The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, page 17
part #694 of Travel Series
I turned in my car at Alamo. David and I walked into the Zona Rosa for a beer, and the summer of 2012 was over, and so was my driving project.
7
Interior Circuit Redux
IN FEBRUARY 2013, Jovi suddenly left me. Throughout the fall of 2012 and into the winter of 2013, I’d flown regularly, sometimes on a weekly basis, from Mexico to New York—taking a train to Hartford to teach my class at Trinity College—and then back, sometimes leaving the DF on Tuesday and returning on Thursday, sometimes spending an impatient nine days in Brooklyn, waiting to get back to the DF. After one such week plus two days in New York, I flew back to the DF and discovered, most unexpectedly, that the relationship was over. I was devastated because I was in love with Jovi. But even so my reaction was out of proportion. The sudden loss of Aura had been irreversible and this one wasn’t that. True, it actually seemed possible that I might never see Jovi again, but she was still alive, and could still answer e-mails. But my nervous system and subconscious seemed not to recognize the difference, and five-year-old trauma symptoms came flooding back. My Mexico City friends recognized what was happening, and were, once again, by my side. But this also meant a return of desperate insomniac prowling nights and all manner of excess, the only way I knew how to outlast and exhaust and finally quiet, for some hours, enough to get some sleep, the bedlam inside me. I believed, probably mistakenly, that without those nights—I was my own boozy Smoky the Bear on midnight to dawn patrol—mind and spirit might have blazed even more toxically. I still had to manage my schedule of flying back up to New York to teach my classes too. One night I dismissed my seminar an hour early because I felt so bereft that I could hardly speak. On the long bus ride back to New York—the bus didn’t get to the Port Authority until nearly two in the morning—I felt the return of the bleak, hollowing despair that had so frightened me five years before.
But this time, I was determined not to go through all that again, not to be swallowed by that abyss. I needed to wrestle myself back onto the “good path” that I’d found myself on at the end of the summer, but without having to reenact that forced march to the bottom first. Instead I decided to retrace my steps through that summer by writing about it. I could use words as my compass to map the route I’d taken and give it a narrative order, a sequence of incident and meaning, and rescue it from being something other than just circumstantial and ephemeral. It was my own life, after all, and now I needed to draw some strength from it. The stories one tells about oneself aren’t necessarily true, of course, but I wanted this one to be as true as I could make it. This didn’t mean that it all had to be factually true, but I decided that this story needed to be factually true too, a dependable Guía Roji of the summer.
In that story a man in at least some ways wrecked by loss and long under the control of grief and its grinding solipsism is determined to find his way out. He finally arrives, if not exactly by his planned route, at a reawakening. He even falls in love again. One thing he discovers—during the writing of it, after having lived it—is that a place, Mexico City, has become an essential part of his own story. He understands the ways in which Mexico City has nourished and invigorated him, and has in certain ways brought him “back to life.” But, of course, the city doesn’t exist only for him; the city isn’t his stage. He understands that he owes the city his attention, and maybe even more than only that. He is curious about the city now in a way that he never was before, hungry for information about it, and to feel a part of it. He wants to celebrate but also defend the city—the same impulse he felt in Aspen when that physician shouted out, “What a bunch of bullshit”—but hopefully he can respond more articulately now, with more knowledge and less innocence.
It was March, a month after Jovi had left me, that I began writing this chronicle. We were exchanging messages again, and began to meet occasionally, at first always in public places, like a couple on the verge of a secret affair. By May Jovi and I were back together, and I was happy and proud that we were. Had I not started writing this chronicle, maybe we, or I, wouldn’t have been able to fix our relationship. I’d gotten hold of myself, pure and simple. I was back on that better route. A few words from a Nicanor Parra poem had served as a mantra: Corazón caliente, cabeza fría. “Hot heart, cool head.”
I finished writing my chronicle of the summer of 2012 in June. At last I could get back to my novel. But a lot had changed in Mexico City since the summer before. Now I knew I also had to write about the summer of 2013.
After Heavens:
Summer of 2013
Tepito is the synthesis of Mexico.
—Humberto Padgett7
7 “Ofrecen Rosario a la Muerte,” Reforma, November 2, 2003, quoted in Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico, p. 496.
IT WASN’T UNTIL THIS YEAR, 2013, that the #Ladies really took off in Mexico, capturing even international media attention. There were a few honored precursors, such as, in 2011, María Vanessa Polo, a former beauty queen who, after being pulled over with a friend for a traffic violation in her upscale neighborhood, erupted in imperious rage, berating two policemen as asalariados de mierda, “shitty salary men,” and pinche putos de mierda, “shitty fucking fags,” and flailing at them with her fists. All over Mexico, virtually overnight, she became known as #LadyPolanco.8 Andrea Benítez, this past April, was tagged #LadyPROFECO after she threw a fit because she didn’t like the table she was given at fashionable Maximo Bistrot in Colonia Roma, and then called in inspectors from PROFECO, the federal consumer protection agency run by her father, to shut the restaurant down. In May, there was Dalia Ortega, #LadyRoma, a wealthy drunk driver who, after running over a female pedestrian in Colonia Roma with her Porsche, indignantly warned police that if they arrested her she would use her family connections with the city government to have them fired. All of those incidents were captured by witnesses with smartphones, whose tweets and posted images and videos went viral, humiliating their subjects and even helping to exact justice—#LadyRoma was charged with homicide after the woman she’d hit died of brain injuries days later; #LadyPROFECO’s father, appointed by the new PRI president to his powerful post, was forced to resign; #LadyPolanco had to pay a fine in order to escape a fifteen-month prison sentence for assaulting authorities and for discrimination. Without those smartphone blitzes, probably none of those #Ladies would have faced any consequences for their actions. They weren’t the only #Ladies, though they were among the most notorious.
The New York Times published a story about #LadyPROFECO and the new phenomena of “broad and swift social media campaigns” through which Mexicans vent their indignation over such high-handed abuse. “Andrea Benítez simply did what many rich, connected Mexicans have always done: she used her influence to step on the lower born,” wrote Randall Archibald, the Times reporter. He quoted a patron of the restaurant where Benítez earned her hashtag: “‘It’s such blatant corruption that’s right in our faces,’ said Max St. Romain, 42, a filmmaker who saw the inspectors slap an enormous ‘suspension of activities’ sticker on Maximo Bistrot on Friday night. ‘It’s a connection to the corruption that ruled Mexico for decades—the fact that a child of someone in power can use it just on a whim, on a tantrum.’” Now the corruption that ruled Mexico for decades is back in power. At least those who may have felt newly uninhibited by the restoration of the PRI about flagrantly exhibiting their own moral corruption now have to worry that an offended and alarmed nation lies in wait, smartphones ready.
So that’s a bright spot, one of the few in Mexico these days. It’s not only PRI elites who have to watch out. The most recent incident was #LadySenado, Luz María Beristáin, a PRD senator who, when she turned up with a female friend at an airline counter in Cancún too late to board her flight to the DF, first tried to intimidate the young female employee who refused her a boarding pass. When that didn’t work, Beristáin grossly harangued her. In her parting shot, the senator sneered, “Where did you study?” and her friend chimed in, “Surely in Tepito, pinche esquincla, fucking brat.”
“The return of the PRI is the worst news that our generation has received,” former mayor Marcelo Ebrard told me. “It’s in the PRI’s genes to restore a semi-authoritarian regime. That’s the logic of the PRI.” When we spoke in the spring, the PRI not only had regained the presidency, but also held the governorships of twenty-six out of thirty-two states, as well as near majorities in both houses of the Mexican Congress. Ebrard said that since Peña Nieto took office, the PRI’s reforms have granted the president ever more control over the country’s politics, concentrating power in the “Eagle’s Seat” and federal government to create a new twenty-first-century PRI hegemony.
One early manifestation of the PRI’s restoration was in the situation faced by journalists, which was dire enough before Peña Nieto’s election. Article 19, a human rights group that monitors free expression issues, reported on June 30 that during Peña Nieto’s first six months in office acts of violence and intimidation against the press rose 46 percent in comparison with the same period in 2012. Eight of the nine Mexican states with the highest homicide rates during Peña Nieto’s first hundred days in office were governed by the PRI.9 During the first nine months of Peña Nieto’s presidency kidnappings rose 19 percent throughout Mexico, compared with the previous year’s rate.10 Amnesty International recently estimated that half the disappearances in Mexico occur with the collaboration or complicity of government authorities.11
On July 7, 2013, there was a new round of nationwide elections, this time for state governorships, mayors, presidentes municipales, state legislatures, and other local posts. During and after the elections, the PRI’s opponents and many voices in the media accused Peña Nieto’s party of having waged the dirtiest and most violent campaign in memory, murdering candidates and other opponents, terrorizing and intimidating voters, employing widespread vote buying and fraud, and conniving with organized crime’s violent and corrupting intrusions into the campaign on the party’s behalf. The PRI’s summer campaign was not, as some observers were determined to perceive it, a masterful if ruthless renewal of traditional Mexican electoral tactics that had served the “wily” old party so well during the last century. It was an in-your-face crime spree shielded by the impunity provided by presidential and PRI power. After the elections, opposition party leaders vented angrily for about a week, even threatening to pull out of the “Pact for Mexico,” their legislative agreement with the PRI on an agenda of proposed political and economic reforms, unless Peña Nieto punished at least those within his party responsible for the most outrageous offenses. But just as with last summer’s presidential elections, the mainstream national television networks and major newspapers, rather than investigating or reporting or editorially denouncing wrongdoing in a sustained way, yielded to Peña Nieto and the PRI, and the criminal election campaign evaporated as a news story and issue.
During its twelve years out of national power, the PRI, retooling its machine with the support of its partners—most overtly, Televisa and TV Azteca—focused all of its energies on recapturing the country. Now, the PRI covets the Distrito Federal, the country’s richest prize. Everyone knows that; it’s openly acknowledged. Of course the PRI wants to govern the DF again, but to do that it would have to win an election there. But the PRI could never win an election in the DF, right? The city—with a demanding, well-informed constituency and an often aggressively activist base—is too smart and too organized for that to happen. The DF takes pride in its defiant apartness from the mediocrity and overt complicity with crime that characterize governance throughout so much of the rest of Mexico. Electoral tactics like those employed nationally by the PRI over the last two summers would never fly in the DF—imagine trying to buy off the city’s millions of voters with cash cards redeemable at a bargain superstore chain or threatening them at the polls or even murdering candidates? Hundreds of thousands and even millions would take to the streets, and the media exposure, local and international, would be intense.
In 1997, when residents of the capital were finally allowed to elect their own government, the DF became a leftist PRD stronghold. But the DF has no longtime allegiance to the PRD like the allegiance of voters in México State for the PRI. In its history the state has never voted for any other party. Mexico City’s revulsion against the PRI was particularly prompted by the corruption exposed by the 1985 earthquake—the collapsed schools built by contractors who’d bribed officials to overlook building codes, and many other examples of official malfeasance—as well as the nearly legendary criminality of that era’s police forces. But 1997 wasn’t so long ago, and it’s logical to assume that there are still important sectors of the DF where the PRI wields influence. Organized crime has millions upon millions in money to distribute to politicians and officials. And the DF is almost completely surrounded by México State, one of the country’s most narco-infested, corrupt, and violent states—a portion of the city touches on the murder and crime inferno of Morelos as well—and now México State’s former governor sits atop the federal government. One possible way for the PRI to take back Mexico City would be to undermine the city from within over several years—however many more years the PRI retains the presidency—and so eventually grind down and exhaust its residents’ and the crucial business and finance sectors’ trust in the governing competence of the left that it might create an opening for an alternative “strong government.” One obvious target would be the city’s prized security; another would be the water supply, which comes from outside the Distrito; there are others. It’s easy to understand how the PRI could have a strategic interest in exploding the perceived “bubble” of the DF as a secure city, for example by bringing some cartel-style mayhem—bodies strung from highway overpasses, beheadings, massacres in nightclubs, young women kidnapped from bus stops, etc.—into the PRD bastion directly from México State. But it’s also hard to conceive how doing so wouldn’t also be self-defeating, given the resulting inevitable damage to the national economy, for example, if the capital, home to many of Mexico’s wealthiest citizens and business interests, were to be overcome with violence and chaos. Months before, when such fears had first occurred to me, I’d decided that to believe the PRI would actually try was only paranoia exaggerated by my own loathing of Peña Nieto and his party.
But by the summer of 2013, many Chilangos no longer considered such a scenario so far-fetched. It was what we often talked about now. The speculations spawned by those fears provided enough conspiratorial plots and subplots to fill a fat le Carré novel. “Something is happening”—we thought the signs were already there, if not yet as openly menacing as the Evil Witch writing “Surrender Dorothy” in the sky. A new consensus was taking hold, one summed up by my friend Yoshua Okón: “Over the next six years, nos van a chingar,” they’re going to fuck us.
“Anytime you want to fall out of love with Mexico, take a bus to Coacalco, to Neza [across the border in México State] and just walk around,” said Juanca, launching, over a glass of mezcal, into one of his John Belushi–like rants, embellished with his own thunderous cannonades of laughter. Well, maybe I could do that, take a bus; to drive I’d need to rent a car, and that wasn’t in my plans for this summer. Juanca works in market research, and lately had been spending long days in México State. “You won’t believe that shit. The poverty, the filth. People park their cars inside cages so they won’t be stolen. Inside cages on the street, you have to see that! How can these people vote for the PRI? Because, after twenty years, they finally have a pinche McDonald’s? Aside from all the streets there named after the pendejos of the PRI, they name their streets after flowers, in a place where no self-loving flower would ever grow, not even if you paid it money. Any of those teenagers you see walking around would become a murderer for eighty bucks. We pay them twenty dollars for two hours of their time just to tell us why they want to buy the shit they want. Go to Monterrey. They used to have a beautiful historic downtown, all lit up at night, full of people and places to go. Now it’s all dark and deserted and bullet holes all over, but they still vote for the PRI. Stop listening to promises, motherfuckers, just look around at where you live if you want to know who to vote for! We look around and see a much better city than we had twenty years ago. But those motherfuckers look at us and say, Those people like their homos and drugs, they’re chaotic motherfuckers in the DF. But you’re the ones who like it up the ass, Monterrey, not us, only when we choose to. We’ve worked our asses off for twenty years to create this bubble that we live in, and we like it. It wasn’t created by God; we worked hard for it. And now that bubble is going to burst; it’s already bursting.”
The DF’s new mayor, Miguel Ángel Mancera, is in his late forties, twice divorced, now single, with a suave metrosexual demeanor despite relatively humble middle-class origins, and is a darling of Mexican gossip and society pages, often described as bearing a resemblance—this really seems to me a stretch—to George Clooney. In 2008, when nine lower-class adolescents and three police officers were killed in a botched and dubiously justified police operation, Mayor Ebrard had moved quickly to quell outrage and regain confidence in his governance by firing both his chief of police and his chief prosecutor. Mancera, a brilliant UNAM-educated lawyer, took over as chief prosecutor—equivalent to a big-city attorney general or head DA—and in that post came to be seen as an aggressive and innovative crime fighter with a smoothly charismatic media personality. The mayoralty was expected to raise Mancera’s profile much more and establish him, like Rudy Giuliani, as a dynamic national political player. Recent former PRD mayors had been nationally competitive presidential candidates: Cuahtémoc Cárdenas in 2000, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2006 and 2012. Some believed that Ebrard would have been a stronger candidate than López Obrador in 2012, though I think Ebrard understood that the populist AMLO was still the more revered figure in the DF and throughout much of the country, especially among the poor, that is, nearly half of Mexico’s population. Many assume that Ebrard will be his party’s candidate in 2018. But it also seemed obvious that Mancera intended his mayoralty to provide a platform from which to challenge Ebrard in 2018. Some commentators even gave Mancera an advantage, speculating that he would benefit from the spotlight of his office, while Ebrard—who chose not to run for the Senate, as many had suggested he should—would find himself challenged to find a way to remain in the public eye over the next six years.
