The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (32 page)

Surely Mayor Mancera knows what is happening in his city, yet following the mass kidnapping at Heavens, he said, “I have no information that any cartel is in the DF,” and, “The Federal authorities haven’t reported to me that any cartel is operating in the city, and they’re the ones who map that situation.” Why would he speak that way? Because as long as the cartels aren’t warring violently with each other in the streets, as the cartels do throughout much of Mexico, as long as they are not massacring each other and each other’s police, to say nothing of innocent bystanders, as the cartels do throughout much of Mexico, as long as they are not leaving corpses strung from overpasses and strewing decapitated bodies and heads all around the city, as the cartels do throughout much of Mexico, as long as they are not kidnapping girls and women off the streets and selling them into sexual slavery or taking them to torture-rape safe houses and tossing their corpses away like trash, as the cartels do throughout much of Mexico, as long as they are not killing reporters and bloggers in the DF or terrorizing media into complete silence about their activities, as the cartels do throughout much of Mexico, as long as they are not trying to
take over
the city through extortion and terror, burning down businesses or murdering their resistant owners and their families, steeping the city in violent death and savagery in order to terrorize its citizens into submission, as the cartels do throughout much of Mexico, as long as they are not upsetting the equilibrium of the city, of nearly everyone’s daily routines, as long as people aren’t afraid to leave their homes to travel to work or school or to go out at night, as people are throughout much of Mexico—then it is
as if
the cartels are not there
. Maybe Mexico City’s
narcomenudeo
plaza
, profitable as it may be, is not big enough, a speck compared to the vast
plaza
over the border, to actually go to war over. The cartels know that, for numerous reasons, they could never take over the DF in the way they can México State and a
municipio
like Neza, or cities like Torreón, Nuevo Laredo, Acapulco, and so on, drug trafficking points of entry and departure, leading north. The city’s real powers, many of them multinational—banking, finance, big media, telecommunications, industry, construction, superstore commerce, and so on—need the DF to be stable, and because the cartels also make money in the DF and want to be left “in peace,” stability even seems to suit them. When the cartels take over a city or town, their control makes it resemble Lovecraft’s “Innsmouth,” occupied by venal frog-fish-men fathered by monstrous creatures, the Deep Ones, who come ashore from their secret citadel under the ocean. The Deep Ones offer treasure in exchange for human sacrifice and immortal life to their hideous offspring, who eventually subsume the town. A stranger coming upon Innsmouth quickly senses its stifling menace and corruption. Everything “reeks.”

The DF isn’t like that, but maybe that’s what going on in the sky over Tepito: something like the hovering shadow over Innsmouth. Maybe the Deep Ones are already in Tepito. But it’s not as if narco executions didn’t happen in the DF before. Jorge, one of former Mayor Ebrard’s younger security guards, told me that once, when he was a beat policeman, he’d had to recover the bodies of some decapitated men, load them into a police pickup, and bring them to the morgue, but this had freaked him out, had left him, he told me, deeply shaken and with nightmares for weeks. So it wasn’t the usual thing, something that a DF policeman would expect to encounter as part of his normal duties, as it would be for his counterparts throughout much of Mexico. But 73 narco executions in the DF over three months is a shocking number, a rate, Padgett reported, comparable to or higher than that in some of the most conflicted narco states, though México State and Coahuila, over the same period, had 209. But what is disconcerting is this: I didn’t notice that those narco executions were happening, and hardly anybody I knew mentioned it. That most excellent journalist Marcela Turati did; I do remember now her telling me, months ago, something like this. But mostly the press, if it did know about the executions, sounded no alarm, nor did anyone else in a position to know. And I recalled what Ebrard’s
guarura
, the “professor,” had told me one afternoon in the lobby of our building, that if police were involved or complicit in the Heavens
levantón
, of course the same kind of thing had happened in the DF before, only this time it had become front-page news.

Pablo and I both had our own off-the-record sources, men with direct lines into the highest levels of the city government and police, his in the Mancera camp, mine in Ebrard’s. Sometimes we got together and shared our notes, and tried to construe from our different mixes of information and speculation some idea of our own about what lay behind the Heavens case.

Pablo’s source, though he was officially “with” Mancera, said it was a police problem. Mancera had lost the internal control over the Procuraduría’s investigative police—formerly known as the judicial police
,
or
judiciales—
and the SSP’s Mexico City police that Ebrard, said Pablo’s source, with thirty years of experience in city government, had known how to exert. Since Mancera had taken office as
jefe de gobierno,
said Pablo’s source, in the DF there had been an “empowering of criminals protected by the police,” manifested in attempts by the Tepito drug gang La Unión to control the
narcomenudeo
in
colonias
Condesa and Roma, the Zona Rosa, and other parts of the city. In Mexico City the police constitute, and long have constituted, an autonomous culture, and the police there, especially the notorious judicial/investigative police,
are
organized crime. The police are what the DF has instead of aggressively operating cartels, Pablo’s source emphasized. Throughout the DF, all the places where drugs are sold and distributed are protected and controlled by police who guarantee their dealers’ impunity. La Unión, said Pablo’s source, began in 2010 as a Tepito gang of extortionists and
sicarios
, assassins for hire. But now, he said, La Unión is a drug gang led by police and former members of the police, and the same is true of the city’s other drug gangs. And it’s not just city police who are in on the action: in the heart of Tepito, said Pablo’s source, there’s a post where federal police conduct their business with their own dealers or factions of La Unión. The city’s stability, said Pablo’s source, rests on a long-established pact between the business powers and the city government that “nobody wants to see broken.” One of the most important responsibilities of the
jefe de gobierno
, in exchange for the ongoing support of that
clase empresarial,
is to keep the police under control. The challenge to Mancera now was to attack his own police, and deactivate at least one of its factions, without provoking a disastrous war within the police. Should the city begin to see
levantones
of police, “the next step,” said Pablo’s source, then it would know that war had begun.

And so while Pablo’s source did not think that elements within the PRI itself had orchestrated the
levantón
—as part of a strategy, say, to fray that pact, and destabilize the city—he asserted that the crime had “great political capital” and had become a “political weapon.” That source said, “Everybody knows the PRI wants the DF.” Whoever had carried out the
levantón
—La Unión or some faction of the gang, or some faction of the police, or some combination of these—had done so imitating the style of a cartel because they thought they had protection. The police protect the local drug gangs. But the overriding question, said Pablo’s source, is: Who protects the police?

When I spoke to my source, I asked whether it was true, and if so how, that Mancera had lost the control over the police that Ebrard had been able to maintain. One mistake Mancera made, said the source, was that when he was chief prosecutor he’d hired as a sub-prosecutor Jesús Rodríguez Almeida, a lawyer and veteran of the federal police, the federal investigations agency, and the federal attorney general’s office. Then, as mayor, Mancera had appointed Rodríguez Almeida to head the SSP as chief of police, the post Ebrard had held under AMLO. As a federal officer and official, Rodríguez Almeida had worked in the north, in narco-controlled states such as Chihuahua, and, said the source, when he came to the DF “he brought all that pollution with him.” Nobody has ever described the notoriously corrupt federal police and justice forces, especially those in the most violent narco zones, as anything much better than at least passively complicit in the criminal activities of the cartels. Such an explanation certainly fitted with the scenario of drug gangs empowered by police factions described by Pablo de Llano’s source. Not every present and former federal police officer or investigator is dishonorable, obviously; hundreds, even thousands, of corrupt Federales have been purged in recent years. In the last year alone, under Rodríguez Almeida, hundreds of police were detained for corruption and other crimes and purged from the Mexico City police. But should it ever be exposed that a DF police force of ninety thousand, led by an official formerly associated with the federal police, had fostered, or protected, a faction or factions of police engaged in cartel-like crimes, nobody is going to fall over in surprise. Nor would there be much surprise if one of those factions came, with or without his knowledge, from Chief Prosecutor Ríos’s investigative police.

To my source, a key to the Heavens case lay in the murder of After Heavens’ owner Dax Rodríguez Ledezma, whose burned and tortured body had turned up with those of his cousin and adolescent lover in the municipality of Huitzilac, in Morelos state, some distance from the Pacific state of Guerrero, where they had been kidnapped and murdered. This occurrence, though it would obviously seem to be of major importance to those trying to solve the Heavens case, had been at least publicly forgotten by Mancera’s government, by his chief prosecutor, and by most of the Mexico City press. The source said that he had heard that Dax Rodríguez Ledezma had been tortured and murdered because he’d been talking to police—whether federal or from the DF or elsewhere, the source didn’t specify. There is a rumor that Dax Rodríguez left behind a video, recorded by himself, in which he revealed what he knew about the
levantón.
It was also being said that the other two owners of After Heavens, in detention, beyond admitting and describing their own roles in setting up the Tepito youths to be kidnapped, were keeping silent about whatever else they knew regarding the case.

Huitzilac, in Morelos, said the source, hadn’t been chosen at random. He said Huitzilac, because of its history and also its geography, is a symbolic place in Mexico, representing “the gate to the city” from the Cuernavaca side. Controlled by the Beltrán Leyvas, the territory was described by one Mexican newspaper as the cartel’s “paradise.” The municipality of Huitzilac is where, on August 24, 2012, in the town of Tres Marías, gunmen later identified as federal police suspected of working for the Beltrán Leyva cartel ambushed two agents of the CIA who were traveling with a Mexican navy captain in a car with diplomatic plates. Two and a half years before, acting on information provided by U.S. authorities, a Mexican navy commando team—the navy is considered by far the least corrupt branch of the Mexican armed forces—had hunted down and killed the cartel’s leader, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, “El Barbas,” in Cuernavaca. The August 2012 ambush of the CIA agents and the Mexican officer was apparently in revenge for that killing. One hundred fifty-two bullets were fired at the car, piercing its armor, but the passengers, though wounded, survived. It was widely assumed in Mexico that the agents were in Tres Marías that day staking out the terrain for an attempted capture of Héctor Beltrán Leyva, “El H,” now the cartel’s leader. The attack exposed CIA involvement in Mexico’s drug war, creating a furor that raised tension between the U.S. and Mexican governments, and embarrassed President Felipe Calderón. Eventually fourteen federal police were arraigned for the assassination attempt, and now await trial. But Héctor Beltrán Leyva, El H, remained free.

Another possibility is that the bodies of Dax Rodríguez Ledezma and the two women had been placed in Huitzilac precisely because it was Beltrán Leyva territory. Then it would have been a message intended for El H and his allies, most likely the Zetas, sent by a rival such as the Sinaloa Cartel.

During the first weeks after the Heavens kidnapping, when the Mexican press was filled with speculations about the case, a rumor turned up in some reports that a few years earlier, a truck shipment of cocaine, worth $2.5 million, belonging to the Beltrán Leyvas had gone missing in Tepito. My source also mentioned this rumor and seemed to credit it. In this version, the
levantón
had been a settling of accounts, by El H, for that apparent theft. The youths lifted from After Heavens, or some of them, or else people they were associated with, had kept, or stolen, the Beltrán Leyvas’ cocaine. But others said that the stolen cocaine had belonged to the Sinaloa Cartel. Another rumor, said the source, was that the kidnappers had asked for a ransom double the worth of the missing cocaine, but if so, who had they asked and who was supposed to pay it? But if the
levantón
was directed against the “sons of La Unión,” possibly including, say, Jerzy Ortíz, the son of El Tanque, then why take all the others? Why not settle the manner in some quieter way, with a direct narco execution of whoever had been directly involved, or of their sons or daughters? Because whoever had sent that message didn’t mean or want it to be discreet. Such a message, said the source, could also have been a testing of Mayor Mancera, to see how he and his government would react to such an incursion and challenge. If the message came from El H, said the source, it would also have been a taunt: “I don’t care if you come looking for me.” The source said that El H most likely wouldn’t have attempted such an audacious strike, in the heart of the DF, if he hadn’t felt sure of federal protection. El H wasn’t punished by the federal government even after the attempted assassination of the CIA men. “If you don’t do anything against Señor H,” said the source, “it’s because of some pact you’ve negotiated with him.”