The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (33 page)

The source had heard a rumor that the twelve abducted young people had already been taken to the
pozolero
.
Pozole
is a corn and meat stew; usually it is made with pork, or sometimes chicken, but the cannibalistic Aztecs cooked it with human meat. A
pozolero
is a drug cartel specialist who melts bodies essentially down to nothing in vats of acid. That would be another kind of message, said the source. When a cartel wants its enemies to know it means to destroy them, then those it takes are never found. They vanish into an acid stew.

But when bodies are found hacked to bits, or tortured and burned, as in the case of the bodies of Dax Rodríguez and the two women in Huitzilac, that, explained the source, says: “There is somebody giving orders and that somebody is not afraid.” If El H was that somebody, then the federal government, the PGR, would have to go after him in Morelos. “It’s strange, isn’t it, that the government can capture Z-40”—the Zeta leader taken near the Texas border in July—“but it can’t get H Beltrán?” The source said that Manuel Mondragón, Ebrard’s former chief of police, now leading the federal government’s investigative unit, “knows that he has people working for him who work for them,” i.e., work for the Beltrán Leyvas.

“We’re never going to know what happened,” Pablo de Llano, whose editors were pressuring him to “solve” the case, often said. “The truth is probably never going to come out.” And I agreed. Recent Mexican history was full of such high-profile cases, which drew a lot of attention for a while but were never solved. But we both felt convinced that much, or some part, of the truth about the Heavens case lay embedded in the accounts of our sources. You could fit various pieces together in different ways—criminal factions of the Mexico City police, El H, or another cartel—and have them make sense. But there were always questions left dangling.

On July 15, 2013, the digital news site
AnimalPolitico.com
published a report titled “Terror in Tepito.” It described the anonymous interviews given to Radio Nederland by residents of the barrio about the Zeta-like way that La Unión reigns over the barrio. Regarding the After Heavens
levantón
, the piece said, “The families of the disappeared say nothing except that they have faith in God and the authorities. At first, the relatives of the victims were noticeably anguished and desperate, but then their attitude changed, as if the authorities had given them good news in exchange for silence. Nevetheless, there are others who prefer not to keep silent, a group of neighbors of the disappeared, also from Tepito.” That was perhaps unfair to the families, but the article gave the impression that their silence had an immediately local cause. The neighbors contradicted the perception that the missing young people were criminals just because some of their parents had been: “
Chale,
that’s not hereditary,” one said. “You shouldn’t criminalize the youngsters.” But La Unión, the neighbors said, had been running rampant in the barrio, extorting and killing at will. One of the interviewed men had a list of thirty Tepiteños he accused the gang of having murdered. “Why does La Unión kill? To eliminate rivals?” he was asked. “No, only to control Tepito by terror. Without any motive, without a word, they come and shoot people, whoever . . . Many people never denounced these crimes out of fear, and the authorities come and say the same as always, that it was a settling of scores between rival gangs, and they don’t verify or investigate, and nothing happens. . . . The police know, and they don’t do anything.” Another interviewed man said that La Unión was founded and is led by “Ricardo López Pérez, alias ‘El Moco’ (The Snot), a former federal police agent. . . . He armed Tepito vagabonds and teenagers in Tepito.” They took over local extortion rackets and the
narcomenudeo
. “El Moco and his henchmen kill people just for the fun of it and so that people will know they’re in control. Nobody opposes them.” Another of the men interviewed brought up the Beltrán Leyvas and the missing cocaine shipment. To retrieve bundles of cocaine dropped into the ocean off the Pacific coast, said the interviewee, Arturo Beltrán Leyva had preferred to hire young Tepito gang members rather than local scuba divers. (I wondered if that could have any relation to the scuba diving lessons at the new Community Development Center in Tepito, where local residents helped to design the curriculum.) When Arturo Beltrán Leyvas was killed, the Tepito scuba diving gang was left holding the cocaine while others fought for control of the cartel, with El H eventually emerging as leader. Another person who was interviewed described the members of La Unión as devout Catholics and followers of La Santa Muerte, and said that some even went on pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

During those same weeks undercover reporters for
Universal
had ostensibly gone shopping for drugs in the
vecindades
of Tepito, at the drug supermarkets and secret vending “safe houses” that are tended by dealers armed with assault weapons. In their newspaper report they described the apparently congenial relations between police and dealers, and wrote of the police, “The few arrests they make are of people who come to Tepito to buy drugs for the first time and in small quantities.” They also described how closely monitored those streets are by
halcones
working for the drug dealers.

These pieces did not do much to clarify my understanding of the After Heavens case, but they did make me understand why some had urged Pablo and me not to walk around in those streets. The “silence” of the families about the case made more sense too, as did Ana María Vargas’s reluctance to pursue the capture of her son’s murderers. And the kid in the
fútbol
shirt who’d followed us to Ana María’s
vecindad
that day probably was, as we’d suspected, a
halcón.
Tepito, in the center of the DF, a figuratively walled-in barrio, had become, I now realized, a place, like so many of Mexico’s darkest places, where people live terrorized by organized crime that they don’t dare or can’t speak out against, for fear of their own and family members’ lives, and because they know the police are in league with their tormentors. “I don’t talk about things I don’t know about,” Doña Queta, the Santa Muerte “priestess” and
santera,
had said. Doña Queta’s hard stare into my eyes now seemed especially disturbing if also enigmatic, both confiding and a perhaps complicit warning. Her stare was Tepito’s stare.

Pablo de Llano was again in touch with Toñín by phone, trying to get him to agree to an interview. Toñín was still in the barrio, but lying low, afraid to talk. Much as DF authorities had seemingly discarded the murder of Dax Rodríguez as a focus of their investigation, Toñín’s account, which he’d since repeated after he’d finally been tracked down in Tepito by police assigned to the Heavens case and hauled in to give an official statement, had also been forgotten. He’d described his friends being abducted from After Heavens by men armed with assault weapons, some with their faces hidden, and then driven away in vans. Back on June 12, Martin Moreno, a columnist and reporter for the mainstream newspaper
Excelsior
, had published a piece in the “Red Publica” section of
SinEmbargo.com
, in which he wrote, “This ‘Red Publica’ is in a position to declare that the video shown last Friday to the families of the abducted Tepiteños by the chief prosecutor in the DF, Rodolfo Ríos, was incomplete.” According to Moreno, the blurry video was
mocho,
that is, it had been cut or altered. “At its end,” wrote Moreno, “[the tape] registers how three vans arrived to take the kidnapped from Heavens. One van is blue. The other white. One wasn’t filmed. Why did Ríos hide that?”

Moreno republished the piece on another digital site, Ciudadanosenred, and sometimes retweets it, as he did, recently, during the last week of July. I don’t disbelieve that Moreno was shown the missing piece of video by somebody, or was at least told about it by somebody he trusted who’d seen it. I can certainly understand his reluctance to reveal these details, because whoever had showed it to him or told him about it, if identified, would certainly be endangered. But I doubt that anyone who tried to find this piece of video now would succeed. Moreno also wrote that Ríos had “discarded the testimony of three witnesses.” Those three statements are verifiable because they are in the official case file as “Preliminary Inquiries.”
¹⁵
Other crime and court beat reporters, but only a few, also read and wrote about the statements. They were given by three young people who had escaped the Heavens
levantón
by fleeing up the club’s stairs and out onto the roof. From one of those statements: “I come out of the bathroom, and I see two
chavos
and two waiters running up the stairs, but the
chavos
went into the ladies’ room, and as you go up the stairs you pass a dog [statue] like all lit up with lights and there’s a glass door, and when you open it you see a spiral staircase that goes up to the second level and the owners’ offices, and running behind the waiters were Toño [Toñín] and Zoé [when Toñín had first gone to testify at CAPEA he’d given Zoé’s name], and at the moment I turned around, as they went past, I saw a subject, tall, robust, dark brown skin, a red scarf covering half his face, very short hair, wearing a long black gabardine, and holding in his hands a type of assault rifle, and behind him was another person I didn’t get a good look at and he was holding what seemed like a pistol, and when I saw that, I turned and ran.”

Another witness: “And at that moment as I was coming down, I saw like seven people armed with rifles or machine guns, and so I didn’t want to go outside so what I did was slam the door shut and run back inside the
antro
.”

And the third: “I’ve already told you that things got heavy because a commando had come to the
antro
and taken a lot of people, and also I said that there were
patrullas
[police] and that, it seemed, there were Federales, and they went in blue vans and a green Suburban and also a gray van. . . . I don’t know if they were local [police ] or Federales but they were armed. . . . One of the men was very brown, with short hair, wearing civilian clothes, and what seemed a white bulletproof vest.”

But Chief Prosecutor Ríos, on June 7,
had declared, “There was no commando or armed persons,” and had said that the missing young people had been taken away in private automobiles. Ever since, that has been the official story.

“Princess, I’m going now,” Gabriela Téllez told her daughter, Danae, who was already in bed. “I love you, my princess. I won’t be long.” Those were the last words her mother spoke to Danae, just before she left their
vecindad
apartment to go to After Heavens. She was wearing fluorescent green pants, recalled Danae, black shoes, and a black jacket, and had her hair in a ponytail.

New information on the Heavens case having dwindled to nothing, or nearly nothing, Pablo de Llano thought that maybe he would publish a story about Danae. This time we took a taxi to meet her. The address she’d originally given Pablo that Sunday a few weeks before turned out to be not very close to where she actually lived. Now, going to meet her, we drove down a street lined with auto body garages that were, according to the taxi driver, “chop shops” where stolen cars were fixed up, sometimes with new paint jobs, and sold cheap. At the large
vecindad
where Danae lives we waited a long time before she finally came downstairs with her older cousin. She said that she didn’t want to take us into her apartment. She said that she didn’t want our conversation to disturb her little brothers, one nine and the other four. And her cousin said that they felt “watched by dangerous people” and didn’t think it was a good idea to bring reporters into her apartment. It was raining lightly, but we sat outside on the curb, partly shielded by a small bus shelter. In person, Danae looked much younger than in her photograph. Her face was a child’s, perky and pretty, and she wore braces. Her figure, however, was womanly, with long legs sheathed in tight orange jeans. She wore a hooded gray sweatshirt that belonged to her little brother. She spoke like a child, in high-pitched bursts of breathy excitement.

“We had total trust in each other,” said Danae when we asked her to describe her relationship with her mother. “I confided everything to her. We always went out together, we did everything together. We hardly ever fought—well, only, say, if she didn’t want me to go out with a man I liked, like this one who was fifteen years older than me.”

Danae said she had no idea who her father was. She didn’t know the identity of the father of one of her brothers either. Her other brother’s father was shot and killed during a robbery. Danae said about her mother, “I do have faith that she’s coming back. I can’t imagine my life without her.”

She wasn’t in school now, and had never held a job. But she said she’d like to go back to school, to study international relations. “You know, to work in an embassy, that kind of thing. I like languages.” In high school she’d studied English and French. Though she had only a year of high school left, it didn’t seem likely that she’d be going back. Not now, when she was going to have to find a way to support her little brothers and elderly grandmother. An uncle had been helping them out, she said. She didn’t like to cook, she said. But she did use to help her mother with the laundry.