June 22, 2020 • 7 mins
In this bonus episode, Mónica gives us a sneak peak into the side of Juárez that is often discussed, but rarely understood. We meet cultural anthropologist and border expert Howard Campbell, who has deeply researched the various criminal networks at work in Ciudad Juárez by spending time on the ground. We'll be back next week with a new episode that takes us even further into the Juárez underworld.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hi, everyone, This is Monica. Thanks so much for listening
to the show, and thanks also for your feedback and comments.
I'm personally very moved to see how you engage with
these stories. Along the journey of this podcast will see
many of the themes that are front and center in
our society at this very moment. These include police accountability,
(00:33):
freedom of the press, globalization, immigration, and violence against women.
We hope the story we tell portrays the importance of
questioning our institutions and holding them accountable. We're taking a
break from our main story this week, but in the meantime,
we wanted to leave you with a teaser into the
(00:55):
second half of the podcast. You'll remember from our last
episode we met the so called Devil's lawyer, Dante al
maras he offers journalist Alfredo Corcillo a passport into the
Howatis underworld. First of all, I can't get over how
appropriate it is for a man named Dante to lead
(01:15):
Alfredo into the underworld. To me, Wattas is itself a
character in this podcast, and like any good character, Wattas
is complicated. The city is made up of these many
intertwining layers that you can't always see how deep they go, well,
we're about to take the plunge into one of the
(01:38):
darkest layers. Before we let Dante guide us, I want
to introduce you to somebody else. His name is Howard Campbell.
He's an anthropology professor my alma mater the University of
Texas at al Paso. Well, for the last twenty seven
twenty eight years, I've been wandering around downtown Huadas, and
(02:02):
I in fact created a kind of research methodology which
I call wandering. To me, Howard is not your typical
professor in that he conducts the bulk of his research
in a library or on a computer or over the phone.
He's an anthropologist and he gets out there. I grew
(02:22):
up in the state of Idaho and the mountains and
wandering around the forests. The idea is to wander around
and get to know a place intimately on a personal level,
without necessarily a full blown research plan, and sort of
stumbling onto things, meeting people in a very impromptu way.
And in that way I felt that I got to
know downtown Wada is quite well. Of course, how it neither.
(02:44):
Huata is, in my opinion, is one of the great
walking streets in the entire world. I would compare it
to La Ramblas in Barcelona, or La Revo in Tijuana,
or Reforma in Mexico City, or Broadway in New York City.
That is an incredible street of any watt is thousands
of people at times on the street and just this
endless parade of interesting people and characters and unpredictable kinds
(03:08):
of eccentric people and regular people and criminals and all
the like. Can you describe what it's like to walk
from El Paso over the bridge onto Abne the Hottes
And so once you get on the bridge, you're in
this Noma's land. You're going from one world to another,
one country to another, one city to another. But also
(03:31):
you're in this nether world in which the law doesn't
really hold as strongly as the United States government like
it too. And you see a lot of people making
a living from illicit activity, scams, hustles, people begging, people
selling drugs, people smuggling birds. The human creativity on the
bridge is remarkable, and it's quite remarkable to leave a
(03:53):
kind of a regular upper middle class professional job in
El Paso and all of a sudden being at times
the dangerous city in the world. I hate to say it,
but part of the appeal for a lot of people
that explore Wadas is the attraction to the dark side.
Howard discovers, it's not that difficult to wade into this
(04:14):
dark side. You simply have to walk across the International
Bridge and be willing to walk past the boundaries of caution.
That's what Howard does. But I often try to pretend
I'm just a tourist or one of the American expats
that lives in Wuadas and goes to the kind of
grungy bars. I've had some difficult circumstances where I've been
(04:35):
essentially captured by police that took money from me, or
else pulled me away from the crowd of people into
a dark area and threatened me was locking me up
in jail if I didn't pay them, or pushing me around,
that sort of thing. About a year ago, as robbed
by a woman who was a very strange circumstance. She
(04:57):
told me this kind of sob story about how difficult
her life wasn't Whuadas, and she wanted me to see
how badly she was living after being deported from the
United States by President Trump. She said Howard follows the
woman to her one room apartment, which is in what's
known as a vissing dove, in this case, a three
story building on a dirt lot. Once I got into
(05:19):
the apartment with the intention of interviewing her, she started
taking off her clothes and said we were going to
perform a sex act. And I said, well, I didn't
come to do this. I came to interview you. And
then she locked me into the room with a padlock
and a chain on the door. I picked up a
hammer and a sharpened piece of metal from a table
and threatened me As I turned to the right and
(05:40):
looked at the wall. She had a table with two
statues of La Santa Marte and burning candles, so the
grim Reaper statue. After speaking English, she switched to Spanish
and told me that she was a member of the
Familia Michoa Kana drug cartel. And she started telling me
if I didn't pay her that she would call for
(06:02):
her pamp She called Jorge and also the police, and
so I was trapped. Eventually, I had to give her
all of my money and she let me out. And
this one was five feet tall, so I felt she
beat me. She actually told me I won Gringo. So
(06:25):
sometimes you get your come uppans. Maybe, and maybe I
deserved this, you know, because I'd been exploring in the
sort of the darker side of downtown Paddies for so long.
I kind of expected something like this would happen. And
ultimately it wasn't so bad. I lost some money in
a bit of my pride, but I wasn't harmed. Howard
got lucky that time, and I'm willing to wager his
(06:45):
risk tolerance is far greater than most anthropologists. He also
has the privilege of coming and going from what is
whenever he pleases. That's a luxury Lots of people who
live in what is don't have. We'll hear more from
Howard later in the podcast, and we'll be back with
(07:06):
another full episode of Forgotten on June twenty ninth. See
you then,
Hi, everyone, This is Monica. Thanks so much for listening
to the show, and thanks also for your feedback and comments.
I'm personally very moved to see how you engage with
these stories. Along the journey of this podcast will see
many of the themes that are front and center in
our society at this very moment. These include police accountability,
(00:33):
freedom of the press, globalization, immigration, and violence against women.
We hope the story we tell portrays the importance of
questioning our institutions and holding them accountable. We're taking a
break from our main story this week, but in the meantime,
we wanted to leave you with a teaser into the
(00:55):
second half of the podcast. You'll remember from our last
episode we met the so called Devil's lawyer, Dante al
maras he offers journalist Alfredo Corcillo a passport into the
Howatis underworld. First of all, I can't get over how
appropriate it is for a man named Dante to lead
(01:15):
Alfredo into the underworld. To me, Wattas is itself a
character in this podcast, and like any good character, Wattas
is complicated. The city is made up of these many
intertwining layers that you can't always see how deep they go, well,
we're about to take the plunge into one of the
(01:38):
darkest layers. Before we let Dante guide us, I want
to introduce you to somebody else. His name is Howard Campbell.
He's an anthropology professor my alma mater the University of
Texas at al Paso. Well, for the last twenty seven
twenty eight years, I've been wandering around downtown Huadas, and
(02:02):
I in fact created a kind of research methodology which
I call wandering. To me, Howard is not your typical
professor in that he conducts the bulk of his research
in a library or on a computer or over the phone.
He's an anthropologist and he gets out there. I grew
(02:22):
up in the state of Idaho and the mountains and
wandering around the forests. The idea is to wander around
and get to know a place intimately on a personal level,
without necessarily a full blown research plan, and sort of
stumbling onto things, meeting people in a very impromptu way.
And in that way I felt that I got to
know downtown Wada is quite well. Of course, how it neither.
(02:44):
Huata is, in my opinion, is one of the great
walking streets in the entire world. I would compare it
to La Ramblas in Barcelona, or La Revo in Tijuana,
or Reforma in Mexico City, or Broadway in New York City.
That is an incredible street of any watt is thousands
of people at times on the street and just this
endless parade of interesting people and characters and unpredictable kinds
(03:08):
of eccentric people and regular people and criminals and all
the like. Can you describe what it's like to walk
from El Paso over the bridge onto Abne the Hottes
And so once you get on the bridge, you're in
this Noma's land. You're going from one world to another,
one country to another, one city to another. But also
(03:31):
you're in this nether world in which the law doesn't
really hold as strongly as the United States government like
it too. And you see a lot of people making
a living from illicit activity, scams, hustles, people begging, people
selling drugs, people smuggling birds. The human creativity on the
bridge is remarkable, and it's quite remarkable to leave a
(03:53):
kind of a regular upper middle class professional job in
El Paso and all of a sudden being at times
the dangerous city in the world. I hate to say it,
but part of the appeal for a lot of people
that explore Wadas is the attraction to the dark side.
Howard discovers, it's not that difficult to wade into this
(04:14):
dark side. You simply have to walk across the International
Bridge and be willing to walk past the boundaries of caution.
That's what Howard does. But I often try to pretend
I'm just a tourist or one of the American expats
that lives in Wuadas and goes to the kind of
grungy bars. I've had some difficult circumstances where I've been
(04:35):
essentially captured by police that took money from me, or
else pulled me away from the crowd of people into
a dark area and threatened me was locking me up
in jail if I didn't pay them, or pushing me around,
that sort of thing. About a year ago, as robbed
by a woman who was a very strange circumstance. She
(04:57):
told me this kind of sob story about how difficult
her life wasn't Whuadas, and she wanted me to see
how badly she was living after being deported from the
United States by President Trump. She said Howard follows the
woman to her one room apartment, which is in what's
known as a vissing dove, in this case, a three
story building on a dirt lot. Once I got into
(05:19):
the apartment with the intention of interviewing her, she started
taking off her clothes and said we were going to
perform a sex act. And I said, well, I didn't
come to do this. I came to interview you. And
then she locked me into the room with a padlock
and a chain on the door. I picked up a
hammer and a sharpened piece of metal from a table
and threatened me As I turned to the right and
(05:40):
looked at the wall. She had a table with two
statues of La Santa Marte and burning candles, so the
grim Reaper statue. After speaking English, she switched to Spanish
and told me that she was a member of the
Familia Michoa Kana drug cartel. And she started telling me
if I didn't pay her that she would call for
(06:02):
her pamp She called Jorge and also the police, and
so I was trapped. Eventually, I had to give her
all of my money and she let me out. And
this one was five feet tall, so I felt she
beat me. She actually told me I won Gringo. So
(06:25):
sometimes you get your come uppans. Maybe, and maybe I
deserved this, you know, because I'd been exploring in the
sort of the darker side of downtown Paddies for so long.
I kind of expected something like this would happen. And
ultimately it wasn't so bad. I lost some money in
a bit of my pride, but I wasn't harmed. Howard
got lucky that time, and I'm willing to wager his
(06:45):
risk tolerance is far greater than most anthropologists. He also
has the privilege of coming and going from what is
whenever he pleases. That's a luxury Lots of people who
live in what is don't have. We'll hear more from
Howard later in the podcast, and we'll be back with
(07:06):
another full episode of Forgotten on June twenty ninth. See
you then,
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.