Down and Delirious in Mexico City (16 page)

The Panteón Francés San Joaquín is known for services with prices that guarantee a certain uniform pedigree among the interred. The decaying, old mausoleums inside are laid out in orderly concourses, offering a parade of names that have had their hand in shaping contemporary Mexico. Familia Haddad Asha, Familia Nader Carrillo, Familia Julian Slim, Familia Dessafiaux Sánchez. It is a week since Silvia Vargas's body was found. I arrive in time for the mass of the ashes in her memory, following in a couple holding hands and dressed in white to a large stone chapel in the middle of the cemetery, Capilla Lorraine. Mourners have been gathering since morning. President Calderón stopped by before noon.

The mass inside is officiated by Father Mario Contreras Martínez and is broadcast from speakers directed at the outdoors, as though overflow crowds were expected. But the only people outside are members of the press and a few curious passersby. Every so often someone strolls out of the chapel in sunglasses to get some air or to walk a restless child. I merge with the reporters behind a grape-colored velvet rope that marks an indistinct boundary between the press and the mourners. I sit on a curb, shielding my eyes from the sun with a notebook. Photographers angle for a useful shot. Radio reporters toy with their equipment. More than anything else, the reporters around me seem bored.

A
Milenio
scribe is sitting beside me. “Here we are again,” he says gruffly under his breath. “And we will be here again, and again, and again. In six months,” he adds, standing up to stretch, “I'll see you here again for the same kind of story.” He whistles. “The truth is, it's embarrassing, man.”

The high valley sun shines hard and bright, maximizing the
visual effect of the mourners' attire. Except for a woman dressed in purple and gold and a few men who wear jeans or track suits, all the mourners are dressed in white, just as the Vargas family requested. Many wear it from head to toe. White loafers, white sundresses, white dress pants on the men and women. The reporters and onlookers outside watch in silence. I am struck by a sensation that the mourners are fundamentally alien to us, with their unshowy yet self-conscious markers of wealth: jewelry, heavy makeup, oversize $1,000 sunglasses. The fully assured gait of privilege of Mexico's rich, even in mourning, unattainable behind the purple velvet rope.

It sounds like a beautiful mass. There is music, prayer, reading of Scripture, and a poem read by Silvia's mother. When the priest bids the mourners to “go in peace,” many more people emerge from the chapel than I imagined were inside. Some immediately light cigarettes. Fashionable women gather in clumps, talking on cell phones. Young men stand in groups talking. One teen with intensely curly yellow hair and rosy red cheeks catches my eye as he walks briskly out. He is clearly rattled by the service and disappears into the passenger seat of an SUV, a stone-faced driver behind the wheel. I am thinking about Silvia Vargas, wondering if in her life she ever went to the funerals of kidnapping victims.

A few media celebrities catch the attention of the waiting reporters, who rush to capture their reactions. One is the track athlete Ana Guevara, a silver medalist in the 400 meters at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, and recently an officer in the national sports commission along with Nelson Vargas. The Olympian, with her pronounced features and baritone voice, is a favorite of reporters in Mexico looking for a juicy quote. Guevara wears a tight-fitting white suit and a white turtleneck underneath. Video cameras, microphones, and tape recorders crowd around her face. I duck
into the huddle and crouch near Guevara's left leg, balancing a small recorder upward.

“Ana,” a male voice calls. “You're a public official. In whose hands is the city, in the hands of the delinquents or the authorities?”

“In the hands of the authorities,” Guevara says firmly. “But I repeat, many of these things shouldn't be happening, and they wouldn't happen if there was more citizen participation.”

“Who is failing?” asks a female journalist.

“There are failures on both sides,” Guevara answers. “So many theories are out there, that it's coming from inside the prisons if it is gangs, that it's coming from inside the very government or the authorities. What has happened here should really open our eyes. We've seen two stories in these past months of well-known families, distinguished figures from the business community, that have made a lot of noise. But what about the families also that don't count with the economic means, what about the families who remain with a permanent complaint, still waiting for an answer, for the bodies of their loved ones?”

I move away. Everyone here is playing his or her role: media, mourner, politician. Since the case broke, I had believed that I could separate myself from the frenzy of coverage on the Silvia Vargas kidnapping and not be engulfed by it, but here I am, both covering the story and wearing white myself. I had told myself while getting dressed this morning that a white shirt might better my chances of getting inside the Panteón Francés San Joaquín in the event that access was restricted. The rationalization is now unconvincing. I am unwittingly a party to the mourning and to the media storm. The kidnapping story has kidnapped me.

Reporters are now preparing for the golden shot at the front of the Capilla Lorraine. We move back to our proper place behind the purple velvet rope. The family spokeswoman has informed us that
the Vargas family will come out and release a flock of white pigeons. There is to be no formal statement to the press. The stage is set. Videographers jostle into position. Given Nelson Vargas's tendency for outbursts, every cameraman wants a choice shot. Momentary chaos. “If you're not here working, then you should just go home,” one photographer proclaims out loud to no one in particular.

When the family and its closest friends finally emerge through the glazed-glass doors of the chapel, Nelson Vargas is among them. The old man seems calm and at peace as a cage full of white pigeons is placed before a gaggle of screeching toddlers, all dressed in white. Vargas makes an effort to acknowledge those who have closely followed his story, taken his photograph, called out questions.

“Thank you for your solidarity!” he calls to the reporters, raising an arm. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

The crowd of mourners behind him breaks into applause. When the cage is opened, most of the birds are too bewildered or undernourished to do much besides flap their wings. A few fly off only to land a couple meters away, near the media photographers. We dutifully keep documenting.

“I am a delinquent.” (Photo by the author.)

I
t's back in the summer of 2005. I am visiting Mexico City from Los Angeles for a short vacation. I want to see friends that I miss. I take a day to visit the Uruzquieta family in Iztacalco, and that's when I witness my first Mexico City street fight. It begins with a couple of guys after somebody who owes them money. It happens in the middle of the street, by the graffiti-scrawled gymnasium and soccer field in the middle of Colonia Zapata Vela. The fight is sloppy and rowdy, happening right in front of us as we visit the home of Don Alfredo's brother around the corner. A few more young guys run toward the commotion and try to step in. Another
one comes to defend the one in the middle of it. Whistling cascades down from the narrow concrete streets, and more men rush out of doorways and driveways and into the fray. In seconds the fight is a hollering brawl. We watch as a single police patrol cruiser rolls into the scene, turning on a lazy siren warning. The fight continues. We stand inside the house watching from the living-room window. The children are outside watching blankly from the covered driveway, as if this were television. The police officers finally catch on, leave their patrol car, and rush over.

They are outmatched. They cannot get inside the brawl to neutralize it. A female officer tries to yell orders but is drowned out. People gather to watch from the gymnasium and from inside the shabby fenced-off soccer field. More police cars arrive. More police officers. Still no order. The officers appear threatened. It is as though their arrival and their attempt to interrupt the neighborhood's social-ordering-in-progress amplifies the local men's impulse to solve everything by blows and the rules of the streets.

Where is Don Alfredo?
I wonder.

Sebastián—Don Alfredo's nephew—and I go outside to get a better view. The kids are now hopping and laughing at the perimeter of the brawl. Something exciting is happening outside, a fight with police that looks out of hand. Inside the house the adults are chattering and pointing and making jokes among themselves. Their tone suggests less enjoyment than nervousness. As the fight gets out of control—pushing, punching, falling, screaming—the cops must respond now purely in defense. More people gather to watch.

Where is Don Alfredo?

Just then he barrels into view, trodding over, chewing on a plastic drinking straw, the dome of the bald top of his head gleaming in the sun. Don Alfredo reaches into the melee with one hand, with
the determination of a lightning bolt, and pulls one of the fighters out by a shoulder. More police cars are pulling up.

“Maybe it's time you should go,” Sebastián suggests, smiling, “I'll walk you.” He leads me around the center of the brawl and across the gym and recreational complex, to a main drag with
pesero
routes that will take me to metro Iztacalco.

“
Cheeeeeeeeeen,
that got intense,” I tell Sebastián.

“Yeah,” he says.

He doesn't seem too perturbed. His uncle stepped in, and that meant, here in the
colonia
where his family are the unofficial community leaders, some level of order will eventually be restored. Eventually.

I head back that afternoon to areas of Mexico City more orderly in the imagination of the transient visitor—Condesa, Roma. Places where the police keep the peace, I tell myself, where their presence as an institution is generally respected. So it seems anyway. In the poor, rough barrios, the police may fear the people. In its more genteel enclaves, the reverse is true. The people have plenty of reasons to fear the police.

In November 2004, two undercover federal police officers were lynched in the small pueblo of San Juan Ixtayopan on the outskirts of Mexico City. A mob had gathered, accusing the officers of raping a neighborhood girl. The incident horrified the public. How could something like this happen? Marcelo Ebrard, then the city's police chief, told the papers the day after, “The problem is that between the moment that the lynching started and in the time that it takes you to move authorities there, they had already accelerated the lynching and we could not arrive in time.”

In August 2008, five “delinquents” dressed as federal investigators who had attempted to kidnap a man in the town of Tlapanalá, Puebla, were captured and nearly lynched by an angry mob. The bleeding and wounded men were turned over to actual uniformed authorities only after a lengthy negotiation. “Delinquents,” whether their uniforms are fake or original, are nuisances that the
pueblo
—the people—will deal with on its own, justly or not.

I'm never quite sure when the laws apply to their full social strength in Mexico. The laws are there, in books, on paper, mentioned in the press, cited by the politicians and angry victims of this injustice or that, updated daily in the dry, dense text of the Federation's Official Diary. But laws in Mexico are really more like starting-off points for negotiations between parties. Between victim and perpetrator, between lawmaker and political leader, person to person, a million times over every hour in every day in the megalopolis. Everyone is hustling everyone, in the micro sense or in the cosmic sense. At the checkout counter, over business deals, in real estate transactions, over drugs, a set of keys, in bed.

They say the screw-or-be-screwed dynamic is most ardently practiced in Mexico City. For people from
provincia
—the provinces—all
capitalinos
are automatically
rateros
—petty thieves. I don't want to believe such a nasty stereotype, but, to put it simply, I also take taxis here. Cabs provide daily examples of how artfully people screw each other in Mexico City. One summer night after a mellow cab ride of relaxing conversation with the driver, the friendly old man gives me a fraudulent ten-peso coin for change. I don't realize it until I get home and I feel the coin is lighter than it should be.
20 CENTAVOS
it reads,
1944.
The coin is essentially worthless. Most impressive of all, in hustler terms, it appears to have been painted to look like a modern ten-peso coin, with a ring of “gold” around the inner silver. I smile.
City of swindlers,
I think.