Day 7 (I wrote this yesterday, but the internet was down)

We started off the morning continuing our orientation.  We watched two documentaries: one focused on the journey of migrants across the border, and the second was about the femicides of Ciudad Juarez (called Bajo Juarez).  Following the videos, we also began to discuss some of the really heavy issues facing us as volunteers.

The first of those issues was the legality of what it is that we do at Annunciation House.  There is a federal statute (I think 1243, if I'm remembering correctly) that has existed since the 1960s that prohibits "harboring, aiding, and abetting" certain undocumented("illegal") immigrants. 
Depending on how one interprets it, we could indeed be violating it by "harboring, aiding, abetting" seeing as how A. House is an emergency shelter where we do indeed offer hospitality to the undocumented.  What we do is humanitarian work, and in my opinion, humanitarian work should never be illegal.   If a federal prosecutor were to go after A. House and its volunteers (like me), we could each receive up to five years for each undocumented person.  Coming here, I had certainly thought about the implications of this, but it was pretty different reading the actual statute.

Seeing as how ICE takes advantage of A. House to get immigrants off its hands, it seems very unlikely that it would want to jeopardize this set-up...we are doing THEM a favor.  Annunciation House is constantly consulting with attorneys who are experts in the field to see if/when the political climate changes in regard to federal prosecution.  This statute was clearly not intended to go after humanitarian organizations like Annunciation House, but if a Rush-Limbaugh-pro-Arizona-law-vigilante were to become the federal prosecutor in this region...then we need to watch out.

Following our discussion about the law, Ruben (the director of A. House) told us more about his vast knowledge of the situation in Cd. Juarez and how it evolved.  It was really interesting to hear how he described it.  Basically, it comes down to economics and politics, starting in the 1970s.  When the peso became very devalued by the Mexican government and the first maquiladoras opened up on the border in Juarez, Mexicans from the even more economically depressed interior began to inundate Juarez looking for work.  Juarez faced a population explosion but none of the social services like law enforcement, schools, medical care, etc. were able to match it.

At the same time, once Nixon decided that criminalization was the way to combat the social woe of drugs, the Colombian drug cartels began to transport their drugs into the US by handing the business to Mexican gangs through rather than flying and shipping them in (new US patrol made these routes impossible).  The new Mexican cartels divided the country into four regions to avoid in-fighting so that they could all make more money, and each cartel embedded itself with bribes into the deepest levels of government.  The power of money speaks when a government is too poor to pay its civil servants, police, and military...

Meanwhile, Juarez is getting out of control and the population soars to over 2 million people where lawlessness rules because sometimes the police and military are the ones behind the crime. Corruption. Meanwhile, the US keeps sending money to support the (corrupt?) military efforts for Presidente Calderon's "war on the cartels."  Analysis by journalists and NGOs has suggested that Calderon may not even be fighting the cartels, but just wants one cartel...the one he has chosen.... (the Sinaloa cartel) to win.

It's kind of a mess.  Sec. of State Hilary Clinton has suggested that instead of sending quite as much money to support the Mexican military, we send it to support social services that would make the general lawlessness less appealing to people, which I think is a good idea.  Before Calderon started his war on the cartels in 2006, nearly all the violence was limited to people involved in the drug trade, but now that lawlessness has become so widespread, much of the violence is attributable to petty gangs taking advantage of the lack of order to wreak havoc on innocents...basically doing whatever they please.

On a cheerier note, the three other new volunteers (Kyla, Andrew, and Eric) and I went hiking in the Franklin Mountains outside El Paso this afternoon. It was hot, but GORGEOUS.