The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (40 page)

Yet Ruth Marines was still among the relatives who refused to accept the remains that the authorities said they had identified as those of their murdered young people. Those remains had by now been moved from a PGR forensic morgue to the DF justice system’s Institute for Forensic Sciences. There a new round of DNA testing, city authorities said, had reconfirmed the identities of the bodies, and the families were summoned to receive them. But only four families had complied, including the family of the thirteenth victim, Alan Francisco Daniel Menchaca Bazán, “Alancito.” Leticia Moreno, who collected the bodies of her two sons, Josué and Arón, said, “They can say whatever thing, whatever they want; my boys were all about study and work.” Nine families refused. “We have no confidence in them,” said Leticia Ponce, Jerzy’s mother, “because most of the skulls they’ve shown us [only in photographs] don’t even have hair and the remains are just bones, without flesh, which doesn’t correspond to the degree of decomposition that should exist.” As much as it was an act of denial or desperate hope against hope—after all, Ruth Marines knew that her son had been identified by the metal plates in his arm and by his prosthetic teeth—the refusal to collect the bodies was a defiant and bitter rebuke of both the city and the federal authorities’ dishonest and cynical handling of the case. It was a public statement of these relatives’ belief in the victims’ innocence, and a rejection of the unacceptable scenario that this mass kidnapping and murder, carried out with nearly military organization and precision, was only a result of a conflict between two local gangs. The nine families’ refusal to collect the bodies, to hold funerals for and bury their loved ones, left a void in the Heavens case, an emptiness that was an absence of answers and of truth, the emptiness engendered by the impunity that is destroying Mexico.

From New York, I tried to follow the case throughout the fall. The news was being dominated by the ongoing teachers’ union strike, which by October was becoming violent, with clashes between protesting teachers, anarchist groups, and the police, and with mass arrests. There were also recurring stories in the press about the Mexican economy’s stagnation in the months since Peña Nieto and the PRI had taken power, and consternation over rising violence and crime all over the country. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography reported that Mexicans’ sense of insecurity, or feeling unsafe, had risen 77.2 percent in the months of Peña Nieto’s presidency. The institute also reported a steep increase in kidnappings throughout much of the country, including the DF, and stated that “police forces were intimately tied to the rise in extortions and kidnappings in 2013.” Clearly the restoration of the PRI was leading to a full restoration of the top-to-bottom culture of institutionalized organized crime that this political party has long been associated with.

In October Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera once again alarmed and baffled the city’s residents by canceling the Mexico City book fair, held over a week and two weekends in the Zócalo every October. It was widely reported that he had done so at the behest of President Peña Nieto, who was in any case no fan of book fairs and in this case wanted to deny Andrés Manuel López Obrador the chance to hold an anti-privatization rally in the Zócalo on one of those weekends. The fair, always well attended, is more than just an occasion for bookselling and author presentations; it also turns its center stages over to activists. For example, preceding a minor event that I took part in last year, there was a main event in which a caravan of mothers and other family members from Central America who’d traveled to Mexico to publicize the plight of their missing migrant relatives were joined onstage by a Mexican families of the disappeared group, and by the migrants’ most outspoken and courageous defender, Father Alejando Solalinde—a stirring event that received wide press coverage. The DF’s writers and intellectuals, especially those who support AMLO and the left, such as Elena Poniatowska, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Fabrizio Mejía Madrid, are influential figures in the city, and, as Mancera should have foreseen, they vowed to go ahead with the book fair anyway. What was Mancera going to do—unleash riot police on writers and readers? Mancera backed down, though only partially, permitting the fair to be held on only one weekend, during which AMLO did hold his rally. In late November the PRD finally pulled out of the “Pact for Mexico” over the proposed privatization of Pemex. Soon afterward, in December—with AMLO suddenly sidelined from the fray by a heart attack—PRI legislators, joined by those of the PAN and smaller right-wing parties, without debate, express-approved the Pemex constitutional reforms.

Polls now showed that the proportion of city residents holding a negative opinion of Mayor Mancera’s leadership was approaching 60 percent. Increasingly, commentators in the press were sounding the alarm, sometimes with overt derision, about the direction in which the mayor was taking the city. A column in
Más por Más
by Alejandro Almazán began, “Yesterday, on a plane flying to Guadalajara, I ran into an old friend who told me that Mancera had tricked the Chilangos. ‘He told you he was on the left, but it looks like you voted for the PRI,’ and he grinned through his teeth and I had no arguments to contradict him with.” A few paragraphs down Almazán wrote, “Mancera has no idea how to act. If he did, during the days when the teachers were occupying the Zócalo, he would have been able to enter through the front doors of city hall, instead of going through the Palacio de Hierro [the department store next door]. He took the employee elevator all the way up, and went across the roof. They say the flies didn’t know what color to turn, they were so embarrassed for him.” In the column Almazán also mocked Mancera’s subservience to Peña Nieto on the matter of the use of the Zócalo.

AnimalPolitico.com
published a widely remarked open letter to Mayor Mancera, in which its young columnist, Antonio Martínez, decried a city government “in free fall,” one in which the current mayor has abandoned the style of government that characterized his PRD predecessors. “My preoccupation, believe me, isn’t for you personally,” wrote Martínez, “but that in truth I believe that the Distrito Federal should survive as a system whose independence stretches the boundaries of public debate. Mexico City, under your leadership, shouldn’t succumb to the terrible agenda of the government of the Republic that seems intent on eliminating opposition, undermining dissent, and stigmatizing minorities. If the beacon goes out—if you put it out—then the return of the ‘perfect dictatorship’ seems inevitable.”

In December, Juan Villoro wrote, “In keeping with the Christmas spirit, the popular imagination has found a new nickname for Miguel Ángel Mancera that rhymes with his surname. They call him La Esfera”—the Bulb—“because he’s just an ornament.” On New Year’s Eve, the city government sponsored a free concert on the Paseo de la Reforma, headlined by the cumbia superstars Los Ángeles Azules. When a government functionary, speaking from the stage, attempted to deliver a greeting from Mayor Mancera, the crowd of 50,000 responded with a storm of shrilly mocking whistles—
rechiflas
—and jeers.

Throughout the fall, though, arrests had continued to be made in the Heavens case; by the end of October, nineteen men were in detention. Most of these, as Pablo de Llano described them in
El País,
were “peons,” young men who said they’d been employed by La Unión in peripheral aspects of the abduction and murder, and who in all liklihood didn’t themselves know who they were ultimately working for. The arrests were quietly announced, little information was given, and the men disappeared into custody, some formally charged, others held for interrogation. The magazine
Proceso
reported that one arrested La Unión youth had told interrogators that he’d been summoned back to the remote ranch in Tlalmanalco hours after the abducted victims had been brought there, and had seen murdered bodies arrayed in a row, but one young man was still alive—he had no idea who this was; “the fattest one,” he told his interrogators—and this one was sobbing, and he was ordered to decapitate him, and he did.

Then, in late September, a Mexico City policeman was arrested. He was a Zona Rosa beat officer who took orders from and informed for a La Unión leader known as “El Javis,” and the public reason given for his having come under suspicion was that his lifestyle didn’t correspond to his salary. Over the next three weeks, three more policemen assigned to the Zona Rosa were arrested in the Heavens case, again quietly, with sparse additional information. But wasn’t this a breakthrough? Didn’t this begin to expose, as some of us had suspected nearly from the start and as our most trusted sources had told us, that police involvement in organized crime was a crucial element of the case? In an e-mail Pablo de Llano wrote that it wouldn’t be such a breakthrough “until a police commander is arrested.”

According to Chief Prosecutor Ríos, a twenty-four-year-old member of La Unión arrested in September had told his interrogators that he and other gang members had been sent to After Heavens because “some of the people” who killed Horacio Vite Ángel, the bar Black dealer, were there that night. The others abducted from the bar had been selected for death because they were partying with the targets, or else they were chosen at random. But Ríos didn’t identify which young people had been the primary targets, and offered no proof or corroborating evidence that there was any truth to the allegation. Nobody seemed to know yet, and the authorities seemed unable to explain, what La Unión and its supposed factions actually were, or why, as Ríos continued to emphatically insist, their existence and activities were not considered “organized crime.” And the authorities, both DF and federal, seemed no closer than they’d been five months before to being able to identify—perhaps because they didn’t want to identify—the crimes’ intellectual authors, the “Deep Ones” who were the actual powers behind it, or to explain their true motives.

According to an investigative report by Raúl Mongé published by
Proceso
on October 3, the authorities
do
know, but “have been determined to deny it from the beginning.” According to Mongé, who seemed to have gathered his information from credible, if anonymous, sources among both DF and federal investigators and police, the “Deep Ones” are the Sinaloa Cartel. The cartel’s main operative in the DF, according to Mongé, is Ricardo López Castillo, El Moco (the Snot), the former federal police agent in the PGR and Santa Muerte devotee who in 2010 founded La Unión in Tepito, the barrio of his birth. This was after the 2009 slaying by navy commandos of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, in Cuernavaca—the Beltrán Leyva Cartel had controlled the Tepito and DF drug market. Since then the Sinaloa Cartel, operating through El Moco and La Unión, had moved to seize that market. Arming some three hundred drug addicts, vagabonds, and teenage delinquents, El Moco took over all the Tepito crime rackets, not only drugs but also contraband, extortion, and fencing stolen goods. As Tepito residents had told Radio Nederland, La Unión controlled the barrio through terror, “killing people just for fun.” “Backed by the Sinaloa Cartel and the connections he’d made during his time in the PGR, López Castillo [El Moco] had little difficulty penetrating the capital’s police corps,” wrote Mongé. El Javis—previously named in connection with the arrest of Zona Rosa police in the Heavens case—was identified as an important subordinate of El Moco. In 2001, El Javis had spent some time in prison after an arrest for drug dealing in the Condesa. Another subordinate, known as “El Antoine,” controlled the dealer trade in the bars, discothèques, and nightclubs of the Zona Rosa–Roma–Condesa
plaza
. The article described an imprisoned “godfather” and
santero
who initiated teenage prisoners into Santería and sent them to El Antione to become drug dealers when they got out. The article in
Proceso
said that Horacio Vite Ángel had been an especially valued dealer for the Sinaloa-Tepito organization, and affirmed that the Heavens
levantón
was in retaliation for his murder, but the article didn’t say whom the retaliation was directed against, nor did it implicate any of the murdered Tepito young people in Vite Ángel’s slaying. It reported that the chief prosecutor’s office, the PGJDF, knew who executed the drug dealer outside Black: “a known Tepito extortionist whose nickname is ‘El Grande.’” If true, that report contradicted Chief Prosecutor Ríos’s recent vague statements suggesting that “some of the people” who had killed Vite Ángel had been among those abducted from Heavens that night.

According to statements given by those so far arrested in the case, El Javis, Mongé wrote, appears to have organized the
levantón.
Wherever El Javis went, he was always accompanied by four veteran
matones
, killers, from Durango, in the heart of the Sinaloa Cartel’s fiefdom. The four gunmen, said to be in their forties, were among the twenty-five men who arrived with the abducted Tepiteños in three vans at the
rancho,
La Negra, which is owned by a man from Durango. According to Mongé only the males were immediately killed, decapitated, and dismembered. The five women—Guadalupe Karen Morales Vargas, Gabriela Téllez Zamudio, Monserrat Loza Fernández, Jennifer Robles González, and Gabriela Ruiz Martínez—were promised that nothing was going to happen to them, were placed inside a truck trailer, and were given beer and drugs. After the males had been killed, El Javis, El Antoine, and the others, “as if nothing had happened,” spent a couple of hours drinking, dancing, and “amusing themselves with the women,” and then the women were slaughtered too.