Bordertown 
Letter From Tamaulipas
Ghost Town
Just a few miles across the Rio Grande, the residents of Ciudad Mier lived in terror, forgotten by their government and at the mercy of drug cartels. Could anyone survive this nightmare?
Debbie Menchaca says: It was with great sadness that I read the article on Mier. My husband descends from 5 of the original families that settled that community in 1753. A beautiful city so rich in history, it’s horrible the way the drug cartels have destroyed the very fiber of the community. This is first time I have heard about the violence in Mier. We who live in South Texas are very much aware of the crime that continues to plague our border. I am truly grateful for the courage Ms. Balli has to risk her own life to get the real facts and expose the hardships the families who do still live in Mier face on a daily basis. Keep up the good work... (February 20th, 2011 at 5:53pm)
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She was in her fifties and had a solemn, self-restrained presence. I’ll call her Romelia. She quickly offered me a chair and a glass of water. The other woman turned out to be her older sister, Lupita. Lupita’s daughter, Marta, also joined us, and then Lupita’s husband, Lorenzo, and their son. The five adults sat or stood around the kitchen and studied us quietly. The room was small and immaculate, its brown floor tiles shining. On the white plastic dining table, a corner altar remembered a niece and nephew who had died too soon.
“We don’t have anything to say,” Romelia began, evidently fearful and distrusting. “The facts speak for themselves.” Lupita agreed. She was dressed in brown, knitted short pants, and her gray hair was pulled back in a tiny ponytail. “Words aren’t necessary,” she said, in a deep, commanding voice that belied her wiry frame. “You’ve seen the images. The houses burned, the streets emptied out, the people leaving? Whatever we have to say is irrelevant.”
Despite their initial hesitance to talk, a story gradually unfolded. This particular family’s misfortunes had begun when five SUVs pulled up outside their home and the Bad Ones started to torch the house next door. The family panicked, but the criminals stayed outside, leaving them no escape route. Their only alternative was to hide and pray. They crammed Lorenzo, the oldest family member, into a small closet. They could hear the laughter of the men outside as the building was engulfed in flames. Why had the house been targeted? The second floor was being expanded and the garage sported an elaborate wrought-iron gate—maybe its owners were involved in the trade and had ended up on the wrong side of the war. If so, Romelia’s family didn’t care, and they certainly didn’t ask. That was a commandment in border towns like Mier.
Hiding soon became their way of life. Whenever shooting would erupt, everyone hit the floor. The gunfire sometimes lasted for hours. The local police were gone and the state police had pulled out—the city was defenseless. Although soldiers from a nearby regiment occasionally patrolled the streets, the criminals would return as soon as they left. And so Romelia, Lupita, Lorenzo, and their families began to live with the rituals of war. They locked themselves in by six every evening, having gathered enough water to last through the night, because they knew the city’s water pump was too dangerous for work crews to get to after dark. The violence always felt as if it were inching closer. “Even the dogs don’t bark anymore when they hear the shots,” Romelia said. “The animals hide.”
More than 100 people, perhaps as many as 140, had disappeared. (One story told of a young woman who had been dating a trafficker; when the Bad Ones came to get her, her parents clung to her in desperation and all three were whisked away.) Both roads that led out of town—Highway 2, along the border, and Highway 54, heading to the industrial and commercial capital of Monterrey—were impassable: The criminals hijacked cars, sacked tractor-trailers, and ambushed one another. The local economy was dead. Americans had always come in the fall and winter to hunt doves and white-tailed deer, but this year they had stayed home. Many of the ranches, the region’s largest industry, had been appropriated by the cartels. (Statewide some five hundred ranches had ceased to operate.) Cows were left to die; some of the ranchers who had risked visiting their properties had never made it back home. Pemex, the government-owned petroleum company that had reliably propped up the local economy with its natural gas exploration, had pulled out all of its workers after some were kidnapped. And dozens of businesses were shuttered: restaurants, hotels, money exchanges, grocery stores, travel agencies, pharmacies, building supply stores, phone companies, gas stations, health clinics, auto repair shops—all of them had closed, having been ransacked, burned, or damaged from gunfire. On the day I visited, only two small grocery stores and a boot shop remained in business.
Families watched their income dissolve. Marta had earned a living making cakes and tamales for family banquets, but who was having parties anymore? Her husband had worked as a welder, but who could afford security bars these days? Jobless, she had sold her car so she’d have enough money to move temporarily to Matamoros, where she hoped to find employment. After she’d spent six weeks there, however, her father-in-law went missing when he visited a ranch to sell some cows. Marta had returned to Mier to be near her mother-in-law, who was slowly losing the will to live. “We’ve been unemployed for nine months,” she told me, exasperated. She had hazel eyes and fair skin and was dressed in aqua-blue sweatpants—the same sweatpants she wore every day, she told me. When I asked what the family was living off of, her mother chimed in, “From the food provided by the DIF [a federal assistance program] and our relatives in the United States.”
Lupita had spent thirteen days in the shelter in Miguel Alemán, but she had felt depression taking hold, and a doctor had diagnosed her with nervous colitis. So she had gone back home to Mier. The family didn’t have the wherewithal to leave for another Mexican city, and crossing the border to join their relatives in Texas would have required renewing their border-crossing visas, which would mean proving their financial solvency to the U.S. consulate and coughing up almost $200. It might as well have been $2 million. “They changed our life,” Marta said, her eyes growing wet. “They changed our whole life.”
Two days later, safety would return, if only temporarily, when the streets of Mier were flooded with one thousand federal police and army and navy troops. They did not come to stay but to protect the governor of Tamaulipas, Eugenio Hernández Flores, and the Mexican minister of the interior, Francisco Blake Mora, who were visiting to determine what kinds of interventions were needed. Although the population was down to about one thousand, more than a hundred families lined the cobblestone streets near the main plaza, which is graced on the south by the Church of the Most Pure Conception, a gorgeous structure built in 1755, with a handsome carved sandstone facade. The church had been one of the main reasons that, in 2007, the Mexican tourism department had named Mier a pueblo mágico, a “magical town,” because of its rich history and culture. These days the joke was that the town was magical because of how easily people disappeared.
After a six-hour wait, the townspeople finally spotted a helicopter preparing to land. The distinguished visitors boarded an armored SUV and took a short tour of the wreckage before arriving at the main plaza. Handsome, blue-eyed, smiling widely, and dressed smartly in a white shirt and black designer jacket, the governor acknowledged the crowd. Behind him, in a white windbreaker, the minister appeared somber, more reserved. The townspeople contemplated the men respectfully for a brief moment. Then, one by one, the voices that had been silent since February began to rise from the crowd.
“Every family has a relative that’s disappeared. Why did it take you nine months to get here?” “My son was killed and my husband is disappeared!” “We want military vigilance!” “We want the soldiers to stay, but we want them to defend us, not to hide in their barracks like they do every time the shooting starts!” “There’s no security, but we also want work. There are no jobs!”
One woman’s voice grew so hoarse from screaming that it was hard to make out what she was saying: “ . . . living in terror during the night! . . . We haven’t had water!” The governor seemed unmoved by her cries; he glanced at someone else and smirked. Minutes later, an elderly woman in a pink shawl politely attempted to get his attention. “My grandson,” she told him in a small voice. “His pharmacy is closed. He doesn’t have any work.” The governor scanned the crowd distractedly and said, “Yes, I can imagine.”
A local online news columnist would later describe the promises made that afternoon with a penetrating world-weariness: “Security as long as necessary, credits for business owners, temporary jobs, ranching subsidies, thorough investigation of disappearances, rule of law, the full weight of authority, cooperation among the three levels of government, frontal attack on organized crime, blah, blah, blah.”
Romelia and her family wanted these things too, and they hoped the government would deliver this time. On the day I visited Mier, as we sat shuttered in their small home, I had turned to Lupita and asked how long she and Lorenzo had been married. Fifty years, she had replied proudly. They had celebrated their anniversary on September 15, the same night that Mexico had marked two hundred years of independence. She recounted how she and Lorenzo had met in singing contests when they were young, how they had fallen for each other’s voices. Then she offered to sing us the tune her husband had performed the day he had won her heart.
She grabbed a green plastic chair and pulled it up close to her old man, who was resting his hand on a cane. He grinned broadly as she began the melody, then immediately jumped in with a harmony, his raspy voice melding perfectly with hers, as if they had never stopped singing. It was a classic by José Alfredo Jiménez. As they sang, their voices filled the room and spilled out onto the quiet street, and their grandchildren, who had been playing outside, gathered around the screen door to listen.
What a beautiful love
What a beautiful sky
What a beautiful moon
What a beautiful sun.
What a beautiful love
I hold it dearly
Because it feels
Everything that I feel.
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