The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (23 page)

During its twelve years out of national power, the PRI, retooling its machine with the support of its partners—most overtly, Televisa and TV Azteca—focused all of its energies on recapturing the country. Now, the PRI covets the Distrito Federal, the country’s richest prize. Everyone knows that; it’s openly acknowledged. Of course the PRI wants to govern the DF again, but to do that it would have to win an election there. But the PRI could never win an election in the DF, right? The city—with a demanding, well-informed constituency and an often aggressively activist base—is too smart and too organized for that to happen. The DF takes pride in its defiant apartness from the mediocrity and overt complicity with crime that characterize governance throughout so much of the rest of Mexico. Electoral tactics like those employed nationally by the PRI over the last two summers would never fly in the DF—imagine trying to buy off the city’s millions of voters with cash cards redeemable at a bargain superstore chain or threatening them at the polls or even murdering candidates? Hundreds of thousands and even millions would take to the streets, and the media exposure, local and international, would be intense.

In 1997, when residents of the capital were finally allowed to elect their own government, the DF became a leftist PRD stronghold. But the DF has no longtime allegiance to the PRD like the allegiance of voters in México State for the PRI. In its history the state has never voted for any other party. Mexico City’s revulsion against the PRI was particularly prompted by the corruption exposed by the 1985 earthquake—the collapsed schools built by contractors who’d bribed officials to overlook building codes, and many other examples of official malfeasance—as well as the nearly legendary criminality of that era’s police forces. But 1997 wasn’t so long ago, and it’s logical to assume that there are still important sectors of the DF where the PRI wields influence. Organized crime has millions upon millions in money to distribute to politicians and officials. And the DF is almost completely surrounded by México State, one of the country’s most narco-infested, corrupt, and violent states—a portion of the city touches on the murder and crime inferno of Morelos as well—and now México State’s former governor sits atop the federal government. One possible way for the PRI to take back Mexico City would be to undermine the city from within over several years—however many more years the PRI retains the presidency—and so eventually grind down and exhaust its residents’ and the crucial business and finance sectors’ trust in the governing competence of the left that it might create an opening for an alternative “strong government.” One obvious target would be the city’s prized security; another would be the water supply, which comes from outside the Distrito; there are others. It’s easy to understand how the PRI could have a strategic interest in exploding the perceived “bubble” of the DF as a secure city, for example by bringing some cartel-style mayhem—bodies strung from highway overpasses, beheadings, massacres in nightclubs, young women kidnapped from bus stops, etc.—into the PRD bastion directly from México State. But it’s also hard to conceive how doing so wouldn’t also be self-defeating, given the resulting inevitable damage to the national economy, for example, if the capital, home to many of Mexico’s wealthiest citizens and business interests, were to be overcome with violence and chaos. Months before, when such fears had first occurred to me, I’d decided that to believe the PRI would actually try was only paranoia exaggerated by my own loathing of Peña Nieto and his party.

But by the summer of 2013, many Chilangos no longer considered such a scenario so far-fetched. It was what we often talked about now. The speculations spawned by those fears provided enough conspiratorial plots and subplots to fill a fat le Carré novel. “Something is happening”—we thought the signs were already there, if not yet as openly menacing as the Evil Witch writing “Surrender Dorothy” in the sky. A new consensus was taking hold, one summed up by my friend Yoshua Okón: “Over the next six years,
nos van a chingar
,” they’re going to fuck us.

“Anytime you want to fall out of love with Mexico, take a bus to Coacalco, to Neza [across the border in México State] and just walk around,” said Juanca, launching, over a glass of
mezcal,
into one of his John Belushi–like rants, embellished with his own thunderous cannonades of laughter. Well, maybe I could do that, take a bus; to drive I’d need to rent a car, and that wasn’t in my plans for this summer. Juanca works in market research, and lately had been spending long days in México State. “You won’t believe that shit. The poverty, the filth. People park their cars inside cages so they won’t be stolen. Inside cages on the street, you have to see that! How can these people vote for the PRI? Because, after twenty years, they finally have a
pinche
McDonald’s? Aside from all the streets there named after the
pendejos
of the PRI, they name their streets after flowers, in a place where no self-loving flower would ever grow, not even if you paid it money. Any of those teenagers you see walking around would become a murderer for eighty bucks. We pay them twenty dollars for two hours of their time just to tell us why they want to buy the shit they want. Go to Monterrey. They used to have a beautiful historic downtown, all lit up at night, full of people and places to go. Now it’s all dark and deserted and bullet holes all over, but they still vote for the PRI. Stop listening to promises, motherfuckers, just look around at where you live if you want to know who to vote for! We look around and see a much better city than we had twenty years ago. But those motherfuckers look at us and say, Those people like their homos and drugs, they’re chaotic motherfuckers in the DF. But
you’re
the ones who like it up the ass, Monterrey, not us, only when we choose to. We’ve worked our asses off for twenty years to create this bubble that we live in, and we like it. It wasn’t created by God; we worked hard for it. And now that bubble is going to burst; it’s already bursting.”

The DF’s new mayor, Miguel Ángel Mancera, is in his late forties, twice divorced, now single, with a suave metrosexual demeanor despite relatively humble middle-class origins, and is a darling of Mexican gossip and society pages, often described as bearing a resemblance—this really seems to me a stretch—to George Clooney. In 2008, when nine lower-class adolescents and three police officers were killed in a botched and dubiously justified police operation, Mayor Ebrard had moved quickly to quell outrage and regain confidence in his governance by firing both his chief of police and his chief prosecutor. Mancera, a brilliant UNAM-educated lawyer, took over as chief prosecutor—equivalent to a big-city attorney general or head DA—and in that post came to be seen as an aggressive and innovative crime fighter with a smoothly charismatic media personality. The mayoralty was expected to raise Mancera’s profile much more and establish him, like Rudy Giuliani, as a dynamic national political player. Recent former PRD mayors had been nationally competitive presidential candidates: Cuahtémoc Cárdenas in 2000, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2006 and 2012. Some believed that Ebrard would have been a stronger candidate than López Obrador in 2012, though I think Ebrard understood that the populist AMLO was still the more revered figure in the DF and throughout much of the country, especially among the poor, that is, nearly half of Mexico’s population. Many assume that Ebrard will be his party’s candidate in 2018. But it also seemed obvious that Mancera intended his mayoralty to provide a platform from which to challenge Ebrard in 2018. Some commentators even gave Mancera an advantage, speculating that he would benefit from the spotlight of his office, while Ebrard—who chose not to run for the Senate, as many had suggested he should—would find himself challenged to find a way to remain in the public eye over the next six years.

But Mancera’s first months in office as mayor were at best a puzzling disappointment; actually, they were downright weird. Previous PRD city governments had staked their identities on representing a leftist alternative to the federal government’s policies, and PRD mayors had sought to be regarded as outspoken opponents of the PRI and PAN presidents. Yet Mancera, who has never actually been a member of the PRD, seemed to have renounced that role. The political agenda and identity of the DF’s PRD isn’t necessarily the same as that of the national PRD, a party that originated as an offshoot of the PRI. Mancera closed ranks with the PRD national party and legislative leaders Jesús Zambrano and Jesús Ortega, politicians, increasingly bitter rivals of Ebrard’s, who’d endorsed the PRI and Peña Nieto’s “Pact for Mexico,” a controversial, apparently pro forma agenda of reforms, some of them good on paper at least. Mancera pointedly distanced himself from Ebrard, who openly disdains the new president. Peña Nieto could not be more unpopular in the DF, yet Mancera met with him in Los Pinos, the presidential residence. In February, in their first joint public appearance, Mancera presided with Peña Nieto over the opening of an exhibition of military hardware in the Zócalo, called “Passion to Serve Mexico,” which offered a more than merely symbolic contrast to the skating rink and dinosaur exhibition that characterized Ebrard’s use of this public space. The Zócalo is also the daily site of public protests over every conceivable issue. (Ebrard, during our conversation, called it “Our country’s space of liberty par excellence, sometimes in excess, but that doesn’t matter. It’s our freedom place, a symbol against authoritarianism.”) In March, Mancera accompanied Peña Nieto to the Vatican to meet with and attend the coronation of Pope Francis, another gesture that seemed intended to mark a difference from Ebrard, who’d relished his battles with the nationally powerful Catholic hierarchy over such issues as gay marriage and abortion. Mancera must have known that his “Peña Nieto, military, and pope” show would strike many Chilangos as a triple heresy; either that, or else, implausibly, the new mayor simply doesn’t understand the city where he has lived all his life and which elected him in a landslide. The heavy-handed response of the Mexico City police to the December 1 protests against Peña Nieto’s inauguration—a day of transition that began with Ebrard and ended with Mancera as the DF’s
jefe de gobierno
—the beating and arbitrary arrests of young protesters and their subsequent long detentions, suggested, especially in hindsight, that Mancera was bringing a new strictness to the governing of the city; such impressions were enforced by new “crowd control” policies that resulted, on June 10, in 269 arrests during the DF’s lesbian and gay parade. Yet throughout the first six months of his term, so far as day-to-day governance was concerned, Mancera seemed to be keeping a strangely low profile. I wondered if I just wasn’t paying enough attention and found myself asking friends how Mancera was doing. It seemed as if Mancera had no desire or ability to speak to the city, or as if he’d suddenly lost his fluency in Chilango, which he’d possessed as chief prosecutor. Mancera could justify his closeness with Peña Nieto by claiming it would help procure more federal money and perhaps, eventually, more autonomy for the capital. But cracking down on protesters, trying to buddy up to Peña Nieto, celebrating military force in the Zócalo, traveling to meet with the pope—what kind of strategy was that for governing the DF? It was as if Mancera was actually looking far beyond the city itself and ahead to 2018, seeking to distance himself from the socially militant and urban progressive images of the DF’s previous
jefes de gobierno
, instead choosing to embrace more “mainstream” Mexican values that, in recent elections, have triumphed nationally, if only just barely. Whether it was already-backfiring, calculated personal ambition, or just the lack of a clear governing agenda of his own, or something else entirely, some other scheme or problem, that lay behind his confusing and passive performance, nothing would ensure Mancera’s failure as mayor or as a future presidential candidate, or even as a relevant political personage, more than the DF’s losing its image as a zone free of narco cartel violence and control. As Ebrard put it, “The mayor has two overriding obligations. To keep the city secure, and to govern in a way that is clearly liberal and progressive. Lose those, and the magic disappears.”

On Sunday, May 26, at approximately eleven-thirty in the morning, in the Zona Rosa, twelve young people—initial news reports said eleven—vanished outside an after-hours club called After Heavens,
¹²
where they’d been partying since the predawn hours. Almost all of the missing, seven men and five women, were from the barrio of Tepito. They were between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four. According to the only initial witness—a friend of the missing young people who’d escaped the kidnapping—one of the club’s owners had suddenly turned off the electronic dance music and told everyone to vacate the premises because there was going to be a police raid. Out on the sidewalk armed men, faces hooded or hidden with scarves, herded the twelve into three vans and disappeared. That sort of
levantón
, literally a “lifting,” in this case a mass kidnapping, is carried out by the cartels every day all over Mexico; its victims are rarely seen alive again. But
levantones
weren’t supposed to happen in the Distrito Federal, certainly not in broad daylight, in such a prominent and central zone of the city as the Zona Rosa, filled with hotels, restaurants, gay bars, and nightclubs, if also with lots of big-city sleaze—
afters
,
teibols,
prostitution, drug dealing, and the like. The alleged
levantón
had occurred on Calle Lancaster, just a block from the Ángel de la Indepenencia and the Paseo de la Reforma, the DF’s Grand Boulevard, which was closed to traffic that Sunday morning for a bike-a-thon, and only a few blocks from Calle Liverpool, where the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP), or Ministry of Public Security, headquarters of the chief of police, is located. An international culture fair was also being held nearby in the neighborhood that Sunday morning. There were some 225 police in the area.