JEWELRY BOX EVOKES MEMORIES OF EXECUTED MIGRANT

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Sometimes we have visitors to our home who ask about the small jewelry box/clock made of light wood and its surfaces adorned with intricate, interlocking square designs fashioned with toothpicks.

"Look at the detail," they say. "Can you imagine the patience and time it took to put it together?"

When they hear where it came from, and who made it, there is often a sober silence that follows.

The clock/jewelry box was made by the late Juan Raul Garza, of Brownsville, who on June 19, 2002, was executed by lethal injection in the execution chamber of the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., after his conviction in federal court for running a drug trafficking enterprise and for ordering several murders.

Garza, a former migrant student at Josephine Castañeda School, was executed eight days after convicted white supremacist Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh received the same punishment.

His plea for clemency was rejected by then-President G.W. Bush. His was only the second federal execution after a 38 years hiatus.

When Garza was growing up, most people in town knew just about everyone or had heard about most other people. People close to the migrant stream remember Juan and his siblings.

“I remember going to school with Juan and his sister Irene,” said one. “In those days, all the migrant students from throughout the city were bused to the same school. We attended classes from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. to make up for the time we missed when we left in April and returned in October. It was segregated education.”

The school itself was circled with an eight-foot, chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. Students could only enter and exit through one gate under the watchful eye of Ruben Gallegos Sr., its first principal. A sign with a silhouette of a migrant with a fruit basket on his shoulder adorned the front gate.

Juan was shy as an adolescent and teenager, and was short for his age.

It was until much later that his activities brought him in contact with the law and the federal government. But when he lined up with the other migrant students for his free milk and baloney sandwich, he was just like anyone else – a working-class child who labored with his family in the fields of northern states.

For them, childhood meant getting up at the break of dawn and laboring their children’s bodies like adults until it was too dark to see the plants anymore. Some migrants overcame their humble beginnings and went on to become economists, Federal Reserve directors, professors, teachers, attorneys, mayors of major cities, accountants, etc.

One, Dr. Rene Rosenbaum, an economics professor at Michigan State University, wondered whether Juan might have turned out different if he hadn’t fallen through the cracks. “He was no different than any of us,” he said.

“We came from poor working families struggling to survive working in the fields. Many families could not afford to their children to school because they depended on the income earned by the entire family to carry them through the lean times in winter when they returned to Texas. There was very little choice for many of them.”

With little economic alternative left for many along the border, contraband and its attendant criminal activity has always been a lure.
And so it was for Juan.

Over time, his activities soon caught the attention of federal anti-drug agents.
Using a disaffected relative who was in his organization, they infiltrated his group and soon flipped enough of his co-defendants to pin several murders on him – including four in Mexico that were never proved. A federal jury sentenced him to death.

Garza’s attorneys asked for clemency citing Death Row statistics that at the time showed that of 20 federal inmates, 17, or 85 percent, were minorities (14 black, 3 Hispanics, and three white); that between 1995 and 2000, 80 percent of all federal cases submitted for capital punishment involved minority defendants.

Further, statistics showed that cases tried in the southern states of Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia made up for 65 percent of federal death penalty prosecutions. Between 1995-2000, 42 percent of all federal death penalty cases came from five of the 94 federal districts.

Their pleas fell on deaf ears and the execution date set. His sister Irene – now deceased – would raffle the clocks/jewelry boxes Juan made from varnished plywood and toothpicks to send him money for his personal expenses. When the time came, she refused to attend his execution.

Witnesses said Garza showed little emotion at the time of his death and asked forgiveness for the pain and grief he had caused. He sighed once, and then it was over.