| | |  Editorials | Issues 
Mexican Valley Discovers Perils of New Wealth
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
go to original
February 15, 2010
| | Manuel Garcia's wife and mother-in-law were killed just weeks after getting $200,000 for selling out for construction of a refinery. (Keith Dannemiller/Chronicle) | |
Colonia Dendhó, Mexico — Barely a month after selling her land to the Mexican government and pocketing $200,000 — a bonanza in rural Mexico — Irma Garcia, 45, was strangled to death along with her 22-year-old daughter.
The younger woman's toddler also was in the room as his mother, Guadalupe Aguilar, and Garcia were slain. The killers tied a solvent-soaked rag over the boy's mouth and presumably left him for dead.
Early suspicions fell upon criminal gangs in the industrial outskirts of Mexico City, 30 miles to the south. But evidence now points to more timeless human maladies: envy, greed and wrath.
The scores of Colonia Dendhó farmers who, like Garcia, had reaped windfalls selling out for construction of Mexico's first oil refinery in 35 years had feared prosperity would attract crime.
“It's been a great thing for those who have collected,” Uriel Nemecio, 23, the elected leader of Colonia Dendhó's 2,300 people, said of the sale of lands. “But it also awakened ambitions.
“Those who have gotten the money now have to live in fear of those who surround them,” he said. “People feel unprotected.”
Investigators insist robbery wasn't a motive for the killings, instead blaming “quarrels” between the dead women and still unnamed relatives.
But no one doubts the crime was about the land. In rural Mexico, most every conflict is rooted in the soil.
Signs of wealth
Nourished by sewage water pouring out of the Mexico City metroplex, Colonia Dendhó's corn and alfalfa fields perhaps rank among the most fertile in the country. But Dendhó's families own too little of the land to scratch more than a basic living from it.
Until December's land sales, the village was one of the many thousands of communal rural communities created with private land seized after the 1910 revolution.
Over eight decades, the parcels have been divided repeatedly among children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Those bits of land proved a godsend for the families who sold out for the refinery. Flashy new trucks and cars have replaced jalopies. The sound of hammers and saws punctuates the village air, as workmen erect new houses and build second floors and extra wings on existing ones.
But villagers worried from the outset that their good fortune could bring trouble. And trouble it has brought.
“Some were concerned about what could come of it all, the bad this could bring,” Manuel Garcia, 29, who is Aguilar's widower, said of the sudden riches. “It has brought a hurricane here.”
The day his wife died, he had dropped her off at his mother-in-law's house before noon and left to work at a nearby construction site.
“She asked if I would come for lunch, and I said I couldn't,” he said, cuddling his sleeping son on the patio of his parents' home. “We said goodbye and that was the last time I spoke to her.”
Aguilar's 10-year-old sister discovered the women when she came home from school.
Irma Garcia lay face up on the floor, her neck twisted and broken. Aguilar was sprawled across her mother's legs, a cord around her throat.
“I couldn't believe it. No one could believe it,” said Manuel Garcia, who grew up next door. “Those who have done this will have no pardon from God.”
Feeling shortchanged
The new refinery will go up less than a mile outside Colonia Dendhó, within shouting distance of the cemetery where the two women are buried. Officials say at least 10,000 workmen will pour into the Colonia Dendhó area to build the refinery, which they estimate will create some 2,000 permanent new jobs.
But if history is a guide, Colonia Dendhó's people will get few of the jobs. Even many villagers who cashed in on the refinery already mourn what will be lost.
And some see the two women's murders, regardless of who killed them, as a fearful omen of what is to come.
“When there wasn't money here, there was never this kind of problem,” said Nemecio, the village official, arguing that the farmers shortchanged themselves despite the lucrative payout. “To me, they exchanged gold for silver.”
dudley.althaus(at)chron.com |
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us