The lash of a dust-laden wind wrestled with the weeping of women, the scrape
of shovels and the ballad of a corrido band as two murdered brothers were
buried under the heat of the desert sky.
A group of spurred ranchero horsemen, lassoes at the saddle, waited among the
assembled pick-up trucks and four-wheel drives on one side of the cemetery
to pay their respects to the dead. Nearby, too, a platoon of heavily armed
Mexican troops, some masked, stood ready to search the mourners as they left
Tuesday's funeral.
For in Palomas, a small frontier settlement with one of the worst murder rates
in Mexico, grief offers no exemption from the depredations of the drug war
that is convulsing the country, and the soldiers were leaving nothing to
chance.
“Drugs. Guns. They can be anywhere, even at a funeral,” the soldiers'
commander stated simply.
The two dead men, Armando and Luis Carreón, 41 and 39 years old, were slain in
the early hours of Sunday morning, gunned down in their pick-up truck as
they cruised the town's main street. Three others died with them as a group
of six gunmen in another vehicle riddled their truck with Kalashnikov fire
from close range. About 150 yards up the street sits a Customs post at the
border with America. A similar distance to the east is the police station.
Cartel assassins can outgun most lawmen in Palomas, and so confident were the
killers that after the initial strike they drove around the block and
returned to finish off two wounded survivors.
“I was trying to help them,” said one man who had rushed to the scene.
Like most of the town's residents he did not wish to be named. “Three were
dead but there were still two alive. One had been hit in the leg, the other
the head. They were conscious and one asked me to get hold of his family.
But then the gunmen came back and shouted at me to get away. As I ran they
killed them both.”
Palomas is no stranger to violent death. Straddling a main contraband route
across the Mexican-US border, the settlement has historically been a
preserve of cattle rustlers, liquor, marijuana and gun smugglers long before
cocaine rode into town.
Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary general, used Palomas to send a
raiding party into America in 1916. Until recently it was common to have
between eight and ten fatal shootings each year in the town, whose
population is little more than 7,500.
This year, though, as Mexico finds itself riven by a savage inter-cartel drug
war that has already resulted in more than 1,100 deaths nationwide, the
death toll has soared.
Since January 37 Palomas residents have been shot dead. Another 17 have been
abducted and are still missing. Nine inhabitants were killed last week
alone. The violence grew two months ago after the local crime boss in
Palomas, Humberto del Hierro, disappeared.
Once affiliated with the dominant Juárez cartel, del Hierro's loyalties had
vacillated after the rival Sinaloa cartel sought to take over Palomas's
lucrative cross-border drug-smuggling business. The combination of American
guns and dollars, Colombian cocaine, government corruption and internal
feuding caused by the arrest of a few mid-level cartel chiefs has since
sparked the tinder into an all-out war. It is now unclear which cartel
controls Palomas.
In response to the wider national crisis, the casualties of which have
included scores of police officers, President Calderón has deployed 25,000
troops to ten Mexican border cities since the start of the year. Despite the
arrival of 200 soldiers in Palomas in March the violence has continued
unabated.
“I can't explain it,” said Father José Abel Retana, the town's outspoken
priest and solitary figure of leadership. “I thought with the arrival of
soldiers peace would come but it hasn't.
“The soldiers know who the people are who control this territory. Now some
people are wondering if the army or Government are also behind the
killings.” Complicit or not, local policemen are outgunned and out financed
by the cartels. The 11 officers in Palomas have only three revolvers, two
decrepit rifles and two patrol cars between them. In March their commander
walked across the border into the US claiming political asylum after
receiving death threats.
“This is the worst violence I have ever seen in 22 years of service,” said his
replacement, Commandante Salomon Baca. “Anyone can get a weapon here.
They have got AK-47s. Thank God we haven't had to confront them yet and I hope
to God we never do.” To date confronting the cartels is the last thing on
the minds of the local lawmen. One patrol car happened to be close to the
location of Sunday morning's shootings, but its immediate response to the
sound of gunfire was to speed away from the scene.
Local people have no confidence in the ability of either the police or
military to contain the situation, and none is willing to offer information
to the authorities for fear of their lives.
One witness to Sunday's killings said that when the gunmen returned to kill
the wounded they had removed their masks. The frightened man said that he
recognised the killers as locals. Another woman said that the hitmen were a
group of 11 Palomas men whose identities were well known to the community.
“There's no faith in any law here,” said Karla Carreón, 28, whose father and
brother were shot dead outside the town's hardware store last Friday before
two of her cousins were killed on Sunday. “The soldiers, the army, the
police, the federal police, whatever - they are probably behind it too.
There's no law here at all.”
The town's formal economy has now collapsed and many residents are opting to
pack up and leave rather than remain in what has become a small war zone.
Seventy per cent of the official economy relies on American citizens
crossing the border to attend either Palomas's opticians or dentists, or
sample the libertine delights of the strip clubs, bars and bordellos.
Now, however, as US authorities warn their citizens against visiting Palomas,
the clinics and hotels are closing down, the bars are empty and the hookers
have drifted elsewhere. After sundown this week the streets resembled
something of a ghost town: dust-devils, a lone paralytic drunk, a fleeting
army patrol and one solitary working girl the only visible presence.
Nationwide the cocaine conflict shows every sign of increasing rather than
waning. Local street gangs as well as professional assassins such as Los
Zetas, a group of former special forces troops and army officers, are
operating on the cartel payrolls.
Police collusion with the cartels is widespread, though included among the
casualties in the past ten days have been Mexico's acting federal police
chief, five other police commanding officers, as well as Edgar Guzmán, the
son of Mexico's most wanted drugs chief, head of the Sinaloa cartel Joaquín
“El Chapo” Guzmán.
In an effort to back President Calderón the US has promised Mexico $500
million (£250 million) as part of a $1.4 billion counter-narcotic package,
Plan Merida, for central America. The money has yet to be approved by
Congress, but many analysts note that cash will do little to halt the
violence as long as government corruption is rife and America and Europe's
ravenous cocaine appetite remains.
Meanwhile, the cartel violence has attracted a degree of popular support among
elements of the country's impoverished youth, who aspire to a romanticised
notion of the 'narco' lifestyle.
Narcocorridos - drug ballads eulogising cartel members, dead and alive - are
no longer the preserve of northern bars and have become a mainstay of Latin
music sales on both sides of the border. Composers are often paid by cartel
members to write songs in their honour and, predictably, band members have
also become casualties, killed by cartel hitmen jealous of their rivals'
glorification. Cyberspace has become a new arena for the conflict, with
opposing gangs using sites such as YouTube to taunt one another and promote
their own escapades.
In Palomas, Father José Abel recalled a five-year-old child, asked by his
grandmother what he wanted to be when he grew up, reply “a narco”. “That was
20 years ago, when I was first ordained. From a moral standpoint people know
it's wrong, but newer generations see it as just a job, something normal,”
the priest added. “Behind most crimes is an addiction, a sickness. And we
are a sick society, addicted to money, guns and drugs.
“I'm not depressed, just really sad. In my years as a priest I've never had to
officiate at Masses for nine killed in a single week.
“What's the point of having soldiers here if nothing changes?”
