The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (35 page)

Many of the young Tepito drug dealers wear Santería necklaces and sometimes they leave esoteric Santería graffiti, as they did on the walls of a washroom of a club in the center, to mark their turf or to leave messages that only somebody familiar with Santería symbols would understand. That would seem to express a belief in magic powers, but also in the spirituality of Santería—like the Santa Muerte cult, the Afro-Caribbean folk religion has a syncretic relationship to Roman Catholicism—and a faith in the holiness and even the redemptive potential of crime. It would be an expression of their surroundings too, something that they’d learned “in the neighborhood,” and that maybe they’d been manipulated into identifying with. The Tepito residents interviewed by Radio Nederland had described La Unión gang members as devout followers of the Santa Muerte who even go on Catholic pilgrimages to Spain. At Doña Queta’s Santa Muerte shrine in Tepito, Santería divinities are also venerated. If the
chicos
who belong to a Tepito
narcomenudeo
gang really are devout in some way—if their Santería trappings are not just gangster pretense and vanity—then they may even see themselves as holy warriors on a violent pilgrimage through a cursed land, rife with injustice, corruption, and hypocrisy, which must be purged of all enemies and made submissive to their will.

In the middle of our conversation, my friend received a phone call from a Mexican woman now living in Paris. They were having an affectionate, friendly conversation. Then I heard my friend saying enthusiastically, “This city has a volcanic energy. . . . Yes, next time we’ll trade stories about the city. . . . It’s really beautiful here. Here, it’s
poca madre
, really fucking cool.” Even someone working in a bar menaced by a drug gang, who’d just shared horrifying stories about his own experiences, hadn’t lost sight of the greater city. Like so many others, and like me, he is in thrall to the DF. While I waited for him to finish his conversation—now he was recommending that she read a book by Edmond Jabes—I thought, So is all this just one more DF story? And then I thought, What do I care? Let them fuck around with the Condesa etc.
plaza
, I don’t go to those clubs, and neither do most of my friends; as long as they don’t harm innocent people, let them sell all the drugs they want. Anyway, my drug-using friends all order their drugs over the phone, to be delivered. It’s not as if the dealers stand around in the Covadonga, or ordinary cantinas, or a little bar like this one we’re in now. This way of thinking has some justification, every megacity breeds crime in one form or another. But, of course, innocent people
have
been harmed, I thought. Maybe not
all
of the missing Tepito young people were “innocent” of any kind of involvement in the drug trade and of the potential consequences of that in Mexico, but surely some were, and maybe they all were, because no one has provided any evidence to the contrary. Their families have been harmed. Ana María Vargas, Ruth Marines, Jennifer Robles, and Danae Téllez have been harmed.

When my friend got off the phone, I asked him what was happening now in the Condesa. He said that what he’d been hearing from other
antro
owners and managers was, “It’s a period of realignment for the mafia capos. The PRI wants the city. Peña Nieto’s drug gangs are coming in to take over the
plaza
. The PRD gangs are being pushed out. That’s what people are saying.”

Peña Nieto’s drug gangs? I thought, If people keep saying that sort of thing, it can’t be coming from nowhere; there must be at least a symbolic truth to it. Mentions of the federal police had cropped up in the Heavens case: in one witness’s statement, for example, and in the conversations that Pablo de Llano had with his source, and that I had with mine. PRI drug gangs, logically—with the federal government now ruled by the PRI—would be protected or led by Federales, along with local police allied with them; PRD gangs by Mexico City police. But is that all the PRI “wants” the city for? To sell drugs in Condesa
antros
? But drug gangs provide deep and dangerous penetration, especially of the police, I thought. Such penetration brings the capos—those for whom not only the gangs but also the police ultimately work—closer to those they most want to corrupt, and this spawns upwardly climbing chains of corruption. The drug gangs hold a key to the city’s stability. If what the city’s true powers want most of all is stability, then it will be “Peña Nieto’s drug gangs” they’ll have to placate, and the police and politicians who protect those gangs. I felt depressed about the city’s future. I felt I was beginning to understand more than I wanted to understand, and could prove nothing. This is what my obsession with the Heavens case—a case I’d begun to follow on my own, rather than as a journalist with an assignment—had brought me to.

My friend said that the situation in the clubs and bars had calmed since the After Heavens
levantón
. That drug gang’s van, he said, which for years had operated from in front of El Mojito, was gone now. Police, at least for the time being, were closely monitoring the adherence of clubs and bars to closing hour regulations. No more laissez-faire “let them have a few more hours,” said my friend. “What was that club doing anyway,” he said of Heavens, “staying open like that until noon?” He thought the Heavens case was part of the “realignment among capos” that he’d mentioned, the elimination of one gang by another, or else a “settling of accounts.” He told me he’d heard a rumor that the missing twelve had already been taken to the
pozolero
. I told him I’d heard that rumor too. It was terrible to think about in every way, twelve young people, including five women, boiled away to nothing in a vat of acid. An emphatic vacancy. The Heavens case is a synthesis of the terrible tragedy that has befallen Mexico. The Heavens case is as Mexican as
pozole
itself.

A friend of his passed by on the sidewalk and stopped to sit at our table. This was the newspaper
Reforma’
s renowned cartoonist “Camacho,” whose graphic history of President Calderón’s disastrous
sexenio
, published earlier this year, had become a Mexican bestseller. The waitress announced last call, and he ordered two whiskeys. Camacho, who looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, told me that he’d read my book about Aura. In 2006, his wife, five months pregnant with their first child, had died of cancer. Seven years later, he was still alone, still trapped deep inside his terrible loss. He said he’d met me, or nearly met me, a couple of times several years ago, not long after Aura had died. He’d shied away from talking to me then, he said, sensing that I wouldn’t want to talk, and that a conversation would be too difficult for both of us. He showed me, on his smartphone, a newspaper column recently published by a friend of his. In the column, titled “Defeats,” his friend, Juan García de Quevedo, reflects on the suffering of someone close to him, someone who provokes worries about suicide: “There are moments in life when you are chased by the black dogs of depression and uninterest in life. . . . On the way home, soaked by the rain, you come upon a bar and stop in for a whiskey to warm your body and soul. One whiskey follows another.” Camacho and I had a moving conversation, there in the little bar. He spoke without self-pity. We spoke like two friends who know what they’re talking about.

Now it is the next morning, August 6. This morning’s headline in
Reforma
:
Cerca crimen a la Ciudad,
“Crime Closes in on the City.” The subheadline: “A Wave of Violence on the Periphery.” A colored map, headed “12 Bands Operate in the DF,” shows where around the city each band, or gang, is based. The story’s lead sentence: “Organized crime is coming ever closer to the Distrito Federal.” Most of the gang violence, the paper reports, is in the México State municipalities adjacent to the DF. In the last four months, there have been 208 killings there. The national cartels, La Familia Michoacana and the Gulf Cartel, are disputing this territory, according to the newspaper. Other organized crime groups, including cells belonging to the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, are also fighting for “control of the drug trade and extortion from businesses, such as bars and nightspots,” in those municipalities. Restaurant-bars have been machine-gunned and burned. Inside a bar in Neza, two men and two women were executed. The story makes no mention of the Heavens case.

On September 9, Jovi and I will be moving up to Brooklyn, maybe for as long as ten months. She wants to learn English. I feel sad to be relinquishing this beautiful apartment on the Plaza Río de Janeiro, but we don’t need three bedrooms and three bathrooms, and with its high rent—Jon Lee gave up his share of the apartment in May—keeping it makes little sense. Hopefully, when Jovi and I return to the DF, I’ll be able to buy an apartment, a place near this one. The DF is home now, whatever is going to happen here. The other day, as we were walking through the Plaza Río de Janeiro, Jovi said that the
David
statue’s
pompas
looked like chewed gum. A few afternoons ago, we were just coming into the plaza when we saw a young man in a tracksuit with a whiplike arm motion cast a weighted net, like those people use to catch fish close to shore, to swoop up pigeons gathered over the corn kernels he’d tossed onto the paved path. He walked swiftly away, carrying his loudly warbling captives in a tightly netted bundle under his arm, looking back nervously at us over his shoulder. Two old women, in their own warbling voices, were reprimanding him, and one was near tears. Jovi wondered if what he’d done was illegal and if we should call for the police. I had no wish to give him a hard time. People will do what they need to do to feed their families, even kidnap pigeons from parks.

One recent afternoon a photographer who was taking my picture for a Chilean magazine made me stand in front of a Spanish colonial home tucked in deep shade into a corner of the plaza. The house’s owner, an enormous, lightly bearded man, came out and asked us what we were doing. The photographer told him. Then, just like that, the owner invited us in for lunch and wine with his friends. He is an artist, originally from Sonora, and he’d prepared a delicious Sonoran lunch, with a
machaca
casserole and flour tortillas. He was generous with his wine too. He regaled us with stories of his youth, when he’d spent five years exploring South America by bicycle.

This morning, in the plaza, I saw the elderly man who practices Asian swordplay, and who looks like a grizzled Pablo Picasso, tutoring a student, a girl of about ten, in
Kill Bill
moves.

A woman in the plain habit of a missionary nun—denim dress, white coif—stops me on the sidewalk on Calle Durango. She has a pleasant, young face, bright and lively dark eyes. A white adhesive strip wrapped into a tight tube around the tip of her nose makes it protrude like Pinocchio’s. She has traveled all over the world, she tells me, evangelizing, spreading the Word of God. It was Barack Obama, she says, who revealed her calling to her. She and Barack Obama grew up together, she tells me, in El Paso, Texas. Even then, she says, Barack Obama never went anywhere without a Bible under his arm. He was so noble, so good, so polite, so dedicated to God, she says. Barack Obama told her that he wished he could go out into the world to spread the Word of God but even back then he knew that he couldn’t, knew that he was called to do other things. But you, Sister Catalina, Barack Obama told her, you have to go out into the world and spread the Word. And so she did. All over the world, to so many countries. Which countries? I ask. She’s been to Sinaloa, she says. She’s been to Sonora, to Tamaulipas, Tabasco, and Chiapas, she’s been all over the world. But the people in Chiapas are selfish and mean, she says. Such poor people, such hard lives, so in need of God, but they are greedy, those
chiapecos.
What have you brought us? they asked her in Chiapas. Money? Food? Nothing, she said, only God and his Word, his message of love, and the
chiapecos
told her that if she had nothing more to give them, she should go away.

The other night Jovi and I talked about the Heavens case. Jovi is, as they say here,
muy barrio
. When she moved at seventeen with her father and younger brother from Veracruz, they lived in México State, in one of those places that Juanca doesn’t like, where streets are named for flowers, and where her family and many of her friends still live. She finished high school and when she started studying at the UAM, not so very long ago, she moved on her own to Iztapalapa, another ancient Indian barrio nearly as notorious as Tepito. There she spent the rest of her adolescence and her early twenties. She never wants to go to Tepito with me, not even to buy DVDs. I get the feeling she doesn’t like Tepito much, though she’s never explicitly said so. She always says, “Be careful,” when I go there. The vox populi in the barrios, Jovi told me, is that the missing Tepito young people must have done something to provoke the violence that befell them, that they owed something, that it was a settling of scores, and that this explained the apparent
valemadrismo
, the indifference, of people in the city regarding the case. “You know how this city is,” she said. “People will come out to march over anything; it doesn’t have to be about something that happened here.” But in this case, only the families were marching. “Why do you think that is?” she asked. She understands the city, its underlying energies and dynamics, as I never could. I feel sad that the stigma attached to Tepito, manipulated by the Mancera government and the media in the Heavens case, has come to so define the kidnapping of twelve young people, like a quarantine wall around it. But I am beginning to understand how this city conserves and balances its diffuse and wild energies, waiting for what its many communities recognize as a real emergency to coalesce around it, as it did last summer, sending a million-voiced howl of protest and warning to the world, when faced with the election of Enrique Peña Nieto as president of Mexico.