NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Warning Messenger, Reynosa, Mexico
No Country for Old Men, Border Town, Mexico

This morning’s headline read, “49 Bodies Dumped on Mexico Highway”. Their heads, hands and feet were cut off to make identification difficult. The bodies were found on the nontoll highway to the border city of Reynosa, an entrance point to Hidalgo and McAllen, Texas. I spent about five years traveling alone in that “no country for old men” while doing private consulting work until the escalating violence between warring drug cartels became a bit too risky. A human head had been tossed into a bar not too far from where I was staying on the night of my last trip there. The bodies are apparently a cruel evil message from a rival cartel not to tread on their lucrative business of smuggling routes, the local drug markets and extortion rackets, including shakedowns of South Americans attempting to enter the United States.

Laredo, Texas shares our southern border with Nuevo Laredo, Mexico and the I-35 corridor that flows all the way through the United States. It’s a strategic beach head for trafficking. I learned of one local law man who was gunned down in broad daylight within twenty four hours of declaring that he would not be defeated by the cartels as was his dead predecessor. Today’s news also reported that so far this month twenty three bodies were found dumped or hanging along the streets of Nuevo Loredo. I had sensed the growing cancer of dirty money as I watched the violence spread along our borders from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. And as the growing number of armed border patrols and check points began to interrupt my travels. Watching the riveting Coen brothers movie, No Country for Old Men, about an aging Texas law man who was even more involved in this morbid exhibition of man’s inhumanity to man was a very personal experience.

In the beginning chapter of the book of Job, it is written that God’s heavenly messengers were assembled to present themselves to the Eternal One and to give reports and receive instructions. The Accuser was with them as well. When God asked Satan “where have you been?” he replied that he had been “roaming through the earth and going back and forth”. There is much goodness and righteousness in this world, but we should never be blind to the explosive potential for evil. When we read of violent, repulsive, evil accounts like those that are occurring with ever more frequency at our southern borders, we know evil continues to walk among us. And I found that it was no country for me.