The Plight of the 'Bravest Woman in Mexico' Christopher Shay - World Policy
go to original April 23, 2013

Marisol Valles Garcia, left, sits with her older sister Miriam before the premier of “So Go the Ghosts of Mexico, Part One,” a play based on Marisol's life. (Ahmet C. Sibdial Sau)

An ice chest containing the head of Manuel Castro Martinez was left on the steps of the Praxedis G. Guerrero city hall four years ago. Martinez, who had been the Mexican border town’s police chief for just three days, is one of up to 100,000 murdered in the country’s drug wars since 2009. Most of the town’s police officers resigned, and for over a year, no one wanted to replace Martinez as violence ravaged Praxedis, located near the drug war’s epicenter in Ciudad Juárez.

At the time, Marisol Valles Garcia was a teenage mother and criminology student in Praxedis. Before the cartels and the drug war, she says her community was “healthy,” a place where everyone knew and cared for each other. Now, people she knew simply disappeared. Sometimes their bodies would show up, she says, and sometimes not. Out her window, her heart broke as she watched local kids imitate cartel assassins on the streets. The town she grew up in was gone.

After more than a year of no one filling the role, Garcia decided to step up and become the town’s police chief “for my son and the entire community.” She was 20 when she was sworn in 2010. “I didn’t want my son to become a killer for hire at age 10,” she explains.

It was a Rosa Parks moment - a soft-spoken hero and mother standing up to violence. Just taking the job was a courageous act that said enough is enough. “I wanted to inspire people to put in a little grain of sand, just I like I did,” Garcia says.

An international media frenzy followed.

Read the rest at World Policy

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