April 5, 2013
WHAT WE WANT IS THE HEAD OF THE FRIAR
Posted by Sarah Stillman
Last week, a young man came to the doors of the Seventy-Two, a shelter for migrants in Tenosique, Mexico, to deliver a message from a local offshoot of the Zetas, Mexico’s most vicious organized-crime group. “What we want is the head of the friar who is in charge of all this,” the man said. “We are going to the shelter today to get all of them.”
The man whose
life was in question is a Franciscan friar named Tomás González Castillo. The
Zetas want the friar’s head primarily because he runs a sanctuary for
U.S.-bound migrants near the Guatemalan border, providing cots, meals, and a
few days of safe haven to hundreds of young Central Americans venturing to the
U.S. each week. Mostly, these young men and women ride north atop commercial
freight trains, facing robberies, rapes, and extortion as they go. Friar Tomás
has begun demanding an end to such routinized crimes, calling out the criminal
gangs—and, often, the Mexican police—who perpetrate them. The Seventy-Two takes
its name from the body count of a massacre that occurred near the U.S. border
several years ago; seventy-two migrants were kidnapped by the Zetas, squeezed
for ransoms, and allegedly assassinated when they failed to follow orders.
Earlier in the
week, Friar Tomás and others at the shelter had lodged formal complaints
against local gang members, and as a result, as he put it, “the situation is
hot.” Rubén Figueroa, a young Mexican activist with big brown eyes and a thick
halo of dark hair, also received a series of death threats. “We have our eyes
on Rubén,” cartel affiliates warned shelter members in early March. “Tell your
friend that we are going to kill him. Our contacts already know.”
I came to know
Friar Tomás and Rubén Figueroa rather closely last fall. For three weeks, I
lived beside them on a bus trip across some twenty-five hundred miles of
Mexico. The trip had a clear goal: we were accompanying a group of thirty-eight
Central American mothers on a search for their disappeared children and
husbands, nearly all of whom had vanished while attempting the dangerous journey
to reach the U.S., undocumented. Many of the desaparecidos had been snatched up by cartel
operatives on the border with Texas or Arizona. Some of the mothers had
received ransom calls, turned over their life savings, and waited for their
sons or husbands to return, to no avail. Other mothers had come on the trip to
search for their missing young daughters who appeared to have been trafficked
into brothels by organized crime. Together, we travelled through twenty-one
cities and towns in fourteen states of Mexico, visiting some of the most
unforgiving terrain of the country’s drug war, looking for signs of hope.
The cartels’
targeting of migrants has become commonplace along the entire route through
Mexico, with an estimated twenty thousand migrant kidnappings each year. Most
of the time, the victims’ relatives in the U.S. are called upon to cough up
ransoms. While the Mexican government has done little to address this
crisis, and U.S. immigration policy has arguably fuelled it (by
empowering rogue coyotes as a migrant’s best chance of traversing the
militarized border), a fearless wing of the Catholic Church has established an
underground railroad of sorts to offer migrants protection on their journey.
Friar Tomás is
among the most vocal leaders of this movement. Day after day, he led the
mothers into morgues, prisons, drug-rehabilitation centers, hospitals, and
cemeteries. He stood beside them as they looked through photographs of the
corpses of migrants in Saltillo, a dangerous Zeta stronghold, and as they
ventured into the Zócalo in Mexico City to beg for help from a non-committal
government. Most days, the friar wore a thin straw hat and a long brown robe.
On the scorching-hot afternoons when I was sweating and tired and could barely
keep up, broadsided by the magnitude of the violence and loss, Father Tomás
barely paused for water—hiking alongside railroad tracks, knocking on the doors
of shantytowns where suspected traffickers lived, showing photos to passersby
and asking, “Have you seen her? Does she look familiar? She’s gone missing.”
Meanwhile,
Rubén was investigating leads, pursuing clues despite the many pressures he
faces in the course of such work. At one point, we ventured into a particularly
violent region where the police wore black ski masks (whether for
self-protection or easy impunity, it wasn’t clear); Father Tomás and Rubén
alike paid no mind. One day, sitting outside a migrant shelter in central
Mexico, Rubén told me, “The death threats are a constant—direct threats, sure,
but also indirect threats. For those of us who’ve taken on this lifestyle, we
have to be strategically brave, since without our own lives, who else is going
to stand up for the lives of migrants?” At the age of sixteen, Figueroa
ventured alone to North Carolina and worked in low-wage factory jobs for
several years. His struggle in the shadows of the U.S. economy brought him to
activism when he returned to Mexico, and he now does the work full-time with
the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, the same group that organized the caravan of
mothers.
The threats
against Rubén and Father Tomás —which I first heard about by way of
Facebook—came at a time when questions of brutality and courage in Latin America
were on my mind. Spring began, after all, with a puff of white smoke heralding
the first Argentine Pope, a selection that raised dark questions about the new leader’s complicity in
kidnappings undertaken by his country’s military junta in the late
nineteen-seventies. A week later, in Guatemala, commenced the grim trial of the
gray-haired General Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator responsible for genocidal crimes in the early nineteen-eighties,
including the Army tossing live babies into village wells. (Alan: Rios Montt is a Christian Evangelical. Learn more at http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/06/180000-guatemalans-dead-at-hands-of.html) Finally, on a different
note, the White House announced last week that President Obama plans to venture
to Mexico in May, with the topic of “citizen security” reportedly on the agenda for his meetings with
President Enrique Peña Nieto. It remains unclear whether that country’s crimes
against migrants will surface for discussion, and whether Friar Tomás González
will still be alive by then.
The theme tying
all this together has to do with moral leadership, or the lack thereof, in the
face of unthinkable violence south of our border. What do powerful onlookers
owe to the disappeared, or to those who sit on the ledge of becoming so? How
does history judge our leaders’ actions in the face of enduring, if not always
high-profile, dirty wars?
Strangely, the
stories of vulnerable migrants facing cartel kidnappings rarely surface in the
domestic debates about immigration reform and border security. What’s more, as
the Catholic Church takes a rightful pummelling in many quarters—for its
sexual-abuse scandals, perverse gender politics, and insular culture of evasive
coverups—it is worth remembering that this other church, too, exists: a
risk-your-life church at the heart of Mexico’s drug war, facing down the
cartels and the masked police who enable them, and standing with the penniless
and powerless. One wonders which Church the new Pope, who took the name of
Francis, after the founder of Friar Tomás’s order, will choose to lead.
“We cannot get
used to living under the constant threat of organized crime and the many
authorities who’ve backed that same crime,” Friar Tomás said of the recent
death threats. “To back down,” Rubén adds, “is not an option for us.” For those
of us north of the border, ignoring both men’s plight doesn’t seem like a
reasonable option, either.
This past
Friday, I’m told, Friar Tomás and Rubén walked further into the fire. With
hundreds of townspeople, they staged an enactment of the Stations of the Cross,
with a migrant-crusaders’ twist. To play Jesus, they enlisted a
sixteen-year-old Guatemalan boy named Kevin Barrientos, who had arrived at the
shelter with empty pockets on his journey north, trying to make it alive to the
U.S. with no parents but two friends. Costumed in a long white robe and
turquoise sandals, the boy enacted the crucifixion on the train tracks. Friar
Tomás told the Mexican
press, “To assist the undocumented is not a crime, it is a grace.”
Meanwhile, men believed to be spies for the cartels watched from afar, taking
photographs from motorcycles.
The trip
through Mexico on which this reporting is based was supported by the Knight
Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion.
Photograph,
of Friar Tomás and Rubén Figueroa, by Fabio Cuttica.
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