06/03/2011
It was a lofty moniker to bestow on a twenty-year-old. And as I fell hook, line and sinker for a narrative that had to be cooked up in Tinseltown, every rational bone in my body knew there couldn’t be a Hollywood ending.
Last October, the international media took to calling a young criminology student named Marisol Valles García, “the bravest woman in Mexico.” She took on the position of police chief in a little town called Práxedis G. Guerrero, about an hour away from Ciudad Juárez—one of the more violent places on the planet (there were 229 murders in February alone).
No hombre wanted anything to do with the traditionally male position.
It took a year for it to be filled after her predecessor’s head was left outside the police station—a warning to future intrepid applicants...
But now, according to the Chief Prosecutor in the state of Chihuahua—Jorge González Nicolás, García has crossed the border and is seeking asylum in the U.S.—the death threats from organized crime having apparently become intolerable.
Or at least one particular death threat…
On Friday the Prosecutor said García “received a threat and that justified her leaving for the United States.” Later an immigration lawyer in El Paso, Texas said she was looking into the asylum process for “personal reasons.”
No one with an ounce of sincerity could question the legitimacy of those threats; Hermila García, the thirty-eight-year-old female police chief of Meoqui—another small town in the Chihuahua province, was ambushed by hit men at the end of November. Then there was the kidnapping of Érika Gándara in late December. Gándara was literally the last police officer in the border town of Guadalupe; everyone else either resigned or went on extended sick leave.
Either of those two women might more deservedly be called “Mexico’s bravest woman”.
I say that because the cynic in me can’t help but ask: What could García have possibly thought she was getting into?
“Everybody is scared here; we’re all scared, but we’re going to trade that fear for security,” she declared after taking the job in October. The requisite photo-op showed her at her desk, working away, openly—though she did have two bodyguards.
She told the media she had no intention of going after the worst of the worst; she’d leave that to the Federal Police. She saw her role as preventative— organizing the town so its citizens wouldn’t succumb to the temptation of crime, drugs, and easy money.
At her swearing-in ceremony, the young mother also said she wanted her son to grow up in “a different community than the one we have today.”
Most—of course, thought she meant in Práxedis…
Her predecessor was decapitated...In all seriousness—what was she expecting? A few rotten eggs and a burning bag of dog….?
So now what happens?
There were supposedly 19 officers on the force when she took the job—nine of whom were women. Maybe one them will be the next step up?
Of course they’d have to accept a healthy dose of public skepticism and the end of magnanimous nicknames.
They’d have to accept there’d be a theory that—like their predecessor, they were just using the job to facilitate their passage north.
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