| | |  Health & Beauty 
Mexico Red Cross Workers Risk Their Lives to Save Others
 Dennis Wagner - Arizona Republic
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March 08, 2010
| | Cruz Roja workers Francisco Martinez (left) and Ruben Moreno (center) and David Galvin help a rebellious man who fights with paramedics while trying to remove his jacket. (Nick Oza/The Arizona Republic) | |
Nogales, Sonora - At 6:05 a.m., the emergency call crackles over a scanner in the Mexican Red Cross ambulance station: gunshot victim.
Jose "Cache" Gomez, an ambulance driver with the agency known here as Cruz Roja, is still snoring in an upstairs bunkroom when the dispatcher whistles sharply and shouts, "Servicio!"
Gomez and three bleary-eyed medical workers jump into the ambulance, turn on the sirens and roll through the darkness on the highway just a couple of miles from Arizona's border.
They are heading toward a tough barrio that is familiar territory for cartel violence. They don helmets before swerving eastward into the hills.
No one says a word as Gomez stops next to a ramshackle home where police lights are flashing. The Red Cross workers see a man whose arm is wrapped in a bloody cloth. They strap him to a gurney and roll him into the ambulance. He pushes away paramedics trying to remove his jacket before offering up some kind of explanation for the bullet hole in his forearm: Shot for no reason at all, you see, while just walking along the road.
The ambulance screams away to Nogales General Hospital. In the emergency room, physicians and nurses work on the wound as police armed with machine guns hover nearby.
After treatment, the man sits alone in the ER, glowering at strangers, blood dripping down his tattoo-covered arm onto his feet.
Gomez and his crew return to headquarters as the city awakens. Another mission accomplished. Another gunshot victim rescued.
They gather around a space heater to trade jokes, watch TV and wait for the next shooting, the next call, the next reminder that their town is the leading combat zone in Sonora's escalating drug war.
A sign in Spanish on the wall offers mental-health advice: "To reduce stress, bang your head here."
'Que valor!'
In January, Mexican authorities reported 40 people gunned down, beheaded or otherwise eliminated in the cartels' battle for control of Nogales.
During one 24-hour period in February, six were murdered and at least that many wounded, including a municipal police commander.
The border city's population is around 200,000. Last year, the deadliest ever, police counted 136 assassinations. Mesa, with more than twice the population, reported nine killings during the same period.
It is impossible for Nogales residents to ignore the carnage or to completely avoid collateral damage. Bullets fly through neighborhoods, along thoroughfares, at hotels and in restaurants. After dark, especially, residents are accustomed to the staccato echo of assault rifles. Most residents stay off the streets, awakening each day to newspapers filled with horrible pictures.
Other than police and cartel members themselves, only one group gets so close to the combat that their hands are routinely bloodied: ambulance crews.
Most of that blood is not their own. But two weeks ago, a Cruz Roja dispatcher in Sinaloa was murdered on the job. The 20-year-old was working in a clinic where a man with a bullet wound sought treatment when a gunman barged in and opened fire, killing the wounded man as well as the dispatcher, Mexican newspapers said.
Cruz Roja teams answered 20,000 medical calls last year in Nogales, said the group's regional president, Humberto Robles Pompa.
Most of those were for illnesses and traffic accidents, where injuries resulted from misfortune. But the number of people intentionally murdered and maimed had proliferated.
"What's going on for the past few months is horrible," Robles Pompa says. "Everyone here has fears. Everyone wonders when it's going to stop.
"There is a war going on. . . . Who's winning? I don't know. Who's going against whom? What are they doing?"
Lupe Gonzalez Burcio, who supervises the ambulance crews, recently attended a meeting of Cruz Roja administrators from Sonora. Although rescue workers throughout the state have faced escalating violence, Gonzalez Burcio stood out among her peers. When she was introduced as the chief from Nogales, the room went quiet. Then a whispered exclamation from the crowd: "Que valor!"
How courageous.
Friends in the business
In the past year, Nogales has suffered from the recession and the drug wars. Tourism died in a Mexican town that relied on souvenir sales. Unemployment became so widespread that, for some, enlisting in cartel armies offered a last financial opportunity - even if it meant having to kill or be killed.
Like almost everyone in town, Cruz Roja workers acknowledge having relatives and acquaintances in the business.
"A lot of my friends were sicarios," or assassins, says Noelly Loreto. "But most of them got dead or are in jail now."
Loreto, 22, says her cousin was murdered over the previous weekend, shot four times while leaving a downtown nightclub. Two companions were wounded.
She pulls out a copy of the afternoon paper with a picture of Cruz Roja workers putting victims in an ambulance. The story identifies her cousin, 23-year-old Raúl Ernesto Tepezano, as a homicide victim.
A few days later, Cruz Roja employee Andres Burrola warns that a major battle may be imminent: A longtime acquaintance had been killed the previous evening.
"My friends called me and said, 'You know what? Jose is dead.' " Burrola says. "His nose and ears were cut. The eyes were out, and seven fingers. . . . How did he die? The pain, I think."
Over the next 48 hours, Mexican media would report at least seven men abducted, with expectations that the bodies would turn up later.
The rules for shootouts
Most of the Cruz Roja emergency workers are volunteers. The paid staffers earn about $10 a day.
By contrast, a drug courier can earn upward of $400 trekking a 40-pound load of marijuana across the border and through the Arizona desert.
Cruz Roja members put in 12-hour shifts - long periods of boredom punctuated by adrenaline-filled rushes.
"When we're sitting and waiting a long time, we say it's not good that it's quiet," Loreto says, "because then everything happens at one time."
There are strict security rules when teams respond to shootouts: Wait for police. Survive first, then deal with victims.
"When we come to the place, we're looking almost everywhere - all around," says Burrola, an ambulance driver with 17 years experience, describing a recent scene where men with AK-47s struck at a nearby restaurant. "Before I stop, I need to be sure the area is safe. That is the most important thing to know. Later, you can give first aid. . . .
"The first person I see is not dead. He's only wounded. Another ambulance picks him up. The second person is dead. He has seven bullet wounds. . . . It is so surprising to see the face of that person still afraid. But I think anyone who has a gunshot is scared."
Sonoran newspapers pin the violence mainly on two cartel armies that previously divided Nogales along the railroad tracks: The Beltran Leyva syndicate owned one side; Chapo Guzman's gang claimed the other. Over the past two years, amid a crackdown by Mexican authorities and increased U.S. border security, an uneasy truce collapsed.
Today, some Cruz Roja workers believe a third or more of the shooting victims are innocent bystanders.
Burrola is skeptical. He says most of the killers are ex-soldiers and former cops. "These people know how to shoot and who they need to shoot," he says.
In seven years of answering emergency calls, ambulance driver Gregorio Galván says he has treated and transported hundreds of gunshot victims. He also spent two years working in a morgue, dealing with corpses.
So Galván figured he was numb to the drug violence - until earlier this year, when he was confronted at the barrel end of a gun.
A gunman leaped from a vehicle outside the Cruz Roja station, put a pistol to Galván's chest and ordered him to stop saving the lives of rival gangsters.
Galván, who is frequently pictured in local media assisting crime-scene victims, says he kept his mouth shut: "They saw me in the newspaper every day. They knew my face and didn't want me helping people," he recalls. "They're crazy. I couldn't say anything."
Galván faces reminders of the peril every day. Returning to Cruz Roja's base after delivering an accident victim to the hospital, he offers a tour of Nogales: "At this restaurant, one man was killed, and three were shot. On that corner, another man was killed, and several were wounded. In front of that store, I don't remember how many died."
Saving themselves
Although none of the 55 staffers at Cruz Roja has been shot, most admit to internal wounds.
Cartel violence has left blood and bodies strewn across their town, their home. They understand the risk each time. They insulate themselves from trauma with camaraderie, denial and professional detachment. The reward that comes from saving lives is a salve for their wounded psyches.
Rubén Moreno, a 22-year-old volunteer, recalls his ambivalence after working a recent homicide scene: "When I got there, I saw the body. He already had a plastic bag over him. His arms were tied and his legs. He had gunshot wounds to the belly and head. . . . I didn't feel very much, so I think there's something wrong with me. But if you get emotional, then you'll be going, 'Oh, my God!' every time."
'In our blood'
An emergency call squawks over the radio. Galván and his crew take off in an ambulance equipped with few medical supplies other than a neck brace, iodine and bandages.
They zigzag through traffic-jammed city streets at 50 mph, sirens blaring, then bounce onto dirt roads twisting into hillside neighborhoods. With no GPS or map as a guide, Galván screeches to a halt occasionally, yelling out to pedestrians for directions before zooming ahead.
Finally, he pulls alongside a man sprawled by the road with blood flowing from his head. A pedestrian struck by a vehicle. The wound is bandaged. Vitals are taken. The man vomits as he is placed on a gurney and is rolled into the ambulance, where he is joined by his elderly mother.
Wherever an ambulance stops, neighbors gather and gawk, wondering if there has been another shootout. "When the people see us and hear us now, their faces get tight," Galván would say later. "Do you know what it's called? Paranoia."
The ambulance takes off. In back, the man loses consciousness. Perla Pacheco Lizarraga, a 19-year-old Cruz Roja volunteer, begins CPR as the mother cries out: "Oh, my God, René, I am here. Oh, my God. Please wake up, René."
The man is brought to General Hospital. Galván wheels him inside the ER, where doctors and nurses take over. His job is done.
Back at Cruz Roja headquarters, Galván says it doesn't matter whether a person gets hit by a car or a bullet: His mission is to save lives. Even after being threatened at gunpoint, he keeps going to shootout scenes, keeps rescuing cartel combatants.
"I have to help them," he says, shrugging. "It's part of my life. . . . We have it in our blood. It's beautiful work to help people, but it comes with risks." |
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