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Mexico drug war displaces families in sinaloa highlands by 123wert sdfsf
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Mexico drug war displaces families in sinaloa highlands |
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Business,Business News,Business Opportunities
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CULIACAN, Mexico — For generations, the extended Hernandez family tendedfields of marijuana high in Sinaloa's western Sierra Madrehighlands. They sold their crops to representatives of the Sinaloa cartel fora fraction of what the drug would bring at the U.S. border and ekedout a pittance. Barefoot children never went to school; they just helped their dadswith the planting and harvest. Women washed clothes in the river.They burned pine sap for light at night because there was noelectricity.
But a couple of weeks ago, the fighting that has raged as the Zetaparamilitary force tries to encroach on the Sinaloa cartel's turfreached the string of ranchitos where the Hernandezes and scores of other families farmed. In a single day, the new bad guys in town killed five members ofthe Hernandez clan. A couple of days later, five more. "We knew we had to run," said one of the women, Consuelo. "Webarely had time to bury the dead." The Hernandez clan of four adults and 15 children ages eight monthsto 17 years piled into a pickup truck and drove for days to hidehere in Culiacan, the state capital.
As they fled, they grabbedfour frying pans and a branding iron and left behind crops, cowsand chickens. All are crowded now into a windowless and abandoned two-roomconcrete house on the southern edge of the city. They are among at least 1,500 families, some with 10 or 15 memberseach, who have been displaced in the last month by fighting in thepot- and poppy-growing Sinaloa hinterlands alone. Nationwide, according to a recent study, drug war violence drove atleast 160,000 Mexicans from their homes in 2011, a displacedpopulation that the government largely refuses to acknowledge.
The study by the Norwegian Refugee Council, which has observedconflicts all over the world, was released in April. It says Mexicoin 2011 saw a 33% increase from 2010 in the number of "internallydisplaced" people. The government of President Felipe Calderon has been slow to recognize the problem and adopt internationallyrecognized ways to deal with it, United Nations officials say. Reluctantly, the state government of Sinaloa began counting itsdisplaced in May.
Gov. Mario Lopez Valdez traveled to the battle zone between the Sinaloa cartel andthe Zetas, today a string of veritable ghost towns. He announced hewould deploy more troops to "restore security," not exactly thecure sought by many of the hiding farmers. For them, more men withguns only seem to exacerbate the problem.
The governor reached the zone by helicopter; a group of reporterstraveling to the event by land were intercepted and turned back bydrug traffickers who control the roads with their own checkpoints. In an interview, Sinaloa state prosecutor Marco Antonio Higuerasought to downplay the problem, saying people flee for manyreasons. He also seemed to suggest that the displaced shared atleast part of the blame for their plight because they coexisted andcooperated with traffickers for so many decades. "The custom was not to denounce the presence of armed gangs,"Higuera said.
"They never imagined the monster would turn on them." The entry of the Zetas to the drug-producing Sierra Madrehighlands, part of a cataclysmic battle with the Sinaloa cartel tobecome the last gang standing, radically altered a long-sustainedand tolerated way of life. Consuelo and the rest of the Hernandezes have known nothing else.Families in the Sierra Madre worked together, intermarried,supported one another. There was no education or healthcareanywhere near. Only some of the older men can read and write.Children can't do math but know how to separate the seeds from themarijuana plants to boost their value. In the last days of April, the Hernandez family heard of newly arrived gunmen who wereterrorizing their neighbors.
Then, one afternoon last month,someone brought Consuelo the burned chunks of a human body —a not-so-subtle message. It was hard to imagine that a drug war that has raged in otherparts of Mexico was finally arriving at their ranchitos , Consuelo thought. "People told us we could not live there anymore," said the35-year-old mother of seven, a compact woman with curly hair andshort, thick arms who had her first baby at 14. "The evil peoplewere taking over." When 10 relatives were killed in two days, the Hernandez familyknew it was time to flee. The women gathered up clothes still wetfrom the river, a fistful of kitchen utensils and the children, andpiled into a pickup truck.
It took three days of precarious travel through uncertaincountryside to reach this capital, about 200 miles away. Wrenched from their livelihood, they now pass listless days in theabandoned house, without beds or chairs or a future. They have no way to earn a living, nor is there a system in placethat might give them donated food, or put the kids in school. "What will we do here?" Consuelo asked.
"How will we live?" wilkinson@latimes.com. I am a professional writer from Hot Water Bottles, which contains a great deal of information about sippy cup valves , sippy cup valve, welcome to visit!
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