Morelia remains jittery after attacks

MORELIA, Mexico — By dusk, an uneasy stillness descends on this city’s colonial center.

Gone are the clowns, their laughter and the tourists they normally entertain. Street vendors take an early bus home. Downtown cafés are nearly empty.

And the people holding flowers at the shrines of burning candles and hand-scrawled messages speak in whispers.

This is Morelia in mourning for eight people who died two weeks ago after two fragmentation grenades exploded here during a crowded Mexican Independence Day celebration, or “grito.”

“You suddenly feel this sensation of, ‘How could this happen to us?’” said 21-year-old Emanuel González, who sees pools of blood around bodies when he closes his eyes to remember the night of Sept. 15. “All we can do is wait to see what happens next.”

The killings not only shook Morelia and the state of Michoacán, they weakened an already fragile sense of national security and the local economy. And they are having ripple effects as far away as the Yakima Valley, long a destination for immigrants from Michoacán.

Frustrated residents here say the attacks exposed the government’s inability to contain Mexico’s escalating and violent drug trade, which has claimed about 3,000 lives this year. They say a major federal crackdown on cartels since President Felipe Calderón took office in 2006 has only worsened the situation.

“Morelia is Calderón’s hometown, so the message was obvious. The attack was about telling him to back off,” said Jorge Vallejo, 35, who like many had come to respect local cartels’ public assurances that they don’t hurt innocent people. “I guess the rules of the game have changed.”

And that scares people. They no longer feel safe in their city of about 600,000, even though three men who allegedly confessed to the attacks are now in custody and hundreds of additional armed officers now patrol the streets.

On Friday, federal authorities arrested three members of the Zetas — a group of hit men that works for a Gulf Coast drug cartel — suspected in the killings. One suspect told authorities the grenade attacks were intended to “frighten and provoke the government.”

As the investigation continues, dozens of copycat threats have been made to popular night clubs and upcoming city festivities.

“You just can’t know if there will be another terrorist attack,” Marta Villanueva, 34, said on a recent gray afternoon at Morelia’s Plaza Melchor Ocampo. “I avoid leaving the house now and came only because my son begged me to bring him after seeing it on the news.”

It was at this plaza that the first of two grenades went off late Sept. 15 as local leaders rang a traditional bell and yelled “Viva México!” to re-enact the 1810 call for independence from Spain.

Now, residents such as Villanueva and her son come here — and to the spot four blocks away where a second bomb exploded — to pay their respects to the dead and pray for the more than 100 people wounded. Mourners bring flowers, light candles in glass Virgen de Guadalupe holders and leave defiant messages for the killers.

One of those messages reads: “You can take away my feet, and you can rip off my hands, but I will not surrender my heart and my liberty.”

Still, the fear of future “terrorist acts” — as national media quickly labeled the killings — has hurt Morelia’s tourism industry, local business owners say.

Visitors come to this UNESCO World Heritage site for its pink quarry stone colonial architecture, lively artisan and candy markets, and nearby reserves where millions of monarch butterflies migrate each winter. Since the bombings, tourism has dropped as much as 80 percent, according to some news reports.

Some say Morelia’s instability might have other effects on the economy. Over the past two weeks, Michoacán’s secretary of migrants has received dozens of calls from leaders of immigrant communities in the United States who feel uneasy about returning home.

“The plan is always to work for a few years, save some money, then come back to Mexico to open a business,” said Secretary Alma Griselda Valencia Medina. “But who will want to invest money here when the drug traffickers run the city, when your children can get kidnapped?”

Because so many Mexican immigrants are in the United States illegally, it’s hard to say where they are or in what numbers. But last year, Michoacán received nearly $2.3 billion in remittances, more than anywhere else in Mexico. It is a state that depends on immigrants sending money back home.

Valencia Medina estimates that for each one of Michoacán’s 4 million residents, another relative lives north of the border — in places like Northern California, Chicago and the Yakima Valley.

On the night of the attacks, Maria Luisa García, a university biology professor in Morelia, received seven frantic calls from relatives working as apple packers in Yakima.

“They saw the TV footage and called to make sure we weren’t hurt,” she said. “And I started thinking about how the attack would affect them, these immigrants living in the United States.”

In the months prior to the attacks, García had heard from many relatives who considered returning home to wait out the U.S. recession.

“Now it’s hard to say where they’re better off, over there where the economy keeps going downhill, or in this place after the attacks,” she said.

For now, residents of Morelia are searching for normalcy. People like 22-year-old Alejandro Marín Leyva are beginning to venture out at night again even as he wonders if it’s worth the risk.

“I’m worried, sure, but we need to carry on as normally as possible,” the college student said.

Today is Morelia’s biggest city festival, celebrating the birth of its hometown independence hero. President Calderón has said he will attend. On Thursday, the country honors the 40th anniversary of a state-sponsored massacre of hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City. And a month later, on the Day of the Dead, Mexicans will pay their respects to friends and relatives who have died.

The symbolism of the attacks on Morelia on the country’s most cherished holiday is lost on nobody, García said.

“How are we supposed to celebrate these dates now?” she asked. “These are such important traditions. The entire family attends the festivities. You take your kids, your mother, your uncles.

“Now, we will all think twice before going.”

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