Lomas del Poleo:
The Newest Laboratory of Binational Development
“Juárez
is famous around the world for its murdered women, but now it’s
going to become famous for its concentration camp at Lomas del
Poleo.”
—Willivaldo Delgadillo, writer and binational activist
Sylvia Vasquez and Juan Garcia (with cane) denounce the state of
siege she and her neighbors suffer at the hands of powerful developers.
Private "guards" (one on horseback) watch behind them.
A Human Rights Forum Across Barbed Wire
Essay by David Dorado
Romo
Photography by Bruce Berman
Part I: Introduction
THE HUMAN RIGHTS FORUM was planned for Saturday, October 20, 2007, at
Lomas del Poleo, a working-class neighborhood in Juárez that has
been surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers and armed thugs since
2004. A group of about 150 people from different grass-roots and human
rights groups from Juárez, El Paso, Guanajuato and Mexico City
arrived in a school bus and private cars around noon to discuss
globalization, displacement, human rights violations and femicide
inside what has now become known as “the concentration
camp” on the U.S.-Mexico line.
But private guards who were waiting for the forum participants on top
of a desert hill just inside this notorious gated community had other
plans. As soon as they saw the bus drive up to the metal gate, dozens
of thugs, carrying stones, sticks and pipes—some with their faces
covered with bandanas—ran down to block their entrance into the
colonia. Four of them were mounted on horses.
The “grupos de choque,” or paramilitary shock troops, hired
by Pedro and Jorge Zaragoza Fuentes—of one of the most powerful
families in Juárez who have been waging a land ownership battle
with
the colonos—wanted to make sure the forum didn’t happen.
“The whole thing was terrifying,” said Connie
Gutiérrez Gonzalez, a part time English as a Second Language
instructor in El Paso who helped organize the forum. “The thugs
ran down to the fence and—just like in the cop movies
—stepped up to the fence, one at a time in a straight line, to
stop us. It was obvious they had received paramilitary training. They
held sticks and PCV pipes ready to beat us if we tried to go in.
“What I found very strange is that there were several women with
the guards. They were tough-looking, like the female version of the
male gang members. They were hiding inside the guard room beside the
gate sticking out their heads once in a while. I guess the Zaragozas
figured if the guards needed to assault the women in the forum it would
look better if other women came out to beat us up rather than
men.”
Gutiérrez said the Juarez municipal police were present but
refused to intervene. “We’re only here to make sure there
is no altercation they told us,” Gutiérrez said. “So
I asked the police, ‘Why don’t you ask the hired thugs to
put their stones down?’ I could tell some of guards were hiding
guns under their clothing. But the police didn’t respond.”
"Gabino," leader of the Zaragoza shock troops.
THE FIRST TIME the shock troops showed their faces in Lomas del Poleo
was in May 2003, a year before the barbed-wire fence came up. About 80
of the armed guards, most of them unemployed youth recruited from
neighboring colonias, were brought in special vans and camped out in a
circus-like tent at the entrance of Lomas de Poleo. The young hoodlums
posed for the cameras mockingly. Some of them showed of their tattoos
with L.A. gang insignias. A few of them had black t-shirts with beasts
baring their fangs. The adolescents in the group killed time by playing
a pick up game of soccer about 50 yards away from a group of nervous
residents who had set up camp at their neighborhood association
headquarters. “We’re here to go at each other with pipes.
Let’s see if the people defend themselves,” spurted out one
teenager when asked what he was doing there. Several older
guards, wearing the uniform of Corona, a beer company founded by Pedro
Zaragoza, shouted out instructions to the pack.
The gang members told the local newspapers that they had been offered
$30 a day (about 5 times the daily wage of an average maquila worker)
and $200 for every home they demolish or burn down. “Various
member of the paramilitary schock troops,” reported El Diaro de
Juárez in May 30, 2003, “admitted that their leaders told
them that they could attack the residents, including women or children,
since they were assured that no charges would be brought against them
in the court system.” When asked for the name of the
“security firm” they work for, some of them responded with
a sly smile: “El Dragón.”
In the past, the Zaragoza guards have not been as shy about showing off
their guns and automatic weapons. Residents and journalist have seen
the guards brandishing cuernos de chivo, AK-47's. The colonos say the
guards often make nightly rounds throughout the neighborhood shooting
their weapons up in the air.
“I accepted this job because I’m unemployed and it’s
pretty easy,” one of the hired guards told the Diario de
Juárez. “All we have to do is apply a little pressure to
get them [the colonos] to relocate.”
Willivaldo Delgadillo and
other members of human rights and community organizations are blocked
from entering into Lomas del Poleo to meet with the residents.
“JUAREZ IS FAMOUS around the world for its murdered women, but
now it’s going to become famous for its concentration camp at
Lomas del Poleo,” said Willivaldo Delgadillo, a writer, historian
and activist who belongs to organizations fighting large binational
redevelopment schemes on both sides of the border—Paso del Sur
Group in El Paso and the Frente Ciudadano por Juárez.
“We were not allowed to go in [for the human rights forum] and
the residents were not allowed to come out, so we set up the forum
there at the fence...one group of people inside the barbed wire and the
other group outside,” he said.
For Delgadillo, the situation was an apt metaphor for what’s
going on in the community at large. “Our city is being divided up
by powerful developers,” he said. “The question from
now on is going to be ‘What side of the fence are you
on?’”
It’s difficult for most people to make sense of what exactly is
going on behind the fence of Lomas del Poleo—a 800-acre
plot of land that sits on a desert mesa right on the dividing line
between Mexico and the United States.
When you get there, the first thing you'll see are acres and acres of barbed-wire anchored by white cement posts. If you're allowed to go in, you’ll see homes made of
wood, cinder blocks, tin sheets, adobe and other assorted material.
Many of those homes had been there for twenty or thirty years. But
recently, more than forty of those homes have been demolished or burned
down. Often the only thing that remains of them are craters and ruins
left behind by the demolition crews.
You'll also see several crosses commemorating the Lomas del Poleo dead.
There is a cross for Luis Alberto Guerrero, a 49-year-old colono who
was beaten to death with shovels, pick axes and lead pipes by
Zaragoza’s thugs for trying to stop the demolition of his
neighbor’s home.
Not far away, just a few feet from the barbed wire, there are two
crosses surrounded by the charred remains of a home colonos claim was
purposely set on fire as part of the demolitions of their homes. The
crosses were put there to remember four-year-old Magdaleno and his
three-year-old sister Maria del Carmen Casango who died during the
fire.
There’s a cross on the roof of a small Catholic chapel, Jesus de
Nazaret, a church that was torn down by the Zaragoza guards only to be
rebuilt after three days by the neighbors and the parish priest, Father
Bill Morton, an American missionary deported from Mexico by immigration
authorities last year because of his advocacy work on behalf of the
colonos.
And right outside the fence there are eight pink crosses commemorating the
murdered women whose bodies who were found in Lomas del Poleo in 1996.
Juan Manuel Garcia sits on the ruins of his recently demolished home.
LOMAS DE POLEO is prime real estate at the moment. As Wall Street puts
it: “When there’s blood on the streets, buy land!”
Well, there’s plenty of blood on the unpaved streets of this
contested border neighborhood, and plenty of interested buyers.
Prices for some strategically located small lots in the area have
reportedly increased by 26 times their original price in recent months.
Lomas de Poleo and some of the surrounding neighborhoods in the
outskirts of Juarez have lately been visited by unsolicited buyers who
are offering as much as $38-39,000 dollars for small lots with nothing
but desert sand dunes. “I don’t know what to do or
think,” a resident who preferred to remain anonymous told a
Juárez newspaper . “It seems strange to me that they are
offering so much money just for a small part of the property.”
In the near future, if all goes according to plan, there will be a highway cutting north-south through Lomas del Poleo that will
connect to an international crossing leading up to Sunland Park, New
Mexico. Another east-west road will cut through the neighborhood that
will connect Ciudad Juárez to two “master-planned
binational cities”—San Jeronimo and Santa Teresa.
The driving forces behind these ambitious new privatized company towns
are the Chihuahuan maquiladora entrepreneur Eloy Vallina Lagüera
on the Mexican side of the line (notorious for his alleged illegal logging schemes that have deforested the Sierra Tarahumara) and real estate mogul William Sanders
on the U.S. side. Critics, who mockingly refer to the proposed
master-planned towns in the middle of nowhere as “Ciudad
Vallina” and the “City of Sanders,” say these
ambitious mega-developments (the projected population for San Jeronimo
will be 400,000 inhabitants within 25 years) will drain Juárez
and El Paso of one of its most essential and rapidly depleting
resources—water. Both Sanders and Vallina sit on the board of the
Verde Realty company, or Grupo Verde as it is known in Spanish, a
transnational real estate corporation founded by William Sanders in
2003 to build warehouses, industrial parks, strip malls and
subdivisions on cheap, underexploited land throughout the entire
U.S.-Mexico border, from the San Diego-Tijuana to the
Brownsville-Matamoros “borderplexes.”
Sanders heads a secretive group called the Paso Del Norte Group that
was contracted by the City of El Paso to draft a controversial
redevelopment plan that was unveiled in 2006 that proposes the
demolition of about 168 acres of the historic Segundo Barrio and
downtown. Hundreds of businesses, homes and apartment
buildings—whose owners have been told that after October 2008
eminent domain will probably be used to force them to sell—will
be razed to make way for “Lifestyle Outlet”
malls, parking garages, an arena, mixed-used apartment complexes
and a big-box retail store. More than 1,500 Segundo Barrio
residents will be urged to abandon their homes and apartments—for
their own good and for the sake of progress, if you believe the city
officials.
About a dozen of Juárez’s most prominent businessmen, land
developers and politicians belong to the Paso Del Norte Group,
including...
(To be continued...)
David Dorado Romo is the author of Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez.
His full article about binational redevelopment projects in
Juárez and El Paso will be published by the pasodelsur.com
website in serial form.
Bruce Berman has
been documenting the Juárez-El Paso border since the 1970s. His
photographic work has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine and
Newsweek.
Click here watch the documentary (with English subtitles) titled Poleo Speaking.
Click here to read Mexico City's La Jornada article about the Lomas de Poleo forum—"La Justicia Sequestrada" ("Justice Under Siege").
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