• Home
• About
• Advertising
• Contact
• Print Subscriptions
• Donate
• Archives
• Links

Emilio’s Story: Life in Fear

Army drives Diario journalist into exile

Introduction to Emilio’s story

By Molly Molloy

The first time I heard of Emilio Gutierrez Soto he was in a small article in a Juárez newspaper in June 2008. A reporter had crossed the border in Antelope Wells, New Mexico and asked for political asylum, saying that he had received death threats from the Mexican army. He was not from the violent hotspot of Ciudad Juárez, but from the small agricultural town of Ascensión in northwestern Chihuahua, an hour or so from the border. A few months earlier, the police chief from the border town of Palomas had crossed into Columbus, N.M. and asked for asylum.

That same week in March 2008, all of the Palomas cops had walked off the job after receiving death threats. I visited Palomas with an American reporter a few days later to find that replacement police from Ascensión (the larger town in the same municipality as Palomas that serves as the administrative seat) had been sent to take over, but they seemed fearful to leave the police station, closing the door to the back room when they heard our questions to the young, English-speaking administrator who had been sent with them from Ascensión.

Shortly after the initial account of the reporter seeking asylum appeared, Emilio Gutierrez had disappeared into a U.S. immigration detention center and had no access to the press at all. On Christmas Day, 2008, a story in El Diario de El Paso featured a letter from Gutierrez’ son, pleading that his father be released from detention so that they could be together and stressing the danger that reporters faced in Mexico. The article mentioned that the boy had been staying with a family in Las Cruces.

Then on Jan. 30, 2009, I was surprised to see that Emilio had been released from detention and was now free to live in the U.S. while pursuing his claim to political asylum. As it turned out later, when I met Emilio, he and his lawyer were even more surprised at his release and attributed it to a change in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) policy in the new Obama administration. Soon after, Charles Bowden, a reporter who has written about the border for many years, came to interview Emilio and to tell this story of terror in northern Mexico for American readers. We spent many hours in February and March with Emilio and his son Oscar and his attorney, Carlos Spector. [Bowden’s article appears in the July/August issue of Mother Jones Magazine, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/we-bring-fear.]

A few weeks later, I translated for another reporter, and after talking to Emilio for many more hours, we took his advice and traveled to Ascensión to see some of the places Emilio had mentioned in his testimony. We talked to a few of Emilio’s former colleagues at the newspaper where he had worked and to several other journalists in the town of Nuevo Casas Grandes – a few miles further south along the road from the New Mexico border to Chihuahua City. Fear haunted their faces and fogged their answers to our questions. That story, by Philip Caputo, was published in the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic.

In August a group of friends in Las Cruces organized a fundraiser for Emilio and his son, because his release from ICE detention did not come with a job or support or even a permit to work in the U.S. Since that time, Emilio has received his work permit but has not yet found a regular job in our depressed economy. He is studying English and has been speaking out to local and international media and to organizations such as Reporters without Borders about the conditions in Mexico that forced him to seek asylum, especially the violent abuses of the Mexican military that he and his son experienced first-hand in their hometown of Ascensión, Chihuahua.  But, most importantly, Emilio is doing again what he does best – reporting. Below is a first installment of Emilio Guiterrez’ story in his own words.

LIFE IN FEAR

By Emilio Gutierrez Soto

Translation by Molly Molloy

We had only been home for about half an hour that Sunday and were waiting for midnight to go to bed. We never thought that this night would mark such an abrupt change in our existence, that nothing would be the same again, but that somehow, we would continue to seek out a way to live in health and peace.

We had only just gotten comfortable in bed when we heard some very loud sounds, like thunder or bursts of gunfire at the front door of our house. I jumped out of bed and ran as fast as I could, just as the door of my beloved home was crashed to splinters by the boots of uniformed men, their assault rifles aimed right at me.

“Press! Press! I’m a reporter for El Diario!” I screamed in a kind of survival reflex, or perhaps just hoping for some divine pardon in the face of this group of soldiers who now forced me to lie flat on the floor of my house, threatening to kill me if I resisted, threatening to shoot if I even dared to move.

I did what they said, feeling as if my life hung by a thread. Then I felt myself pulled to my feet by the soldiers, telling me to turn on the lights. They were all wearing hoods except the one who was giving orders – I think there were at least 50 of them, maybe more. He said to me, “We are looking for drugs and weapons,” this action apparently resulting from a tip by an anonymous informant. Even so, I asked him if they had a search warrant from a judge – I was stalling for time even though at the moment I feared for my life and for what might happen to my son. “These are our orders,” said the military commander as he ran his right hand along the butt of his army pistol and angrily approached within a few centimeters of my face.

They shook my son Oscar out of bed and brought him to me in his underwear while the group of soldiers turned our house upside down looking for guns and drugs. They looked in the refrigerator, under the mattresses, in the closet, in the kitchen cupboards, in shoeboxes, in the dresser drawers, in the chimney of the fireplace, the stove… They looked everywhere.  They made us go out onto the patio, still in our underwear, and they went on with another inspection, in search of anything that might indicate a crime. But found nothing.

“Very well,” said the guy who was in charge of the soldiers, “It looks like you have not committed any crime, that you live honestly and are attentive to your work. Nevertheless, I recommend that you denounce these criminals.” And I pretty much felt obligated to write down the number that he gave me that turned out to be the telephone of the military headquarters in Nuevo Casas Grandes in the northwest region of Chihuahua.

About 45 minutes had passed since the soldiers had violently broken into our house, but it seemed like a lot longer…it seemed like hours…and the whole time we were still being held at gunpoint, threatened by their powerful rifles, and there were a lot of them.

Really, I feared the worst. I had witnessed the results of abductions, kidnappings or as they are called here, “levantones.” People are picked up, taken away, and later the bodies show up dead. I felt a chill from my head to my toes. How many of these levantones had there been in recent days? And the people taken were never heard from again. The only thing that was known is that they had been picked up and taken away by soldiers.

The order came and the soldiers stampeded out, but marching in step. They mounted the green trucks they had come in, with the exception of their chief. He lagged behind to make his recommendation to me again, that I should denounce Organized Crime. “We thought that there would be weapons and drugs here and that is why we broke in like that,” referring as he left to the splintered door that the soldiers had minutes before kicked in and trampled with their heavy boots. I think I finally felt a breath of relief as the last of the violent intruders left. I sort of sat down on an old chair for a few minutes. The soldiers started up their trucks and left for who knows where, after sowing this feeling of terror again inside of us.

I found my cell phone and called the municipal police headquarters and they recognized me immediately. They answered right away and didn’t delay with the usual greeting or anything. “Hey Emilio, what’s up? What can we do for you?” I quickly told them what had happened and asked them to come over to investigate and take a report on what had happened. I needed a witness to this violent aggression against us; in addition to the shock of the event, we were still really nervous.

The preventive police came, but they refused to enter and immediately withdrew for what they said were “orders from above.” Again, we were confronted by this official abandonment that made us feel like we were their prisoners. And outside the streets were deserted, without the usual hubbub of the day. There were a few lights on in the houses, but the street was empty; there were no witnesses. The amber glow of the streetlights lit up the whole length of the street, but not a soul was out and about.

I called my best friend, Willy – who’s like a brother to me –, and told him what had happened. “I’ll be right over,” he said. And a few minutes later he was there at the old house, which had just been broken into by the violent forces of the Mexican state, the Army. “At least they didn’t kill us!” was the first thing I said as we hugged each other and my son also. We were really emotional and worried because they had left the house in a terrible mess, but at least we were alive.

I told my son to go back to bed. I hugged him and kissed him over and over and thanked God that we were lucky enough to be alive, to be together. I really didn’t know what to say to my son, or how to undo the damage caused by these bastards. Finally Oscar closed his eyes and slept for a while, but his breathing was erratic and I could see that he was still upset inside by what had happened. “Goddamn!” I swore. “How dare you screw around with my kid?” I tried to take a breath and get out from under this feeling of helplessness.

I smelled the coffee that Willy had made and went into the kitchen to have some. We were going to stay up all night and keep watch, even though we had no way to defend ourselves against the heavy weapons of the soldiers who were still patrolling up and down the empty streets of the town. All you could hear were their trucks, circulating along different routes, driving fast. Every now and then we could hear voices yelling out orders from far away, but could not make out the words very clearly.  It was better to be inside the house. Afraid, but inside.

The sun started to come up along the horizon in Ascensión, and as soon as it was light I went about the job of letting my bosses at the newspaper, the municipal authorities and other acquaintances know what had happened. It was important to bear witness to the violation of our rights by the soldiers. We knew that a certain tranquility of our lives had been forever been lost, and that we would have to start living whatever was going to come next. That from now on, we would be living with fear.

Comments