Tijuana: The victimized and murdered children of los narcomenudistas

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The victimized and murdered children of los narcomendusitas

When many read about violence, not experiencing it directly, it’s read, and thought about as a singular action.  A man killed by gunfire, his body found on a street corner.  A man beaten to death in a cheap motel room, blood smeared on the unwashed sheets.  A woman strangled in her home. 

Violence isn’t singular, it’s like an infection.  Those who are bloodied, murdered, buried, are but the first person infected, the rest are yet to follow.  Tijuana’s retail methamphetamine and heroin trade is an epidemic of infectious disease, violence that consumes all in it’s path, touching, burning, torturing all in it’s path, never really dying, but spreading across the communities, whose wounds can never really heal.

The car Ashley was killed in

Do you ever question question your path in life?  Your decisions, your actions, your choices?  And wonder what would be different if you could go back and change, replace, repair the things you regret, so you go back and unravel a life, one thread at time, and you realize how fragile the entire system can be, how much one event, one person, one night, can affect everything else after, and before it.  That’s what violence is like. So, it may be one body, but it courses through the veins of many.  It leaves dozens shattered, shaking, convulsed in it’s wake.

 As retail cells, some tightly knit families, engage in tit for tat killings to unset the balances of power, children are murdered.  The killers storm houses, fire into cars, ambush families while eating to kill their victims.  Their lives aren’t seen as worth more then the few thousand pesos made by their fathers, who often are retail drug dealers, or their killers, who kill for as little as a thousand pesos, or more commonly paid in product, cheap, easy.

What happens to the children whose fathers and mothers are murdered, in front of them?  Or who never come home, from a trip to the store?   There is a generations of children in Tijuana who have had at least one parent murdered.  If there were 900 murders last year, you can assume there were at least 700 children, likely more, who were children of the victim.  

How does am 11 year old process the murder of his mother, or father?  How do they cope?  How do they survive, if their provider was killed, and their mother terrified of further retribution?  Who will care for them? There are little resources available in the United States for impoverished families, even less in Tijuana, even less for the families of narcomenudistas whose lives can begin and end in places like Sanchez Taboada, awash in blood and crystal meth.  

Roberto Carlos Marvilla, survived.

Hugo David Contreras, 7, lived in one of the hottest spots in La Sanchez, a known drug trafficking outlet, apartments and houses, where crystal meth, and heroin were sold.  His mother worked in a maquiladora, and his stepfather was a narcocomuedista, in the service of CJNG, his mother had met Roberto Carlos Marvilla three months earlier, and the three lived in his home.  

His killers came for him on May 26th, in the afternoon, it was still light out, the waning afternoon hours, as the sun looms down over the city.  Two men, in a grey honda civic, arrived, and entered through the front of the home.  They fired at Roberto Carlos, and hit him, but their bullets also struck Hugo David in the neck, and head, he died on the scene, while his stepfather lived, transported to the hospital shortly after the attack. 

Three days later, CJNG gunmen came for another narcocomudista, allegedly working for, or under groups associated with “El Guero Chompas”, who was released in March of this year, to return to the bloody fight for his retail territory in eastern Tijuana.  Chompas has been arrested and released twice in the last 5 years, despite his involvement direct or indirect in dozens of killings.

The bullet struck Ashley Castorena, 5, in her stomach, as she sat in the back of the family car, in traffic in Colonia Mariano Matamoros.  Her parents, including Jesus Alberto Aispuro Medina, “El Mazapan”, a narcocomudista, and her mother, drove to the hospital.  Glass, blood, the frantic and anguished cries of a mother, as she watches her daughter slip away, fatally shot, bullets lodged in her tiny frame.

There is a familiar pattern here, impoverished communities, of which there are few choices, very low wages, and almost no hope.  Mothers work in maquiladoras, or other entry level jobs, many of the men sell crystal, or work in some way for the retail cells controlling sales in the neighborhood.  They try to have a life.  Gifts on Christmas, food for the kids, maybe a carne asada every once in awhile.

Children are born into this world everyday, in Sanchez Taboada, Mariano Matamoros, colonias of Tijuana, Mexico, and beyond, in every place there is widespread, concentrated urban poverty.  The symptoms are the same.  The consequences are devastating.  Children who join their families trade, or join the neighborhood cells, to stand on corners, halcones, runners, eventually gunmen, narcomenudistas themselves, in line for a shot at being the plaza boss.  

Hundreds of children have had their parents murdered, and at least dozens have themselves been murdered. Who do we blame?  Who do you attack?  The parents fault. Or is it their parents fault? Have we become so callous and cold, self righteous we blame the children themselves for being in the way of bullets?

Roberto Carlos Marvilla and Jesus Medina survived the attacks.  Do the dead come for them at night? Do their stepdaughters cries echo in their ears?  Can they be drowned or silenced in the beers, the liquor, the crystal, the killings?  They are the walking dead themselves, and they must know it, every time they leave the house, every time they feel the pistol in their waist, or tucked in the belt.

Will they be faster then the men sent to kill them?  Or can they kill those who came for them? Catch them as they attend church on Sunday, firing into the vehicles, ambush them as they return from dinner, emptying 9mm shells in the backs of their targets….Can they take their parents away from their children too?

Lost souls, numb from the killing, lost in the frenzy of death, the metallic, heavy, snap of a slide being pulled back, or a magazine being inserted in a pistol, the echoing of gunfire in the night, the sounds of a child crying, the sight of one who will never cry again….

Sources: Zeta Tijuana

http://zetatijuana.com/2017/06/05/cjng-y-cartel-de-sinaloa-asesinan-ninos/