The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (36 page)

Jovi agrees that Mancera’s handling of the Heavens case, at least as I’ve described it to her, is wrong and should be exposed and condemned. But the city is larger than Mancera, she tells me, and it is larger than the police, and it is larger even than the cartels. Any cartel that actually tried to take over the DF would be hopelessly outnumbered and overwhelmed. Just with all the universities, the activist groups, the anarchists, and so on, said Jovi, the streets would fill; there’d be barricades, and every kind of resistance. People would fight to save the DF. What cartel would be even crazy enough to try, with all the forces it would find arrayed against it? But the PRI represents a more realistic threat than the cartels to the city’s spirit. “Even if Mancera is a total failure as a mayor,” said Jovi, “that doesn’t mean people are going to vote for the PRI.” The city has no automatic allegiance to the PRD, she said, but the people in this city are smart, and they’ll vote for whoever offers the best vision and ideas for the city, probably someone from Morena, AMLO’s new party—who knows? “The people in this city,” insisted Jovi, “know how to force the city government to answer to them.” The other night my friend the artist Yoshua Okón said something similar, grounded in the character of the city in which he has lived all his life, but with a note of warning. “The PRI took the federal government back through a dirty and sophisticated campaign of disinformation and fear,” said Yoshua. “It won’t surprise me if the PRI tries the same tactics here. Mexico City is the only hope left to us in this country against the total hegemony of the PRI. The PRD’s only chance is through the wide and loyal support of the population. To win that, it had better abandon its corrupt practices and defend the rule of law and the public space that little by little it has been selling to the private sector. That’s the only way it can recover its credibility and support from the people of this city.”

Sunday night Jovi and I were returning late, around midnight, from a restaurant on Alvaro Obregón. We were walking down Orizaba, only a few blocks from home. The street, like all the other side streets in Colonia Roma at that hour, was dark and nearly deserted. Suddenly we heard screams, and saw a young woman running down the sidewalk. Ahead of her we saw a police car that had just turned the corner nearly bump up alongside a black car, which accelerated away, police in pursuit. We ran after the girl, and a young man who was packing up a sushi stand on the corner grabbed a delivery bike and took off. He reached her first, and then rode ahead, after the two automobiles. When we caught up to the girl she was hyperventilating and crying. She’d been robbed, she told us. A man had leaped from the black car we’d seen, threatened her with a pistol, stolen her purse and phone, and then gotten back into the car, which another man was driving. Jovi was talking to her, trying to calm her. A small crowd had gathered. A police car suddenly swooped to a stop alongside us. A policeman jumped from the passenger seat, opened the back door, looked at Jovi, and shouted excitedly, “Get in!” Jovi pointed at the other girl. “Get in! We caught them!” The people on the sidewalk broke into cheers and shouts of congratulations. The girl climbed inside, and as the policeman was getting back into the front passenger seat he glanced at us with a gleeful and proud grin that still hadn’t faded as the car sped forward.

Saturday, August 10. Alejandro Almazán, the multi-award-winning writer and journalist, throws a barbecue for his birthday in the apartment he shares with Manuel Larios, “Meño,” also a journalist, just around the corner, on Calle Puebla. They’re Covadonga tablemates, regulars at last summer’s revels in my apartment. There are lots of Mexico City journalists at the party. Some are beat reporters, directly covering the city’s politics; others are long-form
cronistas
who publish in magazines. I’m surprised to discover that they are just as alarmed by and suspicious of Mayor Mancera as I am, since I know that I tend to exaggerate my contempt for public figures I take a dislike to, and sometimes become fixated. “Mancera is just here to hand the city over to the PRI,” says one of the city’s most prominent daily political reporters. “Somebody has Mancera by the balls,” says another; “the question is who?” So far, I learn, Mancera hasn’t sponsored one single initiative to improve city life in the manner of his
jefe de gobierno
predecessors; even the popular
ecobici
bicycle sharing program hasn’t been expanded. Magalí Tercero, the celebrated urban
cronista
, tells me, “We had twelve years of heaven in this city, but now it’s gone.”

It’s been an eventful few weeks in Mexico, one dismaying headline replaced by another before the significance of the former has had a chance to be fully absorbed. On July 19, Raúl Salinas de Gortari was exonerated of charges of illicit enrichment when a federal judge ruled that seventeen million dollars in frozen wealth and thirty-one confiscated properties should be returned to him. Salinas—“the inconvenient brother of the impure president,” the magazine
Proceso
called him—is a symbol of the rampant patronage and corruption of Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s PRI presidency (1988–1994), years during which Raúl, the older brother, amassed a vast and publicly flaunted fortune, with hundreds of millions stashed in overseas accounts. Following his brother’s presidential term, Raúl had spent a decade in jail on charges of embezzlement, tax fraud, and money laundering, and for the 1994 homicide of his brother-in-law, PRI Secretary General José Francisco Ruiz Massieu; but during twelve years of PAN rule judges had absolved him, one by one, of each of those charges. Now Raúl’s seventeen years of legal embroilments seemed finally to have ended. In
Reforma,
the esteemed political commentator and writer Denise Dresser wrote of the Salinas de Gortaris, “They’re a family that exemplifies how politics function in this country, and the rottenness of those politics. They’re a Mexican mafia.”

Days later, a federal judge in Guadalajara delivered an even more surprising and disturbing ruling when, on the basis of a “judicial technicality,” he ordered the release of the notorious drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero from a federal penitentiary. Caro Quintero, accused by the U.S. government of having masterminded the 1985 slaying of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, had twelve years left of his sentence, and was likely to face further charges in the United States. The Obama administration responded to the surprise release, of which it received no advance warning, with outrage, and pressured the Peña Nieto government to recapture Caro Quintero so that he could be extradited to the United States. But the sixty-year-old capo immediately vanished on leaving prison and good luck finding him now. “In the days following the capo’s sudden liberation,” wrote a reporter in
Proceso
, “in the U.S. embassy offices in Mexico City, comments such as this were prevalent: ‘It would have been better if they’d just let him escape from prison; that wouldn’t have been so blatant or offensive.’”

The Monterrey-based journalist Sanjuana Martínez wrote in
SinEmbargo.com
: “The Enrique Peña Nieto government’s agreements with major drug cartels in Mexico cannot remain hidden or backstage. These agreements include the distribution of territories and their respective domains for drug trafficking. Within these agreements surely there is a commitment to free the illustrious drug lords, those who’ve given their lives for the cause and silently endured decades behind bars, so that they can get out of jail and enjoy their fortunes.”

Juanca said, “If they freed Caro Quintero, it’s because they have some job for him to carry out.”

Whenever the PRI captures an important drug trafficker, as occurred this summer with the arrest of Zeta capo “Z-40,” it is believed by most Mexicans to be either because U.S. government authorities have pressured them into it, or because it’s a strategic move that benefits other rival figures and groups. Many who voted for the PRI in the summer of 2012 did so with an acknowledged belief that only a pact between the victorious PRI and one powerful cartel, or with a group of cartels, might restore peace to the country: an end to violence, if not to corruption. Though the violence rages on, maybe, one day—according to this optimistically pessimistic scenario—if ever an alliance of criminal organizations and the PRI successfully takes hold, its rivals vanquished, the narco war will wane. Then the PRI and those crime groups, and their economic allies, can rule over and under Mexico together. In my mind it would be something like Putin’s Russia, though probably with a more complex and combustible prescription of politics, crime, and money than in Russia.
¹⁶

More ominous in this context than the absolving of Salinas Gortari and the freeing of Caro Quintero was the news, in August, that PRI members of Congress had voted to roll back federal laws regarding transparency and access to information—laws enacted twelve years earlier, during the hopeful period following the “overthrow” of the PRI by President Fox’s election. National and international anticorruption and human rights groups credit the laws with having ensured significant advances in Mexican society in those areas in the years since. The laws aided and protected the team of
New York Times
reporters who won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for their investigatory pieces on Walmart and its bribery of officials in Mexico. They’re gone now, those laws.

Given what we’ve seen so far, I don’t understand how anybody could still be credulous enough to buy any of that garbage about a “new PRI.”
¹⁷
However, I live in the DF, where people are used to thinking of the PRI as Mexico’s problem, not theirs. Inside that bubble, I’d for years maintained my own bubble. But by last summer, that had begun to change, and I undertook to learn what I could in a short time. I know that some of my newfound convictions can be somewhat adolescent if only for being so passionately held. Some of the innocence has been drained from my way of living in the DF, but innocence isn’t something that at my age I have much use for. Though I suppose there is also a kind of innocence at the heart of my knight-errant spirit in the summer of 2013, a fantasy ambition to “save the city from Death!” But the city’s resilience and energy, its iconoclastic individual and community spirit, aren’t dependent on me or my perceptions; that’s something the city famously discovered about itself in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 1985 earthquake, and has sustained and built on ever since. The Distrito Federal is the one true bastion against the complete restoration of the PRI and its “perfect dictatorship.” All over the city I hear people saying so, in one way or another, nowadays, and many use precisely this phrase: “the last bastion.”

Sunday night, August 18.
I come home a little before midnight. The lobby is dark, the television is off, and only one of Ebrard’s
guarura
is present, sitting up wide awake on the couch. I probably shouldn’t reveal which
guarura
he was. We speak awhile, first about the Heavens case. He says he’s heard that the twelve kidnapped were clean; and regarding their possible involvement in criminal activity, all there is against them is that two of the kids are the offspring of imprisoned narcos. I say that so far this is the sense I have of it too. I ask how his boss, the former mayor, is doing, and the
guarura
says that it’s a dangerous time. Ebrard, he says softly, has been the only one really
chingando
Peña Nieto. AMLO too, I think, but everyone expects fiery populist opposition from AMLO; I suspect the intelligence and even the reasonableness of Ebrard’s criticisms cut deeper.

The danger to which the
guarura
is referring doesn’t have to be elaborated on. I think immediately of Donaldo Colosio, the urbane PRI presidential candidate assassinated in 1994 just when he was gaining traction as a national figure by unexpectedly campaigning as a reformist who spoke of Mexicans’ “thirst for justice.” Carlos Salinas de Gortari surely hadn’t expected his appointed successor to wage a “thirst for justice” campaign, certainly one of his least favorite political agendas. This is a reason it is commonly believed in Mexico that Salinas was behind the killing, which is also a reason that the reviled former president, for all his continuing offstage power and influence, has been forced to lead a nearly clandestine life. Carlos Salinas, of course, is routinely described as Peña Nieto’s “political godfather.” What lessons does the godson take from the godfather? Political assassinations of nationally low-profile but locally influential opposition figures were a PRI electoral tactic in the 2013 summer elections. To assassinate the widely beloved AMLO would instantly spark a violent national uprising. Ebrard, like Colosio, doesn’t yet inspire that kind of national devotion. His recent outspoken combativeness may be part of a strategy to overcome an image as an effete DF progressive. But with the controversies over the reform of Pemex and the PRD leadership’s role in the “Pact for Mexico,” Ebrard has been winning enemies not just within the PRI but within his own party as well.

“
Esto se va a poner cabroncito,
” says the
guarura
. “This is going to get heavy.”

On August 9, the Procuraduría, the DF chief prosecutor’s office, had announced a significant breakthrough in the Heavens case. Finally one of the “seventeen kidnappers” caught on the video outside the
after
was arrested:
Ricardo Antonio Méndez Muñoz, “El Negro,” twenty-nine, admitted belonging to La Unión, and claimed that during the operation his role, for which he said he was paid a little over two hundred dollars, was to keep an eye out for police. But soon afterward, he said, he was sent to Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, to stand guard in a safe house where three of the kidnapped—two males and a female—were being held. All three, he told his interrogators, had been killed there, the men executed with firearms, the woman suffocated. El Negro also said that the kidnappers were demanding a ransom of fifteen million pesos, which strengthened the Tepiteño families’ beliefs that the missing, or most of the missing, remained alive. His capture seemed by far the most important break in the case so far, though Chief Prosecutor Rodolfo Ríos warned the press not to draw conclusions, because the three bodies still had to be found. Veracruz authorities joined DF and federal police and forensic experts in a search for corpses in the general area identified by El Negro, and found seven. Over the next suspenseful week or so, forensic testing revealed that none of those corpses belonged to the missing Tepiteños. El Negro was quickly forgotten, his testimony a puzzle that soon prosecutors, police, and their spokespersons no longer even alluded to in their statements about how steadily the investigation was proceeding.