I am outraged that Mayor Yazzie and the City Council were not themselves outraged by the Durango Police Department's inaction during the incidents of last October. The police force they are supposed to oversee failed in their sworn duty to serve and protect the people of Durango.
The DPD stood by while masked, armed, and unidentifiable individuals brutalized Durango citizens who were attempting to prevent the kidnapping of a father and two children — and their trafficking into the for-profit immigrant detention system across state and possibly national borders. In failing to intervene, the department failed the very people it is sworn to protect.
It is deeply troubling that Mayor Yazzie expresses more concern about the outrage of Durango residents — including the co-director of Compañeros — than about the events that provoked it. The call for "civility" in the face of the continuing destruction of people's lives and the erosion of constitutional rights is not responsible leadership. It is moral abdication.
Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis for his resistance to Hitler's brutality, observed: "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."
Rev. M. Paul Garrett
Bayfield
