The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (25 page)

A banner hanging in the Tepito market:

¿Les has visto?
Have you seen them?

Said Sánchez G.

Sex: Male. Age: 19 years. Height: 1.85.

Identifying characteristics: Devil tattoo on right shoulder.

Jerzy Ortíz Ponce

Sex: Male. Age: 16. Build: Robust. Height: 1.85. Skin: Light brown. Face: Round. Mouth: Small. Nose: Flat. Eyebrows: Full. Lips: Thin. Chin: Pointed. Type and color of eyes: Large, dark brown. Type and color of hair: Straight, black. Identifying characteristics: Tattoo in the form of a diamond on the outer part of right wrist. His name tattooed in Hebrew letters. On inside of right wrist a tattoo of the letter J, a heart, and the letter L. Both ears pierced with earrings, piercing on the top of one of his ears.

Adjacent to each description was a color photograph. Said Sánchez’s photo, showing the smooth face of a solemn and slightly frightened-looking boy, must have been taken several years earlier. Jerzy Ortíz’s was of a bull-necked, flushed-faced, pugnacious-looking teenager wearing a baseball cap.

At the bottom of the banner a three-line prayer summoned the compassion and mercy of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

The banner hung inside the spacious
tianguis
, deep within the Tepito market, owned by María Teresa Ramos Uruttia, maternal grandmother of Jerzy Ortíz, son of Jorge, El Tanque. Ramos owns two other adjacent stalls, operated by family members. One sells women’s sandals, tattoo sleeves, and other adornments; the other sells cell-phone chips. Ramos’s stall features embroidered and spangled rocker T-shirts, the Misfits, Janis Joplin, Kiss, Megadeath, John Lennon, and others of superheroes, and also hair accessories, gaudy bracelets, earrings, and the like. Ramos has lived in Tepito for all of her sixty-six years. She is a diminutive woman with hair dyed an orange hue, and a softly leathery, puckishly animated face; her eyes, at least on that afternoon, were as puffy and slitted as a boxer’s after a fight with a hard-jabbing opponent. She wore a baggy brown T-shirt, and jeans. Tears overflowed her eyes and she intermittently broke into sobs as she spoke to us, and at moments her entire body seemed to be trembling. Jerzy was the youngest of her six children, she told us, though she meant grandchildren. Ramos has four sons and daughters, including Jerzy’s mother, still married to his father. After El Tanque went to prison, Ramos, along with his mother, raised Jerzy. Jerzy and Said, son of El Papis, the two youngest of the missing, had been friends since childhood. Physically Jerzy was said to be a replica of his hulking father. In a photograph that I saw in a newspaper, taken when El Tanque was in police custody, he looked like a professional wrestler, naked from the waist up, massive upper arm turned to the camera and sporting two big tattoos, one of a demonically laughing skull, and the other of a chubby-cheeked baby, a realistic ink portrait of his first daughter. It was hard to believe that at sixteen Jerzy could be a consequential figure in any organized crime group, or that he’d already inherited his father’s mantle as a feared Tepito gangster, though some believed he possibly was being groomed to be one, a crown prince of Tepito crime. Jerzy, Pablo de Llano would learn a few days later, still slept at night with his mother in her bed. When Pablo asked her why, she answered, “He’s my youngest, my baby.”

Jerzy’s grandmother was incensed over how the Tepito angle had been played in the press. “I’ve been living here for sixty-six years,” she said, “during which nothing like this has ever happened before. Whenever they find a dead person everyone wants to say he’s from Tepito and that that’s why, but that’s a lie. There are killings and robberies here, yes. And, yes, the barrio is dangerous. But that Jerzy’s father was a narco doesn’t diminish the importance of finding the
muchachos
. The boys’ fathers, they’re paying for their crimes. Jorge, they’ve taken him all over the republic,” she said, referring to the different penitentiaries in which El Tanque has served time, in the DF, in Durango, and, currently, in Hermosillo. “None of my children is a
ratero
,” a thief. “None use drugs. All of us are workers. I haven’t moved from here for anything. We have nothing to hide. Let them investigate us all they want.”

Ramos said that on the day when the police came to arrest El Tanque on charges of drug dealing and extortion, he was right there at the family’s complex of stalls—at his, he’d sold exercise equipment—fixing six-year-old Jerzy’s bicycle. She said that one of the police held a gun to the boy’s head. “Now Jerzy works with me here,” she said. “He was in high school. He went to school with his sister, but when she got pregnant, he dropped out.” One of Ramos’s grandchildren is a chef, and another, she said, studied communications, and was spending all his time on the Internet, contacting the media. “If Jerzy didn’t want to study,” she said, “he had to be a merchant, because that’s our trade.” I asked her what Jerzy’s working hours were, and she guilelessly answered, “Ohhh, Jerzy was our spoiled grandson. He came to work at whatever hour he wanted.”

While, on this Saturday, the authorities had yet to confirm that any of the missing had even been in After Heavens, Ramos knew that Jerzy and Said had been in the club because another friend who’d gone with them had been denied entrance, but said that the other two had gone inside. She exclaimed angrily, “How could they have allowed a sixteen-year-old into that place!” News reports described After Heavens as a dark, three-story space where drugs were openly sold. A sister of one of the missing women, who’d often gone to the club herself, said that it had a “heavy atmosphere.” People came armed, she said, though nothing ever happened there, unlike other places she’d been to in the city, where gun battles had broken out. A woman who sold candy at her little stand on Calle Lancaster described for a reporter the young clubgoers’ expensive cars and their intimidating attitudes, and how they would sometimes park where they weren’t supposed to. An employee of a hotel on the block told a reporter, “We’d see women and men come out of that bar very drunk, usually around eleven in the morning.” Ramos said, “Whoever owns that club, and whether they sold drugs there, none of that interests me. I just want them to give back the
chamacos
. Were they taken by aliens from outer space?” How could it be, she asked, that the nineteen security cameras supposedly filming Calle Lancaster, including those of the hotel and of a bank, hadn’t captured anything?

Ramos confided that the stress and anxiety provoked by the disappearance of her grandson had nearly killed her. She’s diabetic and suffers from hypertension, and both her glucose and her blood pressure had risen dangerously. She was weeping again. A sad-eyed, sturdily built gray-haired man spoke to her from across the stall. This was Ramos’s husband. Her expression cleared, and she gestured with her hand. “Go and get the T-shirt,” she said. “We have to keep selling.” He obediently headed off.

Violence, dread, death, and the imperative to keep selling; that’s the way of Tepito, I thought later. “Tepito is blessed!” exclaimed Ramos. “There’s nothing that can’t be bought or sold here.” The merchant matriarch’s expression turned beatific, and her eyes opened wide. “This barrio is so beautiful, it’s miraculous, you have no idea.” She told us how neighbors had rallied around the families of the missing, helping however they could, bringing food, going out into the
eje
to stop traffic, something they would do again, but for now, she said, the families of the missing were asking for calm. They were going to meet with Chief Prosecutor Ríos the next day. “We don’t know what he’s going to say,” she said. “We have to give them an opportunity to do their work.”

One line of investigation that the DF police would obviously have to pursue was whether Jerzy Ortíz’s and Said Sánchez’s parentage did, in fact, have anything to do with the kidnapping. Even if it turned out that it did, they would need to find out why the other ten were taken. Not all of the Tepito market stall merchants we spoke to that day seemed indignant or even disturbed by what had happened. Some said that the kidnapped youths must have “owed something”—implying that they had crossed or taken something from a rival group—or else that Jerzy had been on
un mal camino,
headed down a bad path. I don’t know if those merchants actually knew something about whatever Jerzy or any of the other young people had been up to, or had themselves been influenced by press coverage that implicitly criminalized the victims without providing any proof, or by their own personal memories of El Tanque or legends of his fearsome reputation. When El Tanque was arrested in 2003, it was for drug dealing and extortion; he has claimed that he was just a dealer in the
narcomenudeo
and that prosecutors had inflated the charges to make it seem a more significant operation than it was. Four years later, on February 14, 2007, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard ordered a predawn raid of six hundred police commandos on the enormous
vecindad
or residential complex at Calle Tenochtitlan 40, also known as La Fortaleza, where the imprisoned El Tanque’s gang, known then as the Tepito Cartel—it no longer exists—ran a drug supermarket and had its center of operations. One hundred forty-four families were expelled out onto the streets while police used sledgehammers to smash down doors and walls. According to John Ross’s account in his book on Mexico City,
El Monstruo
, “350 kilos of marijuana, 3.5 kilos of cocaine, and 80 tons of pirate CDs were retrieved from the caves and tunnels inside the Fort.” As the “tenants huddled on the sidewalk in the chill February dawn . . . Marcelo sent the coffee wagon around.” The Fortaleza was razed and bulldozed, and the city government expropriated the property. The Community Development Center that Ebrard promised to build on the site opened in 2011. It has sports facilities, including a boxing school and a pool where lessons are given in swimming and even scuba diving; adult education and job training courses whose curriculum was designed by a committee of Tepito residents; a part-time high school degree program for working youths; and supplementary classes and activities for gifted children. The center means something to a neighborhood whose residents, according to what Ebrard told me, have the highest incarceration rate in Mexico: out of 38,000 Tepiteños
,
he said, 1,600 are in prison. There was a guy, thirty or so, with a pirate’s black beard and swagger, who sold DVDs from a cart at the edge of the pavement on Avenida del Trabajo and was the type who “hears about everything that goes on here”; Pablo regularly checked in on him. He had no regrets over the razing of the Fortaleza. “Have you seen the new center?” he asked. “
Está poca madre
.” In Mexico City slang
poca madre
, literally “little of mother,” or “motherless,” means something like really fucking cool.

The day before Pablo and I went to Tepito, Mayor Mancera, in his hour, had stridden into the glaring spotlight of a press conference to take questions about the Heavens case. The mayor declared that the twelve missing young people should be considered not forcibly “disappeared,” but simply “absent.” He called the incident “an isolated one” and insisted, “There are no cartels operating in the DF.”

Today is July 25, one day shy of two months since the morning the twelve young people were kidnapped—forcibly disappeared—from outside After Heavens. All twelve are still missing. There has been no indication of any sort that they could still be alive. Maybe some are alive, maybe all are, or maybe none are. Nor has there been a counterattack by any criminal group with whom some number of the missing twelve might have had links, as would seem certain if they indeed had such links. Maybe a violent counterattack is in the offing; who knows? It’s possible a ransom was demanded, not of the families but of some such criminal group, but we don’t know if there’s any truth to that, it’s just one rumor among many. There have been some arrests in the case, but they haven’t provided any information beyond what we knew early on, that the after-hours club’s owners and some staff played a role in the kidnapping. Yesterday the families met yet again with the chief prosecutor, Rodolfo Ríos Garza—they’ve met with Mayor Mancera too. In an e-mail last night, Pablo de Llano, who has been closely following the case and reporting on it for
El País
, wrote: “The families haven’t exploded yet, but some of the mothers have reached their limit. Today they’ve again come out of a meeting frustrated. As for your question, why those twelve?—it still makes no sense to me either.” Two months later, and still no reported or leaked evidence or hard allegations that any of the missing were involved in organized crime activities, though two of the young Tepito men had served prison terms for robbery.

Today, July 25, is also the sixth anniversary of Aura’s death. At tonight’s Mass in the church on the corner, the priest will again pronounce Aura’s name during the prayer for the departed. Hopefully he’ll pronounce it correctly this time, though I suppose it won’t matter much, as only I’ll be there to notice. Naty is staying in with five-year-old Aura, my goddaughter. She couldn’t get a babysitter. Her husband Sam says he’ll meet me after the Mass. Juanca can’t make it—he’ll be out of the city for work—and Fabis is in Baja California. Apart from them, I didn’t inform anyone else about the Mass. I only told Jovi about it yesterday. She asked me why I’d told so few people. I said, “I just don’t need people to show me that kind of care or support anymore, and don’t want them to feel obligated.” She nodded as if she completely understood, and I liked the way she looked at me, with something affirming in her softened, grave expression. She won’t go to the Mass, but will meet Sam and me after it.