Character Is Destiny by John McCain

Author:John McCain
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781588364951
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-10-25T04:30:00+00:00

MERCY

Mother Antonia

The wealthy Beverly Hills debutante who found purpose and happiness in a Mexican jail

AT 2 A.M. ON AUGUST 20, 2002, GOVERNMENT HELICOPTERS SWARMING low in the black sky used their floodlights to turn the night into day on the ground below. Two thousand federal and state police burst through the gates of the notorious La Mesa prison, “the black legend,” in Tijuana, Mexico. Within an hour they had rounded up nearly an equal number of the most dangerous inmates—drug traffickers, organized crime bosses, murderers, and worse—handcuffed them, and loaded them onto buses bound for a new prison where the privileges that had made their incarceration at La Mesa a more than tolerable experience would be taken from them.

When the sun rose that day, bulldozers rolled into the prison yard and leveled El Pueblito, the little city that the more well-off prisoners had constructed to accommodate their wives and children. Over four hundred houses and little shops selling everything from tacos to DVDs to drugs were razed. The wives and children who had lived with the former inmates were moved from the prison to a Tijuana homeless shelter.

It had been a lawless and dangerous place. The prisoners in El Pueblito had created their own system of justice based on money, violence, bribery, and drugs. They lived with their families in homes of varying sizes, some with air-conditioning and other modern appliances. Crime bosses had continued to manage their enterprises with the assistance of, or at least without interference from, the prison authorities.

The other prisoners, as many as four thousand, who remained in La Mesa lived a far more desperate existence. Everything cost money in La Mesa, even a prison cell. If you couldn’t afford one, you slept outside in a cardboard shelter or completely exposed. Cots, blankets, clothes, medicine, almost everything had a price. The unlucky were routinely victimized by guards and other prisoners, beaten, subjected to other forms of degradation, murdered. Mexico doesn’t have a death penalty or even life sentences. But prison sentences are notoriously long for even minor offenses. Police corruption is prevalent, and many unlucky souls, including a good number of unsuspecting American tourists, found themselves subjected to the squalor and violence of La Mesa without ever having committed a crime. It was a hellish place where hope was as scarce as justice.

When the police and bulldozers left, El Pueblito reduced to rubble, the women and children gone, the remaining prisoners grimly adjusting to their changed circumstances, one woman remained behind with them—a tiny, aged, ill, bright-blue-eyed Madre Antonia. She was dressed, as always, in her pressed and clean nun’s habit, standing just five feet two inches tall, feeling the aches and pains of her seventy-five years, short of breath and strength. And yet, she was unfailingly cheerful as she made her rounds comforting the afflicted, seeing to their needs, raising their spirits, giving them hope that one day the gates of La Mesa would open for them, and they would leave behind the nightmare lives they had lived and begin new lives, blessed by God and the Angel of Mercy He had sent to them.

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