In the days since her 18-year-old son breathlessly reported that something terrible had happened to her four grandchildren and daughter-in-law, Loretta Miller has cooked nonstop.
Burritos, posole, eggs, potatoes, chicken.
She has cooked to feed the Mexican federal forces sent here to protect her family, the relatives arriving to attend the memorial services and funerals and the streams of international journalists who have come to this remote corner of northern Mexico to find out why nine American women and children were ambushed and killed while driving through the mountains here on Monday.
Having 14 children and 27 grandchildren prepared Miller for this.
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Howard Miller comforts one of his sons after a minor injury as his daughter looks on. Miller’s wife, Rhonita, and four of their children were killed when their cars were ambushed earlier this week.
(Celia Talbot Tobin/For The Times)
“We’re a big family,” she said as a pot of soup simmered on the stove. “We know how to deal with crowds.”
While most houses in this part of Sonora state are made in the Mexican style of mud adobe bricks or cinder block, hers would not look out of place in a Southern California subdivision cul-de-sac. In this land of soccer, even the basketball hoop in the driveway of Miller’s home is a giveaway that this community is different.
With its sprawling, American-style homes and perfectly manicured lawns, the little town of La Mora stands out amid the landscape of mesquite and cactus.
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So do the town’s residents: a community of largely blonde and blue-eyed families from a breakaway Mormon sect who hold both American and Mexican citizenship.
Their blue U.S. passports separate them from their neighbors, allowing them to work or own businesses in the U.S., while local Mexicans toil in $8-a-day factory jobs in the low-slung maquilas that hug the border.
Until this week, the Mormons thought they had another kind of American privilege: protection from narco violence. In the 12 years since Mexico declared war on its drug cartels, sparking an era of record-breaking bloodshed, the cartels have committed horrific acts of violence against Mexicans but have rarely targeted Americans like Miller and her family, aware of the bad publicity and unwanted law enforcement attention it would bring.
That unspoken rule was broken this week when the nine American citizens from the Mormon community were ambushed and killed. So too was another drug war maxim: that women and children were not to be touched.
“Until now, I loved living here,” Miller said.
Extended members of the LeBarón family play outside their house in Sonora, Mexico.
(Celia Talbot Tobin/For The Times)
She said her family has close relationships with the locals, who work in Mormon homes and on their pecan and pomegranate farms. When Miller’s son died last year in a small plane crash, more than 1,000 people showed up to the funeral, she said, and locals hired mariachis to play.
Losing her son had prepared her and the rest of the family to deal with Monday’s loss, she said. “If that hadn’t happened to us we never could have survived this.”
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Her son Howard moved down from the U.S. with his wife Rhonita LeBaron and their children this year, in part to help out after his brother’s death.
LeBaron was excited about living in Mexico, where life was more relaxed than in the U.S., and where their seven kids could roam.
“She was the perfect mother,” said Miller.
On Monday, LeBaron took advantage of joining a caravan of women leaving town to drive to the border to pick up Howard, who was flying back from North Dakota, where he worked in the oil business. Traveling together, the women thought, would protect them from the dangers of driving desolate roads through drug cartel country.
Shortly after leaving, LeBaron got a flat tire. The caravan returned home and LeBaron asked Miller: “Do you think that’s a sign that I shouldn’t leave here?” But she left anyway, switching vehicles and heading out again in Miller’s 2011 Suburban.
When her son went to check on the broken-down vehicle, he found the burned-out Suburban. Up the road, members of the Mormon community would discover the two other vehicles that had been part of the caravan riddled with bullets and strewn with bodies. In total, three mothers and five of their children were killed by assailants that Miller and her family believe were members of a Chihuahua-based drug cartel. The cartel has been feuding with another cartel that controls La Mora and other parts of Sonora state.
Extended members of the LeBarón family play outside their house in Sonora, Mexico.
(Celia Talbot Tobin/For The Times)
Eight children survived the attack. Five were airlifted to Arizona to receive medical treatment and the other three were brought to Miller’s house. She stripped them of their bloody clothes and massaged them until they finally fell asleep.
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“They cried for hours and hours until they couldn’t cry anymore,” she said.
Her son Howard arrived in La Mora on Monday, bearing gifts for his three surviving children who were not with their mom in the car that day. The toys have helped distract the kids, but they know what is going on.
Since his life as a family man exploded in a hail of gunfire, Howard Miller hasn’t talked much, except to play with the kids. “I love you, baby,” he tells his daughter Emma, 5, cradling her on his lap. “Come here big boy,” he says to Tristan, 7. In the den where he sits with them hangs a sign that says, “Families are forever.”
“The cartels had always respected the family,” Miller says. “But they’ve become more ruthless.”
Mexicans have long known that. Homicides have been at record levels for years here, but most killings go unnoticed by the international media.
Police and journalists swarmed the bucolic farming community this week. A similar response wasn’t seen when 27 people were burned to death in a strip club in Veracruz in August. Or when 14 police officers were ambushed and killed in the span of less than an hour in Michoacan in October.
And as families here began memorial services for their dead Thursday, there was an eerie sense that the ground had shifted and life for the Americans had changed. The serviceswere not just for the families but for a Mexico in which white Americans, and especially women and children, were off limits.
“Our lives will never be the same,” Miller said. “This is the first time I’ve ever thought that I might not spend the rest of my life in Mexico.”
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November 07, 2019 at 10:41PM
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Mormons mourn their massacred kin in Mexico: 'Our lives will never be the same' - Los Angeles Times
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