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Wednesday, June 17, 2009
West Texas Girl Killed Near Ciudad Juarez
By Alicia A. Caldwell
Associated Press
SAN ELIZARIO, Texas — When 11-year-old Priscilla Ibarra Alfaro left her mother's house east of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Saturday night, no one thought twice about her jaunt to a nearby hamburger stand.
"They didn't think it was dangerous to go and get a hamburger," Priscilla's aunt, Maria del Carmen Alfaro, said Wednesday.
But Mexican authorities say the middle school student from San Elizario, a small farming community east of El Paso, was gunned down along with an adult family friend as she stood in front of the stand. Her cousin, 14-year-old Victor Manuel Chuca Nevarez, was found dead inside a nearby pickup truck the trio are believed to have used to go to the stand. A few blocks away, police found another man dead in the street.
Mexican authorities say 70 bullet casings were found around the scene. No arrests have been made.
Del Carmen said Wednesday that Mexican authorities have not told the family who may have been behind the attack, but she said relatives believe the man with Priscilla and Manuel, Arturo Amaya Rodriguez, and the other man killed that night, Javier Morales Beltran, may have been the intended targets.
"No one has explained anything," del Carmen said in Spanish, as three of her children and Priscilla's 5-year-old brother played in the family living room.
Del Carmen and her husband took in her niece and nephew after their mother was deported in 2007. She said Priscilla was never afraid to visit her mother and another sister who lived in the village of Barreales, across the Rio Grande from Fabens, Texas
"She just wanted to visit with her mother," del Carmen said as she sifted through photographs of Priscilla from a recent school band concert. The trips, del Carmen added, had become fairly routine since the girl's mother was ordered back to Mexico two years ago.
Del Carmen said friends and relatives, including her four children, were devastated by Priscilla's killing. She said Priscilla's mother, her sister-in-law, called with the news late Saturday and has been nearly inconsolable.
"We're all just devastated and they (the children) don't understand what happened," del Carmen said.
Priscilla's cousin, 14-year-old Francisco Javier Alfaro, struggled Wednesday to describe the girl he thought of as a sister.
"She played a lot with her friends. She made a lot of friends," Francisco quietly recalled.
Priscilla is not the first child with ties to Texas to be killed in Mexico's ongoing drug war.
In May, 15-year-old Tania Lozoya, a high school freshman from El Paso, was killed by a stray bullet while she was at a family gathering in her aunt's Juarez house.
Last year, 12-year-old Alexia Belen Moreno, whose mother lived in El Paso, was shot along with two other men on her way home from school in Ciudad Juarez. Days before she was killed, Alexia told her mother that she wanted to move to El Paso to escape the daily violence of Juarez.
Countless other children across the country have also been caught in the crossfire.
Across Mexico, more than 10,780 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against the drug cartels in December 2006.
More than 2,300 people have been killed in Juarez, where cartels have been fighting for control of lucrative human and drug smuggling routes since January 2008.
Copyright ©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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