Posted on 05/12/2009 4:28:26 PM PDT by SwinneySwitch
Mexico’s crime nightmare hits home for Texan trying to rescue siblings
DURANGO, Mexico — They have been missing now for more than three months — the two brothers and sister of Texan Jose Esparza — snatched by armed men from their rural town in the high desert of Durango state.
From his home in San Antonio, Esparza has spent all his money and countless hours unsuccessfully lobbying Mexican and U.S. officials to help rescue his siblings. He has brought from Mexico his aging mother and a niece and a nephew to try to keep them safe. He has been consumed by Mexico’s criminal nightmare.
“I have been in hell,” said Esparza, 38, an aircraft mechanic who migrated north as a teenager and became a U.S. citizen 15 years ago. “I have a hope they are alive.”
Esparza’s torment cracks a window on the scourge racking Durango and much of the rest of the country. It also provides a vivid account of the toll on American families with relatives living in Mexico.
Amid Mexico’s historic crime wave, most attention has focused on the drug-related violence that has killed more than 10,000 people in little more than two years.
But kidnappings, extortions and robberies have also set upon Mexicans like biblical plagues. Some 8,000 abductions have been reported in Mexico since the mid-1990s. Scores of Americans have been kidnapped along the border, many of them still missing years later.
“We are all convinced that complaints are not very effective,” Durango’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Hector Gonzalez Martinez, said recently in condemning the state’s public security crisis. “It’s a clear indication of the lack of confidence that exists in the justice system.”
A sprawling desert state known for its revolutionary heroes, dramatic landscape and hardpan ranchers, Durango lately has been among the hardest hit...
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Mexico is happy to unload its welfare cases on us, but when somebody kidnaps one of our citizens back to Mexico, it’s so sorry, gringo.
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