The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (41 page)

Apart from the four arrested police, according to the article in
Proceso
, the PGR has informed the DF’s SSP police chief, Jesús Rodríguez Almeida, that at least several more of his police were involved in the crime, and that La Unión’s network of corrupted officers probably includes the PGJDF, the chief prosecutor’s office, whose investigative police unit were heading the investigation into the Heavens case. “Despite having the names of those presumed to be implicated on his desk,” wrote Mongé, “Rodríguez Almeida inexplicably hasn’t handed them over to local prosecutors.” According to Mongé’s sources, during the fallout from the Heavens case, El Moco fled to China. (As most of the
fayuca,
counterfeit goods, sold in Tepito come from China, El Moco would certainly have connections there.) The whereabouts of El Javis, El Antoine, and the four
matones
from Durango are unknown.

The article in
Proceso
was published on October 3. As far as I can tell, following the case from New York, it was met with near silence. Officials didn’t comment, not even to refute it. There was little or no follow-up or commentary in the media. But when I read the article, a lot fell into place; it corroborated much of the information that had come to me, in bits and pieces, over the past six months since the
levantón
occurred. Here was more evidence and a partial explanation of the police involvement that Pablo de Llano and I had long suspected. Here, at last, was an identification of the “Deep Ones,” the ultimate powers behind the crime: the Sinaloa Cartel. The placement of the corpses of Dax Rodríguez and the two women in Huitzilac, Morelos, inside the Beltrán Leyva’s “paradise,” made sense as a message delivered by one cartel, Sinaloa—and implicitly, perhaps, by its allies—to another cartel.

Maybe we, the public, along with the families of the victims, will never know what really happened in the Heavens case, or who was ultimately behind it. Later, in the fall of 2013, I had a chance to speak with a group of veteran PGJDF police officers, investigative police, former
judiciales
, SWAT team commandos, and anti-kidnapping police. We were meeting to talk about a separate matter I was researching, but Tepito, the Heavens case, and police involvement in the crime came up. “Tepito is a center of power in this city,” one of them told me. A great deal of money is made in Tepito, flows through there, and so it is a center of political power. That was why, the police told me, their units—elite crime fighting units—had routinely been kept out of Tepito and were almost never sent on operations there. The neighborhood was left to the police who were assigned to the police stations there. But it was not those police who controlled or empowered crime in Tepito, they told me. It was the politicians who controlled the police, they said.

On Tuesday, October 22, the Federal Human Rights Commission held a press conference to address the Heavens case and other recent disappearances in the city. DF prosecutors and police were criticized for having leaked information in the Heavens case that put both family members and witnesses at risk, and for the many other “irregularities” of their investigation. And the commission accused the DF’s authorities of having deprived the families of their right to truthful information about what had happened to their relatives. Most significantly, the commission called for an investigation into police involvement in the abductions and murders in the Heavens case. “If the police were involved, then we are confronted by a case of forced disappearances,” said the commission’s interim president, Mario Patrón, “and the murders would become extrajudicial assassinations.” Patrón called the Heavens case a “historic occurrence” that had opened eyes to the problem of disappearances inside the DF’s vaunted security “bubble.”

But who would carry out that investigation? It seems likely that all the relevant justice authorities, in the DF and at the federal level, have something to hide in the Heavens case, or else regard only cherry-picked elements of the crime as useful political capital. A
SinEmbargo.com
editorial addressed the problem of police involvement in the rising incidence of disappearances in Mexico, including in the Heavens case: “And the pain, the pain of thousands of families that have suffered from these crimes can’t be healed by anything,” the editors wrote. “Maybe, just slightly, by a true imparting of justice. But the answers never arrive, or they come in slow dribs and drabs. Meanwhile the criminals, among them police authorities, generate all through their communities more and more suffering.”

On December 19, 2013, Mexican news agencies reported that according to “high-level sources within the PGR,” the kidnapping and murder of the young people in the Heavens Case was provoked by a dispute between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Beltran Leyvas over control of the Mexico City drug trade—a direct refutation of the scenario insisted upon by Mayor Mancera and Ríos. According to those sources, the two adolescent sons of the imprisoned Tepito gangsters were the operation’s target, and the other young people were victims of “bad luck.” Left unaddressed was the question of whether or not the
levanton
and mass murder had helped either cartel to achieve its goal. That news report was like the final blips emitted by a missing airliner’s black box—since then silence has all but enveloped the case, at least in the media. 

On the night after the discovery of the clandestine grave in Tlalmanalco, Israel, the brother of Monserrat Loza Fernández, told a reporter from
Universal,
“My sister didn’t deserve this; she was a woman dedicated to her children. She was a young single mother who now and then liked to go out to have fun. Monserrat is a good person, I say that she was a good person. She never was involved in anything illicit and it befell her to die in the cruelest manner that anyone can imagine. These have been desperate months, of anguish, desperation. I didn’t know whether my sister was eating or not, or if they were abusing her, or mistreating her. I had a certain hope because I had many dreams, I kept dreaming that she came home.”

The cruelty and near hopelessness of the situation overwhelm. Maybe the Heavens case is nobody’s cause now but that of the families. They, like tens of thousands of other families in Mexico, have been sent on journeys that they, individually or banded together, will mostly have to endure alone, through that place without solace where the dead often seem more alive than the living.

8
Watch #LadyPolanco:
20minutos.com.mx/noticia/3188/0/lady
-polanco/vanessa-polo-cajica/elude-prision

9
(1) Guerrero, 463. (2) Chihuahua, 417. (3) Estado de México, 407. (4) Jalisco, 362. (5) Sinaloa, 324. (6) Nuevo León, 261. (7) Coahuila, 216. (8) Durango, 197. (9) Tamaulipas, 167. Guerrero, the only exception, is led by a governor who recently switched his affiliation from the PRI to the PRD
(
sinembargo.mx
/15-03-2013/560479).
Michoacán (PRI) and Morelos (PRD) are two more states where violence would explode in the latter months of 2013.

10
animalpolitico.com/2013/09/en
-9-estados-el-secuestro-aumento-entre-20-y-70/#axzz2lbAycntp

11
“AI states that, out of 152 cases of disappearance that they documented in seven states, ‘in at least 85 cases there is sufficient evidence of the involvement of public officials for them [the cases] to constitute crimes of enforced disappearance under international law’ (June 2013).” The Mexican NGO El Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal (CCSPJP) estimates that police and military authorities are involved “in one third of high impact and express kidnappings” in Mexico. The Council for Law and Human Rights puts the proportion at 70 to 80 percent (
ecoi.net/local_link/259326/371897_en.html
).

12
An unlicensed after-hours bar, it was also referred to in the media as “Heavens After” and “After Heaven” and “Bar Heaven” and just “Heaven.” I use “Heavens” because it was the name used by the newspapers
El País
and
Reforma,
and because I simply like that name.

13
“In two and a half years, 415 judicial and preventive police were brought before the criminal courts for involvement in some activity outside the law. . . . According to the Public Information Office of the Chief Prosecutor of the Federal District (PGJDF) the 415 agents were involved in crimes such as abuse of authority, aggravated robbery, sexual abuse, bribery, deprivation of liberty, express kidnapping, murder, malicious wounding, covering up crimes, unlawful exercise of public service, [and] aggravated rape” (
Crónica
, February 11, 2013).

14
Pablo de Llano’s stirring two-page spread of profiles was published on June 25 (
internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/06/25/actualidad/1372189257_835177.html
).

15
Averiguación Previa DGAVD/CAPE/T2/891/13-05.

16
As this book was going to press, the Sinaloa Cartel capo, Joaquín Guzmán, El Chapo, was captured. Please see Appendix note for more on this.

17
Time
magazine hailed Peña Nieto’s presidency in those words on the cover of its November 30, 2012, issue. But “new PRI” babble was all over the U.S. media.

Appendix Note

On February 22, 2014, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, was taken prisoner—without violence, without a single gunshot being fired—in a Mazatlán, Sinaloa, resort hotel in an operation mounted by Mexican navy commandos in cooperation with U.S. authorities, particularly the DEA. Under President Calderón, in 2009, Mexican navy commandos and U.S. law enforcement had hunted down and killed Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, in Cuernavaca. Peña Nieto was carrying on with Calderón’s policy of waging war through the capture and killings of major capos—though there was no bigger trophy than El Chapo. But the running of an organization as wealthy, vast, and global as the Sinaloa Cartel doesn’t depend on just one person. In a famous 2010 interview with
Proceso
, one of the Sinaloa’s other venerable leaders, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, said that the cartel was prepared for the possible capture of its capos and had replacements ready; it’s long rumored in Mexico that Sinaloa’s legendary narco capos work for hidden bosses, men who don’t want
narcocorridos
being sung about them—“there is talk of an x- governor,” wrote Alejandro Páez Varela, a few days after El Chapo’s arrest, in
SinEmbargo.com
. In a widely quoted interview with the Tijuana weekly
Zeta,
Edgardo Buscaglia, a Mexican security expert and senior research scholar in law and economics at Columbia University Law School, said, “El Chapo is one member of the Sinaloa criminal network’s leadership, but let’s not forget that Sinaloa is a horizontal network consisting of thousands of franchises that operate according to directions from Sinaloa transmitted through strategic and tactical alliances. Sinaloa doesn’t have a vertical structure of command and control, they have regional criminal alliances, and in other countries; so that directorship will continue, [El Chapo] will simply be replaced.” Buscaglia said that the capture of the mythologized capo, in a country like Mexico, “with its voids in governance,” didn’t “even minimally guarantee the dismantling of a criminal network.” Buscaglia said, “El Chapo Guzmán and his people in Sinaloa had hundreds of Mexican politicians in their pockets, let’s see if they arrest them now.” The weakening of the Sinaloa Cartel would become a reality, he said, only if El Chapo’s capture was followed by detentions of the corrupt politicians and functionaries at all levels who permitted and aided the Sinaloa Cartel’s operation and expansion, and with investigations into the thousands of seemingly legal businesses and properties, in Mexico and the United States and elsewhere, through which the cartel and its associates laundered and invested its billions, and the eventual seizure and dismantling of those entities. As long as the chains of complicity between politicians and cartel capos are not destroyed, he said, “then the war against the narco traffickers can be considered lost.”

Phil Jordan, a former director of intelligence for the DEA, created a stir when he said in an interview on Univision
,
the U.S.-based Spanish-language television network,
that “I never thought the PRI would arrest him, because El Chapo invested a lot of money in Peña Nieto’s campaign, so I was surprised when I learned that he’d been arrested.” Jordan said that his allegations about El Chapo had been “documented by U.S. intelligence, though I don’t have papers I can show you.” He said that “Chapo has always invested in politics,” just as the capo recently freed from prison Rafael Caro Quintero used to. Jordan made the observation that before the PAN came to power in 2000, “The PRI had a lot to do with drug trafficking and with the godfathers of Mexican trafficking.” He told the television network, “Something bad happened between the PRI and El Chapo Guzmán. What I can’t tell you now, because I don’t know why they arrested him.”