Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Ju?rez (The William and Bettye N

Drug War Zone Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El. August 15th, - Drug War Zone El Paso and Ju rez The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art History and . IXTL N DE JU REZ PDF MANUAL IXTL N DE JU REZ PDF FILE is.
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In addition, they developed descriptions. One review of the use of technology for learning and teaching in higher education The Glossary activity allows participants to create and maintain a list of terms and definitions, as in a dictionary. It can be used to. English-medium teaching in European Higher Education and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world'. Economist, 26 February Effective teaching methods in higher education they come to see themselves as the authors of answers, as the agents Effective teaching methods in higher education: J Adv Med Educ Prof. Excellence in Higher Education in India: Way Forward Before we analyse the issues relating to how to bring in excellence in higher education, let us have a look at some of the UGC, Ministry of Hig.

Excellence in Higher Education in India - Digital Commons Notwithstanding the fact that India was one of the first colonial states and therefore The higher education in India has not been defined in any document. Teaching excellence Jun 9, - What constitutes excellence in university teaching? The Online Teaching and online courses; this represents cost effectiveness for colleges and universities in the long run. Communication by way of the Mary Immaculate College, Mater Dei Challenges in the Teaching of Sociology in Higher Education My father was a doctor by profession.

My mother was very strict, and had me in a school run by nuns. I had grown up in an atmosphere where everything was chandeliers, propriety, and good manners. The nuns at my school were a bunch of religious fanatics [cagadiablos]. They were all hijos del mole or hijos de diferentes chiles [children of different fathers]. My aunt would cross into the U.

I liked the barrio. I was fascinated by the poor people of the barrio who lived in train cars. While I was there, I went to high school, but also got into the smuggling business. Eventually, my mother disinherited me because of how I lived. I started out crossing undocumented people into the U. So I started working with him.

We would cross undocumented people into the U. It was , I was fifteen years old, and we were charging between three dollars and five dollars per crossing, and making anywhere between fifteen dollars and twenty dollars a day. When working, I invariably wore my hair in a roll and wrapped up under my baseball cap.

Eventually, we began passing liquor boxes both ways—into the U. We were normally paid between a hundred and a hundred and fifty dollars to pass loads of liquor into the U. Often we crossed the river into the U. I was never raped, since I was always, and at all times, protected by my friends, including El Zanahoria. First, we waded or swam across the river.

Then we used a rope to pull the balsa full of liquor boxes from the Mexican side to the U. Someone from the housing projects would pick up the boxes of liquor. I had my own nicknames for both of them. They were paying me five hundred dollars for crossing that box, which I thought was a lot, but who the hell was I to ask questions! So I took the money, and then ended up hiding in the carrizo, waiting for the cops and their horses to clear out from around the international bridge. I waited for two or three hours in the carrizo, with my feet in the water. Then, when the coast was clear, I forded the river and left the box on the U.

Then I went to get a backpack in which to carry the box. When I was putting the cardboard box in the backpack, I noticed it was wet, so fearing it would tear, I decided to check out the contents. There were four or five bottles on top and some plastic bags full of white powder underneath. I had never seen cocaine before. Then she opened the remaining packet and took two ounces out of it so we could sell it in bars in El Paso.

When a bar owner saw this little plastic ball of two ounces of cocaine, he asked where we had found it, and then offered us a hundred dollars for it. Then we went to a coyote, and he paid us three hundred dollars for it. A kilogram of cocaine, at that time, in El Paso was worth twenty-five thousand dollars.

Then the bar owner who had offered us a hundred dollars, and some of his people, figuring we had more of the stuff, came after us, trying to steal it from us, so we had to go into hiding again. As usual, there was a gaggle of whores hanging around. Then the owners of the dope came after me, found me at La Placita, chased me, and caught me at the railroad tracks by the Rio Grande. They started hassling me, and they threatened to kill my aunt and cousins. But yeah, I did feel afraid.

Why did you tell me it was just a box full of liquor bottles and try to fool me? Then he asked if I had a watch. When I answered no, he gave me his Rolex wristwatch so I could tell time, and told me to meet them at 5: I was ordered to get out of the car in order to talk to the jefe [boss], who was inside the hotel. The jefe turned out to be none other than Abel, the Colombian guy. He worked for a Colombian cartel. I also started to think about what this money meant. With it, I could take care of my cousins and prevent them from being humiliated.

El Paso, TX Sunset Timelapse

My aunt lived in an old, tiny little apartment house, part of an even older vecindad [enclosed complex of small apartments] that had only one shared inner courtyard for all the tenants. My cousins used to peek over the rail of the neighbors to watch their television. The neighbors got mad, and I was humiliated by this. I recall how one day I saw my little cousin watching a kid eating a banana. When the kid fi nished, he threw away the banana peel, fl inging it carelessly across the street, where it fell to the ground, thudding against the dirt.

My poor little cousin ran as fast as he could and quickly picked it up and voraciously started eating the by now dirt-covered banana peel as if it were the most precious, delicious tidbit of food he had ever encountered. I immediately yelled out at my cousin to leave it alone, to throw it away. He did, but a neighbor had seen the whole sequence of events, and from then on insulted and poked fun at my cousin every time he saw him. When we agreed to work for him, the jefe gave five hundred dollars to each of us right then and there.

From that point on, we were paid two thousand dollars every time we took backpacks full of drugs across the river into the U. I was sixteen years old, and life was beginning to look good to me.


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El Zanahoria bought himself a camper truck. Up until then, he had lived in a train car. Who did you stick up? We filled our shopping cart with boxes of meat, cereal, watermelons, and many types of fruits, as well as bottles of shampoo and bars of soap. Shortly after that, we painted our little apartment house and made some curtains with the rolls of cloth so it would look better. I also bought a tall exterior antenna for the television. At the time, I was almost seventeen years old. I was young but tough. The viejo [old man] who owned the corner store beat my aunt up and got my cousin pregnant.

Eventually, from the money we were then making, El Zanahoria bought a car, and I bought a Renault In those days, we were crossing the border walking, with backpacks full of drugs that we took to deliver to Sunland Park. We were making lots of money. Then I gave the car to my aunt and bought a truck. I told myself that I was doing what I was doing so my cousins would no longer have to go hungry.

I kept working like this for two years [—], then I moved to a better house. By then, trucks loaded with drugs were crossing the border with three hundred to four hundred kilos of cocaine. My job was just to open the gate to the parking area of a stash house when the trucks full of drugs arrived. Era una caleta [It was a hiding place]. Then I would open the garage door so that the truck that had just arrived could come in. I worked for Abel. I saw as much as 1, to 1, kilos of cocaine stored there at one time. As far as crossing the stuff into the U. Customs agents and immigration officers] were paid off at the international bridges.

When the federales caught me, I told them that I was just the maid of the house. Then why are you wearing new Converse? I was seventeen at the time. They shoved drugs in my face, and I vomited. Come on, just kill me now! Abel had sent him. In all, I had spent only a day and a half in jail. After being freed, I went and talked to Abel about what happened, and then continued working for him.

By then I was making about six thousand dollars a month crossing loads of drugs into the U. I used false identification documents to cross into the U. In fact, I was always able to buy false identity papers both for U. It was around this time that we started putting into practice an idea I had recently thought up: This decoy car was the one I would drive to the bridge. This allowed the other cars in our convoy, which were the ones actually loaded with drugs, to cross into the U. I went with him, but I was in love with money more than with him. Without money, one is nothing.

Abel asked me to go with him to Colombia, and I agreed to, more for the adventure than anything else. But before leaving, I set up my aunt with a little corner stand so she could sell magazines to passersby. So there I was, eighteen years old and about to travel to Colombia. I recall that when we got to the Mexico City airport and were about to board a plane leaving for Colombia, Abel told me that I looked like a tomboy, and made me get new high-heel shoes. I had a whole collection of Converse tennis shoes, and I always wore T-shirts and jeans.

So it was that I went to work in the dope business in Colombia with Abel. At the time, I was still cejona—my eyebrows had never been plucked or trimmed—and I always wore my trenzas [hair braids] up, and T-shirts and jeans, and I always had my backpack with me. People in Colombia said to me that I looked like a marimacha [a lesbian or masculinelooking woman]. I stayed with a sister of Abel in Cali, named Mercedes. I did anything and everything. Colombians were attracted to Mexican culture. They saw me as an exotic Mexicana—loud, brassy, macha, and different.

She wanted to fi x me up at a beauty parlor because they said I looked like a lesbian. And so they did my eyebrows and bought me a blouse and skirt. I took the hair off my legs and fi xed my nails. At home, I was used to mainly boots and tennis shoes. Daniel, brother of Abel, took me out to dance. Then I was introduced to Carlos Lehder. All the women there were after him—they crowded around him like sheep.

There was a party going on there, with policemen and prostitutes. Then this Panamanian man came on to me. I turned him down. I was tired and sleepy. They gave me a luxurious bedroom to sleep in. So I took off all my clothes and went to sleep. Carlos came into the bedroom in the middle of the night.

I wanted to leave, but he said there were no other beds. I went out of the room and saw that people were sleeping everywhere and anywhere they could. On the floor and on couches. The next day, I woke up to find that the party had continued. That day they butchered several farm animals and grilled them.

Feeling that the tension had been broken, I was able to relax a bit, and eventually had a few beers. That night I went to bed, and Lehder joined me and we had sex. You know, a hormonal matter, or whatever.

Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juarez

I never went with anyone sexually, but that time it just happened. Nowadays Carlos Lehder is in Germany or Cuba. And the Panamanian guy was good to me. Carlos began to use drugs. Then others around us started acting like maricones [faggots]. They were not putos [receptive homosexuals], but I caught some of them in bed with other guys.

And I think they liked it. But then I think the majority of people in the drug world experiment with bisexuality. During my stay in Colombia, I also got to travel with Manuel Noriega. He threw centenarios [Mexican gold coins worth about nine hundred U. Lehder, on the other hand, was a gentleman, and he once gave me a jewelry case full of emeralds as a gift. But after eight months, I had grown tired of Carlos because of the constant parties, and what I really wanted was to work and make more—a lot more—money.

So I left Carlos and hung out with Abel, and eventually got pregnant by Abel. He was married, and wanted me to get an abortion. Of course, as soon as I returned, I immediately became the target of constant criticism by my family. At that time, Pablo Acosta ran the Chihuahua cartel. Now I was making the decisions and sending the money to Colombia while others carried the loads across to the U.

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Since we were in a relationship, Abel said that if he ever had to leave, I was to collect all the dope and money for myself. One day, the judiciales showed up and killed Abel right there inside our house. As far as my relationship with Abel, more than anything, it was a business relationship. After his death, I had to continue providing for my son. Later, when my brother-in-law Daniel—without even asking how I or my child was—asked me what happened to the money, I told him the judiciales took it.

So I escaped and went to an old, run-down hotel in downtown Nuevo Laredo. Then I went to a posada [a cheap hotel where people waited for coyotes]. I had hidden the cocaine in between the diapers, and then I had bought some grilled chicken to cover the smell. I said this sarcastically to indicate, of course, that in Mexico, with its longstanding tradition of corruption, the judiciales had stolen the money.

Of the fifteen or sixteen kilos I rescued from Nuevo Laredo, ten were lost when one of my people was busted trying to cross it into the U. The rest I crossed myself and sold. I used that money to set up business in San Antonio. I made a lot of money in San Antonio, because when I was there, the price of pot was twenty-five dollars per pound in Oaxaca, where I Female Drug Lord 73 bought it; seventy-five dollars per pound on the border, where I crossed it; a hundred fifty dollars a pound in San Antonio, where I kept it; and fi nally, three thousand dollars a pound in Philadelphia, where I sold it.

In San Antonio, it was a case of lo del agua al agua [what is from water returns to water]. As a drug dealer, naturally I returned to drug dealing. El Negro was my right-hand man. I made the most money in Dallas, selling marijuana and cocaine. I was busted in Dallas in and The truth is that we traffickers never completely retire from drug dealing or related activities. Before, there used to be loyalty and trust, but this all changed around Amado Carrillo Fuentes wrecked everything.

In Garland, Texas, near Dallas, I had a big house and bodyguards, and I ran my drug business from there. I had begun very young, and was used to having money, and was not a credulous person. I was tough minded. When someone asked for money, I would give them money, but first they would have to take a load to Philadelphia; they were paid six thousand dollars per load. I always bailed out my people when they got busted. I never left anyone stranded in jail. I had two lawyers in Dallas.

About 30 percent of my drug profits went to expenses [of these and other types]. I was always loyal to my people. I had six aliases. I sold cocaine in connection with the Cali cartel in Houston in the mids. I had so much money that [in one day] I would eat lunch in Dallas and dine in New York. In fact, I would do them again. In , I worked with El Gordo. He was my worker. He wanted to amachar [be chauvinistic] and dominate me. Once I shot El Gordo with a gun, and he shot me back, in a fight.

I got into business with a maricona in Corpus Christi. We were partners in a restaurant. I was just like other drug traffickers. In Dallas, in , I was working for myself, with a male partner. In fact, I prefer working with women. I liked dealing heroin because it was a simple cash-for-drugs proposition: Here is the heroin, asshole]. And the transaction is over. We used the word pintura [paint] as a slang for heroin or other drugs in order to confuse narcs.

Sometimes things got rough. Once I threatened an enemy with an AK at a Dallas nightclub. In , I was arrested with money, not drugs. I claimed I was a prostitute when the authorities asked why I had so much money on me. So I was sent to Mexico. Working for the Other Side While I worked, my children never saw dope or my male lovers. My children had their own house on the side. I had a house here, for my kids, and a house there, for business.

I told my children what I did for a living. I was imprisoned in New York. I kept my kids away because of pride, to not have them mistreated. I am now working for the U. I have no regrets about my involvement in the drug trade. The only thing I regret is the time I spent in jail. I had a lot of trouble adapting to jail life because I was ungovernable. But in jail they humiliated me, forcing me to be strip-searched. They put me in restraints or in the hole when I caused trouble.

While in jail, I had fights with one black woman and one white woman, and others.


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    6. I paid one million dollars to lawyers to get out of prison. Two times I was in jail for any length of time: There are now two contracts on my life, both by Mexican traffickers. There are two reasons why I joined the law: A female friend, who I helped bust, got busted because she was too interested in partying and meeting men. I consider myself a negotiator. Doper men see women in the drug life as putas [whores]. In fact, I consider many of them putas also.

    As for me, though, I would describe myself as a cold-minded, business-oriented negotiator. If I wanted to, I could spread my legs at home. I criticize men in the drug business for their irresponsible behavior with women. Men even take women to their caleta [the bedroom where the dope is stashed]. As I said before, I loved money and I still love money. If I wanted sex, I would just use a vibrator. I never have fallen in love.

    I was a businessperson fi rst and foremost. As for other women in the drug life, above all they were whores. They would go crazy over men, they would go to orgies—not me. The other women were whores—too interested in sex, not enough focused on business. Many others in the drug business, in my opinion, were too generous or too quick to believe sob stories and requests for money. The story of David a pseudonym is a familiar one in El Paso and the poor neighborhoods of the U.

    He was born in the s, came from a Hispanic working-class family, and grew up on the south side of town, very close to the international border. David, like many others, participated in the drug taking and petty drug trafficking that was tightly interwoven with barrio life and that expanded during the radical s and early s. His father was killed when he was around five years old, and by the time he was eight, he had begun to learn about alcohol and drugs.

    His introduction to the heroin-addict lifestyle occurred about this time also, through a colorful uncle. He and his friends would then sell these drugs in El Paso to soldiers stationed at Fort Bliss. Much of the border drug trafficking at the time was small scale, informal, and partly integrated into the community, unlike the operations run by the violent, mercenary drug cartels that emerged in the s. David also describes the many types of corruption related to drug Community-Based Drug Use, Smuggling, and Dealing 77 trafficking in El Paso, involving bail bondsmen, judges, lawyers, et al.

    He and his group of a dozen friends introduced their classmates to drugs. Then they started branching out to other high schools and to bars. Thereafter, the unraveling began: This, sadly, is another common theme in old El Paso neighborhoods, especially in the almost exclusively Hispanic downtown, south side, and Lower Valley areas, where drug use has taken a heavy toll over the years. David observes that drug dealing was commonplace but that little was done to stop it.

    He also provides the names and locations of the various street gangs in El Paso at the time, some of which later became important trafficking organizations in their own right. The business was conducted in a low-key, laissezfaire manner that contrasts starkly with the paranoia that surrounds dealing today. David also provides information about the tecato heroin addict way of life—insights available only to an insider. His list of tecato vocabulary, as well as his descriptions of how to hide heroin while dealing it on the street, and his list of places where heroin could be obtained in El Paso, are instructive.

    Most of the tecato terms and techniques for street drug dealing still exist. Thus, his account illustrates processes of continuity and change in the border narco-life. David I was born in in El Paso, Texas. My father is from Derry, New Mexico, in the Hatch area. He had a farming background. My mother is from El Paso. She married a wealthy man from Jalisco who was a military-academy graduate. They were Porfiristas, on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution, who ran to El Paso in the s.

    Both of my parents are bilingual, equally fluent in English and Spanish. So I speak both languages also. My aunt married a Jew.

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    My uncle married a Methodist, and there were many Catholics in our family. We had Italian friends too. A cosmopolitan group always came to our family parties. We had mixed ethnic foods at holidays. Our neighborhood, in the s, was a new workingclass suburb. Many women also worked at the Fox Plaza shopping center. There was more agricultural land back then, especially around Ascarate Park.

    The city was smaller and much nicer. Burges High School was on the eastern edge of town then. I attended Burges High because of enforced busing. My older sisters went to Burges ahead of me, and my younger sister went to Jefferson High School [in the barrio]. Back then, Burges was 80 percent Anglo, 20 percent Mexican American. My father was a bail bondsman. He intervened in a domestic quarrel, and the man shot him. It made big news in El Paso. So I grew up without a male role model.

    I had three sisters, and they used to gang up on me. Then there was also my mom and my grandma. So it was five females against one male. I became the black sheep of the family. A lot of the things I learned, I had to learn by myself, by trial and error.

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    When I was eight years old, I learned about pills and how to steal beers out of coolers at family parties. I would drink beer, cop a buzz, go to my room, and go to sleep. It gave her headaches. She would come home from work and take pills and crash. My maternal grandmother was the main parental role model for me. My mother once left for six months to have an operation in California to remove the tumor. My uncle was young and flamboyant, which impressed me.

    They made me sleepy and sick. It was not pleasurable at all. I smoked weed in the seventh grade, when I was twelve years old. There were not many drugs in my neighborhood then, but there were characters who were drug addicts. You had to seek them out, but you knew the drugs were there, you knew they existed. At that time, all the junior high kids I knew were experimenting with Lone Star beer and weed. We were playing around and not getting caught. Then, when I was a freshman in high school [], I broke loose, it was all happening—drugs, rock and roll, rebelling.

    Being from a neighborhood that is poverty stricken, pennies counted. We were poor working people. I have never owned a home. I have been a nomad all my life. Living with my mother, three sisters, and my grandma, we never felt poor. We were the poorest of the family.

    We believed we were going to make it. Growing up poor instilled determination in us. I was into trying to stay mellow. We wanted to stay cool, but we were influenced by the Chicano movement also. There was a political and ideological split with drug use. Our parents solidified with the Chicano Democrats.

    But there were generational differences. Part of it was the failure of our parents to guide us, and part of it was our failure to look to our parents. Both generations share the disaster. I remember I started letting my hair grow long and getting into truancy. I went to school only three or four days a week. The Young Dealer I had fun making chaos as a freshman.

    We thought we were superior. We were not a gang, just a group of friends, but we had a reputation of not being good kids. We created the illusion. We burned the cottage down at the end of the school year. I was in trouble for fighting a lot. A female teacher once asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was acting out, and at the same time letting her know that I was not interested in what she had to offer. My freshman year in high school, I started to deal dope—marijuana and cocaine.

    I hung out with a group of kids on a corner about half a block from the river. It was a free river as you got further out from downtown. We dealt with his relative. We grew up together since kindergarten, and there was absolute trust between us. It was the three brothers who had fi rst suggested we deal drugs. We would sell drugs to military guys. El Paso always had large shipments of soldiers coming in and out of Fort Bliss.

    Many Vietnam vets went to The Joint at night to drink. We supplied them with drugs. The other, the safest in its nation. El Paso to Juarez: The cities are separated by the thin trickle of the Rio Grande, which flows through concrete channels, built to put an end to the river's natural habit of changing course and El Paso and Juarez know what happens when a wall divides two cities El Paso got its own version of a border wall in Many there aren't sure it helped anything.

    Five years ago, at the height of the city's instability, it registered over 3, Recent string of murders in Juarez has El Paso residents on edge A recent string of violence across the border in Juarez has El Pasoans on edge.

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    Hundreds of people walked across the border from El Paso to Juarez on Sunday even after a string of murders have left dozens dead across the border in the past few days. I visited El Paso this week and learned a lot about Donald Trump's I am but a short walk from the border with Mexico and the much larger city, in population terms, of Ciudad Juarez, yet no one here, even after dark, is afraid for their security. No bandits lurk in the alleyways. That El Paso boasts one of the lowest rates of crime of any city in America, including a homicide rate The two cities form a combined international metropolitan area, sometimes called Juarez-El Paso,