Bordertown: The Juarez Murders

A recent trip to a newly opened video outlet yielded an interesting and disturbing find. I have long been a fan of Martin Sheen's work, so my attention was drawn to the hitherto unknown title Bordertown, co-starring Jennifer Lopez. The movie is based on real events in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, located just across the Rio Grande from the west Texas city of El Paso. I had spent several months at nearby Fort Bliss prior to my separation from active duty in the spring of 1969, and had visited Juarez on three different occasions, which further piqued my interest.

My first foray across the border was a daytime visit to an area of shops and stalls selling curios and the types of merchandise that one encounters in tourist traps everywhere. Along with serapes and sombreros, I recall a myriad of paintings on black velvet backgrounds, with Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley as the most common subjects. I remember the aggressive bargaining of several merchants who (possibly) feigned indignation if they were denied a sale. The highlight of the day was a long conversation, mostly conducted in what remained of my high school Spanish, with a vendor who taught English classes in the evening. For well over an hour, I answered his questons on the proper pronunciation and usage of words to the best of my ability. We met as strangers and parted as friends.

Equally memorable was the evening in late December when four members of our squad set out to sample the Juarez nightlife. We were a motley crew: the two squad leaders were a tall, lanky fellow from North Carolina and a Connecticut Yankee of Polish heritage; the third member was a Canadian citizen of native American extraction who had joined the US army to escape the poverty of the reservation, and I was the fourth, an unrepentant liberal with latent musical tendencies. After a few earlier stops, eventually came to a bar with a live band, and there we stayed. I, of course, was interested in the music provided by the house band, a capable mixture of rock and R&B covers. During a break, I became acquainted with the lead singer, and eventually joined the band onstage to sing Revolution by The Beatles. My Connecticut Yankee friend got involved in a long political discussion with a Juarez cop, while our Canadian friend set off in search of a different kind of activity, much to the chagrin of our Southern gent, whose paranoia grew exponentially as the night wore on, culminating with the discovery that our missing member had been relieved of his wallet after being served a loaded drink. Juarez was a rough town, and it was considered unwise for any US serviceman to attract the attention of the local police. As we left, we were being followed by four officers who seemed to have taken an interest in us, but fortunately, we were able to hail a cab for the ride back across the border.

Forty years later, Juarez is home to a large number of assembly plants called maquiladoras, set up in the post-NAFTA era by large U.S. and international corporations to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor and loose environmental regulations. The labor for these plants is predominately provided by young women from the impoverished Mexican interior, earning an estimated $30 to $55 per week under working conditions that were outlawed in this country a century ago. The film deals dramatically with an epidemic of violence that has claimed the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of women, while politicians and capitalists seek only to hide the evidence, and the corporate media acquiesces to the dictates of their masters. It is not a pretty picture.