The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (7 page)

One late afternoon in the summer of 2008, during my first year living in Yoshua Okón’s building, I was walking on Amsterdam, and had gone only about a block and a half when I came upon a commotion on the sidewalk, police cars and vans, yellow tape, a milling crowd, and a small cluster of women sobbing and wailing. Inside the tape, on the sidewalk, was a large pool of blood. A young man who’d come outside to walk his dog had been shot in the back of the head and killed by a man with a pistol, who’d run away. The corpse had already been taken to a morgue. The women, grouped outside the doors of a dingy-looking apartment building, one bypassed by the neighborhood’s renaissance, were the victim’s mother and sisters, an aunt perhaps, whom he had lived with. I felt waves of adrenaline surging through me, chilled ripples over my skin, and I began to cry too. When I went on walking, I was unable to stop crying. The next morning when I woke I heard newspaper vendors outside my window, down on the corners at the intersection of Ozualama and Amsterdam, baying in the same morose singsong voice as the evening bicycle tamale vendors:

Salio a caminar su perro y lo mataron. Salio a caminar su perro y lo mataron
. . . He went out to walk his dog and he was killed . . .

The vendors were selling tabloid newspapers with the outside pages torn away so that the story of our slain neighbor would be the front page. They sold a lot of newspapers. I bought a copy, though it turned out not to provide any information that the neighborhood didn’t already know. He’d stepped outside to walk his dog and was shot in the back of the head by a man who was probably waiting for him, and who ran away. Why? Over a woman? A debt? Maybe even his surviving family would never find out. Probably the shooter would never be arrested or brought to justice. Every morning, I realized, these morbid vendors must turn up in other neighborhoods in the city where tragedies have occurred the previous day, so long as they’ve been reported in the tabloid press. You never stop being surprised by the human ecology of improvisation, all the innovative, opportunistic, scamming, and desperate professions, some legal and many others not, that blossom endlessly in Mexico City’s underground, or informal, economy.

For the next several days, I made myself walk by the spot where our neighbor had been murdered, always pausing to put my foot down on the fading bloodstain left on the sidewalk, mostly scrubbed away but still visible, and I’d feel those adrenaline waves and chills again, fainter now but still forcing me to take deep breaths, and my eyes stinging. I felt powerfully drawn to that stretch of sidewalk, and thought of the bloodstain as a secret door into my own world—a door to the
Pedro Páramo
world, where only the dead are alive—one now shared with the weeping women I’d seen on the afternoon of the murder.

In that year and every year since, there have been tens of thousands of murders in Mexico, 100,000 or so during the six-year presidency of Felipe Calderón, of the PAN party; tens of thousands have been abducted, many turning up in mass graves in desolate borderland deserts and ranchlands. Most are victims of the so-called narco war, including the violence, far from only directly narco-related, engendered by organized crime’s grip on an estimated two-thirds of the country. In a 2012 report ranking the world’s fifty most violent cities, nine were Mexican: Acapulco, with 143 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, was ranked number two, second only to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and was followed by Torreón (5), Nuevo Laredo (8), Culiacán (15), Cuernavaca (18), Ciudad Juárez (19), Chihuahua (32), Ciudad Victoria (36), and Monterrey (46). (The good news in the report was Ciudad Juárez, which had been ranked number two the previous year, and number one the three years before that.) The DF’s 2010 murder rate, 7.36 per 100,000 people, was nearly the same as New York City’s, 7.3; Mexico’s national murder rate was 19.4. The impunity rate for crimes committed throughout Mexico has been estimated at an astounding 99 percent, though in the DF the police capture rate for homicides has improved over these last few years to, in 2012, 52 percent. In the many Mexican cities and municipalities where the cartels constitute the de facto local government and police, reporting on the narco war’s violence and its victims is usually prohibited through censorship enforced with murder. In some places, news editors actually submit their copy before publication to the equivalent of cartel censorship offices. In one case I heard that the censor, in a city in Tamaulipas state, was a local journalist employed by a cartel who sat at a desk in a newspaper office making the final decisions about what that paper could publish and what it couldn’t. Mexico is among the world’s most dangerous countries to be a journalist in. At least forty-eight Mexican journalists were murdered during Calderón’s recently ended
sexenio
, though some put the number of journalists—counting those who provide information anonymously via blogs and tweets—killed during the narco war at well over a hundred. Even obscure bloggers and
tuiteros
who’ve reported the violent incidents in their localities have been hunted down and murdered, their supposedly anonymous online identities deciphered by the cartels, often by sophisticated computer specialists and hackers kidnapped by the cartels for that purpose.

Scenes like the one on Avenida Amsterdam that afternoon, of women, of mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, weeping over the sudden and violent death or disappearance of a loved one, who perhaps only moments or hours before they’d seen alive and will never see alive again, are repeated all over Mexico, all over Latin America, all over so much of the world, of course, every day. Most family survivors weep alike whether the victim was a cartel assassin or an innocent. And most are entering, with those first sobs of shock and terror, the lonely realm of grief, of an absence for which nothing has prepared them, many into a shattering of all that had made their lives reliably routine, seemingly secure, and even much happier than that, and into an aftermath, often, of trauma, hallucinations, nightmares, and enduring depression, among other symptoms, and even psychosis. They’re propelled through the portal of sudden loss into a world where the past is more vivid, more alive, than the present, which will seem to be an abyss that can swallow them if they allow it to. Most of these people, to say the least, don’t have access to
tanatologas
like Nelly Glatt. The people going about their days and nights carrying the often silently riotous inner atmosphere of traumatic grief have by now filled much of Mexico, and Central America too, with an army of exhausted, lonely ghosts. They give pertinent new meaning to Bolaño’s phrase about Latin America being a giant
manicomio
, a lunatic asylum. Little by little the ghosts may again be reconciled to life, in some cases they will even thrive, but many never will.

2
Adela Fernandez died on August 18, 2013. She was cremated and her ashes were deposited in a mausoleum alongside her father’s in the Casa Fortaleza.

3
“And the flames would write your name in the belly of the clouds/ red Palomita.”

2
#YoSoy132

THE UNIVERSIDAD IBEROAMERICANA
is an elite private Jesuit-sponsored university in Mexico City. It educates the children of the economically privileged, and has never had a reputation for political activism. “La Ibero” is a school where Enrique Peña Nieto, who looks like a Ken doll and was the PRI’s candidate in the presidential election during the summer of 2012, might send his daughter. During his campaign, Peña Nieto never dared to visit the public UNAM, nor has he since becoming president. The UNAM, always a politicized campus even in an era like this when widespread political apathy and disillusionment were said to have taken hold even among its students, was considered a bastion of support for the left-leaning PRD’s presidential candidate, a former Mexico City mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But Peña Nieto certainly would have believed, when he came to speak at La Ibero, on May 11, that he was in friendly territory. The PRI, having ruled Mexico for seventy-one years—“the perfect dictatorship,” as Mario Vargas Llosa famously called it—had been out of power since 2000. But the transformation of Mexican politics and society that Vicente Fox’s historic presidential victory seemed to presage never occurred. For two successive presidencies, first under Fox and then under his elected successor Felipe Calderón, the conservative PAN had governed Mexico, mostly ineffectually or worse, and the political establishment had remained essentially unshaken. For years many Mexicans had believed that the PRI—institutionally corrupt, murderously repressive—deserved to fade into irrelevancy. But according to polls published throughout 2012, Peña Nieto was going to win the elections easily. He promised a new PRI. What happened at La Ibero on what came to be called “Black Friday” opened people’s eyes.

At La Ibero, the auditorium overflowed with students in noisy repudiation of the perfectly coiffed PRI candidate, who so resembles a Televisa
telenovela
star, and is in fact married to a Televisa
telenovela
actress. Furthermore, Televisa, Mexico’s media monolith, was supporting Peña Nieto. Televisa
controls 70 percent of the Mexican television viewing market, and TV Azteca controls nearly all the rest. Later that summer it was revealed in the non-Televisa media that Peña Nieto’s campaign had been bribing the most influential Televisa news journalist for positive coverage. That seemed a superfluous expense. Televisa appeared to be as firmly behind the PRI as FOX News in the United States is behind the Republican Party. Many of the Ibero students that day were wearing Carlos Salinas face masks. The despised if brilliant Carlos Salinas de Gortari, considered among the most corrupt and influential PRI presidents of the latter twentieth century, was reputed to still be the power behind the PRI, and behind Peña Nieto. The call to greet Peña Nieto with a sea of Salinas masks had been posted on a student Facebook page just that morning, an Ibero professor told me later; rejecting the common perception that this generation of Mexican students was more apolitical than previous ones, she said that students now simply organized and communicated in ways that their elders didn’t necessarily notice. At La Ibero that day, students chanted “Atenco,” and that Atenco would not be forgotten. This municipality, in México State, was where one of the most squalid instances of government brutality in recent years occurred, in 2006, when Peña Nieto was governor of the state. During his term as governor, México State not only was beset by organized crime but saw a 106 percent rise in femicides. The notorious gang rapes, sexual torture, and murders of women in Ciudad Juárez were carried out as deeply depraved sport by members of drug cartels and other wealthy, powerful men whose total impunity for any crimes was institutionally protected by government and police authorities, locally and nationally, authorities long corrupted by money and intimidation. That is the conclusion of those who’ve studied the Ciudad Juárez femicides most thoroughly, such as the journalist and writer Sergio González Rodríguez; human rights groups; and international and national experts, including from the FBI and Mexican intelligence. “Why were they murdered?” wrote González Rodríguez in his searingly lucid book
The Femicide Machine
. “For the pleasure of killing women who were poor and defenseless.”

In 2002, peasant farmers from Atenco had successfully organized to block PAN president Fox’s plan to build Mexico City’s new airport on illegally expropriated lands there; but the fight over those lands was not over. On May 3, 2006, in Texcoco, the town next to Atenco, 200 riot police evicted 40 flower vendors associated with a land-rights group from their market posts. When the flower vendors joined with residents of Atenco to protest the evictions, disturbances erupted, and dozens of protesters were beaten, many into unconsciousness, and arrested. The next day 3,500 state police invaded Atenco to subdue an estimated 300 resistors. Two young people were murdered: a policeman shot a fourteen-year-old boy, and a university student was clubbed to death with police batons. Protesters beat up a policeman, and other policemen were taken hostage and held for hours before being released to the International Red Cross. Police arrested over 200 people, including more than 45 women and even some children. Dozens of women were raped and sexually assaulted, in some cases repeatedly, by police; among those women were foreign human rights observers and foreign students who were swiftly deported from Mexico to prevent them from telling their stories. There is abundant video and witness testimony of what occurred in Atenco, including a video posted on YouTube,
Atenco: Breaking the Siege.
⁴
Viewers will see mobs of police encircling and frenziedly clubbing single unarmed protesters nearly to death; they will see a partially undressed young woman, dress hoisted around her waist, lying among the piled bodies of detainees in the back of a police pickup. Terrible crimes took place in Atenco that day, yet no police or officials have been convicted of wrongdoing. So too had Peña Nieto evaded culpability for Atenco, until that day at La Ibero when, flustered by the relentless questions of the students, he dropped his guard and defiantly said: “It was a decision that I made personally to reestablish order and peace, and I made it with the legitimate use of force that corresponds to the state.”

So at La Ibero that day, Peña Nieto unrepentantly admitted responsibility for the crimes committed in Atenco, and flaunted his authoritarian character. The students responded with shouts of “Murderer!” and “Get out!” He returned a steely glare. Then he left, hurried by his security team, advisers, and hosts to the university radio station for a scheduled interview that never occurred; though he did reach the station, he then left it. The building’s long corridors were filled with students still shouting “Murderer! . . . Get out! . . . Atenco . . . !” For approximately twenty minutes Peña Nieto and his entourage scurried along the building’s hallways, looking for a way out. They hid for a while in a second-floor men’s room. A video image shows a distressed-looking Peña Nieto standing in the corridor outside the restroom with his people pressed tightly around him, while his hand, clamped to the side of his brow, lifts a seemingly solid flap of gelled hair off his head.
⁵
Afterward, when that second-floor men’s room became an instant landmark, students embellished the generic men’s symbol on its door with a big toupee-like coif. Recently, students took me to see the men’s room on the day I visited La Ibero for an interview—I had a book just out in Spanish—at the university radio station. The men’s room, like everything at La Ibero, is sleekly modern, with smooth whitish marble-like walls, counters and toilet stall doors of burnished dark wood. I contemplated the possible emotions—humiliation, anger, even panic—that the future president and his aides may have felt as they huddled there while the corridors outside rang with riled shouts. No serious future biography of Enrique Peña Nieto or history of his presidency will be able to avoid mentioning that second-floor men’s room.