Mexico Under Siege

LOOKING BACK IN ANGUISH

Fleeing Ciudad Juarez's drug violence, Mexicans find safety - and
torment - across the river in El Paso

They go about their lives here, trying to begin anew. They want to
forget about the clean-shaven assassins, the sound of gunfire, the
graves and the homes they've left behind in Ciudad Juarez.

A 41-year-old mother of three sees a Juarez neighbor shopping in the
discount stores of downtown El Paso. She looks for a place to hide.

A year earlier, she'd been shot through the neck, rushed to a
hospital in Juarez and then a second one in El Paso. She had never
gone back to her Juarez home.

"All the neighbors think I'm dead," she said, asking that her name
not be published. She would prefer for the time being that they
continue to think so.

Escapes to El Paso from Juarez and its drug wars are filled with such
moments. There is safety, yes, but also loneliness, hardship and the
psychological torment that comes with living within walking distance
of a place to which you cannot return.

Juarez and El Paso are twin cities connected by bridges over the Rio
Grande. For much of their history, the locals have thought of them as
a single metropolis - until 1888, they even shared the same name. But
today El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States;
Juarez has seen more killings than Baghdad, more than 3,000 homicides
so far this year.

Brenda Ramirez, a 28-year-old mom, saw the man who ran a neighborhood
store in Juarez when she was headed to an El Paso church one Sunday.

He hugged her and joked with her the way he used to with Raul, her
7-year-old son, who was killed by gunmen last year. For a fleeting
moment some of the good memories of Juarez came flooding back.

Sometimes, in her El Paso exile, Ramirez captures and holds on to
those good Juarez memories and it's as if Raul had never been shot
and killed alongside his father, her ex-husband, as he drove Raul
back to her house. As if Brenda had never had to leave.

"My son loved being with his cousins," she said. "On Saturday and
Sunday, they'd all play soccer. My house was always filled with
children. I'd give them all food and have them all with me, playing
their games."

It was just a year ago, just a few miles away, but it was another world.

Now Ramirez lives with her 2-year-old son and husband in a two-room
converted garage in an El Paso barrio of auto shops and taquerias.
The front door faces an alley. She doesn't know any neighbors. No one
stops by to visit.

"Everyone is gone working all day," she said of her neighbors. "It is
very quiet here."

On the wall and in boxes and albums she keeps pictures of her late
son. Playing soccer. Dressed as an angel for a school Nativity play. In Juarez.

For years, the rich of Juarez have retreated to the United States for
a kind of gilded, voluntary second life. Some have second homes on
the El Paso side where they sleep at night. Their children go to
school in the U.S. too. But they still keep businesses and property
in Juarez. And they go back and forth as they like.

In Juarez now, the rich are shuttled around in armor-plated vehicles.
Soldiers behind sandbags guard office buildings. Few go out at night.
And thousands of ordinary working people are fleeing - some on valid
tourist visas, some not.

Hundreds have applied for political asylum, which means they cannot
return to Juarez for a day or even a minute. A return home voids an
asylum application and risks deportation.

"You can't go back to go to your father's funeral, or to have a
couple of beers, or to see the Indios play," Carlos Spector, an El
Paso attorney, said, referring to the Juarez soccer team. "You're not
going back at all. You're going to be stuck here."

In El Paso, people leave their front doors unlocked. For many, the
absence of fear takes getting used to.

Alejandro Hernandez, a 41-year-old father of two, remembers his first
week in El Paso in July: "I went to Walmart at three or four in the
morning. And there were people there, shopping." He stood on the
store's white floors, gleaming under fluorescent lights - all that
American normality felt impossibly surreal.

In Juarez, you have to be alert to the movement on the streets, to
the slow-moving cars and the paid street-corner lookouts.

In El Paso, you're more likely to be ambushed by your fears.

Hernandez learned this when he got to El Paso, after five horrific
days in the hands of a band of marijuana-smoking, drug-cartel hit
men. He was a TV news cameraman, kidnapped on the job by a cartel
that wanted to force his bosses to broadcast a message.

The kidnappers beat him, then threw him in a room. At one point, he
said, he managed to lift the blindfold over his eyes: "All the walls
and the floors were covered with blood." When they suddenly let him
go, he took his family and raced for the border.

They moved in with an El Paso relative. His children started school.
All seemed normal. Then one day, as he stood outside his lawyer's
office downtown, a pickup truck made a U-turn in front of him. "I
ducked down behind a car," he said.

It was only after the pickup disappeared, after he caught his breath,
that he realized no one was after him.

Fear, loss and death can color the smallest details of daily life.

Ricardo Chavez Aldana, a onetime customs inspector and radio
reporter, drives around El Paso in an old Buick with Chihuahua
license plates that used to belong to his teenage nephew Luis.

It's the car Chavez used to flee Mexico with his wife and five kids,
and since he can't work in the U.S. while his political asylum
application is processed, he can't afford a new one.

"This car is in bad shape, look how dirty it is," he said as he drove
around El Paso. "My nephew kept it so clean."

Luis, 17, his brother and two other teenagers were murdered at a
friend's party in 2009 in one of the home-invasion massacres Juarez
is becoming famous for, symptoms of a lawlessness so widespread it
can strike anyone, anytime. No one has been charged, and no official
theories offered.

On the day Luis was killed, he and his uncle had spent hours trying
to get the car to start so Luis could go to that party. "How many
times since have I wished we didn't get this thing started," Chavez said.

Chavez was then a newly hired reporter at a radio station. He went on
the air to denounce the authorities for protecting assassins ravaging
the city. Within hours, someone called his home threatening "a
massacre" if he kept talking.

His family of seven is now squeezed into two rooms in El Paso,
sharing a home with relatives. Tensions are high. His 14-year-old
son, especially, is having trouble with their isolated American existence.

"I feel like we're being driven apart," Chavez said of his family. "I
don't know if it's because we're crazy because of what's happened to
us, or because we're all shut up in here."

Mexico is visible on the near horizon. He sees the 320-foot flagpole
just across the border when he walks to the corner store to buy bread
and cereal in the morning.

"This store has everything I liked in Juarez, except for one thing,"
Chavez said. "It doesn't have the kind of chocolate cereal I like."

Chavez could hop on a bike, pedal south and be at a store that sells
that cereal in 10 minutes - but he'd be risking his life to do so.

Sometimes he takes a short drive to the hillside neighborhoods that
rise over downtown El Paso. When he was a kid, he'd go
trick-or-treating there - back then, the Border Patrol looked the
other way as Juarez kids in Halloween costumes crossed the river.

From the scenic overlook at Murchison Park, feeding quarters into
the binoculars, Chavez can see Colonia Obrera, the neighborhood where
he lived 34 of his 36 years. It's in a patch of Ciudad Juarez visible
between two El Paso glass office towers.

"I can see the gas station where I used to stop," he said. And his
church. And a little shopping center. "I feel sick seeing all that," he said.

The exiles also can see the Juarez violence play out daily on their
televisions. They can buy the Juarez newspapers and read the grisly
details of bodies decapitated or dumped on the street with notes left
by their killers. And they can hear the Radio Canon daily body count
recited on their AM radios:

"It's 11 o'clock and we can open the scoreboard, with the first
killing of the day...."

The 41-year-old mother who was shot through the neck entered El Paso
on a tourist visa that's since expired. She sees Border Patrol agents
in El Paso, and they make her afraid to go outside.

When her husband goes off to work now at El Paso construction sites,
she stays inside the little apartment provided by a refugee
assistance agency. In the living room is a four-foot-tall Christmas
tree. On the walls are the drawings of the couple's 11-year-old daughter.

But Juarez and its demons live in the apartment too.

In Juarez, one of the gunmen who ambushed their home pointed a gun at
the young girl's head. They shot her mother four times. Her father
still has photos on his cellphone of her neck wound, before it healed.

The gunmen spared the girl, but killed her uncle and another
relative. The family has no answers as to why - only that their house
looked like all the others on the block.

Forced to leave their old homes, the transplants still pine for them,
despite the dark memories they contain.

"My country is always with me and what's happening to it makes me
want to weep," said Emilio Gutierrez Soto, 47, a writer. He remembers
the garden, the mesquite tree and the friendships he left behind.
"That's all over now," he said.

In the kitchen of his small, rented home, Gutierrez labors over pots
of stringed beef, making burritos to sell. The walls are covered with
mementos from his old life as a reporter for a Juarez paper, a job he
was forced to leave after reporting on military links to organized crime.

Once Gutierrez earned his living with his words. Now he uses pots and
pans - and his muscles, cleaning up brush at a local farm.

Even for those who can cross the border freely, going back home is not easy.

Brenda Ramirez has a U.S. visa and can travel to Juarez. But the one
time she did since her son's death and her flight to El Paso, she
stayed just long enough to know there was no going back.

She returned to Colonia Angeles on a mission suggested by her
psychotherapist - to retrieve a few of her late 7-year-old's
belongings and part with others for good. But as she entered her old
home, she said, none of her old neighbors approached her: "They look
at you strange. They look the other way. Maybe they think if they
talk to us, something bad will happen to them too."

In El Paso, she tries to be strong for Omar, her 2-year-old, and to
"honor" Raul's memory.

The routines of life with a toddler help her get through each day. So
does the solitude of exile."You don't live with your neighbors here,"
she said, using a Spanish verb, convivir, that's not easily
translated. "Maybe that helps, I don't know. People don't know my
life. They don't know what happened."

In the anonymity of El Paso, there is the beginning of a new life.
Ramirez takes Omar to a park where he imitates the sounds of the
ducks. "Cua, cua, cua." No one stares. No one looks away. At the
park, she is not a victim. She is just another mom.