The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (39 page)

August 25. Five more corpses have been identified: those of Jerzy Ortíz Ponce, Said Sánchez, Jennifer Robles González (Jacqueline’s sister), Arón Piedra Moreno, and Monserrat Loza Fernández.

August 26.
Reforma
and other newspapers report that nine of the thirteen bodies were decapitated. Such decapitations are a signature of organized crime. The manner in which Heavens’ owner Dax Rodríguez Ledezma and his female companions were murdered—and their bodies tortured, burned, and transported from Guerrero to Morelos to be found there—also bore the grisly symbolism of a narco cartel. The former head police investigator—Raúl Peralta’s predecessor—of the DF chief prosecutor’s office (PGJDF) told
Reforma,
“The DF isn’t a bubble. If they don’t sound the alarms, we’re going to find ourselves with a grave security problem.”

The PGR attorney general, Murillo Karam, seems to be retracting the story that the discovery of the grave was accidental. Now he has told AP that federal investigators were acting on a tip that the bodies might be in Tlalmanalco. Near a cemetery in the area, they spotted an armed man, standing watch, who fled at their approach. The federal investigators proceeded to the ranch with an order to search it. They found bags holding clothes; a box of cell phones; and two “locals” who worked as watchmen there, one of whom, while being questioned, told the investigators that bodies were buried there. And an unidentified PGJDF source has leaked to the press the information that approximately twenty-five men had arrived at the
rancho
at around one in the afternoon that Sunday—less than two hours after the Heavens
levantón
had occurred—in various vans, and ordered the watchmen to leave. Ricardo Martínez, the families’ lawyer, tells the press that the thirteen abducted young people were then murdered and buried almost immediately. They were decapitated and dismembered. The killers probably used chain saws.

August 27. Newspapers headline Chief Prosecutor Ríos’s announcement at a press conference on Monday that the After Heavens mass kidnappings and murders were a
narcovenganza
by La Unión de Insurgentes against La Unión de Tepito, a settling of accounts for the slaying of the drug dealer Horacio Vite Ángel outside the bar Black in the Condesa. Ríos is sticking to the scenario that the crime was nothing more than the result of a turf war between two local drug-dealing gangs. The chief prosecutor insists, “We’re not talking about any cartel, or about organized crime.” Ríos announces that there are now three members of La Unión in custody: El Negro; El Chucho Carmona, an associate of Heavens’ owner El Lobo Espinoza; and another man recently arrested in the DF, Víctor Manuel Aguilera García, who, according to the chief prosecutor, was involved in bringing the abducted victims to Tlalmanalco. Given the record so far, it seems possible that those La Unión detainees, like Heavens’ imprisoned owners, won’t confess much more than their own involvement in the crime, or will even, as in the case of El Negro, give disinformation. If that is so, it could be because they fear the consequences of being truthful. Another possibility is that authorities are suppressing, at least for now, other information the detainees might have given. The involvement of the gang being called La Unión Insurgentes certainly could be and probably even is an essential part of the story, but this only highlights the many questions that remain unanswered. Today, at least, the major Mexico City newspapers are striking a critical and even derisive tone. They cite a series of experts who speak about the telltale signs of organized crime in the case and its implications for the city, and
Universal
insists that the “intellectual authors” of the mass kidnappings and murders, not just those who might have been involved in carrying them out, need to be identified.
Reforma
closes its front-page story by reporting that Attorney General Murillo Karam “admitted that [the PGR] has information on the case, but he refused to reveal it because the case is in the hands of the capital’s chief prosecutor’s office.” In
El País
Pablo de Llano, for the first time, wrote about what his own highly placed off-the-record source had told him about the “criminal empowerment” of gangs “protected” by corrupt police agents. This reality seems to be what the city government of Miguel Ángel Mancera doesn’t want to acknowledge and is determined to hide: not only that organized crime has brazenly asserted a presence in the DF under his watch but, furthermore, that the city’s organized crime problem is rooted in its police.

Neither the chief prosecutor nor anyone else has yet to provide proof that any of the thirteen kidnapped and murdered young people were involved in a
narcomenudeo
gang or even in minor drug dealing. None has yet been linked even circumstantially to the murder of the drug dealer outside Black. There is only a taint by association regarding two of the murdered adolescents: the offspring of Tepito narcos imprisoned ten years ago. Nor has the chief prosecutor, or anybody else, suggested a rationale for why a local gang would kidnap and murder twelve or thirteen seemingly innocent young people in retaliation for the murder of a single drug dealer. At the Monday press conference, Ríos said, “It’s what the witnesses have told us. We can’t provide a personal opinion about why this has happened.” The chief prosecutor has no information—nor even a hypothesis—about why so many people were abducted and killed, or about why those thirteen were chosen.

The PGR seems to be watching the DF’s mayor twist silently in the air while deciding when to give him another whack. The president, meanwhile, has kept completely silent about the Heavens case, not even uttering a few politician’s platitudes of solace to the families directly affected by this unprecedented act of criminal violence in Mexico’s capital, nor offering any words of support during what is clearly, or should be, a trying moment for his friend Mayor Mancera. My source, a month ago, had reflected that if only Mancera would come out and openly acknowledge that the DF now has an organized crime problem—even if his organized crime problem includes his city’s police force—and declare that his government is determined to combat it, “then the city would applaud him.” And it would! Mexico City likes a fighter, and seems repulsed by the specter of a mayor about whom people are always saying things like, “Someone or something has him by the balls, but who or what?” So why doesn’t Mancera do that, and try to rally the city behind him? Instead the mayor triumphantly announces to the press, “The Heavens case is nearly closed.”

The spectacle grows more alarming and shameful day by day. We may not be sure of what the
jefe de gobierno,
Miguel Ángel Mancera, is hiding, but, as now seems starkly apparent, he is hiding something in plain sight.

At the end of August, I received an e-mail from Nelly Glatt. She’d read about my book in a magazine for Mexico City’s Jewish community. She just wanted to say hello and to know how I was doing. I hadn’t seen Nelly since the beginning of the summer of 2012, when, during a therapy session, I’d told her about my driving project, and she’d interpreted it as a means of taking control of my life. A few days later, on August 30, I went to see Nelly again at her cozy office in Las Lomas where, only a week or two after Aura’s death, I’d first come to see her. When I arrived I took my seat on the familiar plush leather couch, across the room from where she sat, as regal and beautiful as always. The mood was different, more effusive and friendly than during all those past sessions, even if we adhered to our roles, me speaking about myself, Nelly commenting. I told her about what had happened in my life since that last meeting; in other words, I retraced my steps through the time frame of this chronicle. Circuits within circuits: February’s collapse, the recurrence of trauma symptoms, which I’d pulled myself out of by starting to write this chronicle of that summer. Nelly asked if I still thought about Aura every day. Every day. She’s a permanent part of me, I said; it’s as though I always know exactly where she is inside me and where to find her whenever I need her. If those words were hyperbolic, it was only to a degree. Every day Aura makes me smile, I said. Or she challenges me. And nearly every day there are also moments when I feel overtaken by her loss and struggle to comprehend it: terrible moments from her last hours come rushing back, and send gutting gusts of dread and confusion through me. Or I encounter somebody who unexpectedly shares an admiring or stirring memory of Aura, which may bring brief tears and, again, that piercing sense of baffled loss, mixed with something sweeter. Enduring love, I suppose that’s what it is. The moments pass. Though I will never be able to comprehend Aura’s death, I do think I live with it now with less resistance, less corrosively, with less inner panic than before. Aura has her place inside me now, I told Nelly, though I hate that phrase and its false impression of gardened cemetery neatness. What is Aura’s place?—death and memory, never neat or orderly, always a forest and an ocean.

“You’ve learned about death in an important way,” said Nelly, “and I imagine it is what you will want to write about from now on. Everyone thinks he or she knows death and almost everybody does to at least an abstract degree, but you know it face-to-face and have lived closely with it in a way that not everybody has.” Nelly said that after Aura’s death it became a pattern with me to need to come face-to-face with the imminent possibility of my own death in order to wake me up to life again. The time I was hit by a car, and the party bus assault I’d just told her about—both of those incidents had somehow made me pull myself together and get going again. Nelly said that she hoped I was through with needing or looking for that kind of jolt. It didn’t surprise her that I’d become so involved with the After Heavens case. She suggested that I was compelled by a wish and even a sense of obligation to be of help—wasn’t that true? Somehow I’d known all along, right from the start, what drew me to the case. Of course there was little, if anything, I could do to be of help or solace to the Tepito families, but the “wish” to, yes, that was true. I’d also felt a compulsion to draw closer to, to get to know a little better, this Mexico of violent death and trauma.

Nelly likes parables, or stories that resemble parables. Some are drawn from her years of practice and others from her Jewish faith and Jewish religious writing and tales. She shared a few during that visit. One was a story she’d read in the same magazine in which she’d come across that piece about my book. A rabbi had written about his first visit to Jerusalem many years before, and to a strange little synagogue there that was founded by Jews who’d emigrated from Africa. Embedded in the wall next to the ark holding the Torah, specially illuminated by lamps, was a coffin. He’d never seen a coffin displayed in a synagogue. That the coffin held the remains of an ancestor was inconceivable. Traditional Jewish law, Nelly explained, prohibits the Kohanim
—
members of the tribe of Levi, the priestly family descended from Aaron, who have a ceremonial role in synagogue prayer services and other special duties—to have contact with or even to be in the same room as the dead. But in this congregation, Jews were encouraged to pray with their eyes fixed on a lamplit coffin. When the visiting rabbi asked the synagogue’s rabbi what was up with the coffin, he answered, “You come from a drop of semen, and you go to the tomb, and in the end you must justify all the actions in your life to the Creator. The consciousness of mortality is the most important truth we can engrave within ourselves in order to be able to live life to its fullest.”

The coffin as a seemingly heretical visual symbol was an affirmation, not of death, the rabbi wrote in the article Nelly had read, but of the power that the knowledge of the inevitability of death has to transform lives. It reminded me of what the Tepito merchant policeman had said as we walked over to Doña Queta’s shrine that day about the Santa Muerte not being “the worship of death itself.” The coffin, wrote the rabbi, “requires introspection from whoever observes it” and should direct the observers’ thoughts not to death but to life.

Rather than a therapy session, it was more like a valedictory ceremony. Later I thought that our conversation had been somewhat like the ending of the movie
The Wizard of Oz,
when the wizard, in “giving” the Tin Man his heart, the Scarecrow his brain, and the Lion his courage, extols virtues they already possess or have recently won. The wizard’s gift is that they finally recognize those virtues in themselves. Nelly—unlike the wizard, in no way a charlatan—gave a meaning to my progress through grief. It was, in many ways, the same meaning that I’d been trying to put into words during the months I’d spent writing this chronicle.

Almost on the same day as my visit to Nelly, Jovi and I had good news. Dr. Parral, my landlord in the Río de Janeiro apartment, who lives upstairs—a crusty but elegant seventy-year-old cardiologist who smokes cigarettes—didn’t want us to give up the apartment. To persuade us to stay, he lowered the rent considerably. I was then able to find a subletter within days, a young Frenchman who used to work for Pfizer and now wants to open a bakery in the DF. I had to agree to rent it to him until next July, a couple of months longer than ideal, but what a huge relief not to have to pack everything up and put it away in storage.

The night before we flew to New York, I met Pablo de Llano for drinks in the little bar near the plaza. He told me that the families were refusing to acknowledge that the bodies in the PGR morgue were those of their relatives until foreign experts performed the DNA testing. Many, thought Pablo, were clinging to the belief that the dismembered bodies found in the grave in Tlalmanalco were not actually those of the missing young people, who might still be alive somewhere. Such was the mistrust the families felt for the authorities now, believing them capable of lying even about that, and also of being too incompetent to do the testing correctly; but surely some family members were simply refusing to accept death until it was irrefutably and “scientifically” proved. Ruth Marines had told Pablo that she’d received a message from her son Rafael—a candle flame taking the visible form of an angel and then of a heart—which she interpreted as meaning that he was all right where he was now and that she shouldn’t worry about him. When Pablo asked if she meant still alive somewhere in Mexico, Ruth responded, “I know that Rafa is no longer with us here on earth; he’s in that other place.”