Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, This is Monica. Thanks so much for listening
Speaker 1: to the show, and thanks also for your feedback and comments.
Speaker 1: I'm personally very moved to see how you engage with
Speaker 1: these stories. Along the journey of this podcast will see
Speaker 1: many of the themes that are front and center in
Speaker 1: our society at this very moment. These include police accountability,
Speaker 1: freedom of the press, globalization, immigration, and violence against women.
Speaker 1: We hope the story we tell portrays the importance of
Speaker 1: questioning our institutions and holding them accountable. We're taking a
Speaker 1: break from our main story this week, but in the meantime,
Speaker 1: we wanted to leave you with a teaser into the
Speaker 1: second half of the podcast. You'll remember from our last
Speaker 1: episode we met the so called Devil's lawyer, Dante al
Speaker 1: maras he offers journalist Alfredo Corcillo a passport into the
Speaker 1: Howatis underworld. First of all, I can't get over how
Speaker 1: appropriate it is for a man named Dante to lead
Speaker 1: Alfredo into the underworld. To me, Wattas is itself a
Speaker 1: character in this podcast, and like any good character, Wattas
Speaker 1: is complicated. The city is made up of these many
Speaker 1: intertwining layers that you can't always see how deep they go, well,
Speaker 1: we're about to take the plunge into one of the
Speaker 1: darkest layers. Before we let Dante guide us, I want
Speaker 1: to introduce you to somebody else. His name is Howard Campbell.
Speaker 1: He's an anthropology professor my alma mater the University of
Speaker 1: Texas at al Paso. Well, for the last twenty seven
Speaker 1: twenty eight years, I've been wandering around downtown Huadas, and
Speaker 1: I in fact created a kind of research methodology which
Speaker 1: I call wandering. To me, Howard is not your typical
Speaker 1: professor in that he conducts the bulk of his research
Speaker 1: in a library or on a computer or over the phone.
Speaker 1: He's an anthropologist and he gets out there. I grew
Speaker 1: up in the state of Idaho and the mountains and
Speaker 1: wandering around the forests. The idea is to wander around
Speaker 1: and get to know a place intimately on a personal level,
Speaker 1: without necessarily a full blown research plan, and sort of
Speaker 1: stumbling onto things, meeting people in a very impromptu way.
Speaker 1: And in that way I felt that I got to
Speaker 1: know downtown Wada is quite well. Of course, how it neither.
Speaker 1: Huata is, in my opinion, is one of the great
Speaker 1: walking streets in the entire world. I would compare it
Speaker 1: to La Ramblas in Barcelona, or La Revo in Tijuana,
Speaker 1: or Reforma in Mexico City, or Broadway in New York City.
Speaker 1: That is an incredible street of any watt is thousands
Speaker 1: of people at times on the street and just this
Speaker 1: endless parade of interesting people and characters and unpredictable kinds
Speaker 1: of eccentric people and regular people and criminals and all
Speaker 1: the like. Can you describe what it's like to walk
Speaker 1: from El Paso over the bridge onto Abne the Hottes
Speaker 1: And so once you get on the bridge, you're in
Speaker 1: this Noma's land. You're going from one world to another,
Speaker 1: one country to another, one city to another. But also
Speaker 1: you're in this nether world in which the law doesn't
Speaker 1: really hold as strongly as the United States government like
Speaker 1: it too. And you see a lot of people making
Speaker 1: a living from illicit activity, scams, hustles, people begging, people
Speaker 1: selling drugs, people smuggling birds. The human creativity on the
Speaker 1: bridge is remarkable, and it's quite remarkable to leave a
Speaker 1: kind of a regular upper middle class professional job in
Speaker 1: El Paso and all of a sudden being at times
Speaker 1: the dangerous city in the world. I hate to say it,
Speaker 1: but part of the appeal for a lot of people
Speaker 1: that explore Wadas is the attraction to the dark side.
Speaker 1: Howard discovers, it's not that difficult to wade into this
Speaker 1: dark side. You simply have to walk across the International
Speaker 1: Bridge and be willing to walk past the boundaries of caution.
Speaker 1: That's what Howard does. But I often try to pretend
Speaker 1: I'm just a tourist or one of the American expats
Speaker 1: that lives in Wuadas and goes to the kind of
Speaker 1: grungy bars. I've had some difficult circumstances where I've been
Speaker 1: essentially captured by police that took money from me, or
Speaker 1: else pulled me away from the crowd of people into
Speaker 1: a dark area and threatened me was locking me up
Speaker 1: in jail if I didn't pay them, or pushing me around,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. About a year ago, as robbed
Speaker 1: by a woman who was a very strange circumstance. She
Speaker 1: told me this kind of sob story about how difficult
Speaker 1: her life wasn't Whuadas, and she wanted me to see
Speaker 1: how badly she was living after being deported from the
Speaker 1: United States by President Trump. She said Howard follows the
Speaker 1: woman to her one room apartment, which is in what's
Speaker 1: known as a vissing dove, in this case, a three
Speaker 1: story building on a dirt lot. Once I got into
Speaker 1: the apartment with the intention of interviewing her, she started
Speaker 1: taking off her clothes and said we were going to
Speaker 1: perform a sex act. And I said, well, I didn't
Speaker 1: come to do this. I came to interview you. And
Speaker 1: then she locked me into the room with a padlock
Speaker 1: and a chain on the door. I picked up a
Speaker 1: hammer and a sharpened piece of metal from a table
Speaker 1: and threatened me As I turned to the right and
Speaker 1: looked at the wall. She had a table with two
Speaker 1: statues of La Santa Marte and burning candles, so the
Speaker 1: grim Reaper statue. After speaking English, she switched to Spanish
Speaker 1: and told me that she was a member of the
Speaker 1: Familia Michoa Kana drug cartel. And she started telling me
Speaker 1: if I didn't pay her that she would call for
Speaker 1: her pamp She called Jorge and also the police, and
Speaker 1: so I was trapped. Eventually, I had to give her
Speaker 1: all of my money and she let me out. And
Speaker 1: this one was five feet tall, so I felt she
Speaker 1: beat me. She actually told me I won Gringo. So
Speaker 1: sometimes you get your come uppans. Maybe, and maybe I
Speaker 1: deserved this, you know, because I'd been exploring in the
Speaker 1: sort of the darker side of downtown Paddies for so long.
Speaker 1: I kind of expected something like this would happen. And
Speaker 1: ultimately it wasn't so bad. I lost some money in
Speaker 1: a bit of my pride, but I wasn't harmed. Howard
Speaker 1: got lucky that time, and I'm willing to wager his
Speaker 1: risk tolerance is far greater than most anthropologists. He also
Speaker 1: has the privilege of coming and going from what is
Speaker 1: whenever he pleases. That's a luxury Lots of people who
Speaker 1: live in what is don't have. We'll hear more from
Speaker 1: Howard later in the podcast, and we'll be back with
Speaker 1: another full episode of Forgotten on June twenty ninth. See
Speaker 1: you then,