Held to answer

Thousands of Mexican girls and women have disappeared into the deserts outside Ciudad Juárez, and it’s Bill Clinton’s fault.

Nobody actually says so in Isaac Gomez’s play, “La Ruta,” being staged by Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre. But the play links the murders of thousands of girls and young women in Juárez to the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed into law by President Clinton in 1993.

NAFTA allowed American companies to open factories in Mexico, produce goods with cheap foreign labor, then sell the products to Americans. The city of Juárez, only eight miles from El Paso, Texas became a hellish landscape of factories or maquiladoras run by corporations like General Electric. Mexico’s poor flocked to Juárez for jobs assembling TVs, sewing shirts, etc. Since the city was so close to the border there was also the lure of pursuing the alleged American dream.

“La Ruta” refers to the bus route between home and factory.  The Director’s Note from Dámaso Rodriguez in the playbill lays it out: “The U.S. companies that own these factories and employ these workers and the local authorities responsible for their safety, have failed to end this senseless violence, nor have they handed justice to the perpetrators.”

The true killers – who sexually brutalize and torture these girls and women before dumping their bodies – are given a pass. “La Ruta” is an all-female cast. The only men in this world are referred to in the third person.

As the play begins, it’s July 4, 1998. Get it? Later, as the play skips back and forth in time, there are references to fireworks and celebrations in honor of Independence Day.

“Whose independence?” asks the mother of a missing girl. “Not mine.”

La Ruta centers on two mothers – Marisela, whose daughter Rubi has been missing for a couple of years, and Yolanda, whose 16-year-old daughter Brenda fails to come home from her factory job. In the opening scene, Marisela and Yolanda wait for the bus to arrive with her. The bus arrives. There is no Brenda.

The mothers wait for a second bus. When Brenda fails to appear, the mothers run from the stage, one of them shrieking, “I’ll call the police!”

We only see Brenda in hindsight – including happier scenes with her mother and her first day on the job at a sewing factory, where she works with a group of other young women, including Ivonne. Portrayed by Naiya Amilcar, Ivonne exudes a conniving amiability as she shows Brenda around. Another co-worker, Zaide, accuses Ivonne of having something to do with the women who have disappeared from the factory.

It will turn out that she likely has something to do with Brenda’s disappearance. But we are led to feel sorry for Ivonne in a scene where she throws herself on the ground in a cemetery and desperately counts her rosary beads.

Artists Repertory Theatre prides itself on being provocative. There is nothing provocative about “La Ruta.” The route that leads these girls and young women to their deaths is an old story. The anguish of their mothers not knowing what happened to their daughters can be found in history and on the news. (Remember the Nigerian school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram and First Lady Michelle Obama holding a sign with the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls?)

Still, the Portland production of “La Ruta” has received significant praise from the Portland Mercury and Willamette Week. The latter’s review, in particular, cited the actors performing in the major roles. But it’s Patricia Alvitez’s fierce portrayal as Zaide in a smaller role that commands attention. She’s the factory worker who confronts Ivonne and pointedly connects her to the crimes.

Give the Zaides of the world guns and teach them how to shoot. See if the death tally changes. (Where is the NRA when you really need them?)

In his Director’s Note, Rodriguez expands on the political message and hints at Donald Trump: “The dehumanization of Mexican asylum seekers and immigrants has been central to the political discourse around immigration.”

Rodriguez wants the audience to learn more about the situation in Ciudad Juarez. OK, here’s what I’ve learned. Thousands of men also died in the same time period. Men and women are still dying. While violent crime has occasionally dipped in Juarez, it’s one of the most violent cities in the world (as are several Mexican and South American cities).

The problem isn’t men. It’s a lack of law and order. In the late 1990s when “La Ruta” takes place, police barely existed in Juárez.

Journalist Sam Quinones visited Juarez a dozen times over the years. In a National Geographic story three years ago, he wrote about the hopes of poor Mexicans, how they came to Juárez to find what they couldn’t get in their hometowns – a solid house, a used car, a steady job. The city filled with family businesses, beauty parlors, upholstery shops.

Growth was chaotic. Quinones described Juárez as a city with more billboards than trees.

“As with all Mexican cities, its tax revenue went to Mexico City. Not much came back. Police officers rationed gasoline and bullets…,” Quinones writes. “As rural people became an industrial workforce, family ties withered. Thousands of kids grew up in the streets. Gangs multiplied into the hundreds. The Juárez cartel formed to control the main drug-smuggling routes. Lawlessness became commonplace.”

Initially, Quinones had come to Juárez in the 1990s to write about the dead women of Juárez.

“Most factory workers were women who arrived without family, making them especially vulnerable. Many bodies were dumped in the desert, where the heat mummified them into anonymity. With killers facing no consequences, the deaths multiplied.”

During the 2008 recession in the U.S., Juárez lost 90,000 jobs.

“The Sinaloa cartel moved in to try to wrest control of the drug routes from the Juárez cartel. Both groups began deploying the city’s street gangs in a vicious battle. For five years violence engulfed the city.”

Kidnappings for ransom became epidemic. Quinones interviewed Ines Montenegro, a man who counted five families on his street who had loved ones kidnapped – including his own. Montenegro had to borrow money to pay the ransom on his youngest son.

“When he’d almost finished paying back the loan, his son was kidnapped again…,” Quinones writes. “By 2010 Juárez authorities estimated that some 8,000 businesses were being extorted.”

Many crimes went uninvestigated and unpunished. Finally, a new state attorney general ordered state police to create an anti-extortion squad. The squad went door-to-door in Juárez, urging business owners to report extortionists.

The squad got their first call from a baker. Extortionists demanded $5,000, or they would burn down his business. The extortionists turned out to be a housewife, a factory worker, and two tire-shop employees.

When Quinones first visited Juárez, the city morgue didn’t even have a forensic lab. Alejandro Cárdenas came to work there in 2002 and was asked to identify leathery corpses shrunken by the desert sun.

Through much experimentation, Cárdenas created a chemical bath that over a few days could transform a mummified body into someone identifiable.

“The rehydrating solution Cárdenas concocted is among the unheralded changes that helped pull the city from its nightmare. … From this chemical treatment emerged faces, tattoos, moles, scars, birthmarks, even tan lines. His invention has helped foil criminals who had relied on the desert to shroud their murders, as so many were doing in the years when hundreds of women were being killed. ‘Now if they do that,’ he says, ‘we have ways of finding them,’” Quinones writes.

Another man who made a difference was Julián Leyzaola. When he took over as police chief he found “about 300 officers out of 2,500 who were really working.” The others just showed up for a paycheck. He required officers to patrol the streets and to confront and pursue offenders. Civil rights activists criticized his methods. He did not apologize.

Two months after Quinones interviewed Leyzaola, he was shot and left paralyzed.

These are all facts. They are not the art of a playwright. If the intent of “La Ruta” is to rouse people to take action, then facts are needed to find the right solution.

One of the mothers in “La Ruta” likes to collect good questions. She especially likes “What if God was one of us?”

If God is a female factory worker in Juárez, that might explain why the situation in “La Ruta” seems hopeless. This god is smearing clown paint on her face and taking to the streets to protest: “Ni Una Más” (Not one more!)

Fortunately, mere mortals can fight back – as Cárdenas and Leyzaola have shown. There aren’t enough of them, and their work is not supported by politicians – or playwrights.

As for NAFTA — the villain of “La Ruta” — the American president who pushed for NAFTA is married to the woman who gave us “the Hillary Doctrine” when she was Secretary of State. As she described it at a TED conference in 2010, “I have made it clear that the rights and the roles of women and girls will be a central tenet of American foreign policy, because where girls and women flourish, our values are also reflected.”

How did this translate to reality? The Hillary Doctrine merged dreams of poor Mexicans with Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart and Exxon by giving women micro-loans to become entrepreneurs and generate income for themselves – or at least buy cell phones.

Had Hillary Clinton become president, would Juárez be a safer place today for women? Well, when Barack Obama was running for president he denounced NAFTA. After he got elected, he moved on to other things – including support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty to extend NAFTA-like rules to Pacific Rim countries. The election of Trump quashed the TPP.

These are probably not the takeaways the playwright and director of “La Ruta” intended.

More than anything, this play is a reminder of the limits of artists when it comes to evil. It’s easier to point to evil than actually fight it.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons