“There is where I saw Esmeralda,” said Elenita as she pointed to the landing on the stairs between the first and second floors. “I knew that she was dying.”
I’m in the squalid Hotel Rio Escondido in Juárez, Mexico, with Elenita Porras, the founder of Reto a la Juventud, a program that helps girls who have been living on the streets rebuild their lives. It is July 28 and she is showing me this horrible hotel from which she has rescued so many girls.
Only a few hours earlier, I had walked across the bridge from El Paso to Juárez, a nervous walk because there was no one else headed from the United States into Mexico. Yes, there was a line of perhaps 1,000 people waiting to go through Customs and enter the United States, plus some 300 cars. But no one else was headed into Juárez.
No wonder. It is estimated that there were 2,663 homicides in Juárez in 2009, more than the combined total for New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, Baltimore and New Orleans. As I walked into the center of Juárez, pickup trucks in pairs circled the streets, four soldiers in the back of each truck with heavy weapons and masks. What I soon found, however, was an uplifting story that no one hears about. Elenita was the first of three chapters.
“That day I found Esmeralda was about 30 years ago,” Elenita continues. “For several years I had been working to help young girls with problems of drugs and prostitution, but I was very discouraged and thinking of quitting,” She then describes how she passed Esmeralda and continued up to the third floor where she found another girl she had worked with. This girl, high on drugs, ridiculed her and said she’d rather stay on drugs and in the hotel than go into rehabilitation. For some reason, that made Elenita realize that this was her mission.
“In that filthy place, the presence of the Lord was there,” she says. “I decided that I would help these young girls until the end of my life and I thanked this girl for helping me to see this.” Then she went back down the stairs, found Esmeralda, and took her to the hospital.
Earlier, Elenita and her granddaughter, Lillian, had driven me about a half-hour south of Juárez to see Reto a la Juventud, the rehabilitation center that she was a leader in building and maintaining.
The girls go through a nine-month program with counseling, workshops and vocational training in areas like computers, hair styling, cooking and making handcrafts. Some are so deprived and abused that they have to learn the simplest things like how to take a bath or make a bed. Counseling is also provided.
Many of them hate themselves and hate authority. “It’s the presence of God only that can change that,” Elenita says.
In the last 35 years, 700 girls have gone through the program.
When I asked her about going into the Hotel Rio Escondido, she said, “I know all of the worst places. That’s where I go to find these girls.” On my own, I wouldn’t have dared enter, but with her I felt safe.
I then met a young man named Leo Enriquez, who is a leader in a small church called Manantial de Vida, and he drove me out to see their pastor, Juan Aguilar. Recently, the church had organized a summer school program for 240 children in this grim impoverished barrio where there are no government programs for anyone.
My third meeting was with Jose Manuel Mascareñas, president of Fundacion Mascareñas, a scholarship program for talented students from all over Mexico. It was founded in Juárez in 1988 and has 60 students on scholarship at any one time. Mascareñas talks about the structural problems plaguing this area — corruption, isolation from a very centralized government located far away in Mexico City, no social programs, poorly prepared teachers, a maquiladora system that was initiated without any infrastructure. Yet, there are more NGOs in Juárez than anyplace else in Mexico, he says. Individuals here are trying to help, often at great personal risk.
That evening, as I walked past the addicts gathered on the Mexican side and crossed over the bridge to El Paso, I realized that I was returning to a United States where we argue and argue but not much gets accomplished, even on problems that we should be taking seriously, like drugs and immigration.
On the Mexican side, there are terrible things like cartels, sicarios (gunmen), atrocities and corruption. But there are also genuine heroes who take enormous risks to improve their societies. In Elenita, Leo and Jose Manuel, I met three of them.
Morgan Smith (morgan-smith@ ) is a former member of the Colorado House of Representatives, state commissioner of agriculture, and director of the Colorado International Trade Office. He travels extensively in Mexico and Latin America.
Reto a la Juventud can be reached at retoalajuventud@gmail.com.
