico or further south, impelled by necessity, leave their homes behind to run the risks of crossing the border.
November 2, 2008: US-Mexico Border Mass for the Victims
When they succeed, they might find jobs in construction, as farm-workers or in meat-packing plants that take advantage of their willingness to work for low wages. Each month they take a portion of their earnings and send it back to their families and, if possible, to pay for the journey of their wives or girlfriends, a journey that may last up to 45 days, leaving their children with the grandparents, and after one or two years of work when they have gained a measure of security, returning to bring the children north.
One of these fathers, for example, left Austin, Minnesota to return to Chiapas, Mexico for his five-year-old and nine-year-old children. On the trip north, they waited three days in Reynosa, Mexico before a group of 25 migrants were ready to cross the border and to pay $1,200 to the coyotes for each child. The adults crossed the border to McAllen, Texas, and then began a second journey lasting weeks walking to Houston, Texas. They entrusted their children to the coyotes who made their way by another route to Houston. Only five of the 25 adults were reunited with their children in Houston, the other twenty were picked up by the migra, placed in detention centers, and eventually deported to Mexico.
In order to work, these migrants need to obtain papers permitting them to work. The trafficking in false papers is a huge business which is no secret either to the companies that employ undocumented immigrants or to the authorities in border towns. Immigrants may secure falsified documents in this black market, including a social security number, a birth certificate, and a work permit, all three of which may cost up to $2,000 to purchase. If they succeed, they look for work where they can find it, often in meat-packing plants like QPP or Hormel in Austin, Minnesota, which pay $12 an hour, a sum much greater than they could make in Mexico or any other country in Latin America for the same kind of work.
The problem is to survive in the United States. Raids on homes and work places are common. Even with a car, which they use to go from their homes to work, many migrants do not have a driver’s license. Many have been picked up and detained simply changing the time of their vehicle on the road side.
And while there is a slight hope that with a new president of the United States, Barack Obama, things will change in their favor, little was said about immigration during the electoral campaign. Faced by an economic crisis, the doors remain open to capital but closed to workers who sell their labor at rock bottom prices to the productive sector en this schizophrenia of the market place.
Those who do not cross
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico is famous for its assembly-plants (maquiladoras), which at one time numbered 400. It’s also famous for crimes committed against women, including children and adolescents. Many families are deported to this city after failing to cross into the United States, and for a time survive and risk their lives here in Juarez. One of the women shared with us that she was forced into prostitution when she could not find work in the maquiladoras, which were being relocated to China. “When I enter a room, I don’t know whether I will come out alive because there is so much brutality.” This, in a city which just in the first ten months of 2008 reported more than 1,200 assassinations.
The crimes against women, which may be characterized as femicidio are brutal and offend one’s conscience. There is already a long history of crimes in this border city, as the following courageous testimony of a woman from the Foundation of Victims of Femicide in Juarez attests:
“It all began with the kidnapping of Lilia Alejandra, 17 years old, on February 14, 2001. We contacted the media about her disappearance. Her body, with signs of violence, was found eight days later in front of the maquiladora where she worked. Since then, hundreds of young girls and women have been kidnapped and their bodies found with multiple signs of violence and torture. We have evidence that the police, business owners and drug-traffickers are involved in these crimes. They are the ones who give the orders. Juarez is affected by drug-trafficking, and whoever gets in the way could lose their life. Ciudad Juarez has become famous for the assassination of women. Those of us who oppose this violence, who denounce the violence and seek justice, have been received twenty international awards for our work. Even if we don’t achieve justice, we at least want the people of Juarez to know the truth.”
There are many theories about the cause of this violence: It could be human trafficking or trafficking of human organs; or the work of satanic sacrifices linked to gangs or drug traffickers; the work of sadistic film producers or sexual predators who are “under control” in El Paso but who continue to operate in Juarez.
Thanks to the courage and tenacity of these mothers and those who accompany them, in November 2007 the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights of the OAS agreed to try the cases of crimes committed in 2002 with the hope that Mexico will be judged for its failure to prosecute these acts of violence which have no end. Already, in the first 10 months of 2008, 84 women have been assassinated.
Structural Shame
President Bush approved the construction of a wall for the border that costs 7 million dollars each mile. He also approved the privatization of the federal detention centers for immigrants waiting to be deported, resulting in the deterioration in the treatment of undocumented detainees, according to a Sister of Mercy who works with prisoners in detention. Five years ago, there were 6,000 beds for detainees; today there are 30,000 beds, and 30,000 more are to be built in the next three years. Before, the undocumented were processed and deported. Today, they are kept longer in detention, and the corporations that run these detention centers receive $95 each day for each undocumented migrant in detention.
This mercenary treatment of undocumented immigrants has meant that those who are detained crossing the border without papers are processed as criminals and treated as terrorists. Since September 11, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the treatment and detention of immigrants falls under this department. As one woman detainee put it: “I don’t know why they treat me as a criminal, I feel like a cockroach, and that they can do anything they want with me.” Each year 450 migrants die in the desert after crossing the border.
Resistance and Accompaniment
The truth about the crimes committed against women, and the structural social injustice that is at the root of migration cannot be denied, and it is verified by those who are victims of these crimes and by those who are forced to migrate. Thousands of people in Mexico and the United States continue to actively resist these migratory policies that only generate exclusion and death.
One such place is known as Casa Tabor, located in a poor barrio in Ciudad Juarez, is a place of hospitality through which many North Americans have passed during the last 13 years to understand and experience the reality of the border in a personal way. Over the years, Fr. Peter Hinde, O.Carm. and Sr. Betty Campbell, RSM, together with Emilia, one of the women active in defense of the victims, have collected the names of the women assassinated or disappeared in Juarez. One of the walls of their backyard is filled with these names. Another wall is filled with the names of those who have died attempting to cross the border. And on a third wall, the names of the Latin American martyrs and others who have given their lives in resistance to injustice may be found, including Archbishop Oscar Romero, Bishop Juan Gerardi, Bishop Gerardo Valencia, Fr. Rutilio Grande and the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador, as well as innumerable people killed in Colombia – 141 people assassinated in Curvarado and Jiguamiando, 85 in Cacarica, 200 in Dabeiba – and countless more throughout Latin America who have been witnesses to the hope and suffering of their people, victims of injustice is their search for justice. The memory of these martyrs, and their living expression in the struggles for justice today, characterize the mission of these faithful servants who have inherited the legacy of the theology of liberation and the most authentic dreams of liberation present in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Another expression of this resistance may be found among the Franciscan Sisters of Lourdes. Sister Ruth and another one of the sisters work for the legalization of those undocumented immigrants who, having crossed the border, continue their journey as far north as Austin, Minnesota, the home of these Franciscan sisters. There the immigrants find support from the sisters who teach English classes, interpret in the hospitals, offer help to obtain work permits, provide legal protection against government raids, and enrollment to their children in schools, in addition to distributing food and clothing.
Sr. Tierney Trueman, president of the Franciscan Sisters of Lourdes, has offered open and visionary support and solidarity to these efforts, making possible the continuation of this work while supporting defenders of human rights fleeing from death in Colombia and attending to prisoners in one of the prisons in Rochester, Minnesota.
In Anthony, New Mexico, in one of the detention centers, Sister Katherine accompanies women who have committed the crime of challenging the social exclusion they experience by seeking a more dignified life in a country of reception that treats them, as one of them shared, as cockroaches. Sister Katherine, by her solidarity, returns to them a measure of dignity and humanity that is denied them on account of their language, their eye color, their skin color, and the fact that they were born outside the United States.
Today, the tens of thousands of North Americans who demonstrated their solidarity with the liberation struggles in Central America twenty-five years ago, now demonstrate that same solidarity in their denunciation of the unjust treatment of migrants and support for the transformation of social structures in order to minimize the social exclusion that immigrants experience. These efforts have made possible such bi-national encounters as the November 2 mass on the border to denounce the wall the divides Mexico and the United States and makes impossible an embrace of peace between the two peoples present at the mass. On that November 2nd afternoon, amidst the songs, prayers, blessings and bi-lingual homilies, 25 Mexican youths climbed the metallic fence to cross over into the United States. Five of the youths were immediately detained by the migra, but the rest disappeared into the crowd.
As if to echo the hopes and desires of all present for a new relationship between these two sister nations, the bishop of El Paso called out, “Tear down this wall!”
