Oh Mexico! Part 2

Continuamos!

Other less-than-savory facts about Juarez:

- Since the mid-80's, over 600 women have been murdered in Juarez, a phenomenon known in Spanish as femenecidio. A large portion are victims to domestic violence, whether by their parents or by lovers. Other women have been raped and murdered on their commute to work, which often necessitates long time spent alone and in darkness, as street lights are scarce outside of downtown. Few arrests and fewer sentences have been procured for the murderers, creating a climate of impunity and fear.

- Thousands of people have migrated to Juarez to work in the maquilas, huge foreign-owned factories that benefit from proximity to the US market, minimal or non-existent tariffs, and a broad base of workers willing to work for cheap. We spent an afternoon with Pancho and Erlinda, lifetime maquiladoras who are on constant watch by their employers for standing up against abuses from time to time. Pancho and Erlinda still have no running water, despite petitioning the municipal government for years. They detailed to us their elaborate steps to conserve water, such as using shower water to water their trees outside. "El agua es oro," Pancho told us - "Water is gold." Yet before we left, they offered us a cafecito, an early afternoon snack break with cookies and, of course, coffee, made with, what else, water. We all drank gold that day, alchemied by generosity.

Beyond the fact that maquila salaries often do not stretch to cover a family's basic needs of food and shelter, the cultural damage the maquila industry wreaks is catastrophic, especially as regards the family, the basic building block of society. A few examples: Even when husbands and wives work at the same maquila, they are prohibited from working the same shift because companies fear theft by submissive wives, and because even the smallest dose of camraderie among workers could blossom into communal defiance of company rules. Add to separate shifts an hour or more commute, and you have both couples who rarely see each other, families who spend a scant amount of time all together, and kids who are left unsupervised for large portions of the day. How can families build strong bonds when work is all-consuming?

Another example: It is a common practice for maquilas to demand that all female workers take birth control, regardless of their age or marital status. Furthermore, if a women gets pregnant while an employee, she is often fired. Such practices treat workers not as human persons with a life beyond the factory walls, and a family, but as mere extensions of the rest of the machinery used to make dashboards or lights or whatever.

A bleak picture, no?

Poverty up close looks like...me and you and my great-aunt Josephine

People can never be reduced to statistics. As helpful as percentages and GDPs are to understand the stability of a society, the persons whose lives produce numbers to crunch are not quantifiable and, in my opinion, the largest benefit of traveling to an impoverished region is that up close, the fabulous variety of personalities and identity is clear on faces and in voices, even of the most impoverished. So on our trip, the strongest notes of hope came not from a (needed) proliferance of programs to feed the poor and gain justice for victims, but from the people at the source of those programs who had an unsatiable thirst and hunger for righteousness.

Still to be continued...