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When Mexican federal police showed up on his front lawn in response to a threat against his family, International Mission Board missionary Douglas Cantu (not his actual name) knew it was time to relocate. The violence associated with the drug cartels in Mexico had been evident in the region?drug-related deaths and gunfire?but there had been no direct threats to the well-being of Cantu and his family until that night.
Escalating violence between the four major Mexican drug cartels has, in some regions, spilled over into the civilian population and is having a chilling effect on mission teams’ travel across the U.S. southern border. But, said missionaries on both sides of the border, with strategic planning, good communications with Mexican nationals, and a healthy dose of common sense, smaller teams can still safely venture into Mexico and continue their ministries with local congregations.
“We don’t want to scare them from what God has called them to do. But be cautious and get as informed as possible,” said Cantu, who now works in the region of Mexico called “the Heart of Darkness” where less than 1 percent of the population is evangelical Christian. God can work amid the drug war, he said.
Terry Simons, chief deputy in the Victoria County Sheriff’s Department and a former Texas pastor, called Mexico a “war zone.” He said the rise in border violence became most evident in 2000 with the emergence of the Zeta gang, the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel. The leader of the Zeta gang, Gregorio Sauceda Gamboa, was arrested April 29 in Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, according to Associated Press reports.
Simons, who helped coordinate mission trips into Mexico from his church in Quemado, said there is a high risk for the traditional mission teams that populate the Texas-Mexico border each summer. Although mission teams have not been targeted, his concern is with the overall level of violence in some regions.
“You can’t pick where a criminal element will choose to have a gunfight,” he said.
Daniel White, pastor of First Baptist Church, Eagle Pass, just blocks from the border, said the one thing the narcortaficantes (drug traffickers) can’t do is shoot straight. Use of an automatic weapon is not a skill they have honed and much more than the intended target can get hit.
“When you have war in your city there is going to be collateral damage,” White said.
The city of Piedras Negras, he continued, is controlled by the Gulf Cartel and the April 26 assassination of its newly appointed Police Chief Arturo Navarro Lopez is evidence of such Mafia-style manipulations. The city is run by elected officials but many of those authorities White accused of being ultimately beholden to the cartel.
The violence and intimidation tactics are nothing new to Scottie Stice, who served as a church planter in El Salvador for the IMB and is now an SBTC field ministry strategist. Dealing with and avoiding the cartels were part of the landscape of living in Central America.
“It’s not a new concept,” he said. The menace has simply migrated north to the U.S. border.
CHANGING STRATEGIES
With reports of drug-related violence along the Texas-Mexico border, mission teams once destined for their annual cross-cultural ministries are reconsidering their options and sending teams out of harm’s way. Pastors who coordinate mission projects along the border from Brownsville to El Paso report the number of teams they will be working with this summer is down significantly.
First Baptist Church, Brownsville, plans and coordinates mission trips into Matamoros and the surrounding region through its Missions Outreach Center.
Thirty teams filtered through the facility last year but that number, MOC Director Dwayne Spearman said, is down to 10 or 11.
Mike Due, a Port Arthur pastor, said the number of teams he usually directs into Mexico is down by half. As of May 1 only 10 teams are scheduled to venture south. That decline is representative of the decisions being made across the U.S. regarding missions work in
