We Built the Wall Page 11
10
Seeking Justice from the Other Side
Nitza Paola Alvarado Espinoza was kidnapped on December 29, 2009. She and her two cousins José Angel and Rocío Irene were taken away in military vehicles. The cousins were detained by elements of the Mexican National Secretary of Defense (SEDENA)—the Mexican army—in the municipality of Ejido Benito Juárez Buenaventura. The three all worked in factories in Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Nitza and José were taken together, while Rocío was kidnapped in a separate incident. The military personnel did not present an order of arrest for any of them. The cousins’ whereabouts are unknown to this day.
Nitza Paola had three daughters, twins Mitzi and Nitza, who were thirteen at the time, and Deisy, who was eleven years old. The last time the Alvarado sisters saw their mother was the morning of December 29.
I met the Alvarado sisters in early August 2014, in El Paso. They had been living there for less than a year. In the five years since their mother and cousins had disappeared, the rest of the family had been moving around from city to city within Mexico, trying to escape the harassment and intimidation they had been subjected to when they tried to seek justice for the disappearances. In the end, they all came to the United States to apply for political asylum. Carlos Spector took their case.
The Alvarado sisters are pure sweetness. Slender, with long brown hair and round childlike smiles, the three girls carry themselves with a cheerful, easy grace. But Mitzi and Nitza, high-school seniors at eighteen, and Deisy, sixteen, a sophomore, all have a certain indelible sadness in their eyes even when they smile—a sadness I’ve noticed in every person I’ve talked to who has lost a loved one to violence. The Alvarado girls, as they are called by the activist groups that have become part of their daily lives, first in Mexico and now the United States, have spent a third of their young lives demanding an investigation into their mother’s disappearance.
The Alvarado girls used to live in Juárez with their mother, Nitza Paola, and their maternal grandparents. In late December 2009, they all traveled to a nearby town, Ejido Benito Juárez, to spend the holidays with relatives. They celebrated Christmas and were preparing to ring in the new year when what Nitza calls “my family’s tragedy” took place. On December 29, Nitza Paola’s cousin José Angel arrived and asked her to go with him to his wife’s house. As they drove up to the house, a Mexican army commando intercepted them, took them into custody, and drove off. Witnesses described a dozen military troops getting out of their trucks, beating the cousins, and taking them away—“los levantaron.”
“When they started to take them away our relatives tried to get involved, they asked why they were taking them, but they told them to get down on the ground,” Nitza describes in the flat tone of someone who has had to tell this story many times, and each time tries not to think too hard about what she is actually saying. “They made the children go inside and they started beating José Angel’s family.” Outside, the heat of the Texas summer rises, but we are talking in the cool, comfortable library in the Spectors’ home. The Alvarado girls have lived with Carlos, his wife Sandra, and their daughter Alejandra for the past nine months.
Once the commando unit had driven off with the two cousins, bystanders tried to drive after them, but the military trucks sped through back roads and lost them. They found out that military personnel had carried out a similar operation with Rosa Irene, another cousin of Nitza Paola’s, locking her children in the bathroom, pulling her baby daughter from her arms, and taking her away.
Just as with all families who have had to confront the disappearance of one of their own, they were faced not just with the raw pain of loss but also with the sheer ineptitude of Mexican bureaucracy and the indifference, or open complicity, of the authorities responsible for meting out justice. On December 30, Nitza Paola’s sister María Jesús Alvarado drove to the city of Casas Grandes, where, according to declarations by witnesses to the kidnapping, the cousins had been driven and where they had spent the night of December 29 at the 35th Infantry Battalion base. Military personnel told her that neither the cousins nor the truck had been there, though she found out later that the latter had been parked behind the building during her visit.
This was when Joint Operation Chihuahua was taking place, Mitzi says, picking up her sister’s story. The military kidnapped and tortured people but brought them back two or three days later. “We thought it would be the same thing with my family, they would show up again a few days later.” The family filed one complaint after another with the federal attorney general. At one point, María de Jesús and José Angel’s mother overheard two employees discussing the Alvarado family and implying that something had happened to one of them. When the employees realized that family members were listening to them, they stopped talking. Piece by piece, the family was gathering clues and signs of hope in their search.
On February 3, 2010, thirty-five days after the disappearance, Nitza Paola’s best friend told the family that Nitza had called her from a number in Mexico City. According to the friend’s account, Nitza told her that she did not know where she was, but pleaded that they keep searching for her. The family filed another complaint with the attorney general, asking the government to investigate the phone call, which turned out to have come from the women’s prison in Santa Martha Acatitla, in Mexico City. “But the government said it wasn’t her,” Mitzi says. “They said someone from inside was trying to extort us, and they closed all lines of investigation.”
As soon as the family understood the magnitude of the kidnapping, they set up a network of relatives to protect Nitza, Mitzi, and Deisy. The girls traveled to the city of Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos in central Mexico first. After spending their entire lives as part of an extended nuclear family, life in Cuernavaca with only their grandmother meant losing touch with everything they had known up until that point. They did not talk on the phone for fear that it had been tapped. They missed their aunt María de Jesús, who had filed the complaints with the attorney general and therefore cut off all contact with the girls to avoid putting them in any danger. They met up with her in Mexico City on the following May 10, when Mother’s Day is celebrated in Mexico. They could only see her for thirty minutes. And the harassment from the government did not stop: federal and municipal authorities surrounded their family home in Benito Juárez, where the kidnapping had taken place, several times, in an apparent show of intimidation.
The family could tell how hard the situation was on the girls, so they decided to move to the city of Hermosillo, in Sonora state, to be together. At the same time, at the suggestion of activist groups working on their behalf, María de Jesús began to bring the girls with her to meetings in order to involve them in the search and show them why the process was taking so long. Soon activist groups in Chihuahua and some media outlets started talking about the case. The story of three sisters left without a mother, represented by the lawyer Luz “Lucha” Castro, founder of the Women’s Human Rights Center, was bound to attract attention. The case helped launch a statewide movement for the disappeared, led by Castro and Alma Gómez Camino.
“We weren’t scared,” Nitza tells me later, calm and composed. “We were happy to go in with the necessary strength to seek justice and truth. Not only for my family, but for the other people who had disappeared.”
On May 10, 2011, the Alvarado sisters played a prominent role in honoring all the mothers who had disappeared. During an event organized by a human rights organization in Mexico City, their lawyer Luz Castro decided that Mitzi and Nitza would read the names of all the disappeared in the state of Chihuahua. Nitza still gets emotional when she talks about it.
“It was very powerful to us, to say all the names and the people answered back, ‘Here!’” she says. “When that part ended we were very emotional, but then the media came up to us and attacked us with questions and more questions: ‘If your mother was here, what would you say to her? If you were spending Mother’s Day with her, wh
at present would you give her?’ What stupid questions! Why would they ask us that? We’re not with our mom; we’re searching for her! How am I going to think about what present I would give her? The only thing I want is to have her with me. When our lawyer [Lucha Castro] realized what was going on, she stopped the interviews. We weren’t prepared; it was really hard for us.”
A few weeks later they began family and individual therapy. After just a few months the change was apparent. The girls began going to meetings held by organizations of families of the disappeared more often, actively participating more each time.
On May 10, 2012, their third Mother’s Day without their mother, the girls met with members of Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS) Mexico, the Mexican chapter of the organization founded in Argentina by children of the disappeared and political prisoners, to demand justice and make sure that their parents are not forgotten by history.
“They helped us a lot,” Nitza says. “They have been searching for their parents for years—they motivated us, and gave us strength.”
After living in Sonora for two years, the family decided to move back to Chihuahua. All eleven people—María de Jesús and her husband, their four children, the three Alvarado sisters, and their maternal grandparents—had been surviving on their uncle’s income. María de Jesús started to work part-time, but she was also taking care of the seven children and working on her sister’s case. Moving back to Chihuahua and living closer to their extended family there seemed likely to make things easier for everybody. But there, the harassment only increased. One of José Angel’s brothers was run over, and his house was broken into and ransacked. Some people appeared in town and menaced the family members.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of the family and supporting organizations, the Alvarado case reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The Secretary of Defense acknowledged that the army was involved in the disappearances. But “instead of offering us protection, they just harassed us,” Mitzi says. “We couldn’t go out. We didn’t feel comfortable at school.” After the intimidating phone calls started—“we heard men and women screaming, a chain saw, that kind of thing,” Mitzi says—the entire family decided to apply for asylum in the United States.
The Alvarado family presented themselves at one of the bridges connecting Juárez with El Paso on September 3, 2013.
Walking over the bridge from the Mexican side to the U.S. side can be intimidating. As you walk, your mind races with questions immigration agents might ask you, and if you are seeking asylum, the rest of your life could depend on how you answer those questions. An incorrect answer or a poorly presented argument could slam the door shut on your ability to live. María de Jesús spoke for the group, showing the immigration agent the pages of legal documents that had been prepared under the guidance of Lucha Castro and Carlos Spector. “They took our pictures, fingerprints,” Mitzi remembers. “They asked a lot of questions and tried to discourage us.”
“They kept us there for a long time,” Nitza adds, her anxiety rising at the memory. “They started to talk to us one at a time, asking us who we were. They put us in some rooms and my sisters and I were there for hours and hours, for two days and a night.” While their aunt and grandparents were released to begin their asylum petition process after establishing credible fear, the girls were kept in detention because they were “unaccompanied children”—their legal guardian being their mother. Then they were transferred to a shelter for minors in Phoenix, Arizona—the first time they had ever been on a plane.
The Hacienda del Sol youth shelter, part of the Southwest Key system, is one of 637 centers around the country that ICE uses to transfer detainees. Although 40 percent of those detained by ICE are from Mexico,1 in that particular center only 6 percent of arrivals between 2013 and 2015 were Mexican, with 64 percent from Guatemala, 20 percent from Honduras, 6 percent from El Salvador and 3 percent from Romania. According to official data, the average length of a stay at the youth shelter is fifty-three days.
“They treated us well,” Nitza acknowledges. Mitzi later tells me about some of the experiences the kids at the shelter had shared with her: sexual abuse in the family, physical abuse, gang recruitment. “A lot of the kids didn’t even know what a bathroom was, or how you make a bed … They divided us into groups A through D, from the most educated down to the ones who couldn’t even write. They were learning there. There were some who didn’t even speak Spanish; they had their own dialects and we couldn’t understand them. It was really hard, because they had to learn Spanish and English.”
After spending two months in the youth shelter, the sisters got the good news that their aunt María de Jesús had been named their legal guardian, and they could be released. Now their legal process would begin, during which they could remain in the United States. For the time being, the threats, Juárez, and Mexico were behind them.
I asked the girls to tell me about the last memory they have of Juárez. Nitza tells me she remembers her life with her mom, at home. It’s the first time in the conversation when it seems she may be overcome by tears.
“For me, the last memory I have of Juárez is my house with my family,” Mitzi says. “It’s so sad because we had to abandon the house, and it’s all still there, my mom’s clothes, her bedroom, just like when we left. Leaving the house behind made us really sad too.”
Nitza says, perhaps more to herself than to me, that her mother will come back someday.
How do you start a new life, if the wounds of the old life have not healed? Impunity hurts, even from exile. Talking about this pain can be not only an effective method of counteracting it, but also a legal strategy. The case of the Alvarado girls is one of the best examples of this.
In the human rights field, especially in the area focusing on those disappeared by violence, the Alvarado case has become iconic for two reasons. First, the compelling story of three young girls denouncing abuses perpetrated by federal and local authorities against their mother has propelled the case into the media both nationally and internationally. On November 29, 2013, the New York Times ran a story originally published in the Texas Tribune, directly blaming the Mexican army for Nitza Paola’s disappearance: “Daughters Look for a Mother Lost to the Mexican Military.” Second, the Alvarado case was the first case of violence in Mexico to reach the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Carlos Spector points out that the increased harassment of the Alvarado family following the court’s ruling is part of a general strategy of repression that focuses on human rights activists and others of the most vocal citizens. “The case was first presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, implicating Colonel Elfego José Luján Ruiz in Nitza Paola’s disappearance, as a result of investigations performed by the organizations presenting the case,” Spector explains. “Then it went on to the Court, which accepted the case and presented it to the media on August 13, 2013, condemning the Mexican government for its incompetence or lack of interest, and the army for not cooperating in resolving the case. And what we saw was the army responded by doubling down on its harassment of the Alvarado Espinosa family, surrounding the house with fifty soldiers from the federal, state, and municipal police. Obviously, at that moment the family said ‘we can’t take it anymore.’ If the response to international criticism is increased harassment, they didn’t have any other choice. Then they fled, and that’s when we took the case. The way it developed is emblematic because it’s a continuation of the repression that started in 2008, identifying and focusing on the human rights activists and on people who make ‘noise.’ ‘It’s a strategy consistent with the PRI’s return to federal power in 2012, using old tactics,’’ he says. “The government is effectively saying, “If this is the most symbolic case in the country, we’re going to shut them up and show that making noise is not going to help them.’”
We are in Carlos’s living room. The Alvarado girls are here too, and their grandmother, who is living in Odess
a, Texas, has come over to visit. Carlos speaks admiringly of the girls. He is impressed with how well they have managed to go on with their lives and continue the search for their mother, demanding justice and involving others. He is also impressed by their generosity. But it has been the Spectors’ generosity that has given the girls some stability. As soon as the girls’ aunt María de Jesús, her husband, and their grandparents were released from detention, the harsh reality of life in the United States hit them: the language barrier, the absence of family and friends, the difficulty of finding a well-paying job, and the high cost of living in dollars. When María was granted guardianship of the girls two months later and they were sent to live with her, it was clear that their financial situation would be even more precarious. The Spectors decided to support the family by letting the girls live with them and attend school in El Paso.
“We had never done anything like that before,” Carlos says. “I am a very private person … But the Alvarado Espinosa family is so unique, with such a historic case. These girls are so brave, so charismatic … When I met them, they were fifteen and seventeen, and already veterans of the Mexican social movement. They had already participated in sit-ins in Chihuahua to occupy the Municipal Palace. It is amazing what the children of the disappeared in Mexico have done and what they have achieved. For me, the girls represent courage, and at the same time they remind us of the Mexican tradition of social struggle. They are here to show the people of the United States that the idea that the Mexican people are passively watching what’s going on in Mexico with their arms crossed is totally false—it’s just the opposite.”
“They have been our angels since we got here,” Mitzi tells me that afternoon, talking about the Spector family. “We are so grateful to them,” she says, and beams the brightest smile of the whole day.
Deisy is the most reserved of the three Alvarado sisters. She is two years younger than her sisters, although only one year behind them in school. She talks less than the twins, and a bit faster. She speaks emphatically but never raises her voice. Mitzi says that after their mother disappeared, Deisy had the hardest time expressing her feelings. She would just cry, and couldn’t talk about how she felt. Her sisters would hug her and try to get her to tell them what she was thinking, and then they would all end up crying together.