In Mexico, War on Drug Cartels Takes Wider Toll

Norberto Ramírez said he was beaten and tortured last May by Mexican soldiers targeting drug traffickers and assassins in his remote village of Nocupetaro, and ruined by the ensuing medical bills. (By Manuel Roig-franzia -- The Washington Post)
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The night the soldiers were killed, Ramírez, a wiry father of five with sad, sunken eyes, had gone to bed in his three-story concrete house in Caracuaro, a small town outside Nocupetaro. He had built the house himself with money earned during 27 years of migrant labor -- building highways in Texas, driving forklifts in Indiana, packing perfume in New Jersey.

In November 2006, tired of the months away from home, he said, he began buying cars in the United States for resale in Mexico. Just two days before the hooded soldiers roused him from sleep last May, he had cleared $500 on a 1990 Chevrolet Cheyenne pickup.

"You're coming with us," he recalled the soldiers telling him.

After taking his money, Ramírez said, the soldiers drove him to La Estrellita bar on the edge of Nocupetaro. They pounded his stomach and back with their rifles, placed his head inside the plastic sacks and jabbed him with electric cattle prods, he said. All along, he said, he told them he knew nothing about the ambush.

At the same time that Ramírez says he was being tortured, García Galindo, the mayor, said he counted at least 300 soldiers in the village. The national human rights commission report said villagers described seeing men tied to posts and "asphyxiated by being submerged in basins of water," accounts corroborated in interviews conducted here recently.

García Galindo, an articulate entrepreneur who owns a water purification plant, was overwhelmed. His police chief had only an elementary school education, no law enforcement experience and had been a migrant laborer until just before he took office. The village judge was the dentist.

With no sense of his legal options and the army in the village streets, García Galindo said, he started calling government agencies.

No one returned his calls.

A Life Demolished

Ramírez said he was taken to a military prison where he was held for several days, then released without charge.

He returned home doubled over in pain, he said. Medical exams, the results of which he provided during an interview, showed severe damage to his liver and intestines. He underwent surgery but was hospitalized again later because of complications.

Each day, it seemed, a new bill arrived. The receipts are stuffed in two backpacks: $300 for medicine on Sept. 4; $450 on Sept. 5; $1,500 on Sept. 8. There are months' worth of them. Unable to keep up, Ramírez sold his little rental house in December. It was to have been the future home of his 12-year-old son, Heriberto Ramírez.

Soon, he said, he plans to leave because he cannot find work. But the green card that allowed him to work in the United States was taken by soldiers, he said, and he doubts he will be able to secure a new one.

If he cannot, Ramírez said, he has another plan. He'll jump into the Rio Grande and swim.