😮 I removed the handcuffs from a prisoner and recognized the tattoo of my dead father. He died in Vietnam three months before I was born; I never knew him. 💔 And this 67-year-old man, accused of stealing medicine from a pharmacy, had the same military badge on his arm that my mother has had framed in the living room for forty-eight years.

He stole pills because El Güero couldn’t even afford them anymore.

I felt something awful. Relief. Relief that the “criminal” was actually a saint. As if that would fix anything for me.

But the old man cut my relief short.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I’m not good. I’m one of those who have Güero in that chair.”

“What do you mean, you?”

“That continue reading …