THE HUMAN COST OF NORTH MEXICO VIOLENCE ON LOCAL FAMILIES

By Juan Montoya
While we worry about shady politicians bending the system to get their relatives jobs, indignant district clerks having to give back money paid for their photograph, and the junior college being fleeced by UT System administrators, an even heavier toll is being levied on local families by the violence in northern Mexico that makes it all seem trivial.
Just today we learned of a local family who lost a relative to illness in a small ranch inland from Soto La Marina along the Tamaulipas coastline.
The ranch bears the name of "Nombre de Dios," and is nestled on the skirts of the cerro along a river that used to flow before drought parched the land north and south of here extending north beyond the Rio Grande and beyond.
Two days ago (early Wednesday) word reached the local family that the wife of their uncle on their mother's side had passed away on the ranch after a long battle with a debilitating digestive disease. She carried a plastic bag to help her pass urine and apparently, the tube to the bag had plugged up and before they could get her medical help outside of the isolated locale, she contracted an infection and died.
Relatives in Mexico and in Texas were alerted to her death via cell phone and told that because of the isolation of the ranch from urban areas and the inability of the family to preserve the body before the unbearable heat would spoil her remains, she would be buried Thursday evening.
Relatives from as far as Torreon, Coahulia, in north central Mexico were able to make it overnight to lend thier support to the stricken relatives. Some from further south also made it to the funeral gathering.
Yet, the Brownsville relatives, stricken with grief over the demise of the close relative, were unable to attend the funeral.
"We wanted desperately to drive down (a matter of five or six hours) to be with them, but we couldn't because of the danger on the roads," said the sister of the woman's husband. "Can you imagine, our family from Torreon was able to go be with them and we don't dare drive down there because of the danger on that road that goes past San Fernando? My brother asked us not to take the chance. It broke my heart to hear him so devastated and not be able to comfort him and my nephews and nieces."
Although the family and other relatives from Austin and Dallas collected money to help the family in Mexico with costs associated with the burial, for an extended family that has a tradition as do most Mexican families of being together and near each other when tragedies strike, it was not quite enough.
When she spoke with her brother, she said, he broke down and she felt helpless because there was nothing she could do to comfort him.
"Money can come and go, but what is really valued is the ability to give them a shoulder to grieve and unload their pain," she said. "I would gladly take the chance of something happening to me if there was a possibility I could reach out and touch my brother right now. This violence is not just killing Mexicans. It's killing us, too."