Down and Delirious in Mexico City (15 page)

As soon as the mass for Silvia is announced, I know that I want to be there. Why be present at the grieving ritual for a person I never knew? In my head, I can't formulate a reply. The only thing I'm sure about is that I am not sharing my Saturday plans with my neighbors.

Kidnappings in Mexico fall into three basic categories: express, virtual, and ransom. The
express
variety refers to quick pickups, with the victim hauled off to a few cash machines, taken on a joyride, then dumped on an unfamiliar street. The
virtual
kidnappings are characterized by trickery. Families are called and told a loved one is in the hands of criminals, so they hastily fork over money, even if no kidnapping has actually taken place.
Ransom
kidnappings
bring more risks for the organized kidnapping rings, but also the potential of much more profit. Professional kidnapping negotiators are called in, and the kidnappers settle into a position of power, terrorizing relatives of the victim with harassing phone calls or, in some cases, by sending over a minor body part to the waiting loved ones—an ear, a finger—proof that the stakes are severe. Victims are held for cash ransoms as large as millions of dollars or as small as a few thousand pesos. Often they are permanently “disappeared,” killed and never returned home, even after families pay up.

As many as two-thirds of the kidnappings in Mexico go unreported, up and down the ransom scale. The phenomenon took off during a soaring national crime wave that followed the economic crises of the 1980s and '90s. People in Mexico City will tell you that everyone was broke and desperate back then. Kidnapping circuits have since become a frightening and lucrative branch of business for drug-trafficking cartels, which have diversified their revenue sources as the government has tried to crack down on narco smugglers. Recent official tallies suggest that more than sixty kidnappings occur in Mexico monthly, but civil organizations says the true number is closer to five hundred. Law enforcement authorities remain widely distrusted by a public accustomed to hearing of cases in which police are found to collude or even lead kidnapping crews. Privacy, without any contact with the police, is the preferred approach in such circumstances. As a result, the fear grips all of society—most kidnapping victims belong to the lower- and middle-income brackets—but in Mexico only the wealthy and well-known are capable of thrusting their problems into the public eye. Only in rare cases do they do it in so dramatic a fashion as Silvia Vargas's parents, in the full glare of the media machine, and with a total appreciation of their privilege even in grief.

The Vargas family broke its silence in late August 2008, hanging
an enormous five-story banner over Paseo de la Reforma, featuring a photo of Silvia and a toll-free number.
PLEASE GIVE ME BACK MY DAUGHTER SILVIA
the banner read.
YOU SHALL BE REWARDED.
They were determined to make the case of their missing daughter a public matter.

Days later, Vargas called his first press conference. He wept uncontrollably before a wall of news cameras. He pleaded with investigators and the news media to do everything possible to locate Silvia. It had been months of agonizing silence for his family, he said. They followed all the instructions given to them by Silvia's kidnappers, and then one day, the family just stopped hearing from them. While Miss Escalera, long separated from Nelson Vargas, was reserved in her press appearances, Mr. Vargas allowed his grief to be a painfully open affair. Here was a grown, gray-haired, distinguished bureaucrat weeping and cursing his way through the intolerable nightmare of having a daughter snatched away from him. The press was riveted.

Vargas—who has bushy, gray eyebrows and wears thin spectacles, and almost always appears in public in a suit and tie—was then featured on the cover of the high-society glossy
Quién,
or
Who,
alongside the quoted words “I am dead in life.” This was unusual for a magazine that normally publishes puffy profiles on prominent politicians or celebrities. The piece on Vargas included photos of Silvia as a small girl, taking swimming lessons, along with revelations by Vargas that he had three meetings with President Calderón himself over the case, as well as numerous face-to-face interviews with the public security secretary and the attorney general. “I have access to that,” he told the magazine. “But imagine those who don't, they are truly screwed.”

Vargas added, “Society has no idea how much evil can exist in this country. We are inhuman.”

As summer and fall wore on, little progress was made in locating Silvia, but her name remained in the news. By October, Nelson Vargas, apparently frustrated with the pace of the official investigation, called yet another press conference. This time he presented the findings of his investigation into his daughter's case, which implicated his family's former driver, Oscar Ortiz González, in the kidnapping. González's brother was a member of a kidnapping gang known as Los Rojos, or the Reds. Vargas told reporters he had alerted the authorities about the connection but was essentially told to butt out. At the press conference, the grieving father vented his rage. “The authorities have told us that we have nothing that may lead us to Silvia. If this is nothing, a man who worked for almost two years for our family, who we know is related to a gang that has already made abductions, that's not having anything?
That's not having a mother!
”

You could almost feel a ripple of scandal sweep over the city after Vargas's outburst. In essence, he called the investigators motherless bastards—an especially emphatic slur in mother-obsessed Mexico. To the public, a grim truth emerged. For all his connections to friends in high places, for all his public pleas, Nelson Vargas was powerless to save his daughter. Her rescue was completely out of his control. And in the hands of Mexican law enforcement, the case was more or less a lost cause. We had all known this since the beginning. That is the sad part. Where it gets weird, I realize, is in the collective response, the way the psychosis of the Mexican elite can play out in the public sphere, trickling down into our brains.

The trend—if it can be called that—started a few weeks before the Silvia Vargas case went public. Another well-connected member of Mexican society, Alejandro Martí, owner of the Martí chain
of sporting-goods stores, went to the press with his family's kidnapping nightmare. His fourteen-year-old son, Fernando, had been picked up in early June, along with his driver, at what was described as a false checkpoint set up by men posing as members of a high-level Mexican investigative agency, the AFI. Weeks later, the boy's decomposing body was found in the trunk of a car parked on a street in a tough southern D.F. neighborhood. His family had already paid the kidnappers as much as $6 million for the young Martí's return, according to one report. Adding to the outrage, subsequent arrests in the case indicated the chief suspects behind the Martí kidnapping were federal police officers. The revelations proved so shocking that President Felipe Calderón himself attended an evening mass in honor of the young Fernando Martí. The president sat in the front pews beside the stricken Martí parents, accompanied by First Lady Margarita Zavala.

This made me a little sick to my stomach. The president's appearance at the Martí funeral was meant to signal to the Mexican public that the executive and his
primera dama
are concerned about the awful kidnappings and killings of children in Mexico and are committed to doing something about it. But this was apparently more urgent now that the elite were becoming so public about their plight. Which begs the question, as Nelson Vargas himself imagines in his glossy magazine interview,
What about those who are not rich and famous, those who do not have a platform on which to transmit their case?
The missing are ever present in Mexico. Missing-person signs adorn the public-announcement panels in metro stations and government buildings like flapping black-and-white sheets of wallpaper. But where are the public and political displays of empathy for thousands of nonwealthy families who are suffering the same nightmare? Where are the cameras and heads of state at those funerals?

In the days after Silvia Vargas's body was found, this discrepancy was overlooked by just about everyone. The Martí and Vargas names, and Silvia Vargas's innocent face, saturated our visual landscape. The media continued to stoke the flames of selective outrage. Anger swelled. New groups on Facebook channeled it: “ENOUGH! No More Violence in Mexico,” “For a Secure Mexico,” “Let's Make an Anti-Kidnapping Squad,” “Yes to the Death Penalty for Kidnappers and Killers,” and the darkly humorous “I Don't Put My Photo on Facebook for Fear of the Kidnappings.”

As he mourned the loss of his son, Alejandro Martí took his considerable assets and connections and transformed himself into a high-profile antikidnapping activist, speaking before lawmakers and government panels. He founded SOS, a civil group meant to lobby for solutions to the kidnapping wave. But he was not alone. Members of the general public began joining him in taking a stand. Some began calling for capital punishment for convicted kidnappers. Joining the chorus was the Mexican Green Party, a move that critics in the left called cynical and politically motivated.

In this atmosphere Martí and his supporters called for a massive march in Mexico City against
“inseguridad,”
in August 2008. On a cool night, under a purple sky, tens of thousands of people clad in white clothing marched from the Angel of Independence monument to the Zócalo. They held candles in memory of the victims of Mexico's crime wave. I wandered around the plaza, listening, looking at posters, signs, and photographs of the missing. A middle-aged architect named Juan Manuel in a plain shirt and jeans told me he has been held up twice recently. “The authorities need to see how many people are upset by this,” he said, holding on to his ten-year-old daughter. Before, he added, “You could walk at any hour of night, houses didn't have bars on their windows. Even the muggers were more decent, in some form.”

“What can be done?” I asked.

Juan Manuel paused. He searched the plaza with his eyes. “What can you expect if the police themselves are involved?”

I ran into a friend named Jorge, a D.F. native who has an office job in a foreign embassy. I was surprised to see him at the
inseguridad
march. Ordinarily Jorge is a fun-loving, joke-telling person I see at bars or parties. Tonight he looked furious, and a little nasty. I approached him and said hello. “Enough, enough, enough,” Jorge was saying to the person standing next to him. “We've had enough.”

We chatted. “What can be done?” I asked.

“Death penalty,” Jorge said flatly, his eyes locked upon me.

Mumbling a good-bye, I backed away. I felt as if I were entering a twilight zone. Around us, people holding small Mexican flags were chanting in unison,
“Pena de muerte! Pena de muerte! Pena de muerte!”
as if “Death penalty!” were a college sporting cheer. I began feeling claustrophobic—more so than usual when the Zócalo is choked with protesters. It was not the crush of people that was making me panic at the moment, it was the
type
of people on the plaza. I looked around. I noticed a certain class stature to the demonstrators. People were in white, as planned, but it is mostly what I'd call designer white. Chanel, Gap, Dockers. Shopping-mall white. A goodly amount of these marchers were taller and paler than the average Mexican, a characteristic that is difficult not to notice in a Centro so identified with its poorer, more racially mixed residents. Several homemade signs openly blamed leftist mayor Marcelo Ebrard for the spike in crime. Demanding answers, they chanted the exact message that teary-eyed, white-haired Alejandro Martí transmitted to authorities as he buried his fourteen-year-old son:
“If you can't do it, resign! If you can't do it, resign! If you can't do it, resign!”
Do what, exactly, was never made clear. I wonder who would take the place of resigning politicians
unable to magically obliterate the criminal threats. More politicians?

As I struggled to make it out of the plaza, it hit me: Most of these marchers must be conservatives, National Action voters, PAN people. These had to be
panistas,
people who in a lasting stereotype live in walled mansions and rarely travel away from their guarded neighborhoods, people who read
Reforma
. With their slogans and signs, the marchers did not aspire to anything beyond seeking revenge or justice for their particular cases. These are Mexicans who insist on wearing class blinders.

There was virtually no discussion in the
inseguridad
protest movement of the need to address or tackle the root causes behind the kidnapping wave. No talk of the crippled public education system, which almost guarantees a dead-end path for millions of young people. No talk of the corrupt and stagnant justice system and its army of police officers who are so severely underpaid and undertrained they see taking petty bribes as a necessary slice of their monthly income. And certainly, no talk of an economic and tax structure that overwhelmingly benefits large companies and the extremely wealthy, leaving millions of working-age men and women on the margins of Mexico's development and with no other option but to flee for work in the United States—or to stay in Mexico and join a gang of pirating, extorting, drug-smuggling, kidnapping criminals.

In Mexico's cycle of corruption, marginalization, and crime, its actors were oblivious to the social inequalities that breed criminals and criminality and to the instincts of greed and self-preservation that perpetually feed the cycle with new victims. Standing in the Zócalo that day, watching the protest, I wondered if it will ever be broken. I wondered if we will ever stop feeding ourselves sad tales of the Silvia Vargas variety. And I wondered what purpose those tales truly fulfill.