Las Cruces to Laredo

Here are some excerpts from the team's daily log for the first full week of the Borderlands Witness Drive:

2 July-- Monday

Departed Sitting Tree, stopped to assist Rick with a bandage for a wound incurred in the course of his roofing project, refueled the Jetta, then headed east on I-10. Lunch in a public park in Deming, NM.

Arrived in Las Cruces, NM, mid-afternoon, at the home of Sally M, a trauma nurse active in border concerns. Sally works at a hospital in El Paso, where they often treat injured migrants; she reports that the Border Patrol sometimes posts guards in the hospital rooms of migrants to ensure their deportation or detention after their release from the hospital (significantly different from what we were told about one hospital in Tucson, where the nurses will often call NMD or Humane Borders to let them know that migrants are ready to go a day or two before they are scheduled for release...). Sally has previously been involved with a group in New Mexico called Desert Humanitarians, who do similar work to the Samaritans, but currently her efforts are focused on helping at the Mariposa respite station. We had hoped also to visit the New Mexico/Sonora border towns of Columbus/Las Palomas, but our contact there canceled.

3 July-- Tuesday

Arrival in El Paso, TX, midpoint of the border. From EP west the border runs across land; from EP east, it is river, the Rio Grande. We met with Simon Chandler, Annunciation House's Border Awareness Events coordinator. Simon offered us several contacts and his perspective on immigration from an Annunciation House vantage point. We then met with CPT reservist Renee Borsberry for lunch with the Annunciation House community. People were still processing the previous evening's apprehension of a guest of Annunciation House by Border Patrol. While such events are common in the neighborhood, they have been rare at 'A' House. One agent actually entered the community sala before being urged out by a volunteer who demanded to see a warrant (see also our earlier post on this).

West Cosgrove, Maryknoll layman, offered us his perspective of the border and provided another series of options for contacts. West points out that E.P./C.J. is really one city, like many border communities. Furthermore he sees the 2,000 mile border as having 4 distinct characters which he calls:

1. San Diego/Tijuana
   
2. Arizona
   
3. El Paso/Juarez
   
4. The Rio Grande Valley

4 July--Wednesday

The BWD went south of the border for U.S. Independence Day. We visited Betty Campbell of Casa Tabor in Juarez. She offered the insights of one who is U.S. citizen and 6 year resident of Juarez on top of years of residence in Latin America. The conversation focused on the myriad forms violence can take in a border community where grinding poverty dominates daily life and the average salary from work in the city's maquiladoras is $4.50 a day. She offered the creative, faith-filled ways in which those at Casa Tabor live amidst the violence. We drove east along the Rio Grande to San Agustin in search of Professor Manuel Robles, educator/activist. We got an eye full of local history in the museum, though Professor Robles was not available.

The day ended at CPTer Anne Herman's house with a cookout and fireworks visible from both sides of the border.

5 July-- Thursday

We joined a group of women today in Juarez, protesting the unexplained and uninvestigated murders and disappearances of more than 300 women in Juarez over the past decade. Women gathered from many different supporting organizations. Families of the victims carried signs, and some had dresses on crosses representing their lost loved ones, while they walked silently in procession in front of the Juarez Dept. of Justice. Around 100 people gathered for the 1 hour vigil.

We met Jim Weaver, a Maryknoll layman living and working in Juarez, at the vigil and he accompanied us to our meeting with Centro de Derechos Humanos, Paso del Norte (Human Rights Center of North Paso). We met with Fr. Oscar, another Oscar, two Silvias and Cecilia who shared with us the work that the Center does with education, legal defense and women's programs. They also talked with us about Lomas de Poleo, a poor agricultural community on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez where wealthy landowner Zaragoza is using his vast resources to force the 80 families off their land so he can develop it for maquilas. Thanks to the generosity of Jim and Cecilia, we were able to travel up to Lomas de Poleo in the afternoon to see the situation first hand. See this earlier post for more. Our team was struck with the strong resemblance of this situation to many other CPT projects. This looks very much like CPT's work elsewhere, and the community does invite international accompaniment.

6 July-- Friday

Following morning conference call with Mark and Rick, BWD participated in the weekly noon vigil in opposition to the occupation of Iraq in downtown El Paso. We joined a dozen or so local concerned citizens including CPT reservist, Anne Herman in engaging the noontime rush with posters and peace flags. The response was largely supportive.

Following the vigil we had a lunch/meeting with Betty Campbell and Peter Hinde of Casa Tabor. Peter offered an economic analysis of the border. He described a reincarnated "colonial economy" wherein local elites ape the original colonizers and keep intact an oppressive system within the wider global economy. This system is characterized by a marked disparity in income, staggering unemployment and elevated costs of food products. Grocery costs are 25% higher in Mexico than in the U.S. NAFTA did not create this crisis, says Hinde, but rather it "locked into place a neoliberal model" which was already in process. He emphasized that one cannot look at the northward migration of workers both to the maquiladoras and U.S. without seeing the root cause of displacement, i.e. the colonial economy and its latest assault, NAFTA, CAFTA and (so called) free trade.

The team spent the remainder of the day documenting our days in El Paso/Juarez and preparing for Del Rio and the Laredos.

7 July-- Saturday

After an early start from El Paso, we were delayed by a clogged fuel filter. Fortunately we had a spare, and a local garage in Sierra Blanca changed it for us. Then a long drive through the desert brought us to Del Rio, TX, on the Mexican border in this lush part of the Rio Grande valley.

John, Haven, and Brian met Jay Johnson-Castro and his friend Sarah Boone, who run a B&B in Del Rio. We went with them to dinner across the border in the twin city of Ciudad Acuña. He had quite a story: he became so angry about the proposed border wall in their city that he walked in protest all the way from Laredo to Brownsville. That attracted local media, and others joined him from time to time. And then the mayor of Acuna joined him in a second walk, to Piedras Négras, across from Eagle Pass, TX. Jay reports that all the mayors, all the sheriffs, and over 90% of the people in the Rio Grande Valley are opposed to the wall. A third walk took him to the Hutto detention center, near Austin, where he reports that immigrant families, including children, are imprisoned under inhumane conditions. He was outraged. And so are we...

8 July-- Sunday

We began the day with worship at one of the local Catholic churches in Del Rio. The Spanish language Mass made things difficult to understand for everyone but Sarah. This provided us some perspective on the foreign environment in which many immigrants find themselves...

After worship we departed Del Rio for Laredo. We arrived there in the early afternoon and checked in with our hosts, Dora and Carlos Flores, contacts that Betty Campbell had given to us. In the second half of the afternoon, Carlos drove us over into Nuevo Laredo to visit Heriberto Galvan of the Biblioteca Tamaulipan, a community center for children and adults that offers computer classes and other instruction, as well as occasional hospitality to migrants. Heriberto took us to several sites around town that are related to migration (a river crossing, train yards, etc.). He also accompanied us to the Casa Del Migrantes, a Scalabrini-run house of hospitality for migrants. They are currently quite full, and most of their guests appear to be from Central America rather than Mexico. The Scalabrinis maintain a number of such houses in Mexico and elsewhere.