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The Weakness of Force
by Juan Carlos Martínez
THE SECOND FORUM at Lomas del Poleo on December 1, 2007 served as a platform for the Juárez industrialists Pedro and Jorge Zaragoza to exhibit the sharpness of their fangs in front of an important gathering of people from various grassroots organizations from Las Cruces, NM, El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juárez, Chih. The empresarios demonstrated that the inhabitants of the border, especially those who live on the outskirts of the city, have no or very few human or civil rights.
The fact that the access road to this neighborhood was blocked by an angry group of relocated people and paramilitary guards hired by the Zaragozas — who again used their representatives Catarino del Río, former PAN party official, and Faustino Olivares, a PRI ward boss, to carry out this act of aggression — offered tangible evidence that in Ciudad Juárez the law serves the exclusive interests of big business. However, the forum participants took careful measures not fall into the trap of their provocations and decided to carry out their event that day in a different site.
The actions by Catarino del Río and Faustino Olivares have ultimately failed to suppress the struggle of the authentic residents of Lomas del Poleo and of those who support their land rights. These actions reveal the lack of human decency on the part of Pedro and Jorge Zaragoza who pay off the people they have relocated and other people from the surrounding Anapra neighborhood with money and “despensas” (bags full of free grocieries) so that they they can insult the dignity of the colonos of Lomas del Poleo who have chosen not to surrender.
This show of force—with chains, metal pipes, firearms and even a pit-bull dog at the hands of a frenzied mob and drug-addicts hired as paramilitary guards—demonstrates that the land developers know very well that they cannot win through legal means. They know that their case is lost in the courts and can only win by an outright land grab with the use of force. They’ve chosen a mistaken path especially when their adversaries have chosen the legal path. In other words, Pedro and Jorge Zaragoza, are mistaken if they refuse to acknowledge that those colonos whose lands they want to seize are not in a state of desperation, instead every day they gain more allies in the terrain of reason and political support by people of conscience.
No honest citizen or judge can look kindly upon a group of empresarios who block the streets to a neighborhood, pull out the electricity for hundreds of families, destroy a church and many homes, kick out a parish priest, give orders to kill people as if the life of others belonged to them, and buy the silence and complicity of the local and state authorities, namely, that of mayor José Reyes Ferriz and governor José Reyes Baeza.
What civilized person is going to sympathize with forcibly blocking a street in order to prevent a gathering of citizens who wish to engage in dialogue about a specific social issue?
But one day justice for those at the bottom will come. And even if the local media remain silent to what is happening in Lomas del Poleo, and even if a particular court refuses to acknowledge that the disputed lands belong to the Nation and to the colonos who inhabit them, there will come a day when the moral conscience of the local, national and international community will repudiate these excesses and will put a stop to these human rights violations.
The Zaragozas, who see themselves as good Catholics, might know the verse: “By what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you.” They should know that God takes his time, but he doesn’t forget.
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