Fear follows Mexicans who flee from drug war

Associated Press

FORT HANCOCK, Texas

When black SUVs trail school buses around here, no one dismisses it as routine traffic. And when three tough-looking Mexican men pace around the high-school gym during a basketball game, no one assumes they’re just fans.

Fear has settled over this border town of 1,700, about 50 miles southeast of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, epicenter of that country’s bloody drug war. Mexican families fleeing the violence have moved here or just sent their children, and authorities and residents say gangsters have followed them across the Rio Grande to apply terrifying, though so far subtle, intimidation.

The message: We know where you are.

At schools in Fort Hancock and nearby Texas towns, new security measures and counseling for young children of murdered parents have become a troubling part of the day.

“I have friends with fathers who’ve been annihilated,” said Israel Morales, a junior at Fort Hancock High School. “They just hug you and start crying. It just traumatizes you.”

He said school doesn’t always feel safe.

“I try to be stoic,” Morales said. “But it still worries the heck out of me.”

Mexican drug gangs have not fired a single shot in Fort Hancock, and no one has disappeared. But as drug violence continues unabated in and around Ciudad Juarez, residents of Texas border towns fear it will spread their way.

“There’s been incidents of school buses followed, and threats to some of the students and threats to some of the staff,” Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Lt. Robert Wilson said. “It’s caused us to really go on high alert.”

Three mysterious men walked into the Fort Hancock High School gymnasium last month during a basketball game, setting off worries they were drug cartel members sent to deliver a message. Parent Maria Aguilar said “a panic” swept through the gym and only subsided when they left.

Drug-related violence in Mexico has claimed 17,900 lives since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug gangs in December 2006.

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