The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (34 page)

Danae was full of a restless, ebullient energy. When a neighbor passed with her small daughter, she sprang off the curb to fuss over the child, squealing, “
Ay, mi vida!
”

While we sat talking, the four of us arrayed along the curb, teenage boys passed behind us on the sidewalk, staring. They came back several times, and seemed to want to make sure that we saw them looking at us.

We spoke about that last night she’d spent with her mother. At Bar Cristal, she said, the deejay was Chris Fortier, from the United States. But she’d had a headache, and that’s why, Danae said, they’d come home early, and why, after a friend phoned and told them to come, she hadn’t gone with her mother to After Heavens. Jerzy Ortíz, she said, never went to After Heavens. He always went to Bar Cristal. That night must have been the first time, she said, that he’d gone to Heavens. Danae and her mother went to the Zona Rosa after-hours club all the time. Admission was two hundred pesos, but she and her mother never had to pay. “We went Friday, Saturday, and Sundays,” she said, “and we wouldn’t come out sometimes until six the next evening.” Then they’d return later, after midnight. And what did she do there? “Dance dance dance,” she said, “and sleep and dance.” She took naps at a table. “No, we didn’t get bored. I’d sleep, and then I’d wake up, and then I’d dance some more.”

But Danae and her mother did more than just go out to bars and after-hours clubs. Her mother sold computer games at work, and had brought a Play Station home, and the family liked to gather around it, playing Super Mario Brothers.

“We haven’t accepted what’s happened,” Danae said. This was the closest she’d come to acknowledging the final consequences of what had happened, or might still happen, to her mother. I can only imagine the terror and sadness that she seemed to be trying to shield herself from with her bright manic talkativeness. “I’m always calling out for my mother,” she said. “I come home and shout out to her, or I ask where she is.”

An old woman with a cane and two little boys were walking down the opposite side of the street. These were Danae’s grandmother and her brothers. She got up and went to them. While they were speaking, she took off her sweatshirt and exchanged it for a red one with the taller of the boys. She bent over the smaller boy, kissing him, and then crossed the street back to us.

We spoke just a little while longer. Danae and her cousin were going to another meeting with the families at the Procuraduría, “the Bunker,” with Chief Prosecutor Ríos, who, according to later newspaper reports, would tell the families that evening, as if to convince them of his good faith, “I might lose my head over this case,” by which he meant his job.

On the way back to Colonia Roma, in a taxi, Pablo and I talked about Danae and about her mother, Gabriela, who, night after night, had taken her teenage daughter to After Heavens, where drugs were sold openly, and where people came armed. There Danae had met a man, fifteen years older, whom her mother hadn’t allowed her to go out with. We speculated about what that man must have been like, if it was over
him
that her mother had turned disciplinarian and protective. Well, nobody could stop Danae, assuming she might still want to, from going out with him now.

Today is August 2, and the Heavens case has disappeared from the Mexico City media as a news story. The press, for the most part, seems to accept the Mancera government’s explanation that the
levantón
was an isolated incident in the context of a turf war between two Tepito drug-dealing gangs. Some newspapers repeatedly describe La Unión as El Tanque’s gang—a description that prosecutors and police never use. But people in the city, insofar as they still pay attention to the case, seem to accept that too.

“The only divinity around here is corruption,” says Pablo, disgustedly. He is referring not just to the Mancera government’s and the police’s handling of the case. It’s long been known in journalistic circles that much of the establishment media, even in Mexico City, have yielded to pressure from the Peña Nieto government to stop running stories about narco violence in the country. Some of Mexico’s most renowned print journalists have personally told me about editors turning down stories that they would once have been eager to run and ruefully citing pressures from above. Something similar may be occurring with the Heavens case. The pressure may be coming from the Mancera government, but also from other powers and interests that want to protect the DF’s reputation as a city shielded from violent organized crime by its competent government and ever-improving police. After all, a lot of wealth, a lot of investor and consumer confidence, depends on the perception that the city is a secure place. Pablo is going home to Spain for a few weeks, but when he comes back, he’s determined to take the Heavens case up again and to interview Toñín. If Pablo can persuade Toñín to tell his story in
El País
, it could put a crack in the wall of complacent silence that now seems to surround the case. He and Toñín have been in regular contact by phone, and Pablo is trying to convince Toñín that an interview in an international newspaper like
El País
, rather than in a Mexico City newspaper, would raise his profile and provide him with protection.

Mancera, Pablo says, is probably being perceived as having done a good job handling the Heavens case. And looking at it in a certain light, maybe he has. For instance, the mayor made no aggressive move that could have provoked a war among police contending for control of the
narcomenudeo
. And if Mexico City works in ways “that nobody wants to see broken,” Mancera seems to have retained the crucial support of the finance and business sectors. Yet if the mayor appears to have defused the crisis, it is likely that he and his prosecutors and police have done so by covering up, willfully ignoring, and maybe even tampering with evidence in the case, and this seems like a ticking time bomb. He has handed his foes, or his challengers, weapons that can be deployed against him. Those behind the Heavens crime—whoever they are—may feel now that they’ve achieved what they wanted, and that they now have an even stronger hand.

Today, August 2, is also the first anniversary of my “party bus” experience—being kicked nearly unconscious by
juniors
celebrating the birthday of a friend whose father was a pharmacy king and a pal of Peña Nieto’s. That incident is now famous among my friends as the night that I completed last summer’s journey to rock bottom. As if to help me observe the date, all week
AnimalPolitico.com
has been promoting an online discussion of the question:
¿Podrán las redes sociales poner límites a la influencia y el poder de los ‘juniors’ mexicanos?
“Can social networks impose limits on the influence and power of the Mexican
juniors
?”—
juniors
being what rich-kid daddies’ boys are called. #Juniorpartybusmob: I wonder, What if Reyna or anybody else had managed to film that incident with a smartphone? How would it have gone over on the social networks? Just the video itself: a dozen or so young
juniors
standing over a man in his fifties laid out on the pavement, kicking him in the head. (Yes, I should never have been there in the first place, but that was
last
summer
.
It could never have happened
this
summer.) When those hearty lads climbed back onto the music-spouting party bus, did they share a round of cheers and toasts, as in some corny beer commercial?

Whenever I go to the movies in Mexico and watch the commercials interspersed with trailers, all I see now are party-busers: adolescents and young men and women who look just like the people on that bus. Seeing them is like enduring a nightmare flashback. In Mexican-made commercial after commercial, for Telcel, for Pepsi, and so on,
juniors
and young
ladies
are the only image of “Mexicaness” ever shown, at least to movie viewers in this country. There is not a single even light brown or
mestizo
face in any one of those commercials, not even in the particular commercial that shows about a hundred scantily clad cheerfully romping Mexican party-busers at a swimming pool party—not
one
among a hundred. I sit there muttering, snorting, and cursing and Jovi, next to me, hushes me. But sometimes I hear people in a nearby row reacting the way I do. When a Gatorade commercial, obviously made in the United States, filled with black and brown as well as white athletes, comes onto the screen, I feel a moment of ridiculous self-righteous pride. All of this makes me recall that day a month ago when Jovi woke with a painful sore throat, and we went to a nearby private hospital with an inpatient clinic. I sat in the waiting room watching the television affixed high on the wall. It was a Televisa daytime talk show, with eight hosts—four men and four women—who stood in a row talking at each other all at once, keeping up a steady stream of frivolous, gossipy, arch banter; waving and flapping their hands; jumping around. The men, especially, instantly reminded me of the younger
juniors
and
mi reyes
—“my kings,” as these types are also called in Mexico—on the party bus. Televisa must assume, or know, that these only slightly older party-busers, acting out the high-spirited good life, appeal to their daytime viewers all across the republic. But I don’t know any Mexicans who are anything like those people on TV; the closest I’ve ever actually come to any social interaction with them was on the party bus.

The talk show cut away to a special segment: one of the young
ladies
was standing in an empty field. This turned out to be the place, in Monterrey, in December of 2012, where the pop singer Jenni Rivera, “La Diva de la Banda,” died along with four others when the private Lear Jet they were traveling in crashed. The man who owned the jet had been under investigation by the DEA for presumed ties to El Chapo Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel. In February 2013, a protected witness testified that Rivera used to perform at private narco parties thrown by Edgar Valdez Villareal, “La Barbie,” a notorious
sicario
and
capo of the Beltrán Leyva cartel until his arrest in 2010. The witness’s testimony confirmed persistent rumors that Rivera, like other Mexican artists, used to give private performances for narcos. The witness described one occasion when Rivera had consumed so much cocaine and so many pills that she could barely perform, and La Barbie came onstage to mock and humiliate her, and even kicked her. The television showed wooden crosses erected in the dirt where Rivera and the others had died, and the flowers and tinsel baubles her fans had left there. Then there were images of yellow butterflies, and a close-up of water dribbling from a patch of parched earth and rocks. A barely audible sappy song, probably one of Rivera’s, was playing. According to the television talk show
lady,
miracles had been occurring at the spot where Rivera lost her life.
Lady
was pitching the idea that Jenni Rivera, in death, had become a saint or a benign magical spirit that attracted butterflies and made water spurt from the desert. So this was the drivel with which Televisa was sentimentalizing Jenni Rivera, the psychotic murderer La Barbie’s coke jester, for Mexican viewers. Well, if you can turn the enabler of Atenco’s murders and rapes into a Ken Doll president, why not turn Jenni Rivera into a saint? But how could
lady
be sure that it wasn’t one of the four others killed in that crash whose magical spirit was responsible for these “miracles”? I mean, why not even acknowledge that possibility? The show returned to the chorus line of Televisa actors and actresses playing at being
junior
and
lady
party-bus hosts.

Someone spoke to me, and I looked over. A tall Mexican man, sixtyish, balding and with a mustache, was looking at me with a polite restraint that failed to completely mask his disdain. “Do you mind if I change the channel?” he’d asked. “Yes, please, go ahead, I didn’t know you could!” I blurted. He switched to a
fútbol
game. Mexico was playing Spain in the world sub-twenty youth team championships. When I’d left our building, Ebrard’s
guarura
and Davíd had been watching the match in the lobby, and Mexico was ahead 1–0. It would be a desperately needed morale-boosting victory for Mexican
fútbol
if Mexico could hold on to win. While we watched in the hospital, Spain quickly tied the score, and then, in the last minutes of regulation, scored again and won, and Mexico’s astonishing
fútbol
summer of humiliating failure in international competitions, including World Cup qualifying matches, continued.

Last night, August 5, I met a friend for drinks in a small bar just off the Plaza Río de Janeiro that serves excellent cold draft beer, the best I’ve found in Mexico, and of course
mezcal,
and where you can sit outside. It’s been “my place” this summer, a calmer summer than the last one. My friend has been working in Condesa
antros
and bars for years. He grew up in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods—he is so worried about being identified that I’ve promised not to even name which one—and went to a university and makes a good living now. We’d arranged to meet because I wanted to ask him about the
narcomenudeo
in the nightspots of the Condesa. His personal stories about intimidation by drug gangs and police collusion confirmed what I’d already heard and read, and the specific details he shared with me, which I promised not to reveal, were bizarre and terrifying. Ten or more years ago, around the time the valet parking services were proliferating around the Condesa, he said, was when this problem began. It was one of the valet parking groups that “initiated the
plaza,
” selling drugs to young people going into the bars and clubs. Their ringleader, a Tepito youth, was arrested and sent to prison, where he met a
narco padrino,
or godfather, also from Tepito, known as “El Rafa.” After they both got out of prison, in 2009, they opened a
narco tiendita
in the Condesa, on Avenida Nuevo León, the main commercial avenue; it operated out of a van parked in front of the
antro
popularly known as El Mojito. “They sent
chicos
to sell drugs outside and inside the bars and clubs,” he said. A year ago, in 2012, El Rafa was arrested for an attempted kidnapping in the Zona Rosa, and was sent back to prison. But, as other
antro
owners and managers had described over the past months, the pressure from the gangs had since grown. Nightclub security guards have been beaten savagely; sometimes the guards, as soon as the gangs conveyed their threats or warnings, simply fled their posts. Obviously, many of the Condesa clubs and bars are extremely lucrative, but their owners and managers have lately been consumed by stress and fear, not only for their own lives, but because even a misunderstanding with the gangs could provoke, for example, on any night, a machine-gunning of clients and staff, such as occurs all over narco-controlled Mexico, but hasn’t occurred, yet, in the DF.