Pemex needs major reforms, said Ebrard. “[Pemex’s] union is extremely corrupt, but the PRI doesn’t want to reform it, because it’s an ally of the PRI.” The union is a sinkhole of corruption that squanders millions upon millions of dollars every year, through its contributions to PRI election campaigns and in other ways. “Pemex’s administrative council is madness, filled with political appointees,” said Ebrard. “So, Pemex is bad because we’re Mexicans and this is how we do everything, and so we’d better sell to Exxon? Of course we can do better. The argument that we don’t have the resources is scandalous.” It was a decision, he said, not a preordained destiny, not to reform and invest. “We can have technology, but we have to make that decision. It’s a decision.”

  Ebrard didn’t want to speak much, on the record, about his successor’s troubles as mayor and about the Heavens case, though he did say the latter was likely to have lasting repercussions.

  One Sunday, June 23, one day short of a month since the Heavens levantón, I’d again accompanied Pablo de Llano to Tepito. At the subway stop we were met by Juan, the younger brother of Alan Omar Atiencia Barranco, twenty-six, one of the missing youths, married to Karen Morales Vargas, twenty-five, also taken from Heavens that Sunday morning. Their two families live in the same vecindad on a street a little outside the Tepito market area. We hadn’t walked very far when we noticed that a kid, about fourteen, small and wiry, had fallen in step just behind us. He was wearing a bright yellow and blue América fútbol team jersey. Sometimes he pulled alongside and looked at us, his stare moving from one face to the other, and then fell back again. Pablo wondered if maybe he was a relative of the Atiencia Barrancos, but Juan hadn’t greeted or even acknowledged him. When we reached the vecindad the kid followed us through the open doorway, down the tunnel-like entrance alley that led to a small courtyard, where there was a glass shrine strung with Christmas lights, and with statues of the Virgin, San Judas Tadeo, and El Niño de Antorcha inside. Most of the vecindades have such shrines in their courtyards, paid for and tended by their residents. Another alley, to the right of the shrine, led to a larger courtyard in back. A steep concrete staircase led to Karen Morales Vargas’s family’s home, perched like a cave dwelling in the wall above the smaller courtyard. With a smirk that was mocking, or maybe deranged, the kid glanced at us and left, back down the alley to the sidewalk. Later Pablo asked if I thought the kid was a halcón, a falcon: that is, in the vocabulary of contemporary Mexico, somebody who works for a cartel or another crime group as “eyes and ears” in the streets, reporting on strangers who enter its territory.

  The Morales Vargas apartment consisted of probably two low-ceilinged bedrooms that we didn’t see but where, in the manner typical of the vecindades, beds were likely to be shared by children and even adults at night, just off the small living room, with an adjacent tiny kitchen. Inside the apartment, Karen’s mother, Ana María Vargas, was seated on the living room couch along with a few of her grandchildren and a Chihuahua. Ruth Marines, the mother of Rafael Rojas Marines, was sitting in an armchair next to the couch. A teenage girl sat at a small table absorbed in her laptop. Pablo and I sat on low plastic stools like the one the girl was sitting on, and Juan stood leaning in a corner. Bureaus and cabinets filled with religious statues and other souvenir-like objects crowded the room, which had the playroom clutter of a home where numerous small children reside, though there were actually few toys to be seen. A large television sat atop one cabinet. Family photographs and religious images covered the walls. One of the photographs, inside the largest frame, was of a handsome young man in a fútbol shirt, his name, Cesar Adrian Morales Vargas, in calligraphic lettering in the poster matting alongside the photo, with “5 Julio 1984–19 Agosto 2011” and some phrases such as “rest in peace . . . forever in our hearts,” though I don’t recall the exact words. Karen’s mother was a diminutive, pretty fortysomething woman, in a sweatshirt and jeans. Ruth Marines, in a dark dress, was taller and more heavyset, with a good-natured face that also suggested a strong character. Both had the classic Mexican features: prominent cheekbones, full lips, vivid dark eyes, and seemingly ageless brown skin. The mood in the room was warm and friendly. It didn’t feel like sitting down with two mothers who were facing the possible death of two children in the most horrific of circumstances. Mexican politeness, I thought, a nearly obliging levity, and also, maybe, the way mothers know they need to be when there are small children in the room. We talked about the Chihuahua, who was named Pecas and belonged to Karen’s younger sister Jéssica, the eighteen-year-old sitting at the computer. Karen’s Chihuahua, Chiquis, was Pecas’s mother, but as Karen was not there to take care of her, Chiquis had been sent to stay with in-laws. Karen and Alan Omar had three children.

  Ana María, Karen’s mother, owned a little sidewalk stand outside the vecindad where she sold candies, popsicles, and chicharrones. That was now providing the family with what they had to live on. Karen had worked selling lingerie and bikinis from a stand out on the eje. Karen and her mother had an especially close bond. Pablo told me that Ana María did not hide even from her other children that Karen was her favorite. The last time Ana María saw Karen was at one in the morning on the Sunday of the levantón. She’d just packed away her candy stand, and was carrying out trash, and Karen came down the stairs and helped her. Alan Omar and their friend Monse—Monserrat Loza, also one of the disappeared—waited out on the sidewalk. Karen was wearing beige slacks and matching beige heels, and a loose black blouse embroidered in front with rhinestones. She was carrying a black bag with a golden chain strap—Jéssica piped up from the corner to add that the bag was studded. Karen had ironed her black hair even straighter than it already was but hadn’t put in a flip curl over her forehead, as she usually did when she went out for the night.

  Alan Omar worked at a stand that repaired cell phones. Though married to Karen, he lived with his mother, María Victoria Barranco, in a neighboring apartment in the vecindad. The two families were tight-knit, sharing the duties of raising the three children. Alan Omar’s father was a merchant seaman from Ecuador who’d turned up in Tepito one day and stayed; now he was gravely ill. A fair-haired, light-skinned little boy, one of the children on the couch in the living room, had inherited the Ecuadoran’s features. Alan Omar was a devoted fan of América, the fútbol team that on Sunday night, May 26, would play Cruz Azul for the Mexican League championship. Alan Omar had planned to watch at home, and had asked his mother, before going out for the night with his wife and Monse, to have his favorite snacks ready. That Sunday afternoon, María Victoria prepared his platter of snacks for the championship match. The match, which América would win, was to begin at eight. As the hours went by and Alan Omar didn’t appear, she grew uneasy. Then she, along with the other families in Tepito, received Toñín’s terrible message.

  Rafael Rojas Marines, thirty-three, sold sunglasses from a stand in front of the Tepito church. In 2004, he’d gone to prison for six years for robbery. He lived with his mother in Tepito. Ruth Marines sat up in her chair and spoke, with a slight smile that seemed both a little chagrined and resigned, about that Saturday night when she’d last seen her son. She knew he was headed out to an antro, as nightspots are called, and tried to talk him out of it. “You’re going out to fight,” she said. “Those places are full of trouble and you get crazy when you drink.” But Rafael had been in a bad motorcycle accident six months before, and surgeons had put metal plates and screws into his shattered arm and shoulder. “Don’t worry, Jefa,” he told her, “I’m going to behave, I couldn’t fight now even if I wanted to.” Later Marines would tell another interviewer, “When I saw my son leave, I felt something really bad, and I wanted to call him back so that he wouldn’t go out.” Only two days before his abduction, Rafael had finally had the money to pay a dentist to implant false teeth to replace the three he’d lost in the accident.

  “My son Cesar Adrian never set foot in prison,” said Ana María, referring to the young man in the memorial photograph on the wall. “He never gave me any trouble. Era un chavo tranquilo, an easygoing boy.” He was a devotee of San Judas Tadeo, who is the “wholesome” saint, in comparison with La Santa Muerte. But two summers before, on August 19, 2011, Cesar Adrian had gotten into a fight out on the street not far from home. Another youth went to fetch his brother, and quickly it was three against one. Ana María, at her candy stand, heard the volley of gunshots. Cesar Adrian had received nine bullets yet managed to come running down the sidewalk to his mother. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “I’m going to get out of this, I can do it, I can. Don’t cry Mamá, I’m going to get out of this.” There was no ambulance at hand, so “luego luego,” she flagged a taxi and rushed him to the nearest hospital, but he did not survive his wounds. Three months later, police arrested one of the youths who’d killed her son. The other two, though everyone knew who they were, remained at large. “And the one who was arrested,” said Ana María, “wasn’t even the one who’d fired the most shots.”

  Now Jéssica stood up from the computer in which she’d been quietly engrossed throughout our conversation. She was entrancingly pretty, fresh-faced, cheerful. In the United States, I thought, she might be a classic cheerleader type, the kind of girl who always looks as if she must smell of soap and laundry detergent, her shimmering hair newly shampooed. A swath of brown belly showed in the space between her pressed T-shirt and spotless pale tight jeans. “He was shot nine times,” she said animatedly. “Four in the chest, and four, no three, in the back, and one in his pompas,” his butt. “That’s eight,” said her mother. “Twice in his pompas,” Jéssica added quickly.

  “They left five children in the street,” said Ana María, referring to her slain son’s children. Two were now living with her, three with other families. Ana María has eleven grandchildren in all. “I was in really bad shape,” she said. Two of her son’s killers were free, but she was afraid to press charges, fearing for the lives of her other children. A psychologist provided by the city finally convinced her, and an arrest warrant was issued for the two, but nothing happened. “They’re still walking around these streets.”

  Another teenager came into the living room. If possible, Brian was even more beautiful than his sister Jéssica. His features resembled hers and his long dark hair was just as lustrous. He was muscular and lithe, covered with tattoos and piercings, but shared his sister’s air of pulchritude, even if his T-shirt, “Rebel Fondue” printed on it, and fatigue pants were fashionably ripped. (I remembered Barbara Patterson in The Savage Detectives ranting about her boyfriend, that all he does is take showers, “because if nothing else Rafael is clean, like practically all fucking Mexicans,” an anthropological observation that, in my experience, is right on the mark.) Just that morning Brian had been let go from criminal detention, where he’d been held for three days for robbery. From the apartment his mother had heard screams down in the street and, heart in mouth, had run outside and seen the police taking her son away. A lady, Brian calmly explained, had accused him of stealing a cell phone and two hundred pesos, equivalent to about seventeen dollars, which he said he hadn’t done. The police wanted to charge him with aggravated robbery and pandillarismo, gang violence. But the woman hadn’t turned up to formally press charges, and so he’d been released.

  The conversation turned to another photograph on the wall, of a young woman whose softly sensual face, with large almond eyes, was the most beautiful in the room. Pablo had mentioned to me before how struck he was by the beauty of many of the women he saw while walking around in Tepito. He’d been coming to Tepito several times a week, meeting with families, preparing a piece for El País that would include photographs and short profiles of each of the missing twelve, to be published a few days before or on June 26, which would mark a month since the levantón.14 The woman in the photograph was named Nayali, and she’d been the only child of Ana-María’s sister-in-law, and a cousin of Jéssica and Brian. She’d been killed, seven years before, in Tepito, at age twenty, by a stray bullet.

  It was as if the young dead on the walls had joined us. It was as if they—along with the missing, Karen, Alan Omar, and Rafael; and the certifiably living, mothers, brothers, a sister, orphaned grandchildren; Pablo and me—were conversing in this crowded vecindad living room. “Don’t cry, Mamá”—as if the photograph on the wall had spoken those words in sync with his mother. We were in the Pedro Páramo world of the murmuring, whispering, talkative dead. But this wasn’t Rulfo’s austere ghost poetry, just as bustling, dangerous Tepito hardly resembles abandoned, desolate Comala. This was more like Aura’s Pedro Páramo, I thought. She’d had an idea for a novel in which she was going to reinvent Pedro Páramo as a modern reality show. In Rulfo’s novel, Juan Preciado comes to Comala to look for his father, Pedro Páramo, not yet understanding that everyone he meets in Comala is dead, and that if he’s come there, it’s because he’s dead too. Aura had an obsession with her absent father and in her novel the protagonist’s search for her father was to be the subject of a reality television show set in contemporary Mexico. For her novel to be a credible reimagining of Pedro Páramo, she would have needed to make the dead be also alive, and vice versa, and, it being set in contemporary Mexico, maybe Aura would have found voices for those who, in the manner of the “disappeared,” seem to exist in no definable condition. Maybe her novel, I thought, would have had some resemblance to the conversation—by turns antic, melancholy, disconcerting, even humorous—we were having in this living room in Tepito.

  Now thirty-four-year-old Gabriela Téllez, also kidnapped from Heavens, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Danae Téllez, “joined” the conversation in that room. In the morning Pablo, by phone, had arranged to meet with Danae in Tepito later that afternoon. But since morning she’d stopped answering her cell phone. Sometimes it rang and she didn’t pick up, and sometimes it was turned off. Pablo was desperate to meet with Danae for his piece of individual portraits of the twelve missing, because he’d now spoken to and collected photographs from members of every family except Gabriela’s, and he was running out of time. Danae was Gabriela’s only relative who could really tell him about her. They’d been inseparable. Night after night, mother and daughter had gone out to the antros, the bars and clubs, together. They were regulars at After Heavens. Danae had escaped being kidnapped along with her mother because that Saturday night, after going first to Bar Cristal, they’d returned to their Tepito apartment when Danae had felt tired, or unwell. Long past midnight, when friends had phoned Gabriela telling her to come to Heavens, Danae had begged off, saying she wanted to sleep, and her mother had gone alone. Gabriela worked at a computer store in the center, and that was how she’d maintained her household, which included Danae, two other much younger children, and an elderly mother in poor health who’d recently had a knee operation. Ana María and Jéssica knew the Téllezes. Danae wasn’t in school, they told us, and had never worked a day in her life. Her mother had always doted on and spoiled Danae, they said. Now she would have to somehow support her younger siblings and grandmother. Danae was described as flighty and immature; she behaved as if she were even younger than Jéssica. She didn’t seem to have grasped the reality of what had occurred, or of her new situation. That was also the impression Pablo had taken from his few brief conversations with her, when the families came out of meetings with the chief prosecutor, or held a vigil or stopped traffic. “A typical teenager,” he’d told me. Danae was lively and scrappy-seeming, he’d said, quick to laugh, and extremely pretty.

  Jéssica suggested that we look at Danae’s Facebook page. Pablo and I bent over the computer. Almost the first thing I noticed was that Danae had more than 2,700 Facebook friends. A teenage girl, not in school, unemployed, residing in Tepito, with nearly 3,000 social network “friends.” The world is a mystery to me, I thought. We looked at her favorite music: Moenia, Da Fresh, La Rolledera, El Komander. Her favorite movies included Dead Poets Society and El Cartel de los Sapos, a cable series about a drug cartel. Pablo was clicking through Danae’s posted photographs, and enlarged a close-up of her and her mother together: Danae with her cheek pressed against her mother’s cheek, her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Gabriela, who doesn’t look much older than her daughter, with blondish hair and pleasant features, just short of plump, gazes with a composed expression into the camera. Danae’s face is all teenage drama. Long messy bangs fall over big glossy dark eyes, which stare passionately, almost sorrowfully, into the lens. She is wearing lipstick and her lips are long, full, and slightly pulled down at the corners, as if to transmit soulful earnestness. A strapped black top bares her shoulder. In the photo, at least, she really does look as if she could be an actress.

  We scrolled through her posts, most written in social networking shorthand. Only hours before, Danae had posted this: “aunke todo sto ha sido muy dificil no dejo de recordar ke smp l pasabamos super by T AMO ♥ y smp stas n mi mnt y n mi corazon u eres l amor de mi vida mami!” Translated, minus shorthand: “though everything has been very difficult I don’t stop remembering that we always had a super time bye I LOVE YOU ♥ and you’re always in my thoughts and heart you’re the love of my life mami!”

  Danae had given Pablo a vague address, Calle Plomeros, near the Circunvalación, a diagonal avenue cutting through an edge of Tepito. We decided to walk there. Danae still wasn’t answering her phone, but Pablo would keep phoning, and maybe a neighbor would be able to tell us where she lived. At the edge of the market, far down Avenida del Trabajo, we asked a woman working at a tianguis for directions. She gave them to us, but then said, “Take a taxi, don’t go that way, está canijo.” Canijo is another of those Mexican words with several meanings but was originally a term for a bad person. She looked anxious. “Or walk around the long way,” she said. We walked there because the Santa Muerte shrine was nearby and Pablo wanted to talk to Doña Queta again. Earlier, Pablo had remarked, “The more time you spend in Tepito, the more dangerous you realize it is.”

 

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