Down and Delirious in Mexico City (17 page)

I take the coin out with me for two days, thinking that maybe I'll be able to return that sneaky cabbie's favor to all of Mexico City. I step onto the action of the sidewalks with the fake ten-peso coin in my pocket. A potential victim: the hunched-over, old newsstand man on the corner of Bolivar and Uruguay Streets. In my head I'm rubbing my palms together. I'm also thinking, if I get caught, the situation could get extremely embarrassing, fast. No one likes being swindled. Making that sentiment known as loudly as possible when you realize it is happening is a customary response here.

I can't do it. I give the old guy a real ten-peso piece for my paper, then show him my bogus ten, casually. The old man explains amiably that it is a worthless coin, and to watch out. I tell him what happened. He laughs and suggests I take the coin to an antique-currency shop down the block, which I go ahead and do, with no luck. When I leave the old man at his newsstand, I could tell that although he is being friendly as we chat, he must be relieved—and also probably a little perplexed—that I didn't try tricking him out of ten pesos.

Millions in Mexico City scrape by on just a few dollars a day. Living amid the city's culture of hustling, I see clearly why so many
capitalinos
cut their losses, take their chances, and embark on the treacherous journey to the United States, smuggling themselves across the border to reach the mythical pastures of dollars.
At least,
they must also think to themselves,
people follow the rules there
.

In Mexico City, it is wit versus wit. No other rules, when it comes down to it, really apply. Money is tight, work is scarce. Rent, water, what will I eat for dinner tonight? I begin to see why people would want to do whatever it takes to feed and clothe themselves, even if it means breaking the law. One night, walking on a street in the
Colonia Portales, I become startled by my own train of thought. I am desperately poor right now, surviving on coffee, orange juice, beer (“grain juice”), and tacos. Gigs for writers don't come easy. I am angry and depressed and feverish. I had moved to Mexico City on a whim and I knew it would be hard. What I fail to expect is that the delinquency mind-set would take over my brain. Who would stop me, I think, who would catch me, if I hop into that cab coming my way and start barking directions? Who would know or care if I held a knife to the driver's throat, demanded all his money, and threatened to kill him if he made any funny moves? How would I feel when I got home at night, finally able to eat properly?

How would I sleep?

At the height of the Silvia Vargas kidnapping saga,
delinquency
was on everyone's lips. “We need a strong fight against delinquency,” they'd call. “Just say no to delinquency.” The extremists proclaimed, “Death penalty to delinquents and kidnappers.” The trouble is the “delinquents” are rarely identified in specific terms. Who are these maddened, heartless criminals who are terrorizing the city? Your neighbors? Aren't many of the major crimes that grab the headlines—the Silvia Vargas and Fernando Martí kidnappings, for instance—committed by police or “delinquents” with ties to police? Politically conscious youth responded with their own answer. “To the administrators of this city,” read a poster that appeared overnight around the city. “I AM A DELINQUENT / I am 20 years old / I am young / I have no right to / An education, to work / To housing, to health care / And to many other things.” It is wheat-pasted in repetition along tagged-up walls, hung or taped upon the blue-tarp layers of stalls at El Chopo. Stamped with the logo of the Multiforo Alicia, the independent-rock venue in Roma, the poster glows with defiance.

I find young people know better. I hear it mostly in casual conversation.
At a cantina in Centro, young university students are sitting around having a few cheap beers, discussing the ins and outs of the government's connections to the major cartels. Which cartel runs which route. Which cartel runs which city. Which cartel is cutting deals with which major political party. The deals struck between capos, and between capos and politicians. They chat as though it goes without saying that the political system is wedded top to bottom to the narco industry. It sounds like baseball stats. When twenty-seven government officials in the state of Michoacán—including ten
mayors—are arrested in May 2009 for alleged ties to La Familia Michoacana, the cartel that controls much of the state, no one bats an eye. Pedestrians stop and browse the headlines at the newsstands, maybe someone shakes his head, and we carry on. Occasionally investigative reports in the newsweekly
Proceso
detail one such relationship between this kingpin and that state governor, but otherwise, the generally assumed truth operates entirely outside the political and media discourse. (In Michoacán, a year later, most of those allegedly narco-related mayors and officials were free. The top-notch federal prosecutors just couldn't come up with many charges.)

In March 2007, pharmaceutical industrialist Zhenli Ye Gon, a naturalized Mexican of Chinese origin, was accused of hiding hundreds of millions of narco-dollars in his Mexico City mansion. Facing arrest and trial, Zhenli responded to the allegations in a public letter, which the newspapers reprinted. He detailed a long episode of torment at the hands of PAN operatives and police who threatened him and his family, frequently kidnapped him for short periods, and left cryptic letters with instructions coded in star symbols. “Those funds are and were secret funds belonging to the political party, used for the presidential campaign, and to buy arms and finance terrorist activities,” Zhenli wrote. “I am an
innocent victim and I was tricked into these participations in the corrupt politics of Mexico.”

Calderón dismissed Zhenli's allegations, calling them a
“cuento chino”
—or a Chinese tall tale. It is a cynical and blithely racist remark, and the press just laughs along.

Everyone is touched by the narco trade in one way or another, and countless numbers are direct players. The commodities at stake are not just drugs. Narco cartels are believed to have their fingers in
every aspect
of Mexico's vast underground economy. The smuggling of desperate undocumented immigrants across the border in the northern deserts. The smuggling of weapons south into Mexico from the United States. Prostitution rings. Kidnap-for-ransom and extortion rings, the kind that so terrorize Mexico's high elites. All the way down to the organization and policing of innocent-looking street vendors. You never know who is the criminal, whether overtly or covertly. The white-collar-looking guy might be taking narco money, or making narco money, or washing it clean. The grandfatherly cabdriver might be in on an express kidnapping ring, which is likely a branch of a cartel anyway.

The combination of demand for drugs in the United States and the overarching reach and penetration of the cartels into Mexican society mean that on current terms the government cannot possibly win its war against them. Before, the governments merely made pacts with the cartels, turning a blind eye to the flow of drugs leaving Mexico for the United States in exchange for order and tranquillity, and maybe a kickback or two. This president's approach—attack, attack, attack—underestimated the traffickers' willingness and thirst to draw blood in the effort to protect their enterprises. Their desire to succeed easily dwarfs the feeble civic motivation of the average cop or soldier who is
supposed to be fighting them. Resistance to their way of doing business, the cartels seem to say, will not be tolerated—from anyone. So they kill and kill and kill. And the citizens are stuck in the middle, absorbing daily servings of funerals, images of human grief and agony, stories about unclaimed bodies dumped into communal graves, videos of torture and beheadings. The strategy is failing. Headlines roll around in my brain: the scandalous Martí and Vargas kidnappings, the narco-terror grenade attack in the provincial capital of Morelia on Independence Day 2008, and the violent death of Juan Camilo Mouriño, Calderón's right-hand man and heir-in-waiting, on November 4, 2008, a night when almost every country in the world except Mexico is united in momentary jubilation with news of Barack Obama's election as president of the United States. A Learjet carrying Mouriño slammed into rush-hour traffic on the swanky west side of town as it approached Mexico City from the state of San Luis Potosí. Mouriño, the interior secretary, along with Mexico's former antidrug czar, a widely respected man named José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, and seven others were killed in the plane. Eight more died on the ground.

The government rushed to declare the incident an “accident,” but suspicion remained that one of the cartels—or even more sinister internal forces in the shadowy corners of conservative power—might have brought the plane down. Attempts had been made on Vasconcelos's life already, and eliminating the president's top cabinet member struck a direct blow to the government. Days later the book
Accomplices of the President
hit stores. In it, journalist Anabel Hernández lays out her evidence of endemic corruption up and down Calderón's cabinet, including allegations against the now deceased Mouriño and Genaro García Luna, the public-safety secretary.
I don't know anyone who went out and bought it; the details were almost beside the point. For most Mexicans, insinuations that their top political leaders are tied to criminals—the national enemy—were nothing new. Same story, new faces.

Sandra Ávila Beltrán, a powerful female figure in a narco underworld dominated by men, fell to the authorities in September 2007. She is known as the Queen of the Pacific, a strong and elegant woman who built a mini-empire of power and money. Now she sits in prison. At one point in early 2009, as panic crested in the United States over the perception that Mexican narco violence was “spilling over” the country's southern border, the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper walked into visiting hours at the prison that houses the Queen of the Pacific and somehow got a sit-down interview with the notorious prisoner. Ávila Beltrán repeatedly pressed upon Cooper the idea that the Mexican government is not part of the solution but part of the problem behind the current wave of bloodshed.

“Can they win?” Cooper asked her.

“I don't think so,” the Queen responded. “You'd have to wipe out the government to wipe out drug trafficking.”

The soft social chaos in Mexico makes me edgy. People are nice to each other, of course, in far more elaborate rituals than anything I've ever seen in the States. The
Thank you
and
You're welcome
and
Until next time
and the
Until next time
in reply happen everywhere all at once, until I think that maybe the formalities will never end. But underneath all the florid etiquette, a cosmic violence is always ready to erupt.

“It reflects a violence that is inherent to our society and the form in which we relate to each other,” the artist Yoshua Okon tells
me one day, as we are walking in Condesa. “There is conflict and resentment and . . . there it is, no?”

I want to pick Okon's brain on this topic because he once made one of the most graphically violent art piece on Mexico that I've seen, a narrative video titled
Rinoplastia.
In it, a wealthy
junior
from the city's rolling hillside mansions takes a joyride around town with a friend, just as the sons of the power elites do when they are, as Yoshua says, “existentially bored.” That is often. Along the way, the
juniors
terrorize day laborers and maids walking on sidewalks, hurling racial and sexual slurs at them. By the end of the night, they are denied entry to a swanky nightclub, and the main character finds violent release from his social anxieties by attempting to rape his maid. The video, Okon tells me, was inspired by a series of scandalous accounts in Mexico in the 1980s and '90s of spoiled
fresa
kids abusing their inherited power and their help around the house, including reported instances of rape.

One police chief from the period was notorious for ordering the Periférico highway closed so that his son could have his motorcycle races in peace. “Mexico is a society where a lot is denied in the official discourse,” Yoshua tells me. “It's a country where a great majority of the population is either colonizer or colonized.” The
Rinoplastia
piece, produced in 2000, became a moderate hit during screenings at galleries and museums.

In Mexico the severe social stratification, the severely lacking pace of economic development, and the widely held impression that elected and law enforcement officials are as fundamentally corrupt as the average street hoodlum combine to create an atmosphere where there is no actual order, only a mimicking of order. No one is in control, not the military, not law enforcement, not the infrastructure of government, not the unions, not even the cartels. “For me the true crisis in Mexico, the real crisis, fundamentally, is
the lack of a rule of law,” Okon says. “The entire judicial system in Mexico is incredibly rotten.

“Now, no modern society is not violent. All modern societies are based on exploitation. But the fundamental difference between Mexico and other nation-states is that the legal system is incredibly corrupt.” Marches against “insecurity,” he adds, “are ridiculously foolish, incredibly superficial, and reactionary.”

The result is moderate anarchy. There are masks and rituals to suggest there is order, but these are inadequate in convincing the average person that he or she should trust the officials, trust the police, or trust the cartels. Intrinsically aware of this, the cartels, brotherhoods of businessmen, want only to sell a marketable product—narcotics. They wish to satisfy the insatiable demand in the United States for marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, and maybe drop a bit off along the way for Mexicans with disposable incomes. The capos wish to live “the American dream,” or the Mexican Dream of What the American Dream Looks Like: big families, big houses, big cars, and other essential luxuries such as private zoos with exotic animals.