DPA/New York
A former Mexican police chief seeking asylum in the US spoke out against the ineffective methods used to fight drug trafficking in her country, after a play based on her life story premiered last week in New York.
Marisol Valles Garcia, who took up the fight against drugs and violence in 2008 in her small town on the US border, spoke to reporters to bring attention to the severity of drug-related violence in Mexico and the plight of Mexican refugees seeking US asylum.
Valles Garcia, the so-called “bravest woman in Mexico,” became police chief at age 20 after her predecessor had been beheaded. She started fighting drug cartels through unconventional methods such as community-building and crime prevention programmes.
Soon, Valles Garcia began receiving death threats and had to flee with her family to the US, where she is currently awaiting an asylum hearing.
“I don’t see any change, and I have been here for two years now,” Valles Garcia said through an interpreter. “I am aware of the continued violence and horror that exists in the country of Mexico.”
Carlos Specter, Valles Garcia’s lawyer and founder of the non-profit Mexicanos en Exilio (Mexicans in Exile), said the play highlights the urgency of the fight against Mexico’s drug violence, which has received only sporadic coverage in the US mainstream media.
“There is a crisis in Mexico that no one is willing to speak about, and Marisol’s case is emblematic of that crisis,” Specter said. “Both countries, the US and Mexico, have a conspiracy of silence to quiet dissent, to murder human-rights activists, journalists, social activists.” The playwright, Matthew Paul Olmos, said he wanted write about the violence in Mexico, which he found was absent in the media. Valles Garcia’s story provided an inspiring vehicle, he said.
“What moved me about Marisol’s story was that there was this idea of change that could happen in a different way,” Olmos said.
“This idea of not focusing on trying to fight guns with guns but focusing on education, focusing on children, seemed to be a very obvious and strangely unique way of thinking about how change can come about.”
Valles Garcia, who does not speak English and could not understand most of the dialogue in the play, said it was very difficult to see parts of her life reenacted on stage. Her real life differs in major aspects from the play, which features characters dead and unborn.