The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (37 page)

On August 19, the DF’s anti-kidnapping police announced the arrest in Toluca of “El Chucho” Carmona, a bar owner and presumed member of the faction La Unión Insurgentes, which had employed, according to some news reports, the drug dealer murdered outside the bar Black in the Condesa. Prosecutors now affirmed that the Heavens
levantón
was tied to a
narcomenudeo
turf war between La Unión Insurgentes and La Unión de Tepito.

August 20. At a party in our apartment, Nayeli, a news editor who is Meño’s boss at the newspaper he reports for,
Más por Más
, as well as his girlfriend, tells us about an adventure she recently had aboard a party bus. She and a girlfriend who writes for the monthly magazine
Chilango
were invited to a publicity cocktail party aboard a party bus so that they could write about it in their respective publications. Two young men outfitted in designer shirts unbuttoned to expose their chests, gelled hair, etc.—a pair of typical
mi reyes
—tried to pick them up. Nayeli went to the washroom, leaving her drink by her stool, just as her friend went to the bar carrying her own glass for a refill. A while later, she began to feel strange, and said she wanted to go home. Hey, said the
mi reyes,
we’ll drive you home. Come on, let us take you home in our car. Why would you rather take a taxi? Taxis aren’t safe for a beautiful young woman at night, let us take you home,
ándale
. But Nayeli shook them off and caught a taxi. She felt a frenzied panic coursing through her body, and also hot flashes. By the time she got home she had so much energy she was practically bouncing off walls but then, suddenly, she fell into unconsciousness. When she woke hours later she understood that those two
mi reyes
she’d met on the party bus had drugged her drink. Needless to say, the party bus company received no publicity plug.

Gonzalo and Pia have brought a huge pot of tamales to the party. We’ve planned a party jam session in my apartment, a sort of encore to last summer’s more spontaneous
tocada
, when their adolescent son Jero got to play guitar with his hero Juan Cirerol at the annual Aura hamburger cookout, which we decided not to hold this year. Juan Carlos Reyna, the Nortec guitarist, said he was going to bring other musicians, including Quique Rangel, the Café Tacuba base player. Cirerol is off touring somewhere. In Paris, Jero has been fronting bands with musicians several years older than he is. In a few weeks, in Paris, he’ll be starting his first year of high school, but he says he wants to go to college in the DF, at the UNAM, because he’d rather play with Mexican than French rockers.

Jero has brought his acoustic guitar. But Reyna turns up empty-handed. In his apartment, he says, he has only an electric guitar. And Quique Rangel has had to cancel because his girlfriend has fallen ill. So there will be no concert, unless Jero wants to give us a solo show. A gawky and shy fifteen-year-old with braces, and ears sticking out, Jero stands stiffly against a counter in the kitchen emphatically shaking his head no.

A number of the guests are Mexico City reporters and the talk among them tonight is especially about the teachers’ strike against Peña Nieto’s and “the Pact’s” educational reforms. It’s one of the Pact’s necessary reforms, most people tell me, but there is sympathy for the teachers too. It seems unfair that underpaid teachers, especially those who work in extremely underfunded rural schools, should have to sacrifice their job security to evaluation exams when no one else on the federal payroll has been required to do the same. Some sixteen thousand teachers from the national teachers’ union, mostly from Oaxaca and Guerrero, have poured into the city, blocking and tying up traffic, especially in the center, and they have surrounded both the Senate and the Congress, preventing legislators from entering. They’ve set up a tent city in the Zócalo. Both Mancera and the PRI seem paralyzed by the protests. So far neither dares use force to try to disperse or control the protesters. (The teachers’ so far fruitless protests, marches, and occupations will grow in the coming weeks, and endure well into the fall.)

It’s a good party, maybe the last we’ll ever have in this apartment. A lot of conversation and laughter, plenty to drink, lots of tamales. Eventually, well past midnight, guests begin to leave. Jovi goes to bed. The approach of dawn finds Reyna and me up alone, still drinking, listening to music on YouTube; only this one aspect of the night and dawn is an exact reprise of last summer. At about six a.m. a new girlfriend phones Reyna; she’s coming to his apartment, so he has to leave. I finally go to bed. And then it’s about two hours later and Jovi is frantically shaking me awake. There’s an earthquake. Sirens are wailing. She runs to stand inside a doorframe. She’s furious because it took so long to wake me, too long for us now to be able to run downstairs. Disoriented, I think I am in Guatemala. I’m still drunk. I stand watching her, feeling confused about where I am and what is happening, and then I get it, and run to squeeze into the doorframe alongside her, but she tells me to go and stand under my own doorframe. The earthquake, measuring 6.2, is one of the strongest in the unusual series of quakes the city has experienced over the last year. This one also lasts nearly two minutes, I learn later, but I’ve been awake for only the tail end. People say it’s a good sign that we’ve had so many quakes recently, that tectonic plates beneath the earth are shifting and making adjustments, relieving pressures that might otherwise lead to a massive killer quake. On the living room floor are the telltale splotches of crumbled cement that shake down from the ceiling only when the swaying of our building has been especially forceful and sustained. The walls and floor begin to tremble again—it’s an aftershock—and Jovi and I run outside and scamper down the six flights of stairs to the lobby, and out onto the sidewalk.

August 22. It’s a little past nine in the morning when I sit down at my computer and, as I routinely do, open up
SinEmbargo.com
. Only a few minutes before, Martin Moreno has filed a breaking story about the Heavens case. Bodies thought to be those of the abducted young people have been discovered by federal police in a concealed grave near a small farmhouse in a wooded area of the México State municipality Tlalmanalco, about fifty-five kilometers outside the DF, near La Mesa ecotourism park. Moreno’s sources say police and others from the PGR (the federal attorney general’s office) have been excavating the grave since last night, and that thirteen corpses are buried there, twelve those of the victims abducted outside Heavens.
AnimalPolitico.com
carries the same story, though it says seven bodies have been found, and only that they are possibly connected to the Heavens case. A few hours later it is reported that DF chief prosecutor Ríos has told Radio 98.5 that so far five bodies have been found in the grave, and that it will not be possible to identify them until DNA testing, which should take two days, has been performed. Ríos says that it is possible there are more bodies; later he tells a television station that there are seven. The lawyer for the families of the abducted young people, Ricardo Martínez, says that according to his PGR, PGJDF, and México State sources, the bodies are indeed those of the missing Tepiteños. Moreno files again to report that according to his sources the thirteenth corpse is that of a young man from Guadalajara, who before wasn’t counted among the abducted because nobody had filed a missing person report on his behalf. Moreno reports that the families had told authorities about him—a youth they knew by the name “Alancito”—from the very beginning.

Chief Prosecutor Ríos tells the media that finding the grave was a result of collaborative work between his PGJDF investigators and the federal PGR. That claim is contradicted hours later when the federal attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, says that the discovery of the grave was accidental. Federal police had gone to the remote
rancho
to investigate a possible safe house where arms were stored, he said, and had found the grave nearby, covered with lime and asbestos and a lid of cement. Two unnamed men taken into detention there are described as
lugareños,
locals.

But perhaps this too will turn out to be a false alarm, like El Negro’s declaration that three of the dead were in Veracruz. It will be at least two days until the DNA testing is completed, according to federal authorities. But when I wake the next morning, Saturday, it’s to the news that five of the corpses have already been identified. Three of the five—Guadalupe Karen Morales, her husband, Alan Omar Atiencia Barranco, and Rafael Rojas Marines—are related to the three families Pablo de Llano, the
El País
reporter, and I had visited in the Tepito
vecindad
apartment a month before. Only Alan Omar Atiencia, whose brother Juan had met us at the subway stop and walked us over there, had been identified by DNA. Ana María Vargas’s daughter, Guadalupe Karen, had been identified by a tattoo of entwined dolphins on her hip, and Rafael Rojas, Ruth Marines’s son, by the metal plates in his arm and his new prosthetic teeth. Also identified were the corpses of Gabriela Ruiz Martínez and Josué Piedra Moreno.

Pablo de Llano had returned from his vacation in Spain the same night the grave was discovered, though he didn’t know that when he went to sleep. He was awoken by a phone call from one of his editors the next morning—that was yesterday, Friday—who gave him the news. Then he’d spent a long day and night reporting the story, much of it with the families; at the Bunker, the prosecutor’s office; and at the PGR’s DF headquarters. During the day he’d also gone out to Tlalmanalco, and to the isolated
rancho
called La Negra that held the grave, where PGR police, forensic experts, and earthmoving equipment were at work. The area was cordoned off and he hadn’t been able to get anywhere near the grave, but he was able to speak to police coming out from the site, who told him that the scene there was extremely grisly and that the stench was horrible. Pablo told me that the wooded area was very remote, an “in the middle of nowhere” kind of place. It seemed hard to believe, he said, that the PGR had found the grave there by accident. The DF chief prosecutor’s and the federal PGR’s first statements about the grave had been published and broadcast in the media before any of the family members had been informed of the discovery. Later that Friday, though, the families had been summoned to an afternoon meeting at five-thirty with Chief Prosecutor Ríos at the Bunker. But at four-thirty the PGR held its own press conference. María Victoria Barranco was on the subway on the way to her meeting with the city’s chief prosecutor when she received a text message on her phone saying that her son Alan Omar’s corpse had been identified. “We’d agreed that we were to be the first to find out, and it wasn’t like that,” she told a reporter. “I need to see the body of my son. What if they give me a body that isn’t his and I bury it? My son had tattoos. I want to see those tattoos. The authorities didn’t do anything; we had confidence in them at one time, but we’ve been deceived. I found out on the metro, and if the prosecutor knew it was my son, why didn’t he have the decency to tell me, his mother, first. Why my son? What did he ever do to them?”

That afternoon’s meeting in the Procuraduría with Chief Prosecutor Ríos and Raúl Peralta, the chief of the investigative police, in charge of the investigations in the Heavens case, was contentious. Afterward the families went to the federal PGR’s DF headquarters for another meeting that lasted until one in the morning. Outside the PGR, family members and friends gathered while others were speaking to officials inside. Pablo saw Danae Téllez, Gabriela Téllez’s teenage daughter, sobbing. When he saw Jacqueline Robles, Jennifer’s sister, arrive he thought that she looked typically composed and cool. Only a few seconds later, he told me, he heard a pained shriek, turned, and saw Jacqueline doubled over, wailing, and a male friend holding on to her.

Saturday afternoon, August 24, Pablo and I return to Tepito, once again to the
tianguis
owned by María Teresa Ramos, maternal grandmother of Jerzy Ortíz, son of El Tanque. The stall is full of family members, four generations in all, middle-aged women, younger women, men, children nestled in their mothers’ laps. They greet Pablo warmly. “We should have waited to eat these
quesadillas
until you got here, Pablo,” says a woman behind the counter, gesturing at the paper plates and take-out containers in front of her. Of all the reporters covering the Heavens story, only Pablo has devoted attention to the families and tried to tell their stories. That day’s
Reforma
blatantly “copied” without crediting Pablo’s
El País
piece of photographs and short word portraits of the missing young people, reducing the latter to snippets of two or three sentences. María Teresa, the elfish matriarch of the clan, sits behind the counter. Compared with the last time I saw her, her feisty vitality seems depleted. Her lids look swollen and narrowed, as if it is a struggle to hold them open, and her gaze is listless and a bit frightened. She seems lost inside her own sadness and crushed hopes for her youngest grandson. But the younger women project a bustling family solidarity. Jerzy’s mother, El Tanque’s wife, Leticia Ponce, is speaking to another man at the back of the stall. She’d had a blue diamond tattooed onto her wrist shortly after her youngest son’s disappearance to match the one he had in the same spot. Lying atop a pile of John Lennon T-shirts in the shelving along a wall is a copy of that day’s
Universal
, open to an inside page, and above the fold there is a headline,
Identifican a cinco del Heaven en fosa
—“Five Identified from Heavens Grave”—and a color photograph showing Leticia from behind, her long blond hair loose and wild-looking in the camera’s flash, the blue diamond tattoo like a butterfly perched on her wrist as she reaches out to embrace a woman whose face is contorted in a sob. The man Leticia has been speaking to at the back of the stall holds her in a long hug, and when they part I see Leticia composing herself, wiping tears from her eyes. She comes over to speak with us. Today her hair is tied back, and she wears a yellow long-sleeved pullover shirt with one of those 1960s huge-eyed waif girls printed down the side. She is light-skinned, in her late forties, about five feet three inches, her facial and physical features pleasantly rounded, with a nearly unlined face. She seems almost a Scandinavian type of woman, sweet natured but hearty and strong. Pablo has told me that the other families regard Leticia as their leader, and I can see why. She projects spontaneous warmth, an air of soft manners that is without timidity. She looks you right in the eye, and speaks directly. The notorious capo’s wife. The family, prosperous by Tepito standards, clearly belongs to the barrio’s upper strata. María Teresa has college-educated grandchildren, the grandson who knows about “communications” but who studied art and became a performance artist, the granddaughter who is a chef. I can’t help thinking of the mafia family portrayed in
The Sopranos,
their middle-class mores and aspirations.