The Battle for Ciudad Mier (Chapter 9)

This is the story of a village on the border with the United States swept in silence because of a war in Tamaulipas.

By: Diego Enrique Osorno
Gatopardo

Chapter 9

Look at a map of Mexico to realize that Ciudad Mier is the dividing line between two warring groups. Reynosa (next to McAllen TX), area of influence of the CDG, is in the east, and Nuevo Laredo (next to Laredo TX), controlled by the Zetas is to the northwest. Ciudad Mier is right in the middle, so it is easy to understand why Ciudad Mier is the place where the most important battles of the drug war are taking place for control of the state of Tamaulipas.

What is hard to understand is why Ciudad Mier was abandoned by the federal government to its fate, in essence the authorities allowed it to die slowly for about nine months.

At least that is what some of the residents believe happened, they suspect that one criminal group (CDG) is waging war against another criminal group (Zetas) which is something that the government should be doing instead and they ask if this is not so, then why did the military not come in to the city permanently to establish order, as they had done previously last year on November 2, after a violent confrontation by feuding cartels that led to the exodus of virtually every resident of the city.

The Eighth Military Battalion responsible for security in the region answer this question by saying that it was impossible to do this because most of the troops were concentrated in other areas ordered from the Mexico City and Ciudad Mier was not the only place at war. A lot of the people do not believe this and argue that government was negligent in their responsibility. In their view, the military found that the logical solution was to allow the drug dealers to destroy themselves, but in doing so, incidentally, they also allowed the destruction of Ciudad Mier.

During that time of absence of protection, the dead from the war of Tamaulipas were left without even a death certificate. From February to November of 2010 there were massacres, assassinations and shootouts, but there was no news of the battles or any information or any communication from a spokesman to relate what happened or what were the causes. In the midst of the warring factions, the people in the city became just random toys left to be sacrificed, and outside of Tamaulipas very few had knowledge of what was happening. The information of the atrocities in the area was trickling in small pieces over the internet and cyber blogs.



One woman dared to video record the aftermath of the area known as La Ribereña, a road from Ciudad Mier to the town of Camargo, after a confrontation that lasted all night. Days later after the images were uploaded on to social networks and covered by blogs, did the video started to make its rounds on the front pages of national newspapers and a topic of conversation for a couple of days.

Then the silence of the news in Mier returned, the war in Tamaulipas had dead bodies everywhere, bloody blankets scattered about, burned bodies in trucks, thousands of spend casing from bullets everywhere, and military troops recorded on video by citizens who are seen combing the area from apparent signs confrontations which by the way, there are no official records of the events ever occurring, but they did occur and it was only revealed because of the camera from a cellular phone belonging to a mysterious woman.

Someday someone will tell of the heroic stories of so many brave nameless people that this war has produced in Tamaulipas, like this woman.

During that time, Ciudad Mier was not only a town without police: but it was also was a town with no schools, no banks, no stores, no doctors, and no pharmacies, because most of all services and businesses were closed for the most part of the nine months.

Truckloads of people with suitcases and bags fled the town of Cd Mier. The Archdiocese was also attempting to flee Ciudad Mier leaving the city without a priest, but, despite the order of his superiors, the local priest was the only one in Frontera Chica who refused to leave his temple during the fighting. The loneliness of Ciudad Mier was so much that the mayor only visited city hall twice a week, and the rest of the days he spent in Roma, Texas, or any other distant secure place.

In 2010 Cd Mier did not only celebrates their anniversary, there was no Easter holiday, no Mother's Day, not even the celebration of Mexico's Independence (Grito de Independencia). Life in Ciudad Mier was dying in a silent and cruel way, not until November when the official census counted only 6,117 inhabitants. It was only then when the rest of the country paid attention to the tragedy of the people, not really knowing what had happened over the past months.

The Media Factor

When the war started, he was one of the few journalists who traveled from Mexico City to Tamaulipas to see what was happening. He was a very serious as a person and even more as a reporter.

He was not one of those who decided to go in to journalism because they go looking for the same adrenaline that you get when on a roller coaster, or those who believe that wars are like what you see in Hollywood movies, or that it is a poetic subject. He had already been to Lebanon, and he knows that the battlefields are full of blood, mutilated bodies, of pain and panic, that the word "war" does not have the same meaning for a politician who uses it as a means of rhetoric as for those who are suffering in the flesh.

He was working at first without much fuss in those days of March 2010 in Reynosa, along with a cameraman for Millennium television. They did a story on the hip-hop that sings about the drug culture and the other on the Twitter account of the city government. When they tried to confirm information on the disappearances of local journalists due to the war, they encountered a convoy of armed men traveling at daylight by a central location. The gunmen rode their SUVs beside them trying to intimidate them or send them a message.

A few minutes later, a few blocks ahead they ran in to them a second time. The gunmen stopped him and his colleague, the cameraman; they put the assault rifles to their heads and chambered a round with a loud noise. They took them to a safe house where they beat them and interrogated them for hours. Before they set them free, they were warned, "Leave and tell the rest of the press not to come here to heat up our town (calentarnos la plaza)." A few minutes later the reporters left and said: "The hell with journalism; what we do serve no purpose."