ANOTHER SORT OF SPILLOVER VIOLENCE ASSAILS LOCAL FAMILY

By Juan Montoya

Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos and Gov. Rick Perry may point to a one-hour kidnapping of a cross-border newsman or bullets striking a building on this side of the Rio Grande as proof of violence touching us locally, but cross-border violence runs deeper than that.

We learned just yesterday of an 86-year-old Brownsville man learning that his 70 something brother Refugio became yet another statistic in the ongoing hell called existence in northern Mexico.

The story is all too familiar.

The homicide happened on the same stretch of road between Soto la Marina and Victoria, Tamaulipas where the PRI candidate for governor was shot down earlier this year. The man was driving a modest older-model car when he was apparently assailed and "levantado" by unknown parties. To those still uninitiated when people say someone is "levantado" they mean that they were intercepted on the road, robbed, perhaps tortured, and then killed and their bodies dumped somewhere along the stretch of road.

This time the victim wasn't a famous politician, or a wealthy businessman, or a Central American on a bus heading north. It was an old man going about his business.
The criminals (no one knows who they were) then shot him three times, took his car and dumped his body into a city dump outside Victoria, his destination. The local family didn't know what had happened, only that there was talk among the locals at Soto la Marina that someone had "levantado" their relative.
"We called family and they searched the local mortuaries and found that they already had him there," said the man's wife. "What hurt even more than watching the effect this had on my husband is that we couldn't even visit our relatives to give our 'pesames' because it is too dangerous to go there. The weight of the pain is heavy on his brother."
Cross-border violence is not new to this family. The man's wife had a brother kidnapped, forced to turn over his vehicles and properties to his kidnappers before he was released. It was only later that he found out that officers with the state police of Tamaulipas had participated in the kidnapping and robbery.
And some 30 years ago, one of the family's sons was in Houston when he was brutally murdered by his co-workers who were jealous of the fact that he could peak English and that he was placed as their supervisor at their job clearing tree branches from power lines. He was only 20. His murderers were in this country illegally and have never been found. At the time, Houston detectives said they had fled to Mexico to avoid arrest.
"The whole thing came back with his brother's death," the man's wife said. "The frustrating thing about this is that there is very little one can do. We can only watch the pain of the people and hope things get better soon."
So how exactly does spillover violence affect you and me?
The elderly man killed in Tamaulipas was my uncle on my father's side, the man who was kidnapped and robbed was my uncle on my mother's side, and the 20-year-old killed in Houston was my brother.