The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (31 page)

Jéssica suggested that we look at Danae’s Facebook page. Pablo and I bent over the computer. Almost the first thing I noticed was that Danae had more than 2,700 Facebook friends. A teenage girl, not in school, unemployed, residing in Tepito, with nearly 3,000 social network “friends.” The world is a mystery to me, I thought. We looked at her favorite music: Moenia, Da Fresh, La Rolledera, El Komander. Her favorite movies included
Dead Poets Society
and
El Cartel de los Sapos
, a cable series about a drug cartel. Pablo was clicking through Danae’s posted photographs, and enlarged a close-up of her and her mother together: Danae with her cheek pressed against her mother’s cheek, her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Gabriela, who doesn’t look much older than her daughter, with blondish hair and pleasant features, just short of plump, gazes with a composed expression into the camera. Danae’s face is all teenage drama. Long messy bangs fall over big glossy dark eyes, which stare passionately, almost sorrowfully, into the lens. She is wearing lipstick and her lips are long, full, and slightly pulled down at the corners, as if to transmit soulful earnestness. A strapped black top bares her shoulder. In the photo, at least, she really does look as if she could be an actress.

We scrolled through her posts, most written in social networking shorthand. Only hours before, Danae had posted this: “aunke todo sto ha sido muy dificil no dejo de recordar ke smp l pasabamos super by T AMO
♥
y smp stas n mi mnt y n mi corazon u eres l amor de mi vida mami!” Translated, minus shorthand: “though everything has been very difficult I don’t stop remembering that we always had a super time bye I LOVE YOU
♥
and you’re always in my thoughts and heart you’re the love of my life mami!”

Danae had given Pablo a vague address, Calle Plomeros, near the Circunvalación, a diagonal avenue cutting through an edge of Tepito. We decided to walk there. Danae still wasn’t answering her phone, but Pablo would keep phoning, and maybe a neighbor would be able to tell us where she lived. At the edge of the market, far down Avenida del Trabajo, we asked a woman working at a
tianguis
for directions. She gave them to us, but then said, “Take a taxi, don’t go that way,
está canijo
.”
Canijo
is another of those Mexican words with several meanings but was originally a term for a bad person. She looked anxious. “Or walk around the long way,” she said. We walked there because the Santa Muerte shrine was nearby and Pablo wanted to talk to Doña Queta again. Earlier, Pablo had remarked, “The more time you spend in Tepito, the more dangerous you realize it is.”

We crossed the avenue, passing by a small plaza with a bare concrete crucifix that seemed to serve as a local garbage dump, and a hangout for people who sniff paint thinner. A man in blackened, filthy clothes sat at the base of the crucifix, holding a paint thinner–soaked rag to his nose. A few other younger addicts, expressions glazed and stuporous, milled about. It was quiet at the Santa Muerte shrine, but Doña Queta came out to speak with us. Pablo again asked her if she knew anything, had heard anything, about the Heavens case, and asked what people in the neighborhood were saying about it. Just as before, her expression turned cold. She said she knew nothing. “I don’t talk about things I don’t know about,” she repeated a few times. Her fierce eyes bored into mine. “People shouldn’t talk about things they don’t know about,” she said. She held my gaze in a way clearly meant to challenge me, and I returned it. For some reason, I didn’t feel at all discomforted.

“I don’t talk about things I don’t know about,” I said, though of course I sometimes do.

“Good,” she said, and her expression relaxed a little.

Pablo had told her where we were going and why. Doña Queta also warned us, “Be careful walking around there.”

We continued down Calle Alfarería, past Panaderos (Bakers). There, its two stories rising above other buildings midway down the block, we saw Extreme Body, the gym where four Tepiteños had been assassinated nearly a month before, and we went past Peluqueros (Barbers), Pintores (Painters), to Plomeros (Plumbers). The streets had a Sunday quiet. Few people were out on the sidewalks. Pablo was supposed to phone Danae when he reached Plomeros and the Circunvalación, but again, she didn’t answer. If she lived on this corner, said Pablo, her neighbors must know her. We spoke with a couple in a small
tienda
, asking if they knew Danae Téllez, the daughter of Gabriela Téllez, one of the Tepiteños who’d been taken from outside that
after.
No, they answered, they didn’t know her. We walked up and down the block, and when we passed the
tienda
again, the man came out to tell us that he thought he knew of a Gabriela who lived one street over, on Carpintería. When we were on that street Pablo stopped at the wide-open entrance of what seemed to be a mechanics garage of some sort, and inquired again about Gabriela and Danae. There were about eight men seated inside, in a loose circle of chairs amid machinery and benches, many of the men grimy with black grease, most in T-shirts, with
cuayamas
—liter bottles of beer—on the floor between their feet. But the tall, muscular man who came out to speak with us didn’t look like a mechanic. He was wearing what seemed to be a blue ski sweater, and he was distinctly Aryan looking, blond, with a flushed face, and vividly bloodshot blue eyes. His fleshy pink lips were wrenched into an amused leer that didn’t seem at all relevant to the matter of whether or not he knew if Gabriela and Danae Téllez lived around there. He grabbed Pablo by his skinny arm with his two big hands and tried to kiss him on the mouth. Pablo jerked his head away and struggled to pull free and the man pulled back harder, trying to kiss him again and telling him to come inside, cajoling like an insistent lover for him to do that, promising a good time. The other men, like orcs sitting in a dark cave, watched. I didn’t want to do anything to provoke them. I was frightened that if I were to go to Pablo’s aid—and do what? punch the blond giant?—the orcs would rise and charge outside and then it would be extremely violent, we wouldn’t stand a chance. So I stood frozen, nearly at Pablo’s side but helpless. While the man pulled on him, Pablo shouted that he was a reporter for
El País
. But it was over quickly. Pablo wrenched free, or else the man finally just let go, and we hurried away, around the corner, with nobody chasing after us. A group of homosexual Tepito mechanics sitting around getting drunk on a Sunday afternoon, was that what they were? We agreed that it was hard to imagine a face more depraved-looking than that blond giant’s.

We gave up on Danae. Pablo had another idea. Jacqueline, the sister of Jennifer Robles, another of the missing, was a close friend of Gabriela Téllez. Jacqueline often went out with her sister and Gabriela and Danae, but, like Danae, she also hadn’t partied on into the morning hours on the Saturday night that ended with the Sunday
levantón
. Pablo had already interviewed Jacqueline about her sister for his piece, and thought that she would be able to talk about Gabriela. Pablo had described Jacqueline to me before, giving the impression of a tough, funny girl who said what she thought, and I could tell he liked her a lot. After he’d phoned her, we caught a taxi. By then evening had fallen and it was dark. Jacqueline lived just outside Tepito, in a small
vecindad
in Colonia Morelos, in a neighborhood considered distinctly a notch below Tepito in the city’s social gradations. When she came down to let us inside, she wiggled a finger through the hole in the black sheet metal sliding door where a lock should have been, and said, “This is our combination security lock.” Jacqueline is twenty-six, a striking woman with an ample figure and a sultry, self-possessed manner. Very rickety metal stairs led upstairs to the apartment, which was small and dark. It belonged to her grandmother—whom Jacqueline always referred to as her mother—and doubled as her workplace. The Robles sisters’ grandmother sews stuffed animals and figures that are sold in the Tepito market and by street vendors. Currently she was making felt dolls of Mike Wazowski, the one-eyed monster from the
Monster Inc.
movies. Green and white felt limbs, big-eyed heads, and some fully assembled Mike Wazowskis were spread over the workbench along one side of the room. Jacqueline sat down at a low plastic table. With the back of her T-shirt riding up, you could see some of the Santa Muerte tattooed over the small of her back. She was in a sullen mood, and gave not very descriptive answers to Pablo’s questions about Gabriela. “
Muy tranquila, muy noble
, always willing to help a friend . . .” Yes, affirmed Jacqueline, Gabriela always went to places like Heavens and Bar Cristal with her daughter. Mother and daughter both liked to dance to electronic music, house,
progre, minima
. When Pablo pressed her for an anecdote, some special memory of Gabriela that she could share, she shrugged and repeated her generic words of praise. In the photograph that would appear above Jennifer’s profile in Pablo’s
El País
piece, the two sisters stand close together inside a nightspot, in pretty club dresses, Jennifer’s arm draped around Jacqueline’s shoulders. They wear identical sunglasses with huge white frames and both have their hair bleached peroxide blond. But Jacqueline had dyed her hair dark, her natural color, within days of her sister’s disappearance. Later Pablo would speculate that Jacqueline was so reticent that evening because she was probably hungover from drinks or drugs. Maybe she was, but to me her mood, which filled the room, seemed familiar, a murky, exhausted, locked up inside grief and trauma mood. We must have seemed to her as if we were speaking from another planet, and I remembered Iris Murdoch’s famous remark, “The bereaved have no language with which to speak to the unbereaved.”

The families we’d spoken to earlier that day hadn’t wanted to talk about the Heavens case itself, the progress of the investigation, or what Chief Prosecutor Ríos had told them at their last meeting. Pablo told Jacqueline that he’d heard the chief prosecutor and his people had been pressuring the families not to talk to the press about the case, and he asked if that was true. She nodded affirmatively. But what did she think? Did she believe, I asked, that the
levantón
had in some way been directed against El Tanque?

“It’s been ten years. El Tanque isn’t anybody now,” she said. “They don’t have anything.” She was dismissive of the scenario of a turf war between two Tepito gangs as the motive for the
levantón
. “It’s not just any idiot who is going to do something like this,” she said. I asked her who, then, she thought was behind it.

Jacqueline, staring down at the tabletop, said sullenly, “The government.”

“The city government?”

“Peña Nieto,” she said. “They want to control the
plazas
, like they do in México State.”

Mexican drug cartels are in the DF and have been for years. In
SinEmbargo.com
in June, Humberto Padgett wrote that a U.S. Congress report, prepared by the Congressional Research Service in 2011, identified seven drug cartels operating in Mexico City: the Sinaloa Cartel, the Zetas, the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, the Juárez Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, El Cartel del Golfo, and the Tijuana Cartel. Any more recent report would have to add Los Templarios, among others. It must be noted, though, that that report was on greater Mexico City, all those parts of it outside the borders of the DF. In the DF, it’s an open secret that the Sinaloa Cartel has been the main supplier of the local
narcomenudeo
, along with the Beltrán Leyvas; the 2011 CRS report confirmed that. La Familia Michoacana, according to Humberto Padgett and also to what you just hear around, entrenched in Neza, abutting the DF, is said have penetrated the Tepito
narcomenudeo
market. Padgett also reported, in that piece, the arrest of a narco religious leader of a Santa Muerte cult, though he didn’t say where in Mexico City it had occurred. Capos and other major cartel figures have always kept homes in the DF. The cartels do big business in the city, laundering money through the banks, investing, and so on. Over the last ten years, I’ve only very occasionally gone to the
teibols
, the strip clubs, but I still have a few women friends who work in those places—one, for example, who has worked for twenty years to raise her son and put him through school and into a university—or who have until recently. One of them told me this summer, “As you know, Frank, all kinds of people come to a
teibol.
” When she’d worked in a
teibol
, she’d met men from the Sinaloa Cartel, and knew girls who’d gone out with them. “They like to live in the Condesa,” she said. These aren’t crack-addicted
sicarios
, assassins, that she was talking about, but criminals higher up in the food chain, who, if they live in the Condesa, look, at least, as if they fit right in. “Los Sinaloas,” she told me, were men who could talk about books, movies, politics; they’d been to college. She knew a girl who’d gone out with a Zeta too and that had ended as one would expect a romance with a Zeta to end, with a violent beating, and now nobody had heard from the girl in a long while. Another
teibolera
friend had recently told her that a customer, a man who seemed to know what he was talking about, had warned her to be careful because there was going to be an outbreak of violence in the city, probably with assassinations and gunfights occurring in nightspots, including
teibols
. This was not long before the killing of the drug dealer outside the nearby bar Black, followed two days later by the Heavens
levantón
. But those events did not seem a part of, or had not subsequently triggered, anything like an all-out narco cartel war. Humberto Padgett wrote, “However narco-executions have been going up in the Mexican capital. According to . . . the newspaper
Reforma
[March 12, 2013] during the first 100 days of president Enrique Peña Nieto’s government . . . the Distrito Federal was the scene of 73 executions between December 1, 2012, and March 11, 2013.”