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FORT
HANCOCK, Tex. — The giant rusty fence of metal bars along the border
here, built in recent years to keep illegal immigrants from crossing
into the United States, has a new nickname among local residents:
Jurassic Park Gate, a nod to the barrier in a 1993 movie that kept
dangerous dinosaurs at bay in a theme park.
Vicente Burciaga and his wife, Mayra left after gang members burned
down five homes in their neighborhood and killed a neighbor.
A brutal war between drug gangs has forced dozens of fearful
families from the Mexican town of El Porvenir to seek political
asylum.
Others use
special visas, border-crossing cards.They say drug gangs have laid
waste to their town, burning down houses, and killing people in the
street.
Americans are taking in their Mexican relatives, and the local
schools have swelled with traumatized children, many of whom have
witnessed gangland violence, school officials say.
“It’s very hard over there,” said Vicente Burciaga, 23, who fled El
Porvenir a month ago with his wife, Mayra, and their infant son
after gang members burned down five homes in their neighborhood and
killed a neighbor. “They are killing people who have nothing to do
with drug trafficking,” he said. “They kill you just for having seen
what they are doing.”
The story of Fort Hancock, 57 miles southeast of El Paso on the Rio
Grande, is echoed along the Texas border with Mexico, from
Brownsville to El Paso. The influx of people fleeing the violence,
some of whom were involved in drug dealing in Mexico, has disrupted
Fort Hancock’s peaceful rhythms. These days, there are more police
cars prowling the dusty streets, and fear runs high among residents.
The town has only a few paved streets, one restaurant near
Interstate 10, a feed store, a small grocery, a gas station and
a couple of general
stores. Irrigation canals carry water from the Rio Grande to alfalfa
and chili fields, set amid the cactus, sand and mesquite of the
Chihuahuan Desert.
About 2,000 people live here, in ramshackle trailer homes,
weather-battered recreational vehicles and well-kept brick houses.
The water tower boasts of the high school’s six-man football team
having won the state championship five times between 1986 and 1991.
A few children among the refugees belong to families involved in the
drug trade, and rival gang members have threatened them, bringing
the specter of gangland killings to the high school, law enforcement
and school officials say.
“Some of the families who are fleeing from Mexico are doing it
because they were somehow participating in these acts,” said Jose G.
Franco, the school superintendent, “and if you want to get at
somebody, you get at their children.”
The Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department and the state police are
keeping a close eye on unknown vehicles parked near the schools. The
school district has for the first time hired a law enforcement
officer to patrol its three campuses and has installed security
cameras. Spectators are now barred from football and basketball
practices.
“The kids are a little bit on edge, you know,” said Constable Jose
Sierra, who patrols the schools. “When we see a different car, we
start to get phone calls.”
Not everyone coming from El Porvenir is seeking asylum. Many
Mexicans in towns along the river have special border-crossing
cards, which let them cross for up to 30 days to do business and
shop near the border. But some have used the visas to relocate their
families temporarily to Fort Hancock and other small towns on the
Texas side.
Those who have temporary tourist visas or who can obtain business
visas because they have enough money to start businesses in the
United States are also moving their families across the border.
(Cities like El Paso and San Antonio have had real estate booms and
a flourishing of small businesses and Mexican restaurants as a
result.)
Other Mexicans who were once happy living in Mexico are taking
advantage of whatever means they have to obtain a visa and get out.
Some were born in a hospital on the United States side and are
American citizens, for instance, or have married citizens but have
never applied for residency.
In El Paso alone, the police estimate that at least 30,000 Mexicans
have moved across the border in the past two years because of the
violence in Juárez and the river towns to the southeast. So many
people have left El Porvenir and nearby Guadalupe Bravos that the
two resemble ghost towns, former residents say.
People without access to
visas, however, have been seeking asylum, even at the risk of being
detained for months. In the early days of the conflict, the
asylum-seekers were mostly journalists, police officers and
officials who had been threatened by organized crime.
But now people with ordinary jobs are showing up at the border and
saying they fear for their lives.
In Fort Hancock, the influx grew after one of the warring drug gangs
placed a banner in El Porvenir’s central square recently threatening
death for anyone left in the town on Easter.
In response,
the Mexican authorities flooded the town with federal police
officers, and the promised mayhem was averted.
A 23-year-old woman with five children, who asked to be identified
only as Noemi because she feared reprisals, was one of the people
who crossed the two-lane bridge over the Rio Grande the Thursday
before Easter.
The night
before, drug cartel thugs had set fire to four houses, and she and
her husband were afraid there would a blood bath that weekend, as
the banner warned.
The United States customs officers sent the family to El Paso,
where, after a night in a jail, Noemi and her children were allowed
to enter the country pending an asylum hearing. Her husband, a farm
worker, has remained locked up while officials weigh his claim to be
in danger. Noemi is staying with her mother-in-law, who has legal
residency, in a squalid trailer home on one of Fort Hancock’s
unpaved streets.
Her oldest son, a wide-eyed boy of 8, clung to her sleeve and
refused to speak. Three girls, ages 4, 2 and 1, played in the desert
dust at her feet or climbed on a rusted pickup. She held an infant
boy of 7 months.
“All the children, the only
thing they know how to play is sicarios,” she said, using the
Spanish word for hired killers.
She and her children are
sleeping well for the first time in months, she said, and she does
not know if her family will ever be able to return to their small
house on the other side of the river. They did not even bring a
change of clothes with them, she said.
Mr. Franco, the school superintendent, said the schools have
absorbed about 50 new students from Mexico since last year, a 10
percent increase in enrollment.
Many of the new students
speak no English and are dealing with the trauma of having had
family members killed.
One Mexican boy in the high
school, for instance, is so deeply affected by what he has seen that
he is being tutored apart from other students, Mr. Franco said.
Several members of the boy’s family — his mother, his grandfather,
an aunt and an uncle — were tortured with ice picks in El Porvenir
in March, the police said.
Reports of the atrocities on the other side of the border are passed
from neighbor to neighbor. Almost every family in Fort Hancock has
been touched in some way by the violence.
Porfírio Flores sought
asylum for his estranged wife and their two children, who still live
in El Porvenir. On the day before Easter, Mr. Flores, a 60-year-old
oil worker with legal residency who lives in a cramped RV in Fort
Hancock, crossed over to Mexico and escorted his wife and children
to the border so they could ask for asylum. But the United States
customs officers turned them down without an explanation, he said.
Few Mexicans are granted
asylum. Over the last three federal fiscal years, immigration judges
heard 9,317 requests across the country, and granted only 183.
Lady,
“For the children, the only thing they know how to play is sicarios,”
using the Spanish word for hired killers.
She and her children are sleeping well for the first time in months,
she said, and she does not know if her family will ever be able to
return to their small house on the other side of the river. They did
not even bring a change of clothes with them, she said.
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