A wealthy Mexican industrialist is trying to force factory workers from their meager homes near the U.S. border. But there is one problem: he doesn’t own the land.
By Fr. Bill Morton & Robert Fraass

Above: Fr. Bill Morton addressed a group organized to stop the destruction of their homes on the Lomas de Poleo mesa southwest of El Paso, Texas.

Drive further on the roads of sand, and – horsepower and traction willing – you climb a mesa onto Lomas de Poleo, another part of the Anapra squatter community west of Juárez.

Lomas de Poleo lies on the westernmost part of the Columban parish of Corpus Cristi de Anapra just south of where the borders of Mexico, Texas and New Mexico come together. Most of the residents work in Juárez’s maquiladoras, the foreign-owned manufacturing factories that pay workers about 50 to 70 dollars (U.S.) a week.

The land looks anything but valuable; mostly desert sands and inadequate homes built with shipping pallets and tarpaper or—for the fortunate residents—cinderblocks.

But for one corrupt Mexican industrialist, the land is very valuable. So valuable, in fact, that he is willing to use his political and economic clout to illegally seize the land and evict the residents, many of whom have lived there for 20 or more years.

Fr. Morton spoke with Faustino Olivares, the director of the local Asociacion Civil, about the group’s efforts to stop the destruction of their homes.

The Zaragoza family’s exact plan for the land is unclear, but the area is wide-open space that could see potential widespread development when the Santa Teresa port of entry between the United States and Mexico west of El Paso is expanded.

He has offered money, other plots of land, and has in recent weeks resorted to intimidation and abuse. He influenced a judge to order the electric company to remove all the electric poles and transformers, leaving the residents since mid-May without electricity they had legally contracted and paid for. During this desert summer, they now have no light, refrigeration or fans.

Zaragoza planted a group of paid men—some would say hooligans—who he recruited from other poor parts of the area and paid them 300 pesos a day (about 30 U.S. dollars), to intimidate and harass the residents.

On June 3, these men appeared in pickup trucks, brandishing bats, stones and pipes. An El Paso Times photographer zoomed in and photographed some with firearms in their belts.

People began settling on the mesa northwest of Juárez as long as 30-plus years ago:

These examples are just a few of the hundreds of people who have been there for many years.

Five Years & A Day
Here is the crux of the dispute: According to the Mexican Constitution, anyone who peacefully occupies a piece of land for five years and one day, without using violence and without ever receiving a personal visit from the owner or the owner’s agent showing legal title to the land, becomes the legal owner. In other words, people can own land by simply “squatting” for at least five years if there is no intervention from the legal owners, if there are any.

Most residents have been on the mesa at least five years, and there were no visits from Zaragoza or his agents. The land belongs to the residents of Lomas de Poleo.

Because all street lights have been removed, groups of vandals (until Juárez officials recently intervened and forced them to leave) easily roamed Lomas de Poleo at night, stealing and creating fear among young women. This was easily done because of the more than 300 women that have been raped and murdered in the last 10 years in the Juárez area.

All day, the paid grupo de choque, as the men are called, and private security guards employed by Grupo Zaragoza sat ensconced on the mesa next to the only road that leads into the area. They dug a 6-inch deep trench in the sand road that created a kind of speed bump, forcing cars to nearly stop and face black-clad private security agents guarding both sides of the road.

Zaragoza has almost limitless resources, and had set up huge circus tents, electric generators, refrigerators, water, food service and portable toilets. Witnesses had seen younger men sniffing glue under the protection of the grupo de choque leaders.

The Juárez police are visible and claim they are neutral, just separating the two groups. But more than 70 police vehicles accompanied the electric company in May as it dismantled the poles it had placed there the previous year.

Two days after electric company workers hauled away the concrete electricity poles (lower right), the family home of Jose Luis and Sylvia Roche burnt down (above left). They were using candles for light because the electricity they had paid for was taken away.

And, in a bit of good news, a judge has imposed an amparo, a type of injunction prohibiting eviction until the case is settled in court. Zaragoza’s son, Zaragoza Fuentes, is claiming ownership of the land, but this was already denied by a judge in 1992. Also, a June news report declared that the Zaragoza family has no legal claim to the land.

Because of the tense situation and the fear of a attack on their homes, many people were forced to remain on the mesa—unable to work and, therefore, lacking food and other necessities.

The situation, although eased in recent weeks, had been a siege with all the advantages, except justice, on the Zaragoza side.

Each illegal or threatening action has been reported to the civil authorities, and the local Asociacion Civil (a nonprofit community organization) has tried to document these events with video cameras and photographs.

Our group has drafted a letter to Juárez Mayor Jesús Alfredo Delgado Muñoz asking him to remove the grupo de choque. We also plan to visit him in person.

Petitions also have been sent to the governor of Chihuahua and Mexico President Vicente Fox. The Asociacion Civil has contracted several lawyers, but you can imagine the expense for people who, when working, earn a meager wage.

Sustenance In Prayer
We are also deeply concerned about the spiritual dimension of the struggle. Complicated by the fact that Catholics are a minority in an area filled with evangelicals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, we wonder how to unify the people and express faith in God who will not abandon them.

We use prayer, Scripture and song to fortify ourselves spiritually and offer a witness that we are God’s children with dignity and the right to be here. We have consistently emphasized the value of peaceful resistance and nonviolence in the face of any provocation, citing examples of Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus himself.

We are considering a boycott of Zaragoza’s products sold in the United States to pressure them to remove the threatening group from the mesa.

There are also stories of FBI charges against the group for drug-trafficking. Negative publicity about the Zaragozas could be used as part of the boycott against Corona beer, for example.

Our group plans to do whatever it takes to help the residents of Lomas de Poleo retain their homes and human dignity in their struggle against this injustice.