Mexico buries last victim of cartel attack
>>COLONIA LEBARON: Family and friends prepared to bury yesterday the last victim of a cartel ambush that slaughtered nine American women and children from a community of US-Mexican dual citizens in a corner of northern Mexico where having gangsters in their midst has long been an unavoidable fact of life.
Christina Langford Johnson jumped out of her vehicle and waved her hands to show she was no threat to the attackers and was shot twice in the heart, community members say. Her daughter Faith Marie Johnson, 7 months old, was found unharmed in her car seat.
Her burial ceremony, the third in as many days, culminates an outpouring of grief in the closely-knit community with family ties in two Mexican states and across the border in many western US states.
The shocking attack has many in the small farming town of La Mora, established in Sonora state by their Mormon ancestors decades ago, wondering whether they should stay or leave to flee the cartel threat.
On Friday, the bodies of Rhonita Miller and four of her children were brought from La Mora to Colonia LeBaron in neighbouring Chihuahua state by a convoy of pickup trucks and SUVs that followed the same dirt-and-rock mountainous road where they were killed. Many residents of the two communities that lie a five-hour, bone-jarring drive apart are related. They are not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
The three simple wooden coffins arrived at the cemetery about a mile east of Colonia LeBaron off a rural road flanked by cotton fields and were lowered into three graves under white tents set up to guard from the intermittent rain.
“Nita,’’ as she was affectionately known, was laid to rest in the middle grave with the remains of her 8-monthold twins, Titus and Tiana, in her arms. Twelve-year-old Howard Jr and 10-year-old Kristal were buried in their own coffins on either side.
Kenny Miller, Rhonita Miller’s fatherin-law, said she was “like an angel’’ and the children “little angels’.’
Mr Miller said that with the eyes of the world upon these communities, he hopes their deaths may not be in vain and can spotlight what he deems a nationwide concern with thousands of Mexicans mourning missing and dead loved ones amid record-setting homicide levels.
“We’ve got terrorists here,’’ he said. “I would like this to be used for people who have no voice,’’ Mr Miller said, “and I think ‘Nita’ would approve wholeheartedly.’’
What had been a largely peaceful existence in a fertile valley ringed by rugged mountains and desert scrub about 112 kilometres from the border with Arizona became increasingly dangerous in recent years as the cartels exerted their power and battled each other in a region that is a drug smuggling hotbed.