When the violence erupted in 2008, Hector Lozoya was the Juárez government representative in Zaragoza, a town at the western end of the Juárez Valley. As city official, he met farmers from Guadalupe, Villa Ahumada and Juárez who asked him to mediate in order to recover 5,000 acres that, according to them, were stolen by one of the most powerful families in the region, the Fuentes.

The Fuentes exercise control over a huge part of the distribution network of natural gas from the U.S. to Central America. Coincidentally, the lands taken from the farmers are the site of planned highways to connect to the new international crossing at Tornillo-Guadalupe. They are also rich in water deposits and are part of the region’s gas and petroleum basin.

“The link between the violence and private interests is clearly established,” said Lozoya, who now heads Juárez’s sanitation department. “They made people leave so they could take over their lands and homes. It is not by chance that criminals knew everything about them, be they locals or from out of town. They had all the information — access to public records that clearly established what each extorted person owned. How could a common criminal get such information? Only with help from the authorities.”

Some of the affected farmers had as their defender then–Guadalupe Mayor Jesús Lara Rodríguez. Lara was killed in June 2010 while arriving to his house in Juárez, where he sought refuge after abandoning his hometown. Before him, two of his police chiefs were assassinated, as were the two councilwomen who worked with Huéramo. Although Lara’s death was never related to the stolen lands, he had been a whistleblower about the terror.

Huéramo, who as a councilman in Guadalupe saw the plans for many of the projects in the Juárez Valley that form the fabric of the country’s energy future, said he needs no more evidence than his life experience to prove that the supposed war between drug cartels in the valley — and the rest of the country — is fabricated.

In 1968 he escaped from being shot to death because he was only 1 year old. At the time, he lived in his grandmother’s ranch in Chupícuaro, in the state of Michoacán. Soldiers killed his grandmother with 19 shots. Years later, his father told him she was assassinated because she refused to sell her land.

“Some time later, poppy and marijuana were planted there,” Huéramo said while sitting in front of his mobile home in San Elizario, Texas. “What’s clear to me is that I have not only experienced violence from 2008 to this day. I have lived with violence since I was born. And we were exiled, not in our own country but in another, on this side of the border.”

Translated from Spanish by Julián Cardona