The Sinaloa Story by Barry Gifford

Author:Barry Gifford [Gifford, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, Thrillers, Fiction
ISBN: 9781583226766
Google: -FQfGhQh7fEC
Amazon: 1583226761
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 1998-06-07T07:00:00+00:00

Bad Head

Leander Ray’s friend Asa Hand, with whom he had bunked at Parris Island, fought beside in Nam, on Grenada, in El Salvador and beaten like a rug at poker and blackjack for the better part of two decades, had written to Lee from Mexico, imploring him to join in “a good fight for a change. Got my head bad down here one too many times, I guess,” Asa Hand wrote. “Woke up one day and what I saw wasn’t poverty, it was misery. Only so many beatings, jailings, tortures and assassinations a man can ignore, along with the low pay, pisspoor working conditions, land ripoffs, exploitation of the general population by oil and drug cartels, etc., before he decides to get off his pimply butt and do something. One statistic: Last year 17,000 Indians died of hunger. Lee, it’s acceptable for people to die of cancer, of AIDS, of heartbreak. But hunger? The caciques are selling off the peasants’ land the campesino cooperatives granted them after the revolution of 1910. This ain’t communism versus capitalism, good buddy, it’s life or death. Two-thirds of the people here in La Villanía, where I’m headquartered, have no electricity, they live in dirt-floor huts. At the Ejido Santa Maria Luisa, kids eat every other day, adults twice a week. The irony is that the region is one of Mexico’s richest, with hundreds of millions of dollars available for agricultural development and petroleum research and drilling. Trouble is that only 15 to 20% of that money has actually been spent—the rest is in the pockets and bank accounts of a small group of people who maintain control over politics by keeping the state backwards. Sound familiar? Come on down, man. The Indians call me a tatic, an honored one. You can be a tatic, too. These people need us, Lee. This is the final nail in their coffin. Mexico is on the verge of becoming one big maquiladora. Come on down and lend a Hand a hand.”

Leander Ray showed Cobra Asa Hand’s letter and told her he had to go. She read it and said she understood but that he had to take her with him.

“You don’t,” said Cobra Box, “you might wake up with more than a bad head go along with the parts be missin’.”

Lee grinned, embraced his wife, and said, “Cobra, I truly wish my folks could have met you. You’re their kind of people.”

“What does La Villanía mean?”

“Nasty.”

Cobra laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Baby,” Cobra said, “I believe I been there before.”

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