Ghost of Mexico: New plays tell tale of young police chief fighting narcos in the Valley of Juárez

Marisol Valles García -- a woman who in 2010 at age 20 took over the police department in a Valley of Juárez municipality plagued by narcotrafficking and who was called the "bravest woman in Mexico" by international media -- is in the spotlight again.
This time, however, her name is not on the front pages of newspapers, but up in lights.
Valles García's story is being told in the play "So Go the Ghosts of México," which premiered Thursday at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York City and runs through April 28.
The play was written by Matthew Paul Olmos, 35, an award-winning, Los Angeles-born playwright who now lives in Brooklyn. He said he was inspired by the impact Valles García left on her town and the rest of the world when she became police chief of the town of Praxedis G. Guerrero, which was in the midst of a drug cartel war at the time.
"I wanted to portray the message she sent -- that there are other alternatives, like community improvements, rather than weapons or violence to fight drug cartels and crime," he explained.
That message still echoes.
Earlier this year, a Sweden theatrical company premiered its own story about Valles García.
Olmos came across Valles García's story while doing research for his three-play cycle on the U.S.-Mexico drug war about four years ago, he said.
The play, the first of the series, "follows a young woman, Mary, who volunteers to replace a beheaded police chief in
México and sets off a chain reaction with her husband, the Narcos, and the rest of the country," according to a post on La MaMa's website.
Worldwide fame
Valles García got international notoriety when she took over the Praxedis police department in October 2010 amid the narco violence in the Valley of Juárez.
Praxedis' mayor appointed Valles García, who at the time was a criminology student and the mother of a baby boy, to the job after the chief of police was beheaded in January 2009.Ê



Marisol Valles Garcia in 2010 in a town in Valley of Juarez, 35 miles southeast of Juarez, where she served as Mexico's youngest police chief before fleeing to the United States for safety.


At age 20 and without any police experience, Valles García became the town's first woman police chief -- and the youngest in México.Ê
Valles García couldn't be reached for this story, but according to news archives and the website marisol-valles.com, she was part of an experiment to transform police officers into social workers as a way to regain trust from the community. The idea was to hire more women, who like Valles García would not carry a gun.
She began working with 13 officers, nine of whom were women, and one patrol car.
"From my first day, I was very clear that we were not going to engage or fight the drug cartels. I told the press that it was not our job to fight them, but rather the Mexican federal government's job. I also stated that we did not want to fight them, because we were afraid of them," Valles García wrote on the website.
In March 2011, Valles García was dismissed from her post after failing to show up to work. She crossed the border from El Porvenir, Chihuahua, into Fort Hancock near El Paso with her toddler, her husband and parents to seek asylum in the United States.
El Paso immigration lawyer Carlos Spector, who is handling Valles García's asylum case, said she was forced to leave her hometown after getting death threats from drug cartel members.
"She was heating up the plaza," Spector said, pointing out that Newsweek magazine included her in the list of "150 Women Who Shake the World" around the same time she received the threats.
"The drug cartels did not want all of the national and international attention she was bringing to the town," he continued. "They wanted to shut her up. They wanted to kill her."
Valles García said she was being harassed.
"I was offered the choice, like my predecessors, to either join the cartels or my family and I would die. É One day, I received a death threat from a cartel member saying he was coming to get me. After I hung up the phone, I decided to come to the United States and seek political asylum. I realized that I was no longer safe neither in my community of Praxedis or in Mexico," she wrote.
Spector said she is now living with her family in an undisclosed place in Texas awaiting a hearing in an immigration court El Paso this year, before there is a final decision on her asylum case in 2014.
Olmos said he is eager to meet Valles García. He did not have any contact with the ex-chief of police in the two years it took him to write the play -- the fourth theatrical piece in his career.
'Marisol' in Sweden
In February, the Unga Klara Theatre Company in Stockholm, Sweden, premiered its own story about Valles García taking charge of Praxedis' police department.
The play, called "Marisol," is directed to a young audience and the story is told from a child's perspective, said Alejandra Spector, spokeswoman for Mexicanos en El Exhilio, an organization of about 200 Mexican petitioners for political asylum in the United States.
Valles García was involved in the process making of "Marisol." She had interviews in Spanish with actors and producers through Skype, an online video and phone service, for a couple of weeks during the fall, Spector said.
Because of her pending asylum petition, Valles García could not leave the United States for the premiere in Sweden.
Spector was invited to represent Valles García and traveled to Stockholm in March to see the play, which will run until May.
"I was impressed of the work," he said.
Spector said he is surprised by the plays being done this year about Valles García's story.
"There are cases more dramatic and terrible than Marisol's, but I think that her story has captured more attention because of her youth and her innocence to try to fight crime and deal with the cartels," Spector said.
Olmos, who was born in California but has lived in New York for the past 11 years, said that before writing the play he did not know how violent Mexico had turned during former President Felipe Calderón's war against drug cartels.
"I was aware of Calderón's fight against the cartels, but not on how many people were dying. All of this caught my attention," said Olmos, who is writing the second of his three-play cycle about the cartels.
Olmos admitted he hasn't traveled to the border or recently been to México. However, he said his father is from Sonora and still has family ties in México.
He said he wants to leave a message with his play series.
Olmos said he wants the United States and Mexico to approach the war against drugs in a better way and to focus more attention on drug prevention and opportunities for children so that they won't be recruited by drug organizations when they grow up.