Think Mexican

Marisol Valles: Paying a Bitter Price for Bravery

From a windswept ridge high above El Paso, looking out across the Rio Grande to the vast plains of northern Mexico, Marisol Valles García can almost see her home town. But she can’t go back.

Ms Valles, 21, fled Mexico in fear of her life, hustling her parents, sisters, husband and one-year-old son into a 4 x 4 vehicle and hurtling across the border to seek asylum in the United States. They left just in time. That night a squad of hit men arrived at their small bungalow and ransacked the rooms.

“I would like to go back home,” she said. “But if I hadn’t left my country I wouldn’t be alive now.”

In spite of her diminutive size and sweet, girlish manner, Ms Valles had some powerful and vicious enemies. The criminology graduate was appointed chief of police in the small town of Praxedis G Guerrero, 50 miles east of Ciudad Juarez and a few miles from the US border.

It is this proximity to the border – and the insatiable drugs market, which sees $300 billion of drugs a year cross it – that placed Praxedis in the centre of the cross-border trafficking battles, with rival cartels engaged in ferocious turf wars that turned the small agricultural municipality into one of the most dangerous towns in a violent region.