The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (38 page)

Leticia tells us about the meeting with the chief prosecutor at the Procuraduría, the Bunker, the previous evening. She says that in their prior meetings, she and the families had held their tongues, always ceding the benefit of the doubt to the authorities. They hadn’t wanted to say anything that could put their abducted relatives or the hoped-for goodwill of the investigators at risk. The meeting last evening, Friday, was different. “The families aired their anger and complaints,” she says. Julieta, Jennifer’s “mother,” the one who sews
Monster Inc.
figures, usually so quiet and stern, had opened the meeting pugnaciously, warning the authorities, “Don’t take us for
pendejos.
” Chief Prosecutor Ríos was nearly speechless throughout the meeting, Leticia says. We ask what his demeanor was like. “Stone faced,” she says, but also “shaken, no, very consternated.” She says, “I wanted my son alive. Just give me back my child and I’ll be gone, I don’t care about the rest.” That used to be her attitude, she says. “But now the situation has changed. I want the people who did this behind bars. This is just the beginning. I want them in prison so that this can’t happen again. I don’t want this to happen to anybody else.”

The families have no faith left in the chief prosecutor and his investigators and police, who over three months of constant assurances that the investigation was advancing failed to provide answers or results. And they are skeptical of the PGR’s claim to have found the grave by accident. Nor do they even trust the PGR to correctly identify the corpses. Like María Victoria Barranco, Leticia asks, “What if they give me a body that isn’t my son’s?” She and the other family members are demanding that Argentine forensics experts be brought to Mexico to verify and complete the autopspies. I think, for a moment, that the families’ insistence on Argentine experts is a way of postponing their acceptance of the inevitable. But then Leticia, clutching the sleeve of another woman who is leaving the stall, declares, “A mourning is starting, and I want Jorge to be here.” Jorge is El Tanque. Leticia’s face crumples, and she begins to cry. El Papis too, she says, referring to Said Sánchez’s imprisoned father. “I want them to be here for the reception of the bodies.” She is petitioning, she tells us when she turns back to us, for her husband and Said’s father to be transferred to a prison in the DF for the funeral. They won’t be allowed to go to the funeral, but she wants the caskets brought to them.

Later I think that the vocal distrust of the PGR to correctly identify the bodies, the insistence on Argentine forensic experts, is a way for the families to deny the authorities the opportunity to claim that this one grimly final job has been competently done and executed in good faith when nothing else has been.

A pretty, dark-haired little girl is clutching Leticia’s leg. This is her granddaughter, four-year-old Karewit. “
Mi vida
,” Leticia coos cheerfully, embracing the girl. “Yes, we’re going soon,” she tells her. She introduces Karewit to me, and I lean down so we can exchange kisses on the cheek. Karewit wants to go to the fountains at the Monument to the Revolution, which has an esplanade with shooting jets of water. Leticia wants to go too. “I want to get wet, I want to scream,” she says emphatically. Her smile is almost embarrassed and contrite, as if she thinks I might regard what she has just confided as odd. Then she says that Karewit gets nervous when she hears people talking about Jerzy. He was Karewit’s favorite; she called him, though he was her uncle,
el chiquito guapo
, “the little handsome one.” Karawit’s father has filled his bedroom with pictures of his brother Jerzy. The father is there in the stall too, and Leticia asks him to hand her his cell phone. She shows us a close-up of a wall covered with a collage of color photos of Jerzy. Karewit leans over the phone and touches one of the images and says, “That’s the best one.” Leticia asks, “What do you call Jerzy, Karewit?” The little girl smiles and responds shyly, “
El chiquito guapo
,” and dances away.

Leticia’s cell phone rings, and when she answers, she says, “
Mi amor
.” It is her husband, phoning from prison. After a moment she passes the phone to Pablo, who has interviewed El Tanque in the prison in Hermosillo, Sonora. “Jorge says that God is with us,” Leticia tells me. “That only God knows why these things happen.” When Pablo gets off the phone, he tells me that El Tanque has told him that he wants to be able to touch his son’s coffin.

“
Ya cambia todo
,” Leticia says to me. Everything has changed. “It changes your life, and it’s not fair.” She briefly succumbs to tears again, collects herself, calls for Karewit, and says, “Let’s go.” Saying good-bye, I embrace Leticia tightly; I can’t help myself, and I feel as if I don’t want to let go. The imprisoned narco’s wife. The warm physical life in my arms encloses the shattered mother inside her. I want to tell her, Believe me, I know, I understand—but I don’t say anything like that. Go and get wet in the fountain, go and scream! A memory of riding my bicycle in the countryside, screaming Aura’s name at the top of my lungs. I remember too, from the first days of death, this mix of manic sociability, shock, displays of “strength,” sudden tears, the impulse for magic rites, to get wet and scream. As Leticia is leaving, holding Karewit’s hand, Eugenia gives her sister a hard slap on the rear, like a football coach sending a player into a game.

María Teresa’s husband, the gray-haired, fit-looking man who, last time we were there, was sent to fetch a T-shirt, is at the stall too. His nickname is “Alain Delon,” because the family thinks he resembles the actor. Well, I think, with his soulful eyes and suave demeanor, he resembles Alain Delon more than Mancera resembles George Clooney. Later Pablo tells me that he’s a workout freak and long-distance jogger. He uses a long pole to bring a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt down from a hanger for a customer.

Eugenia, in a loose beige blouse and jeans, is darker than her sister, and has a similarly gentle and direct manner; it must be a family trait. But right now she looks a little stunned. She has just received a text message on her cell phone, she calmly tells us, that her nephew Jerzy Ortíz’s corpse has been identified. The family has a source in the PGR, she tells us. She shrugs helplessly. “Who knows if it’s true,” she says. Until the Argentines confirm it, she will not accept it. She pauses a long moment, and then says, “If it’s not them, then where
en chingados
are they? It’s almost worst, if it’s not them. Then where are they?” From the very beginning of the case, there has been mistrust between the families and the city’s justice authorities. “We told them there were thirteen who were missing,” says Eugenia, “but they didn’t believe us. It was eighteen days before they even accepted they were there [in Heavens]. Oh, they’re just out partying, they told us.” It was the families, Eugenia said, who had brought prosecutors and police a witness, a youth from the neighborhood, who knew the identity of at least some of the kidnappers. It was that witness who’d led police to El Negro, the La Unión gang member who admitted to taking part in the kidnapping, but who’d misdirected investigators to Veracruz. That same witness, Eugenia told us, went on a drive around the Condesa with the investigative police chief Raúl Peralta. “He saw a van circling the neighborhood,” said Eugenia, “and said, ‘That’s them! Grab them now or you’ll never get another chance.’ But Peralta said, ‘No, we need an arrest order,’ and then he never did anything more about it.”

Eugenia is the family note taker at meetings with city prosecutors and investigators and the federal PGR, and she produces two of her notebooks. Pablo wants to get the exact sequence of what was said at yesterday’s meetings. The PGR was asserting that some of the bodies had been identified by the clothing they had on, says Pablo, but hadn’t they said earlier that the bodies were nude? Hadn’t they discovered the clothing in bags nearby? “Yes, nude,” says Eugenia. “No, wait,” she says, “no.” She flips through her spiral notebook, and then lifts her hand to her forehead. “I don’t know,” she says, flustered. “I was in shock, I think. I missed things. I couldn’t keep track of everything.”

We go back over the meeting at the Bunker with Chief Prosecutor Rodolfo Ríos and Raúl Peralta, in charge of the police investigation. It’s important to Eugenia that we get it right because it was the first time, she says, that the families spoke out and said what they thought. She tells us that at the meeting Leticia had said, looking directly from one official to the other, “Whoever is behind this, whoever falls, whether it’s you, Rodolfo, or you, Raúl, I want them captured.” Eugenia says, “But they had no responses to anything.”

Betty, aunt of Monserrat Loza Fernández, was always the most supportive of the investigators at their meetings, says Eugenia. “She was always tossing them bouquets, saying, ‘Oh, thank you, we have so much confidence in you,’ but yesterday she stood up and demanded, ‘We want answers.’ The chief prosecutor ignored her. ‘I’m waiting for you to answer me,’ she said. She repeated it three times before the chief prosecutor finally turned to her.”

“All Ríos said was, ‘We’re going to capture those responsible,’” says Eugenia. Chief Prosecutor Ríos is a balding man with deeply pitted shadow-encircled eyes, flaccid cheeks, and a large jutting chin that exaggerates the smallness of his thin-lipped mouth. But I’ve seen him only in news photographs.

“Then Peralta,” says Eugenia, “got into an argument with Rafael Rojas’s brother. ‘Let me finish,’ he kept saying, raising his voice.” The room erupted angrily, she says, with family members accusing the police chief of speaking like a
grosero
, lacking respect. “Peralta apologized. He said that he’d raised his voice only so that everyone could hear him,” says Eugenia, wryly.

Gaby Ruiz’s father, who had come from Veracruz, said, “If this was narcos, if there are narcos in Mexico City, it’s because you permit it, maybe not you specifically, but you knew. And now you put on this little theater.”

Eugenia said, “My daughter Penelope never talks at the meetings. She listens, analyzes, passes me notes on pieces of paper. But yesterday she stood up and raised her hand. Peralta passed her over three times to call on others. But finally he called on her and she said, ‘
Buenas noches
, I’m Penelope Ponce, the cousin of Jerzy. My question is: Is this case still your responsibility?’”

Penelope is there in the stall too, and Eugenia calls her over so that she can tell us exactly what she’d said. Penelope, who resembles her mother, and seems to be in her late twenties, is the chef. She sits down with us, clasping her hands between her knees. Her expression and dark brown eyes looking grave with concentration, she softly and methodically begins to recount what she said at the meeting. Yes, she’d introduced herself just as her mother said she had, and had asked Ríos and Peralta if the case was still their responsibility. Then she’d said, “If it is, as for me at least, I don’t think that’s good news. You didn’t find them alive, or dead, and you haven’t found the people responsible for this. This is just like the other twenty-seven thousand disappeared in Mexico,” citing the official number given by human rights groups for the number of disappeared during President Calderón’s
sexenio.
“In all these cases, the same thing happens. First you deny that it happened. You say that they weren’t even there. That there weren’t cars and then that there were cars. Then you criminalize the victims. Because they were out at that hour. Because they’re from Tepito. You did the same with Virtual Mix”—another club, from which five young people had disappeared earlier that year—“but there it was because the victims were gay. You try to fill the families with doubts. Maybe in some cases you find them alive, or you find them dead, or you never find them, but you always close the case without finding the guilty ones. But this case isn’t finished.”

“Twenty-seven thousand, that’s just a number,” Chief Prosecutor Ríos responded.

“Twenty-seven thousand times the results have been just like in this case,” Penelope retorted. “Your incompetence is visible from kilometers away.”

With that, the meeting ended.

Penelope couldn’t have drawn a truer or more pertinent analogy. Twenty-seven thousand times in Mexico. Only once in the DF but only in the sense that the capital had so far not experienced a
levantón
of so many, like this one. Twenty-seven thousand, and more, cases of government incompetence and malfeasance, and of impunity. The shadow over Tepito and the shadow over Mexico are the same shadow. That shadow has spread over the DF.

As Pablo and I walk out of the Tepito market, a small boy in front of a stall selling fragrances adroitly sprays each of us on one hand with cologne. The strong sweet smell of undoubtedly counterfeit cologne fills the taxi we share back to Colonia Roma. Pablo says the families’ lawyer, Ricardo Martínez, told him, and is publicly stating, that he has information—undoubtedly from the PGR—that about thirty men were involved in the kidnapping from Heavens, and that they’d been armed with assault weapons, and had come and departed in vans. This is similar, of course, to what the three young witnesses fortunate enough to escape by fleeing onto Heavens’ roof had told authorities. But it is information that Chief Prosecutor Rodolfo Ríos has willfully ignored, and hidden. Pablo and I think we know, more or less, what the Mancera government is so desperate to hide, the presence of assault weapons and vans lending credibility to the witnesses’ declarations and what can be inferred from those declarations. But it may be just a matter of time before the truth begins to come out. The federal government, the PGR, now seems to hold the cards in the Heavens case and, in Pablo’s words, “is marking the paces,” deciding what comes out, and when. The Heavens case, to paraphrase Pablo’s source, still has a long way to go before all its political capital will have been spent.