Talks start today in no-knock death

SAN FELIPE JESUS DE LAS CASAS BLANCAS, Mexico – Ismael Mena’s three-room adobe house gives shelter from hot wind.

Nine children once chattered by flowers in the courtyard
where, today, their 80-year-old grandmother putters alone.

An adjoining stable Mena built for his beloved red horse sits
empty; the saddle gathers dust. His cornfield fights weeds.

The 14-acre farm here was Mena’s dream.

To keep it alive – traditional lifestyles are dwindling as
Mexico goes modern – Mena had to toil in the United States for
much of his life. Most recently, he worked the night shift for
Coca-Cola in a graffiti-splotched north Denver neighborhood where
drug deals are done. He fixed wooden pallets. He lifted hundreds
of red plastic crates, each packed with eight 2-liter plastic
bottles of Coke, and hoisted them into red trucks.

The money he sent home sustained his wife and seven children
on the farm. Two older sons had moved to work in Los Angeles.

Now Mena’s dead. Denver police shot the 45-year-old migrant
mistakenly in a botched no-knock drug raid last fall; they went to
the wrong house. Once a policeman in Mexico, Mena had been
sleeping off his night shift.

Five months later, Mena’s family is torn. Without him
working, Maria del Carmen saw fit to sell his 10 cows, one mule
and the horse. She has moved the children in with her parents 5
miles closer to the nearby town of San Julian and the doctor her
diabetic son needs.

“We are wondering how we will live,” she said.

Today, negotiations for wrongful-death compensation begin in
Denver, where Maria, eldest son Heriberto, and attorney Robert
Maes, referred by the Mexican government, square off against
Denver’s legal team.

The city’s offer – $150,000 – falls short of the $5.5 million
Maes seeks for the family. Former federal Judge James Carrigan is
to guide arbitration today.

The only reason Maria didn’t sell her husband’s land, too, is
that Mena’s mother, Dona Julia, absolutely refuses to leave it.
While water trickled from a tap into buckets, Julia conjured
images of Ismael talking to his cows as he milked them.

“Why did they have to kill my son? I loved him so,” she said,
drawing a black shawl across her wrinkled face. If she left the
farm, Dona Julia said, “everything would be over. It would all
fall down. That’s why I don’t want to go.”

Meantime, Ismael’s 20-year-old daughter, Rosalilia, is in
charge of the children surviving here on beans and tortillas,
cooked over a wood fire in an adobe house with no bathroom. Ismael
Jr., 17, injects himself each morning with insulin. Rosalilia’s
twin, Rosaelia, cradles Mena’s 1-year-old grandson, also named
after him, whom he never saw.

Little Maria del Carmen, 8, and Alejandro, 11, attend a small
rural school; no secondary school is reachable for Juanita, 11,
Irene, 14, and the others. The younger children grasped that their
father was dead when they saw his body at the funeral. Now they
treasure his clothes.

“We try not to talk about it too much,” Rosalilia said.
“Thinking about their father makes them feel very bad.”

The pastoral lifestyle Mena preferred to modern city life is
also a dream for thousands of other migrant workers in the United
States. For lack of money as Mexico modernizes, they travel north,
sometimes at great risk, to fill proliferating U.S. jobs that pay
$8 an hour or less. Our humming economy depends on their labor.
U.S. big business is lobbying Congress to allow more migrant
workers, especially those with basic skills, lest labor shortages
force up wages.

Yet rather than settle in the United States, many like Mena
work solely to build up what’s theirs back in Mexico, using their
savings to expand rural houses and herds. Here in rugged
6,000-feet-high eastern Jalisco, electricity lines installed
around 1993 and telephones more recently raise the possibility of
comfortable rural living.

For one fleeting moment in 1997, Maria del Carmen said, she
felt Mena had achieved his Mexican dream. Water holes were full.
Green maize shoots poked up from the field. Mena strode proudly
from the adobe house to the field. “I was walking with him. We
were walking with all the children too.”

She wanted that togetherness every day.

“I’d tell him: “Come back and live with your brother and
sisters and horses,'” Maria del Carmen said. “He’d say he’d come
back when he got some more money.”

His mother Julia said she regularly reminded him: “Save the
money. Send it to Mexico. Or bring it. So that you can stay here
and not have to leave so much.”

Mena was born during hard times. His father moved from the
town of San Miguel across what is called “El Canon” to a mesa.
Drought soon drove the family away again to the current farm near
the stone church and a dozen or so homes that together are known
as San Felipe Jesus de las Casas Blancas.

They sold a little maize.

Mena loved horses, his brother Salvador, 58, said in the
dirt-floor house where he lives nearby. “Charro” horsemen are
local heros to this day.

School for Mena lasted only a few years. Work beckoned. At 18,
he left Mexico, crossing to Arizona, where he drove a tractor.

Back from that first stint abroad, he was playing soccer one
day when Maria del Carmen and friends stopped to watch. He
remembered her. A few weeks later at a fiesta nearby in Jalpa, he
approached. “He said: “I want you to be my girlfriend,'” Maria del
Carmen recalled. “I said: “Yes.'”

They married. “He wanted a family.”

To that end, Mena moved north again – the migration that would
repeat itself again and again over nearly three decades. In the
United States he worked as a meatpacker, cook, busboy while she
raised their babies. Family photos show Mena working at one
restaurant in California. He wore a clean white shirt with black
bow tie and cap. He tended bar, washed dishes in the kitchen,
wiped tables and, after closing time, swept the floors.

When he returned to Mexico, his children said, he brought them
presents: bicycles, dolls, a tape deck. Once he brought a
television. The kids spend hours watching a wide commercial world
from the countryside here.

The children especially remember his way with horses. “He
could make one lie down, and then he’d motion and it would get
up,” Rosalilia said.

Ismael Jr. recalled: “He would say “Never hit an animal. Talk
with them, chat. Feed them well. And stroke them.'”

He also worked on roads. Once, his brother Salvador said, he
cracked a rib trying to pry loose a rock. For days he wheezed.

Unable to work on his farm, he arranged to serve as policeman
in the sleepy town of San Diego de Alejandria. A family photo
shows Mena standing with a pistol tucked into the waist of his
trousers. Six months later, he turned in the pistol and the
bullets. “He thought police work might be dangerous,” Salvador
said. “He wanted to get back to the ranch.”

Yet to buy animals, Mena had to migrate, carrying a crinkled
Virgen de Guadalupe prayer card in his wallet.

Mena left last in August 1997. He worked for a beef company in
Idaho, earning more than $18,000 in 1998, according to records
attorney Maes collected.

Last year he moved to Colorado, staying first with cousins in
Fort Lupton, cleaning apartments and landscaping.

He moved into Denver as pressure mounted back home: Ismael Jr.
had collapsed. Maria del Carmen and her parents hauled him to San
Julian. “He was almost in a coma,” said Dr. Ismael Macias, who
gave basic treatment and then sent the boy to a hospital in
Guadalajara. He lay for 15 days on intravenous fluid. The final
diagnosis is that “his pancreas does not work at all,” Macias
said. He needs insulin daily.

Mena began building up savings when he landed what his son
Heriberto described as a $300-a-week job at the Coca-Cola bottling
plant.

Heriberto recalled their last telephone conversation: “It was
difficult for him to sleep at day. But he was happy with this
work,” said Heriberto, a restaurant worker in Los Angeles.

Mena also “asked about the family. He said he was going back
to Mexico this year.”

Coca-Cola managers said they were preparing Mena to drive
forklifts.

At daybreak, Mena would walk two blocks past public housing
and an alley where dealers and junkies would hang out. He’d climb
the 15 stairs in the house at 3738 High St. where he rented an
8-by-8-foot room. The window looked out on the Coca-Cola plant and
a round brick smokestack in the distance. And he’d sleep.

Penciled Xs still mark the spot where bullets pierced walls
in Mena’s room during the midday raid on Sept. 29. A
Spanish-speaking little girl from another family now sleeps there.

Mena was sleeping when police burst in.

They’d been paying an informant who once used drugs to make
undercover purchases in the area. Based on his information, they
secured a no-knock warrant for the two-story house where Mena
lived. The informant apparently got mixed up.

Police said they shouted “Police!” and “Policia!” as they
entered. They pinned down Antonio Hernandez in the room next to
Mena’s.

Earlier in September, police apparently had confiscated a gun
Mena was carrying illegally. They say he had another one on Sept.
29, a Burgo .22 – untraceable so far – and that, despite their
warnings, he fired three shots.

Police fired too. Eight bullets tore into Mena’s face, chest
and arms. He died at the scene. Here in Mexico, his sister Maria
de Jesus figured he had the gun “for his protection” in a
dangerous big city.

The shooting was “a violation of basic human rights,” Dr.
Macias contends.

“Police shouldn’t be able to do things like this,” Mena’s
brother Salvador said.

“Who fired first?” nephew Sergio, 26, wanted to know.

Sergio feels the “indignity” acutely. When he was headed to
the United States for work in 1992, his mother Maria de Jesus told
him to go with her brother. The men crossed near Tijuana. Though
Mena knew the way well, he hired a “coyote” guide for $800, Sergio
said. “He wanted to be more sure we’d make it because of me.” In
tense moments crossing, Sergio recalled, Mena encouraged him.

“He said: “We’re going to go work … We’ll go and earn a
whole lot.'”

Today the farming lifestyle Mena loved is generally
threatened. His relatives hanging on here still contend “nothing’s
better.”

At night, cattle low amid nopal cactuses, dogs howl, and
constellations light the sky: Virgen de San Juan in the north,
Ojos de Santa Lucia overhead, and the Cruz de Mayo to the south.

But shoe factories run by transnational companies are the
focus of economic action in the region. Small farming in Mexico
“doesn’t work economically,” said Dr. Macias The land is too poor
and there’s not enough water, he said. “It doesn’t pay. Fertilizer
costs. Seeds cost.”

Dr. Macias worries that Mena’s children still are “suffering
a lot.” He and others advise Maria del Carmen to move into San
Julian so her children can salvage some education. Then they could
work in small business.

Maria del Carmen has a sewing machine. With money from Denver,
she said, she might afford a house. Living in San Julian would
cost about $1,000 a month, she figured. Rosalilia says she’s
interested in designing clothes. She wants to make up the school
she’s missed over the last eight years.

“I’d say it would be justice to help my brothers and sisters
with their studies. Because my father can’t help us. We don’t have
any help.”

The decision to sell off the animals was painful, Maria del
Carmen said, and if immigration papers were available she’d
consider leaving Mexico altogether and moving to the United States.

“It’s over,” she said of the farm. Yet nobody’s ready to
really accept that, least of all Dona Julia.

In Mena’s empty stable, she tried to fix his bridles and
lassos. She nailed a stirrup on the wall above a crucifix and
broken television.

She envisions everybody back in the house. “Como antes,” she
said. “Like before.”

Money from Denver might help at least fix up the farm,
“starting with Ismael’s room,” she suggested. She envisions white
paint on the walls, a tiled floor “not cement,” a new door, with a
tractor and little cow outside.

The last time she spoke with Ismael, “he told me, “You know, I
love you too much.’ I cried,” she said, crying again.

“He told me: “Don’t cry. When you think about me, just make a quick prayer. Nothing more.'”