We Built the Wall Read online

  The ones who managed to get out of Guadalupe alive arrived in Fabens with nothing. They don’t speak English, they have no savings, no furniture, no property, no papers. Some don’t even have an old family photo album. They came to Fabens with nothing more than their beating hearts—no dreams, no plans beyond the simple will to survive.

  The distance between Fabens and Guadalupe is the distance between life and death.

  On New Year’s Eve, 2013, the Reyes house glows with light. Saúl Reyes, his wife Gloria, his children, his mother Sara, and six or seven close friends have gathered for dinner. Saúl lives in this little residential enclave in the middle of the desert, in Fabens, but just like the rest of his family, his home will always be on the Mexico side, in Guadalupe. He fled north to survive. The Reyes Salazar family, a clan of bakers with a long history of social activism, resisted leaving their hometown. But out of ten siblings, four of them men, Saúl Reyes Salazar and three of his sisters are the only ones still living. Two died of natural causes. Four were murdered.

  The members of the Reyes Salazar family had been militant leftists for decades. They belonged to various organizations and political parties that sprang up across Mexico in the sixties: from the Popular Defense Committee (CDP) and the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM) to the still-functioning Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD). Eusebio Reyes, a baker and the family patriarch, was born in Torreón, Coahuila, a state bordering Texas. After trying to organize his fellow bakers to demand better working conditions, he was fired, and no one else would hire him. He decided to move away, and wound up in Guadalupe. He opened his own bakery and taught his children the trade, while imparting lessons in worker solidarity and social activism.

  In the early nineties, the Reyeses led a resistance movement against a proposed nuclear waste dump in Sierra Blanca, Texas, nine miles north of the Mexican border and Juárez Valley. On March 21, 1992, along with other local activist groups, they held a protest called “Marcha por la Vida” (March for Life), which advanced towards Sierra Blanca from El Paso and both sides of the border, to highlight the rights of border communities to a safe environment free of pollution.

  Saúl, in his forties and about average height, has a ruddy, dark complexion. With a sharp gaze and a tendency to get right to the point, he is serious, attentive. But when he looks back on the protest, he smiles proudly. They shut down every border crossing in the area for an entire hour.

  “It was the first time in history anything like that was ever done,” he points out. As a result of the wave of protests, the Sierra Blanca nuclear waste project was canceled. Years later some attempts were made to revive it, with no success.

  The Reyes family came to symbolize the fight to protect the environment against big corporations and U.S. interests, in a part of Mexico that had never seemed to matter much to the rest of the country or the federal government. Over the years, the family was active in a variety of causes: constructing homes in Juárez Valley for people who had tried unsuccessfully to cross into the United States; protesting the killing of women in the area, an issue that Josefina, one of Saúl’s sisters, worked on the most; fighting to improve conditions for factory workers in Juárez; and protesting the militarization of the area that began in 2008 as part of an operation by the Mexican federal government to combat narcotrafficking, and which included a wave of repression and human rights violations.

  People who knew the Reyes family recall the four brothers—Eleazar, Elías, Saúl, and Rubén—working together at the bakery and at the small chain of stores that the family owned. One kneaded the dough while another shaped it into loaves, the third prepared pastries, and the fourth took bread out of the oven. As they worked, they would discuss issues in the residential development they had built and politics in Juárez Valley. Sometimes they would go out to deliver the bread, or serve pastries to customers, along with a cup of coffee.

  On that New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2013, Saúl falls back on an old custom. He gets home at around nine o’clock, when dinner is almost ready. He has brought with him a traditional Reyes, or “king’s” cake—which in this case is aptly named for two reasons—that he baked for his family himself. He had started working at a bakery in Fabens as soon as he got there, earning eight dollars an hour. This is what he knows, and he’s good at it, but now he’s alone. All that remains of his brothers are memories.

  The string of Reyes murders started on August 23, 2008. Josefina and other activists had organized a march to protest the military’s presence in the Juárez Valley. A week later, a group of soldiers kidnapped her younger son, Miguel Angel. After two weeks of demonstrations outside military installations, and a hunger strike by Josefina, Miguel Angel was released with two fractured ribs, a broken nose, and signs of torture from electric shocks delivered to the soles of his feet.1 Three months later, men wearing masks and armed with guns burst into an event hall where a wedding reception was being held, searched among the guests, and killed Josefina’s oldest son, Julio César. They shot him through the heart. He was nineteen years old.

  Instead of keeping quiet, the Reyeses kept up their activism. They demanded justice for Julio César and the army’s withdrawal from Guadalupe and Juárez Valley. On January 3, 2010, Josefina Reyes was killed when she stopped to get something to eat while driving home from her mother’s house. In August 2010, her brother Rubén Reyes was gunned down in the street, in broad daylight. On February 7, 2011, Malena Reyes, Elías Reyes, and his wife Luisa Ornelas were kidnapped. A week after the kidnapping, while Sara, the matriarch of the family, was protesting in front of the state-house in Chihuahua, the state’s capital, her house was burned to the ground. On February 26, the dead bodies of the three kidnapping victims were found. An onslaught of threats to the family followed.

  In spite of his earlier resolve not to give in to threats, Saúl understood that the time to leave had come. The family left everything behind: the comfortable home Saúl and Gloria had built themselves, brick by brick; their family bakery passed down to him by his mother; the books Saúl had read with his siblings as they made bread; all of their belongings. As soon as Saúl, Gloria, and their three children fled Guadalupe in April 2011, their house and the bakery were broken into and burned to the ground. Sara, his mother, crossed the border the following December.

  “We didn’t want to leave. We had been taught that we had to fight for our country, and we knew that our country was in a bad way, but we wanted to stay to make it better,” Saúl Reyes explained when I talked to him for the first time in El Paso. “When I go to give a talk at the universities and they ask me why I came, I tell them I didn’t just come here, they pushed me out.”

  Saúl was granted political asylum in January 2012, and in the coming months around thirty Reyes family members started the process of applying for asylum. The family’s story traveled around the world as a devastating example of the persecution and extreme violence endured by ordinary individuals and the tragic impunity enjoyed by criminals in Mexico.

  In 2008 Operation Chihuahua went into effect, an initiative of then-president Felipe Calderón’s administration aiming to dismantle organized crime in that state. In its first phase, the program dispatched roughly 10,000 military and federal police personnel to Chihuahua, claiming that these forces of law and order would take control of the state. Meanwhile, the local municipal and state police forces would be “cleansed” of their connections to drug cartels. The Sinaloa cartel, the Juárez cartel (known as “La Linea”), and the Zetas were all at war over territory and had been accused of murdering police chiefs who formed alliances with rival drug gangs. During the operation’s second phase, the newly installed local police would be trained, and the state would be left under their control. But according to official data and claims by human rights groups, kidnappings, extortion, breaking and entering, and murders became even worse during the years when the operation was in effect.

  Not even four months had passed since the operation began when Carlos Spector, an imm
igration lawyer in El Paso, began to be approached by activists and journalists from Chihuahua seeking political asylum in the United States. The exodus began with Emilio Gutiérrez, a journalist from Ascención, Chihuahua. He was followed by Cipriana Jurado, who in 2011 became the first human rights activist to have an asylum petition approved by the United States. Asylum seeker Marisol Valles, police chief of the Práxedis G. Guerrero municipality, was dubbed “the bravest woman in Mexico.” Carlos Gutiérrez, a married father of two, refused to pay the extortion “quota” for his catering business; his feet were sawed off in the back of his car as punishment. Incredibly, he survived, although both legs had to be amputated below the knee. In 2014, using prosthetic legs, Gutiérrez launched a bike caravan that traveled across Texas to the governor’s mansion in Austin to demand justice for the victims of violence in Mexico.

  Newspapers in Mexico and around the world published stories on Carlos’s clients. One, then another, then another came to ask for his help, until the protagonists of perhaps the most emblematic case of all those exiled by violence in Juárez Valley made their way to Carlos’s office: the Reyes Salazar family.

  After leaving Guadalupe, Saúl and his family made their way to El Paso and stayed at a shelter for migrants and the homeless. Neither Saúl nor Gloria spoke any English. Their children—thirteen, six, and three years old—would have to attend a school program for English language learners. Saúl took whatever work he could get, from gardening and yard work to unpacking fresh produce at a supermarket. They found a small apartment, which, with a little effort, could accommodate the five of them and Sara, who had arrived by then. A few months later Saúl heard that rents were much cheaper in Fabens, about a half hour east of El Paso, and that there were other people from Guadalupe there. The family moved, and Saúl found a new job.

  The Reyes family has tried to make a fresh start and adapt to a new life in a mobile home in the middle of the Texas desert. According to the most recent census figures available, of 8,250 residents in Fabens, 97 percent are Latino and 90 percent are Mexican. That figure is from 2010 and a large part of the exodus caused by violence only began that year; it is hard to say, therefore, how much the population has grown or changed in composition since then.2 A walk through Fabens’s sandy streets indicates that many of the people living here arrived recently: about a third of the homes are not houses but mobile homes or trailers—“trailas,” as they are known in local parlance.

  People in the same circumstances as Saúl live in these trailers. They do not have the financial resources to buy a plot of land or a house, and monthly rent payments on an apartment are too burdensome. Renting a trailer is cheaper, and although space is tight, trailers come equipped with the basic necessities: a small kitchen area with a gas stove, a bathroom, electricity, and divided rooms. Saúl has a trailer on a corner lot, enclosed by a fence. The trailer is not in great shape, but it’s a good size, big enough to house separate, though small, rooms for his mother and his children. The dining room table is at the heart of the trailer.

  As guests arrive in the final hours of 2013, more chairs are placed around the table. Saúl greets everyone as they enter the trailer, making them feel welcome. In comes Martín Huéramo, forty-six, a trusted political ally of the Reyes brothers back in Guadalupe, and like a brother to Saúl. When the Reyes family moved to Fabens in 2013, Martín was already there. With a powerful build, a complexion tanned from the sun, and a thick mustache framing a gentle smile, Martín had been doing well in Guadalupe. His family, originally from Michoacán, had moved to Guadalupe when he was just a boy. Like everyone who grew up in Juárez Valley then, Martín remembers a time of plenty, when hard work paid off. Skilled in construction, Martín built himself three houses in Guadalupe. He sold one in order to come to Fabens.

  “They weren’t fancy houses, just the typical kind of house in Juárez Valley,” he says, humbly. Martín wears a checkered shirt typical of the working-class men in the area, and even though he has lived in Texas for three years, when he talks his accent is 100 percent Chihuahua.

  Since he had always owned the houses where he lived, Martín set about searching for a plot of land to build a house on when he arrived in the United States. But a few days into his search, he got the first hard dose of reality that often greets new arrivals: the value of Mexican currency plummets the minute you cross the border.

  “What had been my whole life’s work had no value here,” Martín explains, dejected. “I was basically illiterate, I didn’t know the language and I couldn’t write. I had to start all over, like a child.”

  A few minutes before the clock strikes midnight, as the women put the final touches on the meal, Saúl and Martín talk. Martín comments on the sheer magnitude of the migration from Juárez to El Paso. Because of the politics specific to border cities, many people on the Mexican side have a document that allows them to cross back and forth. Others are U.S. citizens or have children who are. In the face of growing violence and the resulting crisis in Juárez Valley and in the capital city of Chihuahua, people are coming over to El Paso and deciding to stay put. The effects of the growing numbers of exiles have become apparent within just a few months, Martín says, including overcrowding in schools from the influx of new students and heavier traffic on the highways connecting El Paso to the surrounding suburbs.

  One of those suburbs is Fabens. It’s something of a paradox that, of all the places to migrate, these natives of Guadalupe have settled in a town that’s the mirror image of where they came from. When I ask Saúl and Martín if the similarity convinced them to stay in Fabens, they both smile. Saúl assures me that they live in Fabens simply because it’s cheaper than other places.

  I met Sara Salazar de Reyes for the first time in a Chinese restaurant in El Paso, the same day I met Saúl, Gloria, and their children. Doña Sara was seventy-nine, with a vacant stare. She is polite and smiles cordially to everyone, but her eyes are blank—the emptiness death leaves behind.

  Almost a year later, I see Sara for the second time, at the New Year’s dinner at Saúl’s trailer home. At the stroke of midnight we are all sitting around the table, with Saúl’s rosca de reyes, or three kings’ bread, which he baked that afternoon at the supermarket bakery where he works. As the head of the family, Saúl thanks everyone for their friendship and for coming to dinner. He also gives thanks simply for being alive, and says that he hopes the new year will be the best one yet. The clock strikes twelve, announcing the arrival of 2014, and everyone starts hugging each other. Doña Sara goes over to a little side table to look at some family photos displayed there and starts to cry. She does not stop for quite a while. A decorative wall hanging reads, “The love of a family is life’s greatest blessing.” Later, Sara tells me that when her son Eleazar was diagnosed with cancer, she told everyone, “It is forbidden to die before I do.”

  The next morning everyone gets together again for a breakfast of leftovers from the night before, and Gloria cooks some more. The women play dominoes at the table, while Doña Sara invites me to come back to her little room to talk. There, surrounded by photos of all of her children, she tells me about each one of them. Her daughter Elba died in childbirth, and Sara raised Elba’s son, Ismael, like one of her own. Rubén, her son, was a good man; he had been walking to the store to buy milk for his workers when he was killed. Josefina was closest to her mother; Sara went along with her to the demonstrations, the protests, the meetings with other activists. “Just imagine, me and my daughter are having coffee, and just an hour later they tell me she has been killed. It was very hard,” she says, letting out a sob.

  Sara tells me how painful it was to see Saúl in those first days of exile. When she first arrived in El Paso, the family was still living in a shelter. “When I got there, I found my son eating a piece of stale bread,” she says. “It broke my heart.”

  “I always went along with my children in everything we did,” she recalls of the family’s activism in Mexico. “After they killed my grandson, we step
ped up protests against the police, the soldiers. When the soldiers came, that’s when our martyrdom began. We started to protest, to get people together to demand the soldiers be withdrawn, but my children started to fall.” She weeps openly. “The last thing, which was hardest for me, was the kidnapping of Elías and Malena. I don’t mean it wasn’t hard with my other children—as each one fell, a piece of my heart was lost—but with them I had nothing left.”

  Sara had not wanted to come to the United States, but had been left without a choice when Saúl began receiving threats. “If you stay here, they’re going to come after you to find out where I am,” Saúl told her. Now she says she probably would not return to Mexico. “We don’t have anything left there anymore,” she says. “They burned it all down.”

  Through Doña Sara’s window you can see laundry hanging out to dry on the clotheslines. On sunny days, like that New Year’s Day in 2014, the clothes dry quickly. But when the wind picks up and gusts from the south, everything gets covered in dust. The desert is wily.

  2

  Carlos Spector, Attorney-at-

  Law for Impossible Cases

  I first meet Carlos Spector, a lawyer, in early 2013 at ¡Ándale!, a restaurant in El Paso with a logo of a fat man in a sombrero eating tacos. Stepping inside is like walking into a garish street fair, with fake cast-iron bars over fake windows and fake serenades. An overweight Joan Sebastian impersonator performs for a sparse audience, who silently beg him to stop. Carlos’s wife Sandra greets me warmly at the door, and we look for a table as far as possible from the “entertainment.”