Yesterday, the University of Oregon won a football game in El Paso, TX. The Ducks (whose myriad uniform combinations make them look like the clown princes of Division I) rolled South Florida 56-21 in the Sun Bowl, a game really only of importance if you live in the Willamette Valley or in Tampa/St.Pete. Three days from now, no one will care nor remember who won the game, where it was played, or what the score was. The Sun Bowl is merely one of 32 largely meaningless college bowl games that will change nothing and count for even less.
If you’ve ever driven east through El Paso on I-10, you know that you have only to look a few yards to the right ot see the Third World, right there maybe 50 yards away just beyond the fence and in our backyard. The contrast couldn’t be more stark. On the El Paso side, you have wealth and prosperity. Just a few yards away in Ciudad Juarez is abject poverty, a dearth of opportunity, and a dark force that threatens the safety and even the lives of Mexican men and women from all walks of life.
The Oregonian’s John Canzano does a phenomenal job of putting a meaningless football in El Paso into proper perspective. While the Ducks were sending those of their fans who’d made the long journey to El Paso away happy, women in Ciudad Juarez exist in a world in which their lives are devalued almost to the point of being worthless. As if this weren’t tragedy enough, random, seemingly indiscriminate murder of innocent Mexican men and women perpetrated by narcotraficantes continues unabated.
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - For a couple of bucks you can get a soda and a pile of steak tacos for lunch here. And for 50 cents, you can buy a small bag of citrus fruit. And for $20 you can get cheap dental work here, or a tattoo, or buy a bottle of tequila, or visit a brothel.
But what’s the value of life in Mexico?
Forget that Oregon and the University of South Florida will play in a football bowl game a few miles from this Mexican bordertown today. And that more than 50,000 tickets will be sold. And that a national television network will cover the game, dissecting everything that happens.
While all of this is going on, across the border in Juarez, women will live in fear. They’ll leave for work in the early-morning dark, working the first of a six-day work week, on their way to the American-owned factories, called maquiladoras. They’ll do this knowing that 570 women just like them have been kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered since 1993, many while making the same walk.
Meanwhile, authorities here will offer no solutions, despite 4,000 women who have been reported missing in the last two decades.
And men with shovels will spend the final day of 2007 by digging up a few more of the 1,200 unidentified bodies that were buried here over the last 16 years, many believed to be the work of drug cartels and gangs. And city officials and police won’t say a word about why they allowed so many unsolved homicide cases to pile up.
Consider these realities, and somehow a college football game seems pretty meaningless, especially when the carnage that occurs frequently and regularly takes place just a few short miles from the stadium where the Sun Bowl was played. Kinda puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Both schools, and 50,000 fans, scattered to the four winds after the game, while just over the border it’s another world. Literally.
It would seem that life is indeed rather cheap in Mexico. It’s apparently worth about as much as a college football game in El Paso, just a few miles and a border fence away. Making matters worse is that Mexican authorities seem disinclined to do the heavy lifting required to have a positive impact. After all, what’s a Mexican life worth these days? Not nearly as much as you might have hoped.
