The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (28 page)

In November and December 2012, when Mancera took office, the dealers came back in force. Now sometimes as many as twenty or thirty arrived at the clubs and bars in old automobiles, carrying assault weapons. “They were armed and told the business owners that if they didn’t let them work they’d kill them or burn their places down,” said Rivera Cruces. As a warning, some establishments received funeral wreaths with the owner’s name; others received decapitated dogs’ heads. Now the drug dealers were hitting places not just in the Condesa and Zona Rosa, but in the Roma, in the Center, and in other
colonias
. Rivera Cruces told
Proceso
that he didn’t know who the dealers were, whether they were with a cartel, or whom they worked for. Two months before the Heavens
levantón
, Rivera Cruces went to speak to Chief Prosecutor Ríos about the worsening situation; he said that Ríos told him the owners were obligated to denounce the drug dealers to the police, because if the owners let them in, they became accomplices. “I told him, sure,” said Rivera Cruces, “and we’ll pay for those denunciations with our lives.” The “delinquents,” he told the magazine, never partied with the other clients; they just stood and watched, while others stayed outside, observing the people arriving, “how they paid, if they wore watches, etcetera.” I couldn’t recall seeing people like that, or drugs being sold openly, at the Colonia Roma after-hours club Reyna and I frequented last summer; but when the club was shut down by the city for a few months this spring, the rumor was that drug dealing on the premises had something to do with it. Now the place is open again, though I haven’t been there this summer. The usual clientele there ranged in age from the twenties to the forties, and it was obvious that there was plenty of drug use. “How else are people going to dance until seven in the morning?” said Reyna, when we talked about it the other day.

In the weeks following the Heavens
levantón,
reports of a few other apparent kidnappings from nightspots appeared in the press. One of those had occurred in April, when five young men had disappeared from Bar Virtual, in Colonia 18 de Marzo. Their families came forward only after they saw how quickly the media and authorities responded to the Tepito families stopping traffic on the Eje 1. Neighbors from Colonia Pensador Mexicano (Mexican Thinker) and other
colonias
near the airport blocked the Circuito Interior in protest against the authorities’ indifference to the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old boy from a bar the week before. The press also began to report on the workings of the
narcomenudeo
in the city. According to the SSP, the public security ministry headed by the chief of police, there are five thousand
narco-tienditas,
places where you can buy drugs, operating in the city. But a study carried out by the DF’s legislative assembly put the number at thirteen thousand and concluded that they operated “with complete impunity.” One delegate said, “It’s easier to buy coke powder in the DF at night than Coca-Cola,” which doesn’t seem like much of an exaggeration to me.

Mancera appointed a special operations force to conduct an investigation into the Heavens case, parallel to those being carried out by the Procuraduría’s anti-kidnapping police and other police units. And he flooded both the Zona Rosa and Tepito with heavily armed police patrols. Bars and clubs were raided and shut down. Mancera announced a plan to shut down all after-hours clubs in the city, though that didn’t seem likely to happen. On June 4, Chief Prosecutor Ríos announced that the kidnappers had belonged to a
pandilla
, a gang, and not to an organized crime group, i.e., a national or transnational drug cartel. For the first time since the disappearance, Ríos made mention of La Unión, supposedly founded in 2010, a Tepito gang that allegedly controlled, or wanted to control, the Zona Rosa–Condesa–Roma drug
plaza.
From then on La Unión would remain at the center of official accounts and speculations about the case. However, the same day, Mancera declared that there was no proof—in the form of “witness, scientific, or documented evidence”—that the missing twelve had even been in After Heavens that night. A few days later, when another young man was gunned down in Tepito, becoming the ninth person murdered in the barrio in the first eight days of June, Mancera declared that it was “the same situation we’ve always had in Tepito.” The mainstream newspaper
Milenio
published, probably as a result of a leak, that this last slain youth “possibly could have worked for a relative of ‘El Tanque.’”

Meanwhile prosecutors and police had been going over images from the private and city security cameras on Calle Lancaster, and had discovered footage that showed seven of the Tepito young people arriving at the after-hours club at four in the morning in two vehicles: a dark red compact car and a taxi. They had come to After Heavens from Bar Cristal on Avenida Cuahtémoc in Colonia Roma. Bar Cristal was promptly searched by police and shut down; it was reported to be a hangout for La Unión gang members. The next day, June 7, the prosecutor’s office announced the discovery of footage showing the actual
levantón
as it occurred, which, after sharing it with the families of the missing, Ríos unveiled at a press conference. The images, filmed from a distance and blurry, showed about seventeen men pulling up in front of the club in eight cars, mostly compacts. The men milled around and walked up and down the sidewalk and street in front of Heavens. They appeared to be unarmed, and their faces were uncovered. According to Ríos, the footage showed nine of the missing young people exiting the club, and docilely getting into the waiting cars. But according to some, including Josefina García, the mother of Said Sánchez, “You don’t see the
muchachos
getting into the cars.” And neither Jorge Ortíz nor Said Sánchez was visible in the video. So, no assault weapons, no commandos with their faces hidden, and no vans, as the first and so far only publicly known witness, Toñín, had reported to CAPEA. Chief Prosecutor Ríos said at the press conference, “We discount the participation of a commando operation. What we can credit is the intervention of a gang that arrived in various vehicles.” There had been no “violence”; it had been a peaceful
levantón
. Ríos ascribed the mass kidnapping to a conflict between two rival Tepito gangs. He added that there was “a connecting thread” between the Heavens kidnapping and the slaying of Horacio Vite Ángel, the drug dealer murdered outside the bar Black in the Condesa two days before.

During those days the first arrests were made in the case. Heavens’ head of security, Gabriel Carrasco, “El Diablo,” was captured along with his driver-bodyguard, Andrés Henonet González, and the wife of one of the club’s three owners. The next day, apparently in response to his wife’s capture, that owner, Mario Rodríguez Ledezma, “El Moschino,” turned himself in. El Diablo had told his interrogators that a few days before the kidnapping, El Moschino, along with another of the bar’s owners, Ernesto Espinosa Lobo, “El Lobo,” and the club’s manager, Ismael García, “Polo,” had told him and other employees to be ready to help out with a
levantón
at the club that Sunday. “Which is to say,” he said, “they were going to put some subjects, apparently from Tepito, in place to be lifted.” He said that he’d understood that Jerzy Ortíz, El Tanque’s son, was the operation’s target. El Moschino mentioned to his interrogators that the club’s manager, Polo, had told him that the kidnappers included members of La Unión. According to El Moschino, dealers from La Unión had sold drugs inside Heavens. When the police studied the phone records of the drug dealer executed outside the bar Black in the Condesa, they revealed that he’d been in regular telephone contact with Heavens’ manager, Polo. It might be that the dealer, Vite Ángel, worked for Polo, who’d told him when and where to sell his drugs. At least one newspaper reported, apparently on the basis of the detained owner’s testimony, that dealers from La Unión had told Polo that he would be killed in retaliation for the dealer Vita Ángel’s murder unless he helped to deliver the people they wanted from Tepito. But according to another report I came across in the press, Polo had boasted that he was the one who’d murdered Vita Ángel. So Polo was obviously a key figure, but he was a fugitive. The two other owners, Ernesto Espinosa, El Lobo, and El Moschino’s brother, Dax Rodríguez Ledezma, were fugitives too.

In Tepito, on June 9, a youth was murdered and another wounded, when they were gunned down by men who’d chased them through the streets in an automobile. The next day
Milenio
had a headline quoting Mancera’s exhortation: “Speak Well About the DF.” At almost the same time as the shooting in Tepito, Mancera made an appearance in the Metropolitan Cathedral on behalf of a family assistance program, accompanied by Cardinal Norberto Rivera and Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner, who resides in the DF. Addressing the press and the others assembled there, Mayor Mancera said: “Mexico City is all of us, and Mexico City is stronger today. It’s strong and it’s alive and therein is the proof of our strength. Let’s speak well about Mexico City, let’s talk about all the good things that happen in this city every day, and our government will take care of the rest, and in that we have many allies. Our most important ally is our social fabric, the strength represented by the men and women of this capital.”

Mancera spoke that day, or tried to speak, as a DF mayor is expected to, confidently cheerleading for the city and the competence of his own government. But his words were also patronizing and somewhat Big Brotherish. Over the coming days and weeks, Mancera was more visible than before, frequently speaking out in that exhortatory and optimistic way, and presiding over a group same-sex wedding. Mancera repeatedly emphasized that, despite the Heavens case and the violence in Tepito, the DF’s overall murder and crime rate had not gone up at all. Mancera was not wrong about that, though news stories, in the national and international press, precisely because of the Heavens case, were suggesting the opposite. But Mancera still needed his government to solve the case and to find out what had happened to the twelve missing young people. Mancera had already fired the head of CAPEA over its perceived bumbling of the case in the first days. And now he publicly warned both his chief prosecutor and his chief of police that they should not consider their jobs secure if they couldn’t produce results.

Mancera was still insisting that there were no “organized crime” groups operating in the city. If he were to acknowledge that these existed, then the Heavens case would become the responsibility of federal prosecutors and their police investigators. Though Mancera had asked the PGR, the office of the attorney general of Mexico, for help in finding the missing twelve wherever they might be in Mexico, he was determined to keep the case tightly under his government’s control. After all, what big city in the world doesn’t have local drug gangs that sometimes turn violent or go to war against each other?

On June 29, while conducting an antinarcotics operation in the city that
was
under the jurisdiction of the PGR, federal police busted a drug den—a house where drugs were sold and consumed—in Coyoacán. There, they found and arrested one of the two fugitive owners of After Heavens, El Lobo, Ernesto Espinosa. El Lobo was allegedly involved in running the Coyoacán den. That night he was driving a yellow Hummer, and was, reportedly, on drugs. The feds turned El Lobo over to city prosecutors.

The investigation seemed to be advancing. But El Lobo’s capture raised disconcerting questions. Mancera had a special task force assigned to the Heavens case. The Procuraduría’s anti-kidnapping force and the SSP’s Mexico City police were at work on the case, combing the streets. And who should know the streets of the DF and the workings of its criminal underworld better than the police? Not only do Mexico City police know criminals; many police are in league with criminals. But there are also internal affairs units that monitor the police—several hundred police have been sent to trial and prison in recent years.
¹³
A lot of people had been involved in the After Heavens
levantón
, at least seventeen kidnappers for starters, and people talk—criminals to other criminals and to their friends, to police, to people who inform for the police; police among themselves; and so on. With informers and security cameras everywhere, no part of the city should be impenetrable to the Mexico City police, and those whom the police really want to capture should never be impossible to find, so long as they are still in the DF. So then how could it be that El Lobo, running a drug den, driving his yellow Hummer around the DF, while on drugs no less, had eluded the Mexico City police during the month when he was one of the most wanted men in the city? And how could it be that, of the seventeen men who prosecutors had said carried out the kidnappings, who had arrived at Heavens in eight cars, captured by security cameras, not a single one had been arrested? Didn’t it defy logic to believe that merely a gang of local drug dealers, many of whom were probably adolescents, could carry out such a cartel-style
levantón
at eleven-thirty on a Sunday morning in the heart of the Zona Rosa? Wouldn’t they have known that such an audacious and unprecedented crime in the DF would be likely to attract the focus of the national and even international media, and inevitably trigger a major police investigation and manhunt? Why would a local Tepito gang, in cartel terminology, so
heat up the plaza
, and bring all of that heat down on themselves?