The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (24 page)

But it wasn’t until Wednesday that news of the mass kidnapping became public, after family members of the missing, in order to call attention to what had happened, began contacting the media and then blocked the Eje 1-Norte that runs along an edge of Tepito, bringing traffic to a halt. Until that Wednesday, Mancera’s prosecutors and police hadn’t even acknowledged the case; and it wasn’t until Thursday, four days after the twelve young people had disappeared outside its premises, that police finally conducted a crime scene investigation of After Heavens. They recovered some marijuana, psychotropic pills, and beer bottles with fingerprints, and discovered that the security cameras over the club’s door were essentially sham, without video or memory, unconnected to any cables. The city’s vaunted C-4 monitored security cameras seemed not to have captured images of a commando kidnapping on Calle Lancaster or of vans arriving or leaving. Government investigators and police could offer the public no theory of what had happened. By Friday, Mancera’s chief prosecutor, Rodolfo Ríos Garza, was declaring, “We haven’t yet determined if it even occurred.” The sole witness, Ríos added, was “not locatable.” On Monday, the day after the incident, the Tepito youth had gone on his own to the Support Center for Lost and Missing Persons (CAPEA) of the Procuraduría General de Justicia (PGJDF), the chief prosecutor’s headquarters, popularly known as “El Bunker,” to report what he’d seen, but he gave both a false name and a false address. Because of that, Chief Prosecutor Ríos was now casting doubt on the truthfulness of his statement and on the legitimacy of his person. But the families themselves were one proof, at least, that the witness existed—they’d known within hours that their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, had disappeared outside After Heavens because the witness, a neighborhood boy they all knew, had phoned many of them that same Sunday to relay what had happened, and then their missing relatives hadn’t come home.

The baffling “Heavens” case, the most serious crime to have occurred in the DF in as long as anyone could remember, would dominate headlines for days and weeks, and rattle the city’s sense of security like a strong earthquake tremor. In December the outgoing mayor, Ebrard, had declared that the DF was on the verge of becoming one of the safest major cities in the world. Now stories in both the Mexican and the international press, under headlines such as “Fear Arrives in the Heart of the DF,” were citing the Zona Rosa mass kidnapping to question Ebrard’s claim—many stories quoted him—and to suggest that the DF was no longer a haven from organized crime violence, if it ever truly had been. Mayor Mancera and Chief Prosecutor Ríos were repeatedly insisting that the DF remained free of operating cartels, but those claims now rang hollow. And Mancera was suddenly facing his first political crisis. In a column in Spain’s
El País,
the paper’s veteran DF journalist Salvador Camarena wrote, “The worse that can happen to Mancera is that the people he governs start to miss the former prosecutor they used to have while at the same time realizing that they don’t have a mayor who rises to the level that Chilangos have formed of themselves, whether valid or not: the notion that their city is different from the rest of the country, [a country] ravaged by violence and moral hypocrisy. Mancera’s hour has arrived.”

On Thursday, the day before the chief prosecutor announced that the only witness so far couldn’t be found, while insinuating that perhaps he was no witness at all, Pablo de Llano, the thirty-two-year-old
El País
correspondent, had gone to Tepito. There he met with some relatives of the missing, who put him in touch by cell phone with that same witness, who is known as Toñín. “I told them I wasn’t going to give my name,” Toñín told de Llano. “I went wearing dark glasses and a cap that I never took off.” Toñín repeated what he’d told CAPEA, how one of the owners of the after-hours club—a man named Ernesto Espinosa Lobo—had ordered everyone to leave, and how Toñín himself had escaped the kidnapping by fleeing up a back stairway with some waiters and at least two other youths, and out onto a rooftop; and how, presumably from that perch, he’d seen armed commandos take his friends away in vans. De Llano was astounded that authorities had let Toñín slip away, that they hadn’t even offered him police protection. Even while city government officials were still publicly doubting that the
levantón
had occurred, they were also leaking information to the press, which unquestioningly made public whatever was shared. The leaks were intended—their purpose was obvious to knowing observers such as the correspondent from
El País
—to exploit the stigma attached to Tepito, for the Barrio Bravo, or the Fierce Barrio, in the minds of many residents of the capital, evokes practically congenital criminality. Two of the missing Tepiteños, sixteen-year-old Jerzy Ortíz Ponce and his friend nineteen-year-old Said Sánchez García, were the sons of imprisoned Tepito gangsters: the locally legendary Jorge Ortíz, known as “El Tanque,” and his associate Alejandro Sánchez Zamudio, aka “El Papis.” The families and even some journalists protested that Mancera’s prosecutors were already trying to “criminalize” all of the missing by linking them to two fathers who’d been in prison for ten years. (Placards held up by relatives of the missing at their continuing street protests read, “We want an Investigation, not Criminalization.”) Government officials, including Ríos, denied being the source of the leaks, and insisted that they were not trying to smear the victims. A subsequent widely publicized leak suggested that the Heavens case might be related to, and was perhaps in retaliation for, what had happened on May 24, two days before the
levantón
, when a drug dealer had been expelled by the security guards of a Condesa nightclub and bar known as Black and then executed by men waiting for him outside; his body was left slumped against a tree in one of those pretty tree-shaded medians where fashionable
condechis
walk their purebred dogs in the morning. By means of such leaks, Mancera’s government, before it had even publicly accepted that there had been a
levantón
, was already imposing the scenario that the Heavens case was related to a war among Tepito gangs and drug dealers—not “organized crime,” that is, not narco cartels—over the lucrative nightlife turf, or
plaza
, of Delegación Cuahtémoc and especially of its three bordering neighborhoods: the Zona Rosa and
colonias
Condesa and Roma, the DF’s golden nightlife triangle, drawing young drug consumers from all over the city and beyond. But also leaked to the press during that first week were images captured by security cameras of a pair of vans circling through the neighborhood.

Along with the two adolescents Jerzy Ortíz and Said Sánchez, the abducted included Eulogio Fonseca Arreola, twenty-six; Alan Omar Atiencia Barranco, twenty-six; Gabriela Téllez Zamudio, thirty-four; Jennifer Robles González, twenty-five; Monserrat Loza Fernández, twenty-eight; Josué Piedra Moreno, twenty-nine; Arón Piedra Moreno, twenty; Rafael Rojas Marines, thirty-three; Guadalupe Karen Morales, twenty-five; and Gabriela Ruiz Martínez, twenty-five.

On Saturday, June 1, I went with Pablo de Llano to Tepito. One of the reasons he invited me along, both on that day and on subsequent visits, is that Tepito is a notoriously unsafe neighborhood for an obvious outsider—especially a tallish, thin, fair-haired young man like Pablo—to walk around alone in. Tepito’s place in Mexico City lore is unique, and not just because of its reputation for violence and criminality—Iztapalapa and a few other neighborhoods have a similar reputation. For hundreds of years, Tepito has been regarded as a uniquely insular, tight-knit, obstinate barrio that operates according to its own codes, hostile to law and authority. Some residents of the capital take a paradoxical vicarious pride in the barrio, regarding it both as the outlaw heart of the city’s iconoclastic, tough, hustling spirit, and as a dreaded place of violence and crime that they’d like to keep walled in. In the colonial era, Tepito was a poor indigenous neighborhood and market area whose residents despised the Spaniards and were always looking for ways to dupe them. Near the neighborhood there was a customhouse through which
pulque
, the alcoholic drink made from fermented maguey sap, entered the city, and much of it ended up being sold in Tepito. By the nineteenth century the barrio had also become notorious for its drunkards, robbers, pimps, and whores. During the Mexican-American War, residents waged a scrappy resistance against U.S. troops, hurling rocks and debris from rooftops, luring soldiers by night into traps—it isn’t hard to imagine what sort of traps—and murdering them, and General Winfield Scott ordered the barrio razed. On December 1, 2012, the day of the anti–Peña Nieto disturbances, young protesters fled into the neighborhood and Tepiteños
took to the streets to block pursuing riot police from entering.

Tepito today is a neighborhood of pirates, contrabandists, gangs, gangsters, drug use, and drug peddling, its danger and pockets of despair somewhat disguised by its teeming, feverish mercantile activity, for more than anything else Tepito is, and has always been, about buying and selling. The barrio gives the impression that there is nothing on earth that isn’t bought or sold in its twenty-five-block labyrinth lined with
tianguis
—market stalls—and plastic tarp–covered streets and alleys, or that isn’t counterfeited in small clandestine factories or warehoused behind the scarred walls of its
vecindades,
the two- or three-story tenement complexes where most Tepiteños live, and other buildings. It is estimated that seven out of ten pirated goods, especially copied CDs and DVDs, that are sold in Mexico come from Tepito. A steady river of
fayuca,
or
counterfeit products, from China arrives in Tepito daily direct from Mexican ports, though a great deal of
fayuca
is produced within Tepito itself. Koreans supply knockoff and cheap clothing turned out by their own Mexican
maquiladores
and sweatshops, and Jews control the market’s textile trade, and there is a strong contingent of Middle Eastern vendors as well, but most of the stalls are owned and worked by people from the neighborhood. Tepito is also the source of at least half of the drugs sold in the DF’s
narcomenudeo
, or street trade; it’s the city’s narcotics warehouse. The Sinaloa Cartel is now reputed to be the main supplier, but Tepito gangs and dealers control and sell into the city’s
narcomenudeo.

The emblem of the Tepito subway stop is a boxing glove, symbolizing the many fighters who’ve come from the neighborhood, including national hero “Kid Azteca.” After being roughly expelled out a subway car’s doors by a rugby scrum of hard-shouldered passengers, Pablo and I climbed station stairs lined on both sides with vendors, and emerged as if through the gates of a medina directly into a tarped, shaded, crammed tunnel of market stalls, most selling pirated DVDs in gleaming cellophane envelopes for the equivalent of three U.S. cents apiece. I saw a young man coming toward me with a tawny baby hawk perched on the stick he held out; a cage holding small parrots and owl chicks hung from a strap around his neck. For a moment I imagined bringing a hawk back to my Brooklyn apartment in the fall to hunt mice.

Police, needless to say, are not beloved in Tepito. A private police force hired by the Tepito merchant association patrols the market, on the lookout for thieves and robbers. Most of these, Pablo de Llano told me, are former DF policemen who were purged for corruption or other violations. Pablo had already established good relations with a number of the merchant police, and they’d provided an entry into the neighborhood and put him in touch with relatives of the missing young people who owned
tianguis
and worked in the market. The merchant police communicate with each other by walkie-talkie, and keep their pistols tucked inside their belts, hidden by their top garments. That Saturday afternoon Pablo and I spoke with Raúl, a short, stocky man in a black utility vest. Despite his paramilitary demeanor, he was articulate and friendly. Raúl told me later that he’d gone to high school in a small town in California, and I wondered if that was the source of his mix of TV cop earnestness and laid-back garrulity. Most of the relatives of the abducted twelve weren’t in Tepito that day; they’d traveled together into México State in response to news reports that corpses of three of the victims had turned up there. But Pablo had already checked this out, and the México State authority he’d spoken to by phone had denied that any bodies had been found. (Whether any bodies were actually found or not, the reports about some of the missing Tepiteños turning up there did prove false.) We went behind the row of stalls into an area covered by laminated roofing, and, standing together near the mouth of an alley leading back into a long concrete warehouse building, spoke about the case for a while. Raúl shared our initial incredulity and skepticism, and amplified it: a Sunday morning
levantón
in the heart of the Zona Rosa, only blocks from the SSP’s headquarters, and police all over the neighborhood? And then it wasn’t until four days later that the prosecutor’s office finally sent investigators and police into After Heavens? In the meantime, the club’s owners, security personnel, and waiters hadn’t even been questioned, and now, apparently, couldn’t be found?
¡No mames!
The chief prosecutor claimed that the witness, Toñín, also couldn’t be found, but Raúl knew that he was hiding out right there in Tepito—of course Toñín was terrified!—protected by family and friends. All over Mexico, when cartel commandos are going to carry out a
levantón
like that, they inform the police first, so that the police will know to stay out of the way. Raúl said that such an operation, in the heart of the DF, was inconceivable without at least the connivance if not the active complicity of police. But who’d carried out this one, and why? The Heavens
levantón
, he opined, couldn’t have been orchestrated without the involvement of authorities, and only someone high up could have given the order. Higher up than just a local police commander, he said. How high up? I asked. Very high up, he said. Someone at the very top. One of the top three. As high up as the chief of police, he said, or the head of the judicial police—that high up. We discussed various scenarios, including that the kidnapping could have been in retaliation for the murder of the drug dealer outside of the bar Black, a young man said to be from México State. Raúl suggested that whatever else was involved, the operation seemed likely to have a political motive. Mancera was the most obvious target, Mancera and the PRD. Who would gain from striking such a blow? The PRI, for one. Could that mean, I asked, that the PRI had a mole in Mancera’s government, someone very high up, such as the chief of police or chief prosecutor? That seemed like at least a logical possibility, we all agreed. Moments later, walking with Pablo through the market, I said, “If this were a le Carré novel, the PRI’s mole would be Mancera himself.” That idea excited me. Our conversation with Raúl had consisted of speculation mixed with commonsense deduction, fortified somewhat, though not necessarily or absolutely reliably, by the former Mexico City policeman’s knowledge of “how things work.” Still, all that afternoon, my thoughts kept returning to the implications and possibilities of that exciting and scandalous story, Mancera as PRI mole. But, of course, this wasn’t a le Carré novel. Most probably this was mass murder, almost inconceivably cruel and, like almost all similar murders that have been occurring throughout Mexico in recent years, unlikely ever to be fully solved or punished. In Raúl’s opinion, the kidnapped victims were probably already dead. Most people one spoke to, even in Tepito, apart from the family members, said the same. A crime like that impatiently begs for a narrative, and when authorities seem unable or unwilling to provide a credible one, imagination, presumptuous, even vain, tries to provide that narrative on its own, reading and deciphering the circumstances according to its own propensities. Rumors, speculation, and extremely divergent interpretations of what little information and evidence exists fill the vacuum, in the media and in people’s conversation, as was already profusely happening in the Heavens case. But usually, in such cases, after enough time has passed, indifference sets in, and confusion becomes boredom or resigned skepticism: “We’ll never find out what happened there.” Other stories seize headlines. People begin to forget, and often that’s just what authorities count on, waiting for it to provide an escape from accountability. Of course there are always those who can’t forget, such as victims’ family members, lovers, and friends, though usually, in Mexico, they are condemned to anguished solitude and silence. But over the coming weeks it would at least initially seem that the banded-together families of the missing Tepiteños were not going to lapse or be intimidated into resignation and silence. Sometimes there are other people, totally unrelated personally to the victims and their families, probably without the least bit of personal feeling for their plight, who have their own reasons for keeping a case such as “Heavens” simmering in the public eye.