Stay or go?

U.S. residents of Mexico town torn after 9 killed

COLONIA LEBARON, Mexico — U.S. citizens living in a small Mexican farming community established by their Mormon ancestors are trying to decide whether they should stay or leave after burying some of the nine American women and children slaughtered this week in a drug cartel ambush.

What had been a peaceful existence in a fertile valley ringed by rugged mountains and desert scrub about 70 miles (112 kilometers) from the border with Arizona became increasingly dangerous in recent years as the cartels exerted their power and battled each other in Sonora state, a drug smuggling hotbed.

But La Mora, a hamlet of about 300 people where residents raise cattle and cultivate pomegranates, “will be forever changed” following the killings Monday as the women traveled with their children to visit relatives, a tearful David Langford told mourners at the funeral for his wife, Dawna Ray Langford, and their 11-year-old and 2-year-old sons.

“One of the dearest things to our lives is the safety of our family,” said Langford. “And I won’t feel safe. I haven’t for a few years here.”

On Friday, the bodies of Rhonita Miller and four of her children were taken in a convoy of pickup trucks and SUVS, on the same dirt-and-rock mountainous road where they were killed, for burial in the community of Colonia LeBaron in Chihuahua state. Many residents of the two communities that lie a five-hour, bone-jarring drive apart are related. They consider themselves Mormon but are not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and many have dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship.

Three simple wooden coffins arrived at the cemetery about a mile east of Colonia LeBaron off a rural road flanked by cotton fields.

Kenny Miller, Rhonita Miller’s father-in-law, said she was “like an angel” and the children “little angels.”

Miller said that with the eyes of the world upon the shocking attacks, 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,” Miller said, “and I think ‘Nita’ would approve wholeheartedly.”

The coffins 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-yearold Howard Jr. and 10-year-old Kristal were buried in their own coffins on either side.

Colonia LeBaron has been largely peaceful since the 2009 killing of one of its members who was an anticrime activist prompted Mexican authorities to establish a security base. But the police presence in La Mora was negligible until the women and children were killed and authorities sent a swarm of state and federal police to the area. How long they stay could be crucial to the community’s future, residents said.

“The truth is we aren’t safe here as a community,” Langford said. “We live in the mountains, we have no access to authorities, or very, very little.”

The governments of Chihuahua and Sonora said in a statement Friday that an “important number” of security agents had been deployed to the state border region that the road traverses since the “lamentable” attack, resulting in arrests and seizures of weapons, drugs and stolen vehicles. “We will not waver, I reiterate, not a single step backward,” Sonora state security commissioner Óscar Alberto Aparicio Avendaño was quoted as saying.

But former La Mora Mayor Steven Langford predicted that as many as half of the community’s the residents could leave, turning it into a “ghost town.” The motive in the killings still isn’t known, though Mexican authorities have suggested the victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time as competing cartels fought over turf and may have mistaken the SUVs the women and children were in for rivals who travel in similar vehicles.