The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (29 page)

On July 2 three charred bodies turned up in the municipality of Huitzilac, in Morelos, a state that has become a gruesome war zone contested by rival cartels, a part of which borders on Mexico City. One corpse was that of the third Heavens owner, Dax Rodríguez Ledezma, brother of El Moschino, and the other two belonged to two women: his cousin, Heidi Fabiola Rodríguez, thirty-three; and his girlfriend, Diana Guadalupe Velasco, an eighteen-year-old university student. They’d been snatched after coming out of a movie theater in Iguala, Guerrero, also one of Mexico’s most violent, narco-contested states. According to the federal attonery general’s office, the victims had been tortured and murdered in Guerrero, and their bodies had been transported to and left in Huitzilac, hundreds of miles away. That is to say, the bodies had been planted—somebody had wanted them to be found in that place.

This orchestrated triple homicide did not seem like the work of a local Tepito gang. However, in the DF, Chief Prosecutor Ríos did not make much of it; he merely lamented that now his investigators would not be able to interrogate the third owner of Heavens. Mancera’s government said that the murder was under the jurisdiction of police in Morelos, because that was where the bodies were found. In Morelos that claim was rejected—the police there said it was the DF’s case to investigate. And so, at least as of this writing, no further investigation had been made into the murder of Dax Rodríguez Ledezma and the two women.

A city judge had already dispatched El Diablo, along with his chauffer-thug and Dax’s brother Mario, El Moschino, to prison on pretrial kidnapping charges. The club’s manager, Polo, and all the kidnappers remained at large. Only two weeks after the crime, in June, the Tepito families had publicly called on President Peña Nieto and the federal government to intervene in the case. During the second week of July the families finally met with federal prosecutors to ask them to take over. But they were told that the PGR couldn’t do so until the DF declared the involvement of “organized crime” and formally requested help or handed over the case. Those the families spoke with at the PGR confided that they did believe “organized crime”—a national narco cartel—was involved, but added that they couldn’t say so publicly. However, two or three days later, the families’ lawyer shared that opinion with the press, making it seem as if it was his own.

I wondered: if the families knew about any of the missing young people’s involvement in criminal activities that could have provoked such an extreme retaliation, or if city prosecutors and investigators had shared any such information with them, would they so openly and insistently be pressuring to push the case forward? The families, especially the mothers, clung to the belief that the victims were still alive, and these relatives would do anything to get them back, whatever they had been involved in before. At a press conference, a female journalist directed a question to the families as a whole, skeptically asking if they really believed that their missing relatives could still be alive. One of the mothers responded, “Do you have children?” The journalist answered that she didn’t. The mother said, “Then you don’t understand the question you’re asking.”

By mid-July, the Heavens case was fading as a news story. Since the murder of Dax Rodríguez Ledezma, there really had been nothing new to report. Perhaps this allowed Mancera to feel that he was bringing the situation under control. Meanwhile, President Peña Nieto and his government, including federal prosecutors and police, had maintained a wall of silence regarding the Heavens case and the situation in the DF. My own best off-the-record source, a man with years of experience in the government of the DF and the Mexico City police, said, “The PRI could have rung the bell, Here come the Apaches! They could have had Mancera’s head. Instead they went forty-five days without opening their mouths. They didn’t even bite during Mancera’s weakest moment.”—i.e., during the first days and weeks after the
levantón.

Then, on July 11, forty-five days after the abductions, Peña Nieto’s commissioner of national security—something like his chief federal police investigator—Manuel Mondragón, broke that silence. During an interview with the television news show
Primeras Noticias
, Mondragón said that organized crime “was getting a little out of control in the DF,” and that in some zones, such as Tepito, it had “crystallized.” The interviewer asked him if he meant that there were national drug cartels, such as the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas, in Mexico City, and Mondragón responded, “Not overtly, except in some areas as in this case we’re talking about [Tepito]. There it is manifesting itself, and we’re seeing the results of that.” Apparently referring to a Tepito “gang,” or gangs, he said, “I believe they must have . . . it’s possible that they have connections with other cartels from outside, but they are there in the city, with naturalization cards.” Twice during the interview he repeated that figurative mention of naturalization cards, implying that the cartels’ presence was known and accepted. Mondragón had been Ebrard’s chief of police and the two were close; when Mondragón accepted the post under Peña Nieto, Ebrard even publicly wished him well. In the interview, Mondragón had spoken carefully, as if reluctant to put the DF’s current mayor in a difficult spot. But his words instantly became the day’s top story and Heavens was back in the news, in bold headlines. “Mondragón Sees Cartels in the DF” and, beneath it, “Mancera Denies It” were on
Milenio
’s front page, and the headlines in other newspapers were similar.

“What’s happening in the Distrito Federal?” Salvador Camarena of
El País
asked when he interviewed Marcelo Ebrard in late June.

Ebrard answered, “I’d better not get into that, not now. I’ve already been
jefe de gobierno
.”

“They say you’re moving the new mayor’s chair”—that is, undermining or even conspiring against him—said the journalist.

“What would I gain by moving his chair? That would be putting the city at risk; it would be opening the way for the PRI.”

“It appears that the current
jefe de gobierno
, Miguel Ángel Mancera, has many enemies.”

Ebrard didn’t deny it. “I’m not among his enemies,” he said. “On the contrary.”

One plausible element in a strategy for the PRI to eventually take back the DF would be rendering the PRD defunct or irrelevant as a national party, and thus “opening the way for the PRI.” The PRI might be able to accomplish that now by simply watching the party self-destruct. The PRD was drubbed in Mexico’s summer local elections. In one year, it fell from being Mexico’s main opposition party, a serious contender for power, to being the country’s third party, behind the PAN. Many blamed the losses on party leaders Jesús Zambrano and Jesús Ortega, PRD insiders who gained control of the party in the wake of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s defection to form his own political organization. The pair, with whom Mayor Mancera had cast his lot, are known as “Los Chuchos”—Chucho is a common Mexican nickname for people named Jesús. It was Los Chuchos who negotiated the PRD’s participation in Peña Nieto and the PRI’s “Pact for Mexico.” There’s nothing wrong, of course, about an opposition party working with the party in power on reforms—of the education and tax systems, of media and labor laws, and so on—to improve a country. It made sense that to withdraw from the Pact for Mexico would strip the PRD of legislative influence, an argument Zambrano often asserted. But by going all in on the Pact for Mexico before Mexico and even the PRD’s congressional delegation knew what all of its agreements were, Los Chuchos seemed to have abdicated their party’s political identity, which is one that provides a critical opposition voice from the left. On June 17, when Peña Nieto was in the United Kingdom for a G-8 meeting, the
Financial Times
published an interview with him in which he announced a plan to reform the constitution to permit a privatization of Pemex, the behemoth national petroleum industry. In the interview, Peña Nieto said that the opposition parties, including the PRD, who’d signed the Pact for Mexico had already agreed to the potentially historic reform. Ever since Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the oil industry in 1938, expropriating U.S. and Anglo-Dutch companies, Pemex has been an icon of Mexican national sovereignty. Extremely corrupt, troubled, and dysfunctional as Pemex unsurprisingly is, poll after poll shows that the majority of the population opposes its privatization. Many Mexicans may be less against a reform of the national oil industry that could include some privatization than they are against giving the PRI, with its obvious legacy of patronage and corruption, the opportunity to carry this out. Nobody has forgotten the squalid crony enrichment of the PRI privatizations carried out by President Carlos Salinas and his government.

The
Financial Times
story kicked up a storm. “Chucho” Zambrano denied that he’d secretly agreed to the Pemex constitutional reform, but members of Peña Nieto’s cabinet and PRI senators came forward to say, adamantly, that he had. The controversy opened the way for Marcelo Ebrard’s return to the political spotlight. He challenged Peña Nieto to a public debate over what to do about Pemex, and insisted that any proposed constitutional reform of the petroleum company be voted on in a national referendum. Ebrard called on the PRD to pull out of Peña Nieto’s Pact for Mexico.

In a column in
SinEmbargo.com
titled “The Chucho Train, the Mancera Train,” Alejandro Páez Varela, the digital site’s founder and editor, wrote of Zambrano and Ortega, “[T]heir ‘enemies’ are multiplying by the hour . . . the overwhelming majority of Mexico City’s congressional delegation has decided to sign a letter that says NO to the PRD leadership’s intention to negotiate an energy reform that includes an opening to privatize Pemex . . . This train is losing steam. And its engineers are all alone. . . . ‘Los Chuchos’ conspire and search for allies. They discover that every day they have fewer. They cling to the other engine that is losing steam day after day: the Jefe de Gobierno’s. Now it’s two engines that are going nowhere. . . . Mancera is paying the price for having gone to bed with ‘Los Chuchos.’ So the Jefe de Gobierno shuts himself inside his four walls. He can’t face his voters. How, if the twelve
chamacos
from Tepito are still ‘absent’? He can’t face the leaders of the left. How, if he’s already been bought by another band?”

On July 20, at a public event packed with PRD politicians and supporters, Ebrard announced a new movement, the Progressive Movement, to renovate and change the party’s direction. The event itself signaled Ebrard’s ambition to take control of the PRD, and to oust Zambrano as its leader. “We are going to be a counterweight to the excesses and abuses of the PRI,” declared Ebrard.

“In Mexico Machiavelli couldn’t even get elected to a local leadership post,” Ebrard said of Mexican politics when we spoke again in the summer of 2013. “Nobody here reads his books because they’re too obvious, they’re like folklore.” Ebrard said, “The party’s leadership is a disaster. They just want to be a little moon of the earth,” the earth being Peña Nieto, whom Ebrard also compared to a monarch. “People need us to be their voice. But these leaders are with the Bourbons, and Paris isn’t represented anymore.”

The proposed privatization of Pemex had handed Ebrard a “line in the sand” issue. “The people who tell us not to be nationalistic are two of the most nationalistic countries in the world,” he said, “the United States and the United Kingdom. Of course we need to be nationalistic; finally that’s what this is all about, what kind of project can we carry out as a country, or not. How do we maximize our profits from petroleum? Their basic argument is that we don’t have the technology and we don’t have the resources, and so we have to open up and share a majority of what’s ours. They say, Don’t be ideological—but their ideological argument is the worst because they say privatization is always the best, and that argument is nothing more than the last remnants of Thatcherismo. You listen to Peña Nieto, his life story is from Atlacamulco [the president’s birthplace] to Thatcher.”

Pemex needs major reforms, said Ebrard. “[Pemex’s] union is extremely corrupt, but the PRI doesn’t want to reform it, because it’s an ally of the PRI.” The union is a sinkhole of corruption that squanders millions upon millions of dollars every year, through its contributions to PRI election campaigns and in other ways. “Pemex’s administrative council is madness, filled with political appointees,” said Ebrard. “So, Pemex is bad because we’re Mexicans and this is how we do everything, and so we’d better sell to Exxon? Of course we can do better. The argument that we don’t have the resources is scandalous.” It was a decision, he said, not a preordained destiny, not to reform and invest. “We can have technology, but we have to make that decision. It’s a decision.”

Ebrard didn’t want to speak much, on the record, about his successor’s troubles as mayor and about the Heavens case, though he did say the latter was likely to have lasting repercussions.

One Sunday, June 23, one day short of a month since the Heavens
levantón
, I’d again accompanied Pablo de Llano to Tepito. At the subway stop we were met by Juan, the younger brother of Alan Omar Atiencia Barranco, twenty-six, one of the missing youths, married to Karen Morales Vargas, twenty-five, also taken from Heavens that Sunday morning. Their two families live in the same
vecindad
on a street a little outside the Tepito market area. We hadn’t walked very far when we noticed that a kid, about fourteen, small and wiry, had fallen in step just behind us. He was wearing a bright yellow and blue América
fútbol
team jersey. Sometimes he pulled alongside and looked at us, his stare moving from one face to the other, and then fell back again. Pablo wondered if maybe he was a relative of the Atiencia Barrancos, but Juan hadn’t greeted or even acknowledged him. When we reached the
vecindad
the kid followed us through the open doorway, down the tunnel-like entrance alley that led to a small courtyard, where there was a glass shrine strung with Christmas lights, and with statues of the Virgin, San Judas Tadeo, and El Niño de Antorcha inside. Most of the
vecindades
have such shrines in their courtyards, paid for and tended by their residents. Another alley, to the right of the shrine, led to a larger courtyard in back. A steep concrete staircase led to Karen Morales Vargas’s family’s home, perched like a cave dwelling in the wall above the smaller courtyard. With a smirk that was mocking, or maybe deranged, the kid glanced at us and left, back down the alley to the sidewalk. Later Pablo asked if I thought the kid was a
halcón,
a falcon: that is, in the vocabulary of contemporary Mexico, somebody who works for a cartel or another crime group as “eyes and ears” in the streets, reporting on strangers who enter its territory.