causes: constructing homes in Juárez Valley for people who had tried unsuccessfully to cross into the United States; protesting the killing of women in the area, an issue that Josefina, one of Saúl’s sisters, worked on the most; fighting to improve conditions for factory workers in Juárez; and protesting the militarization of the area that began in 2008 as part of an operation by the Mexican federal government to combat narcotrafficking, and which included a wave of repression and human rights violations.
People who knew the Reyes family recall the four brothers—Eleazar, Elías, Saúl, and Rubén—working together at the bakery and at the small chain of stores that the family owned. One kneaded the dough while another shaped it into loaves, the third prepared pastries, and the fourth took bread out of the oven. As they worked, they would discuss issues in the residential development they had built and politics in Juárez Valley. Sometimes they would go out to deliver the bread, or serve pastries to customers, along with a cup of coffee.
On that New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2013, Saúl falls back on an old custom. He gets home at around nine o’clock, when dinner is almost ready. He has brought with him a traditional Reyes, or “king’s” cake—which in this case is aptly named for two reasons—that he baked for his family himself. He had started working at a bakery in Fabens as soon as he got there, earning eight dollars an hour. This is what he knows, and he’s good at it, but now he’s alone. All that remains of his brothers are memories.
The string of Reyes murders started on August 23, 2008. Josefina and other activists had organized a march to protest the military’s presence in the Juárez Valley. A week later, a group of soldiers kidnapped her younger son, Miguel Angel. After two weeks of demonstrations outside military installations, and a hunger strike by Josefina, Miguel Angel was released with two fractured ribs, a broken nose, and signs of torture from electric shocks delivered to the soles of his feet.1 Three months later, men wearing masks and armed with guns burst into an event hall where a wedding reception was being held, searched among the guests, and killed Josefina’s oldest son, Julio César. They shot him through the heart. He was nineteen years old.
Instead of keeping quiet, the Reyeses kept up their activism. They demanded justice for Julio César and the army’s withdrawal from Guadalupe and Juárez Valley. On January 3, 2010, Josefina Reyes was killed when she stopped to get something to eat while driving home from her mother’s house. In August 2010, her brother Rubén Reyes was gunned down in the street, in broad daylight. On February 7, 2011, Malena Reyes, Elías Reyes, and his wife Luisa Ornelas were kidnapped. A week after the kidnapping, while Sara, the matriarch of the family, was protesting in front of the state-house in Chihuahua, the state’s capital, her house was burned to the ground. On February 26, the dead bodies of the three kidnapping victims were found. An onslaught of threats to the family followed.
In spite of his earlier resolve not to give in to threats, Saúl understood that the time to leave had come. The family left everything behind: the comfortable home Saúl and Gloria had built themselves, brick by brick; their family bakery passed down to him by his mother; the books Saúl had read with his siblings as they made bread; all of their belongings. As soon as Saúl, Gloria, and their three children fled Guadalupe in April 2011, their house and the bakery were broken into and burned to the ground. Sara, his mother, crossed the border the following December.
“We didn’t want to leave. We had been taught that we had to fight for our country, and we knew that our country was in a bad way, but we wanted to stay to make it better,” Saúl Reyes explained when I talked to him for the first time in El Paso. “When I go to give a talk at the universities and they ask me why I came, I tell them I didn’t just come here, they pushed me out.”
Saúl was granted political asylum in January 2012, and in the coming months around thirty Reyes family members started the process of applying for asylum. The family’s story traveled around the world as a devastating example of the persecution and extreme violence endured by ordinary individuals and the tragic impunity enjoyed by criminals in Mexico.
In 2008 Operation Chihuahua went into effect, an initiative of then-president Felipe Calderón’s administration aiming to dismantle organized crime in that state. In its first phase, the program dispatched roughly 10,000 military and federal police personnel to Chihuahua, claiming that these forces of law and order would take control of the state. Meanwhile, the local municipal and state police forces would be “cleansed” of their connections to drug cartels. The Sinaloa cartel, the Juárez cartel (known as “La Linea”), and the Zetas were all at war over territory and had been accused of murdering police chiefs who formed alliances with rival drug gangs. During the operation’s second phase, the newly installed local police would be trained, and the state would be left under their control. But according to official data and claims by human rights groups, kidnappings, extortion, breaking and entering, and murders became even worse during the years when the operation was in effect.
Not even four months had passed since the operation began when Carlos Spector, an immigration lawyer in El Paso, began to be approached by activists and journalists from Chihuahua seeking political asylum in the United States. The exodus began with Emilio Gutiérrez, a journalist from Ascención, Chihuahua. He was followed by Cipriana Jurado, who in 2011 became the first human rights activist to have an asylum petition approved by the United States. Asylum seeker Marisol Valles, police chief of the Práxedis G. Guerrero municipality, was dubbed “the bravest woman in Mexico.” Carlos Gutiérrez, a married father of two, refused to pay the extortion “quota” for his catering business; his feet were sawed off in the back of his car as punishment. Incredibly, he survived, although both legs had to be amputated below the knee. In 2014, using prosthetic legs, Gutiérrez launched a bike caravan that traveled across Texas to the governor’s mansion in Austin to demand justice for the victims of violence in Mexico.
Newspapers in Mexico and around the world published stories on Carlos’s clients. One, then another, then another came to ask for his help, until the protagonists of perhaps the most emblematic case of all those exiled by violence in Juárez Valley made their way to Carlos’s office: the Reyes Salazar family.
After leaving Guadalupe, Saúl and his family made their way to El Paso and stayed at a shelter for migrants and the homeless. Neither Saúl nor Gloria spoke any English. Their children—thirteen, six, and three years old—would have to attend a school program for English language learners. Saúl took whatever work he could get, from gardening and yard work to unpacking fresh produce at a supermarket. They found a small apartment, which, with a little effort, could accommodate the five of them and Sara, who had arrived by then. A few months later Saúl heard that rents were much cheaper in Fabens, about a half hour east of El Paso, and that there were other people from Guadalupe there. The family moved, and Saúl found a new job.
The Reyes family has tried to make a fresh start and adapt to a new life in a mobile home in the middle of the Texas desert. According to the most recent census figures available, of 8,250 residents in Fabens, 97 percent are Latino and 90 percent are Mexican. That figure is from 2010 and a large part of the exodus caused by violence only began that year; it is hard to say, therefore, how much the population has grown or changed in composition since then.2 A walk through Fabens’s sandy streets indicates that many of the people living here arrived recently: about a third of the homes are not houses but mobile homes or trailers—“trailas,” as they are known in local parlance.
People in the same circumstances as Saúl live in these trailers. They do not have the financial resources to buy a plot of land or a house, and monthly rent payments on an apartment are too burdensome. Renting a trailer is cheaper, and although space is tight, trailers come equipped with the basic necessities: a small kitchen area with a gas stove, a bathroom, electricity, and divided rooms. Saúl has a trailer on a corner lot, enclosed by a fence. The trailer is not in great shape, but it’s a good size, big enough to house separate, though small, rooms for his mother and his children. The dining room table is at the heart of the trailer.
As
