The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, page 31
part #694 of Travel Series
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.
Apart from the four arrested police, according to the article in Proceso, the PGR has informed the DF’s SSP police chief, Jesús Rodríguez Almeida, that at least several more of his police were involved in the crime, and that La Unión’s network of corrupted officers probably includes the PGJDF, the chief prosecutor’s office, whose investigative police unit were heading the investigation into the Heavens case. “Despite having the names of those presumed to be implicated on his desk,” wrote Mongé, “Rodríguez Almeida inexplicably hasn’t handed them over to local prosecutors.” According to Mongé’s sources, during the fallout from the Heavens case, El Moco fled to China. (As most of the fayuca, counterfeit goods, sold in Tepito come from China, El Moco would certainly have connections there.) The whereabouts of El Javis, El Antoine, and the four matones from Durango are unknown.
The article in Proceso was published on October 3. As far as I can tell, following the case from New York, it was met with near silence. Officials didn’t comment, not even to refute it. There was little or no follow-up or commentary in the media. But when I read the article, a lot fell into place; it corroborated much of the information that had come to me, in bits and pieces, over the past six months since the levantón occurred. Here was more evidence and a partial explanation of the police involvement that Pablo de Llano and I had long suspected. Here, at last, was an identification of the “Deep Ones,” the ultimate powers behind the crime: the Sinaloa Cartel. The placement of the corpses of Dax Rodríguez and the two women in Huitzilac, Morelos, inside the Beltrán Leyva’s “paradise,” made sense as a message delivered by one cartel, Sinaloa—and implicitly, perhaps, by its allies—to another cartel.
Maybe we, the public, along with the families of the victims, will never know what really happened in the Heavens case, or who was ultimately behind it. Later, in the fall of 2013, I had a chance to speak with a group of veteran PGJDF police officers, investigative police, former judiciales, SWAT team commandos, and anti-kidnapping police. We were meeting to talk about a separate matter I was researching, but Tepito, the Heavens case, and police involvement in the crime came up. “Tepito is a center of power in this city,” one of them told me. A great deal of money is made in Tepito, flows through there, and so it is a center of political power. That was why, the police told me, their units—elite crime fighting units—had routinely been kept out of Tepito and were almost never sent on operations there. The neighborhood was left to the police who were assigned to the police stations there. But it was not those police who controlled or empowered crime in Tepito, they told me. It was the politicians who controlled the police, they said.
On Tuesday, October 22, the Federal Human Rights Commission held a press conference to address the Heavens case and other recent disappearances in the city. DF prosecutors and police were criticized for having leaked information in the Heavens case that put both family members and witnesses at risk, and for the many other “irregularities” of their investigation. And the commission accused the DF’s authorities of having deprived the families of their right to truthful information about what had happened to their relatives. Most significantly, the commission called for an investigation into police involvement in the abductions and murders in the Heavens case. “If the police were involved, then we are confronted by a case of forced disappearances,” said the commission’s interim president, Mario Patrón, “and the murders would become extrajudicial assassinations.” Patrón called the Heavens case a “historic occurrence” that had opened eyes to the problem of disappearances inside the DF’s vaunted security “bubble.”
But who would carry out that investigation? It seems likely that all the relevant justice authorities, in the DF and at the federal level, have something to hide in the Heavens case, or else regard only cherry-picked elements of the crime as useful political capital. A SinEmbargo.com editorial addressed the problem of police involvement in the rising incidence of disappearances in Mexico, including in the Heavens case: “And the pain, the pain of thousands of families that have suffered from these crimes can’t be healed by anything,” the editors wrote. “Maybe, just slightly, by a true imparting of justice. But the answers never arrive, or they come in slow dribs and drabs. Meanwhile the criminals, among them police authorities, generate all through their communities more and more suffering.”
On December 19, 2013, Mexican news agencies reported that according to “high-level sources within the PGR,” the kidnapping and murder of the young people in the Heavens Case was provoked by a dispute between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Beltran Leyvas over control of the Mexico City drug trade—a direct refutation of the scenario insisted upon by Mayor Mancera and Ríos. According to those sources, the two adolescent sons of the imprisoned Tepito gangsters were the operation’s target, and the other young people were victims of “bad luck.” Left unaddressed was the question of whether or not the levanton and mass murder had helped either cartel to achieve its goal. That news report was like the final blips emitted by a missing airliner’s black box—since then silence has all but enveloped the case, at least in the media.
On the night after the discovery of the clandestine grave in Tlalmanalco, Israel, the brother of Monserrat Loza Fernández, told a reporter from Universal, “My sister didn’t deserve this; she was a woman dedicated to her children. She was a young single mother who now and then liked to go out to have fun. Monserrat is a good person, I say that she was a good person. She never was involved in anything illicit and it befell her to die in the cruelest manner that anyone can imagine. These have been desperate months, of anguish, desperation. I didn’t know whether my sister was eating or not, or if they were abusing her, or mistreating her. I had a certain hope because I had many dreams, I kept dreaming that she came home.”
The cruelty and near hopelessness of the situation overwhelm. Maybe the Heavens case is nobody’s cause now but that of the families. They, like tens of thousands of other families in Mexico, have been sent on journeys that they, individually or banded together, will mostly have to endure alone, through that place without solace where the dead often seem more alive than the living.
8 Watch #LadyPolanco: 20minutos.com.mx/noticia/3188/0/lady-polanco/vanessa-polo-cajica/elude-prision
9 (1) Guerrero, 463. (2) Chihuahua, 417. (3) Estado de México, 407. (4) Jalisco, 362. (5) Sinaloa, 324. (6) Nuevo León, 261. (7) Coahuila, 216. (8) Durango, 197. (9) Tamaulipas, 167. Guerrero, the only exception, is led by a governor who recently switched his affiliation from the PRI to the PRD (sinembargo.mx/15-03-2013/560479). Michoacán (PRI) and Morelos (PRD) are two more states where violence would explode in the latter months of 2013.
10 animalpolitico.com/2013/09/en-9-estados-el-secuestro-aumento-entre-20-y-70/#axzz2lbAycntp
11 “AI states that, out of 152 cases of disappearance that they documented in seven states, ‘in at least 85 cases there is sufficient evidence of the involvement of public officials for them [the cases] to constitute crimes of enforced disappearance under international law’ (June 2013).” The Mexican NGO El Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal (CCSPJP) estimates that police and military authorities are involved “in one third of high impact and express kidnappings” in Mexico. The Council for Law and Human Rights puts the proportion at 70 to 80 percent (ecoi.net/local_link/259326/371897_en.html).
12 An unlicensed after-hours bar, it was also referred to in the media as “Heavens After” and “After Heaven” and “Bar Heaven” and just “Heaven.” I use “Heavens” because it was the name used by the newspapers El País and Reforma, and because I simply like that name.
13 “In two and a half years, 415 judicial and preventive police were brought before the criminal courts for involvement in some activity outside the law. . . . According to the Public Information Office of the Chief Prosecutor of the Federal District (PGJDF) the 415 agents were involved in crimes such as abuse of authority, aggravated robbery, sexual abuse, bribery, deprivation of liberty, express kidnapping, murder, malicious wounding, covering up crimes, unlawful exercise of public service, [and] aggravated rape” (Crónica, February 11, 2013).
14 Pablo de Llano’s stirring two-page spread of profiles was published on June 25 (internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/06/25/actualidad/1372189257_835177.html).
15 Averiguación Previa DGAVD/CAPE/T2/891/13-05.
16 As this book was going to press, the Sinaloa Cartel capo, Joaquín Guzmán, El Chapo, was captured. Please see Appendix note for more on this.
17 Time magazine hailed Peña Nieto’s presidency in those words on the cover of its November 30, 2012, issue. But “new PRI” babble was all over the U.S. media.
Appendix Note
On February 22, 2014, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, was taken prisoner—without violence, without a single gunshot being fired—in a Mazatlán, Sinaloa, resort hotel in an operation mounted by Mexican navy commandos in cooperation with U.S. authorities, particularly the DEA. Under President Calderón, in 2009, Mexican navy commandos and U.S. law enforcement had hunted down and killed Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, in Cuernavaca. Peña Nieto was carrying on with Calderón’s policy of waging war through the capture and killings of major capos—though there was no bigger trophy than El Chapo. But the running of an organization as wealthy, vast, and global as the Sinaloa Cartel doesn’t depend on just one person. In a famous 2010 interview with Proceso, one of the Sinaloa’s other venerable leaders, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, said that the cartel was prepared for the possible capture of its capos and had replacements ready; it’s long rumored in Mexico that Sinaloa’s legendary narco capos work for hidden bosses, men who don’t want narcocorridos being sung about them—“there is talk of an x- governor,” wrote Alejandro Páez Varela, a few days after El Chapo’s arrest, in SinEmbargo.com. In a widely quoted interview with the Tijuana weekly Zeta, Edgardo Buscaglia, a Mexican security expert and senior research scholar in law and economics at Columbia University Law School, said, “El Chapo is one member of the Sinaloa criminal network’s leadership, but let’s not forget that Sinaloa is a horizontal network consisting of thousands of franchises that operate according to directions from Sinaloa transmitted through strategic and tactical alliances. Sinaloa doesn’t have a vertical structure of command and control, they have regional criminal alliances, and in other countries; so that directorship will continue, [El Chapo] will simply be replaced.” Buscaglia said that the capture of the mythologized capo, in a country like Mexico, “with its voids in governance,” didn’t “even minimally guarantee the dismantling of a criminal network.” Buscaglia said, “El Chapo Guzmán and his people in Sinaloa had hundreds of Mexican politicians in their pockets, let’s see if they arrest them now.” The weakening of the Sinaloa Cartel would become a reality, he said, only if El Chapo’s capture was followed by detentions of the corrupt politicians and functionaries at all levels who permitted and aided the Sinaloa Cartel’s operation and expansion, and with investigations into the thousands of seemingly legal businesses and properties, in Mexico and the United States and elsewhere, through which the cartel and its associates laundered and invested its billions, and the eventual seizure and dismantling of those entities. As long as the chains of complicity between politicians and cartel capos are not destroyed, he said, “then the war against the narco traffickers can be considered lost.”
