METLATONOC, Mexico. - Perhaps a warning would have been sufficient. If he had known, Juan Garcia would not be crying in front of his son’s tomb, begging for the freedom of his second child, Omar, now jailed in the United States.
Which pain is greater? It’s an impossible question to answer but it is obvious that, when speaking of Omar, anger and frustration reflect in the old man’s face.
The imprisoned son is only 18 years old and he was sentenced to 12 years for rape. Juan, his father, does not understand it. His indigenous culture does not see it that way.
Sitting at the cemetery of this small town in the state of Guerrero, he wonders: what can be wrong with his son having sex with a 12-year-old girl?
Juan is a Mixteco native. Mixteco is one of the 64 indigenous groups of Mexico that live in the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca. In his culture marriages are pre-arranged during childhood and teens start having children when they have not yet turned 15.
With his children’s tragedies, Juan learned that in the towns farther north, aspects of his culture can be seen as crimes. But nobody warned him.
Like Omar, hundreds of indigenous Mexicans are falling in the trap of the American prison system. Criminals or prisoners of their own practices and customs, the faces of jailed natives are like a cancer that spreads quickly.
A June 8 report by Mexico’s House of Representatives reveals that more than 20,000 natives currently purge sentences in the United States. The report also indicates that 10 out of 100 Mexican prisoners are of indigenous origin.
Mexico has the greatest indigenous population in all of Latin America, with more than 10 million people concentrated in the central and southern region of the country, who speak more than 60 different dialects divided into more than 300 variants.
Immigration has spread their reality from New York to California, in places where poverty, ignorance, and the language barrier add to their desperation.
“It took us by surprise. In less than two years the cases began to arrive one after the other. During 2007 we had six registered cases; for the first quarter of 2008 we documented 25 new files… More and more brothers are lost in the U.S. judicial system and the worrisome thing is that previously they were [charged with] crimes related to immigration and now their situations are considered serious. The great majority faces charges of rape, murder, drugs”, says Margarita Nemecio. She is the coordinator of the migrant section at the Human Rights Center of La Montaña Tlachinollan.
In Juan’s family, jail brought about still another tragedy.
Last year, in July, a brown coffin with his son Javier’s body arrived at the old man’s humble house.
Powerless to fight a penitentiary system he did not understand, without money and speaking less than a basic Spanish, not to mention English, Javier could not bear the pain of seeing his brother Omar suffer behind bars and decided to take his own life.
His kitchen co-workers at a restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky, saw Javier cry out of desperation. Nobody imagined that after saying good-bye to everybody, he would go to the river to take his own life.
Seated next to the coarse cement tomb where Javier rests today, at the top of a hill that serves as a cemetery for the Metlatonoc people, Juan narrated his story to La Opinión.
“I still have my only alive son there [in Kentucky], he is waiting for his brother to come out of prison. He suffers a lot. He stayed there by himself”, says the old man, making an enormous effort to speak Spanish. He speaks mije, the same dialect that his mixteco people have spoken for centuries. It’s the only one that his three sons know, including Omar, now behind bars.
In desperation, Juan turns to an interpreter. There is so much more he wants to say but often cannot.
“They left on a Sunday”, translates Paulino Reyes, interpreter for the Human Rights Organization of Tlachinollan. The words are followed by a long pause. Pain and tears blocks Juan’s throat. It hurts to remember that poverty forced his children to leave the town and that many years have passed and he has not seen them again.
Juan gets a handkerchief, cleans the snot threads that slither from his nose and join his tears. He breathes and starts over. “I feel that I lost two children. I have the body of one here, but the other one, jailed there so far, it’s as if they had buried him alive”, he sobs.
The scent of sulfur from the matches Juan used to light a candle in memory of his son invades the cemetery.
In the distance, one may see the town of Metlatonoc, one of the 19 indigenous municipalities in the zone known as La Montaña de Guerrero and described by the United Nations as one of the regions with the greatest poverty rate and widest social gap in all Latin America.
Ironically, from Javier’s tomb, one gets the most beautiful view of La Montaña.
To the right of the tomb, one can see the town church. Built with the money sent by those who live abroad, its colorful beauty contrasts with the perpetual brown of the adobe and straw houses, the color of poverty in these indigenous towns.
In front of Javier’s remains, by the paths of the cemetery, a group of children run barefoot. The sharp stones no longer harm their little feet and the dust and snots that cover their little faces crack when they smile.
A bath would do, but water is simply a luxury in this town, since it takes up to a three hour-walk, carrying water tanks in the back, to get to the town’s only source of potable water.
La Montaña has an indigenous population estimated in 529,780, who come from diverse groups as Mixtecos, Nauas, Me'phaa or Amuzgos, all speakers of a dialect different from Spanish. In this place, La Opinión documented dozens of cases of children, parents and spouses who are more than 3,000 miles away, purging sentences in U.S. prisons.
“Help me bring my son back. Let them judge him here. My son already served much. He is good”, were the pleas that arose from the communities where, in some cases, even 15 feet of distance did not separate one story from the next.
For these natives, the fear of the border is no longer to cross the river or the desert. Now fear has more specific names: Lowndes County Jail, in Alabama; Rikers Island, in New York; Woodford County Detention Center, in Kentucky; Pleasant Valley State Prison, in California.
Atoyameh (rivers) of immigrants
One of the causes of the vertiginous increase of jailed indigenous Mexicans, experts agree, is that while the immigration of non-indigenous Mexicans is decreasing, natives are leaving their towns in record numbers.
Figures back that reality. In 2002, the indigenous migration towards the U.S. was estimated in near 60,000 people per year; for 2006, that number increased to more than 130,000 annually, according to the migratory census done by the School of the Northern Border, in Tijuana.
“This country no longer offers them opportunities. In the past, they were `the handy men.’ Now, there is not even that kind of work. And from where do people migrate? From those places that do not offer any possibilities to survive, and those places are the indigenous communities”, explains Heladio Ramírez López, ex-governor of the state of Oaxaca and currently a senator in charge of rural issues, in an interview with La Opinión.
In fiscal years 2006 and 2007, the Department of Internal Security repatriated a total of 40,407 Mexican natives jailed in immigration prisons and correctional institutions throughout the country, almost 14,000 more than the previous year.
“The Mexican government does not have an analysis of the indigenous prisoners in the United States when it is already a critical problem”, said Marcos Matías Alonso, president of the Commission of Indigenous Issues of the Mexican Senate.
When it comes to indigenous Mexicans, the repatriation surveys show that over 85% of the cases refer to the one and only offense: been undocumented.
“We natives do not come to commit crimes; we simply do not know the legal system of the United States. We have a different language and culture, we marry at a very young age and these facts bring us to a historical disadvantage. People see us as `rapists' and they say that we are savages. If we go back in history when Jacob married Rebecca he was approximately 40 years old, she was like 14, and they see it like something sacred. But if a native marries at 14 he is a `savage'. In consequence, there is structural racism”, says Odilia Romero, from The Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB), in Los Angeles.
But same as in any other country, ignorance of the law is no excuse, says attorney Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC).
“If people come to this country, they must be prepared to lead their life in agreement with the basic foundations of the law. Also it is not the obligation of the U.S. to modify its legal statutes for the benefit of people from another country, even and if they find those laws offensive”, he added.
Nevertheless Scheer recognized that, at the moment, the legal processes against Mexican natives in the U.S. are crossing the line of unconstitutionality.
“The number of court translators is very limited, and they are only available for judges and prosecutors, but not for defense attorneys whose work is to defend the client, and one cannot defend a client if one cannot communicate with him. For an indigenous person who is absolutely incapable to understand the procedures around him and to communicate with his defender, it is impossible to have a fair trial”, he said.
Anecdotes and nothing else
The Secretary of Foreign Affairs (SRE) of Mexico described the increase of jailed natives as simple “anecdotal” facts.
“We do no even have a precise figure of how many Mexicans are held in the prisons of the U.S. We have anecdotal versions that the numbers are rising, but there are not more than a couple of dozens of cases in a year. There are just a few cases”, said Daniel Hernandez Joseph, General Chief of Protection of Mexicans Abroad, in an interview with this newspaper.
Hernandez Joseph stated that the great majority of indigenous migrants are perfectly bilingual and bicultural, that is, they have an excellent command of Spanish and of their Mexican mestizo or racially mixed culture as well.
Paradoxically, according to data released by Hernandez Joseph himself, 115,000 Mexicans requested consular protection last year; 17,000 of them needed the services of a translator of indigenous dialects.
That is, out of 100 cases of Mexicans requiring consular protection, 15 were indigenous.
“It is a slap on the face to the native”, says Romero, the spokeswoman from FIOB. “It is not that they do not know, it is that they do not want to know. I believe that for years now the Mexican government has tried to erase us out of the map”.
After Hernandez Joseph’s declarations, the SRE communications office contacted this newspaper and disavowed the translator figures given by the official.
La Opinión asked the office for the exact statistical data but the source indicated that they do not keep track of that information.
But the American government does. In Ventura County, in California, 110 legal processes related to natives who needed the services of a translator were registered last year; 90% were of Mexican origin. In Oregon, courts receive an average of three cases involving natives per week, almost the triple compared to five years ago, according to numbers released by its Department of Justice.
Family Nostalgia
Francisca Diaz has never left her Alpoyeca town, but more than 15 years of letters and drawings have shown her the reality of California’s penitentiary system.
“My son was very young when he left, 14 [years old]. I do not know what he looks like now”, said the indigenous woman while she showed a reporter an old photograph in which, to the center, a brown, barefoot and shirtless youngster looks at the camera, scared.
The image was taken the same day Sergio Diaz, her son, arrived in California, where he serves a sentence for murder in the second degree since 1994.
Members of the Nahuatl community, direct descendants of the Aztecs -the dominant civilization until the Spanish conquest- mother and son have only spoken three times, but never, even in photography, have they seen each other again.
Sergio was “lost” in the American penitentiary system during almost eight years. After being located in a jail in California, his father, of the same name, asked government organizations and municipal presidents for help. Nobody listened to him.
“The greatest challenge that families face is, indeed, the feeling of abandonment, and abandonment from everyone; there is no government support, they do not know whom to go to or whom they need to see, or which authority to address. Some government agencies that take credit for helping people are more likely to abuse them rather than help or protect them. Some politicians tell them `I am going to help you, I will defend you. Give me your vote, I am going to look into your case,' but they only swindle them”, says Margarita Nemecio.
Francisca remembers well those days of abandonment, and she remembers even more because of what came later. A week after they had received the first letter from prison, Sergio, the father, died in an accident.
“God granted that to him”, says Francisca.
After that first letter, Sergio and his mother have kept in touch. In his letters, which almost always include drawings and poems, the prisoner cries out that he is behind bars by mistake.
Folio 720-146230 from the criminal court of San Diego states that he was sentenced to 16 years for the murder of another minor in the crop fields, a sentence he has already fulfilled although inexplicably he is still behind bars.
His file does not specify the use of a translator during the trial even though Diaz only spoke Nahuatl at the time of his detention.
Under the record number J-15310 number, Sergio occupies today a bunk in the jail of Pleasant Valley. He has stayed more than half of his life in California, almost all behind bars.
Cruel Figures
Mere figures for the government, but history with first and last names for their families. Statistical reports from the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs show that the legal processes against Mexicans in the U.S. increased from 14,622 in 2005 to 19,782 for 2008: the highest numbers in five years.
Like many Mixteca women, Francisca Pardo keeps a slight touch of shyness that makes her cast her eyes when speaking.
Sitting in an old palm thread chair, under a roof made of mud and reeds that is on the verge of falling down, as soon as she calls the name of her son Neftalí the sadness dims her eyes.
Neftalí has been three years in the U.S. prison system accused of attempted murder and possession of a weapon, as shown in his file number 8550900432 at New York’s Rikers Island prison.
“Send him to Mexico. Send him down here, close to us, then. When his feet hurt they do not treat them”, says the mother in a mix of Mixteco and a broken Spanish.
Although she is only 48 years old, the mother has already lost her teeth. She aged since she learned about her son’s arrest, says Constantina, Francisca’s eldest daughter.
Extreme poverty made this indigenous mother strong, but the strength does not help to overcome a son’s confinement.
For years, Francisca raised her six children with the 450 pesos (less than 40 dollars) that she received by selling 50 grams of opium paste to the Mexican drug trafficking cartel.
For a while, the money was enough to feed and dress her children, but not to keep them next to her when they grew up.
“The misery of these communities is at such degree that in order to survive they migrate to the United States or they work in the poppy fields. The natives cannot compete with the great transnational markets, there are no jobs. They can only raise chickens, grow kidney beans, maize, but that will only satisfy their family consumption. The drug trafficking is the only door left and if they go that way, they are badly exploited there. Here life does not promise a future; here the future is the following day and the present is `what am I going to eat, what am I going to wear’” says Margarita Nemecio. She is the Coordinator for the Migrants Area of the Center for Human Rights at La Montaña Tlachinollan.
Francisca preferred to see her two only sons head North before they ended up like her, planting poppy.
The members of the army and the hired killers of the cartels are threatening the natives of La Montaña. Many have disappeared and hundreds are behind bars, although they are the poorest in the drug trafficking chain.
But, how can one imagine that the U.S., the country of the American dream, can also be hell for the indigenous immigrant?
This is the dirty secret of the indigenous exodus, say the experts; a reality that nobody is talking about although from New York to California, the Mexican native languages are now spoken behind bars.
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The first of a three-part series based on a three-month investigation by La Opinión, in which judicial testimonies, files, interviews with public agencies, interpreters, lawyers and documents -on both sides of the border- were successfully obtained. Together, they describe the nightmare lived by Mexican indigenous people behind bars.
Tomorrow: Abandoned in a labyrinth of laws. Indigenous families share their helplessness before the U.S. justice system and the pain to see a beloved being behind bars.
Thursday: When everything is lost. In Mexico and the U.S., the imprisonment of natives drags tens of innocent victims.
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Translated by Marvelia Alpízar/La Opinión
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Reporting for this project was supported in part by the Institute for Justice and Journalism, funded by the Ford Foundation.
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METLATONOC, Mexico. - Perhaps a warning would have been sufficient. If he had known, Juan Garcia would not be crying in front of his son’s tomb, begging for the freedom of his second child, Omar, now jailed in the United States.
Which pain is greater? It’s an impossible question to answer but it is obvious that, when speaking of Omar, anger and frustration reflect in the old man’s face.
The imprisoned son is only 18 years old and he was sentenced to 12 years for rape. Juan, his father, does not understand it. His indigenous culture does not see it that way.
Sitting at the cemetery of this small town in the state of Guerrero, he wonders: what can be wrong with his son having sex with a 12-year-old girl?
Juan is a Mixteco native. Mixteco is one of the 64 indigenous groups of Mexico that live in the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca. In his culture marriages are pre-arranged during childhood and teens start having children when they have not yet turned 15.
With his children’s tragedies, Juan learned that in the towns farther north, aspects of his culture can be seen as crimes. But nobody warned him.
Like Omar, hundreds of indigenous Mexicans are falling in the trap of the American prison system. Criminals or prisoners of their own practices and customs, the faces of jailed natives are like a cancer that spreads quickly.
A June 8 report by Mexico’s House of Representatives reveals that more than 20,000 natives currently purge sentences in the United States. The report also indicates that 10 out of 100 Mexican prisoners are of indigenous origin.
Mexico has the greatest indigenous population in all of Latin America, with more than 10 million people concentrated in the central and southern region of the country, who speak more than 60 different dialects divided into more than 300 variants.
