The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (42 page)

BOOK: The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle

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There was nothing particularly surprising in Jordan’s remarks, other than, perhaps, that he’d made them on television. After all, in Mexico there had been many news reports of Sinaloa Cartel intrusions, especially in Sinaloa state, into the 2012 and 2013 summer election campaigns. But spokesmen for the PRI and Peña Nieto’s government responded as if with shocked indignation over Jordan’s interview. The DEA and the U.S. embassy quickly released statements disassociating themselves from “the opinions” of the former DEA intelligence chief.

A U.S. news agency, AP, had been the first to announce the capture of El Chapo. Mexican government officials did not confirm it until hours later. Over the next week, the Mexican media was filled with analysis and speculation about the arrest; many conspiracy theories—many sounding not at all farfetched—were aired. There was a consensus that the U.S. government had instigated the arrest, and there were reports of U.S. drones having been used. “If one believes that both governments often knew where [El Chapo] was and that he was allowed to operate freely for many years, as I do,” wrote the Mexico City–based director of the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, “the question is why now? Why capture him at this particular time?” Another former DEA agent, Héctor Beréllez, told the EFE news agency that El Chapo’s capture was related to the recent freeing from prison of Rafael Caro Quintero, now ready to reassume his position as “capo of capos.” El Chapo, according to Beréllez, knew he’d lost his protection and that his arrest was imminent; that he may even have negotiated his arrest was an opinion shared by several other experts in the Mexican press, and was not discounted by Buscaglia, the security expert from Columbia University. The Sinaloa Cartel is widely perceived to have enjoyed its greatest protection and growth under Calderón’s PAN government; the Sinaloa Cartel’s greatest rival, the “unspeakable” Zetas, has been especially entrenched in PRI strongholds such as the states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and México; thus another expert saw behind the strategy to “strike and weaken the Sinaloa Cartel,” an effort to “fortify the group ‘of the last letter.’”

In a later interview with
SinEmbargo.com
, Buscaglia said that the Sinaloa Cartel might have come to perceive El Chapo as a liability—he was too notorious, he drew too much attention—and that that might be how he’d lost his protection. He explained that when one cartel or another is described as “protected,” this doesn’t mean that someone at the top, a previous president or the one Mexico has now, has given such an order, but that the protection is something the cartels create themselves, from the bottom up, from a base of regional police and politicians and so on and moving upward, nationally, internationally, weaving their net of corruption, secret deals, and protection. But then something can change, a decision is made, a drone flies through the weave just like that, and down goes the capo. The capo goes down, but usually not the cartel.

Of course El Chapo has been in prison in Mexico before, from 1993 to 2001—he famously bought his way out, escaping in a laundry cart—years during which his cartel’s profits and growth were hardly impeded. If Mexico decides not to extradite him to the United States—and for now, Mexico seems determined to keep him, just as El Chapo and his lawyers seem determined to stay—and he remains in prison there, he can probably maintain some degree of command over his cartel. During his previous prison stint, El Chapo had a lavish lifestyle. A young Televisa-contracted actress I spoke to at a dinner party two years ago told me about a Televisa
telenovela
star who earned six-figure sums—in U.S. dollars—for her prison assignations with El Chapo. Following his arrest, the capo spoke with his captors during the helicopter flight to the capital. El Chapo freely admitted to responsibility for two or three thousand deaths, though the number of those murdered by the Sinaloa Cartel—including many innocents, and maybe even including the Heavens thirteen—during his years of command is far higher. El Chapo boasted to his captors that he was just a narco trafficker, not a kidnapper, extortionist, or human trafficker like his rivals in “the group of the last letter” indeed are. El Chapo is a family man. When asked why, having barely evaded capture in Culiacán barely a week before—escaping through a tunnel network leading from the bathroom of one of his mansions—he hadn’t returned to the safety of the mountains, and had gone to Mazatlán instead, he said it was because he “hadn’t seen his girls,” and wanted to—his twenty-two-year-old wife and their two small daughters, the youngest of his sixteen children, who were present at his capture. It was also reported in the Mexican press after his capture that, according to police authorities, a woman named La Michelle had the job of bringing the capo, every three days, a girl between thirteen and sixteen years of age, “who received a hundred thousand pesos for a day of sexual labor.”

The journalist Diego Osorno told me, “This is the situation now. Peña Nieto has decided that there’s going to be no other capo of capos but himself.”

Acknowledgments

The Interior Circuit
is a book inspired by the friendships that have marked and sustained my life in Mexico City, especially in the aftermath of July, 25, 2007. I’d like to thank more people than I’ll be able to here, but without these front line
cuates
, this book would not have come to be: Juan Carlos “Juanca” López, Yoshua Okón, Juan Carlos “Fresa Salvaje” Reyna, Martin Solares, and David Lida; Fabiola Rebora; Naty Pérez, Sam Steinberg, and my goddaughter, Aura Steinberg-Pérez; Pia Elizondo, Gonzalo García Barcha, and Jaime Navarro; Jon Lee “Saqui” Anderson. I’ve learned from the work of so many journalists in Mexico, many of whom are also good friends: Alejandro Almazán, John Gibler, Nayeli Gómez, Sergio González Rodríguez, Manuel “Meño” Larios, Mónica Maristain, Oscar Martínez, Diego Enrique Osorno, Guillermo Osorno, Alejandro Páez Varela, Marcela Turati, Neldy San Martín and Magalí Tercero. I’m especially grateful to my guide to Tepito,
el joven
Pablo de Llano.

Abrazos grandes
also to: Alejandra Frausto, Yuri Herrera, Tanya Huntington, Brenda Lozano, Valeria Luiseli, Luisa Matarrodona, Mauricio Montiel, Ruth Mungia, Luis “Brazi” Muñoz Oliveira, Laura-Emilia Pacheco, los Rabasa, Quique Rangel, América Sanchez, Paola Tinoco, and Mariana Vargas. Nelly Glatt, you are in a category of your own. The Premio Aura Estrada, given every two years at the Oaxaca International Book Fair, has become an essential part of my life in Mexico, and I’m especially
grateful to my partners in running the prize: Guillermo Quijas y Vania Resendíz and the wonderful Almadía/FIL Oaxaca family; and collaborator, juror-for-life, and beloved friend, Gabriela Juaregui. My thanks also to all the writers who’ve served on our juries—they’ve now chosen three winners, Susana Iglesias, Majo Ramírez and Verónica Gerber—and also those who’ve so generously come to Mexico to present the Cátedra Aura Estrada: Vivian Abenshushan, Daniel Alarcón, Paul Auster, Luis Jorge Boone, Carmen Boullosa, Alvaro Enrigue, Margo Glantz, Siri Hustvedt, Mónica de la Torre, Junot Díaz, Richard Ford, Rivka Galchen, Alma Guillermoprieto, Nicole Krauss, Guadalupe Nettel, Cristina Rivera Garza, Colm Toíbín and Alejandro Zambra; and also to those who’ve helped sustain the prize in other ways: Sharon Dynak, DW Gibson, Sandra Lorenzano, Ernesto Zeivy, Carolina Ferreras and the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, Gabo and Mercedes, and my dear friend Beatrice Monti von Rezzori.

Outside of Mexico, and especially in the darkest times, I could always count on Barbara “Panda” Epler, Bex Brian and Vanessa Manko; also Andrew Kaufman, Esther Allen, Calvin Baker, Rachel Cobb, and, of course, for decades, Chuck, John and Mary; also, Annie Proulx. Kim R., a profound thank you. Fabulous
Sarah Wang was the first to give an encouraging read to parts of this book. Trinity College helps to keep me afloat, and so does the espirit de corps of my colleagues in the English department, including my friend, hall of fame prof and scholar, Paul Lauter, retiring this year. Warm gratitude too, for their crucial critical reads, support and efforts, to my agent Binky Urban, and to my other family at Grove Atlantic, including my good friend Morgan Entrekin; my editors Elisabeth Schmitz and Katie Raissian; Amy Hundley, Deb Seager, and Charles Woods. Thanks also to Rachel Kushner.

Jhoana Montes Hernández,
mi
Jovi, you are the resurrection and the light.

Francisco Goldman has published four novels and one book of nonfiction. His most recent novel is
Say Her Name
, which won the 2011 Prix Femina Étranger.
The Long Night of White Chickens
was awarded the American Academy’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His novels have been finalists for several prizes, including the Pen/Faulkner and the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize.
The Ordinary Seaman
was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin literary award.
The Divine Husband
was a finalist for
The Believer
Book Award.
The Art of Political Murder
won the Index on Censorship T. R. Fyvel Book Award and the WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award. His books have been published in many languages. He is currently back to work on the novel that writing
The Interior Circuit
interrupted.

Francisco Goldman has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the NY Public Library, and a Berlin Fellow at the American Academy. He has written for
The New Yorker
, the
New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Believer,
and many other publications. He directs the Aura Estrada Prize (
www.auraestradaprize.org
.) Every year Goldman teaches one semester at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and then hightails it back to Mexico City.