The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (11 page)

On the day of Peña Nieto’s inauguration in December violence did break out in the DF. Young people, mostly, not all of them students, battled riot police in the streets outside Congress and elsewhere, smashed store windows, erected burning barricades. There were no fatalities, but one student was severely beaten, and there were many arbitrary arrests, which fed surprised indignation over what some saw as the heavy-handed response, on that day of transition of power, of Mayor Ebrard’s and Mancera’s police. #YoSoy132 distanced itself from the disturbances, though undoubtedly, or probably, students who’d associated themselves with the movement took part. It wasn’t hard to understand how frustrations had boiled over. The country’s electoral institutions, resorting to the usual “formalisms,” had chosen to overlook the illegalities of Peña Nieto and the PRI’s campaign. The riots were also an expression of frustration with #YoSoy132’s moderation. But then that was that; there was no more violence in the streets, of this sort anyway. The Distrito Federal went back to being the DF, a place apart. And Mexico went on being Mexico, as narco and military violence continued to grind down and traumatize so much of the country. However distanced they may feel from the bloody mayhem itself, it’s not as if residents of the capital don’t get depressed by the war as the death toll keeps climbing, or feel fear and a sense of impending doom that they try to push from their minds.
Vivimos adentro de una burbuja
—“We live inside a bubble,” I’m always hearing people in the DF say. People sense the entire country collapsing, even vanishing, around them, becoming, as one friend put it, an “anti-country.” The plague of terror, chaos, and murder is as close as the city’s borders, already having consumed large parts of México State and its most populous municipalities.

Why has the DF so far been relatively immune from that violence? Is it only because the city isn’t on a major drug trafficking route; or because of the near-ubiquity of its police forces and surveillance cameras; or because it is a big enough drug consumption market on its own that it’s just good business to keep it relatively calm and prosperous, yet somehow not a big enough drug consumption market on its own for the cartels to go to war over? Those are all commonly heard hypotheses; but are there more conspiratorial reasons? I sometimes imagine that the cartels have been sent the message that if they don’t want U.S. Navy SEALs and drone-fired missiles hunting down their capos and blowing up their mountain and desert ranch hideouts and
sicario
caravans—a nauseating solution, even if it were a solution, which it surely isn’t—then they should stay out of the DF, the nation’s economic vital organ and political and media capital. But I have no proof that there is any truth to this; it’s just one of those paranoid hypotheses. What will happen now? Peña Nieto surrounded himself with what some regard as an experienced and capable cabinet, a mix of PRI “dinosaurs” and “new” technocrats just like those who have filled every Mexican presidential cabinet since the dawn of the technocrat vogue under Carlos Salinas. Will the PRI go back to dealing with the cartels as it is said to have done before, making pacts that benefit both sides, going in as partners as it were, tamping things down for the time being at least? It’s widely assumed that the PRI is going to do something like that. But how will it or anyone else subdue the Zetas, “Mexico’s most organized and dangerous group of assassins,” as the DEA has understatedly described them? The Zetas are crime monopolists who seem to have lifted satanic self-interest and sadistic self-indulgence to a level hardly seen before in the world.
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Let go of one thing, you let go of the adjoining, and the adjoining. . . . Zetas are far from being the only ultraviolent organized crime group right now. There is a feeling that Mexico’s lawlessness has spread too widely and too deeply now for anyone—even “El Chapo” Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel—to be able to reverse it. The U.S. drug consumption that fuels the war is not going to go away, even if marijuana is legalized in all fifty states, nor will U.S. weapons merchants stop supplying the cartels, nor are U.S. politicians likely to become less beholden to the gun lobby and do anything to limit those sales. Many people say that only years of implementing entirely new approaches; of major investments in many areas, not least public education; and of a patient transforming of the judicial and police cultures, and of government, by a kind of national government that Mexico has never seen before—probably few countries have seen it—could eventually bring about a change. Still, the Mexican economy is considered to be fairly robust; its national growth rate is twice that of the United States, with some 70 percent of the economy said to be tied up in one way or another with narco money; and in recent years forecasters have been predicting that the Mexican economy is about to take off, though this “Mexican moment” never arrives. Without a doubt, Mexico’s so-called civic society, which manifests the conviction that change won’t come unless the population forces it, has grown stronger and noisier—as exemplified by #YoSoy132; by influential civilian groups against violence, like the one led by Javier Sicilia; and by groups founded by the families of Mexico’s disappeared. Church and civilian groups try to protect and aid the Central American migrants who in their grueling treks across the country to the northern border, fleeing the violence and economic devastation of their homelands, are preyed on by cartels, police, Mexican immigration authorities,
maras,
and random rural gangs—robbed, enslaved, forced into narco assassin squads, and raped. An estimated eight out of ten migrant women who attempt to cross Mexico suffer sexual abuse along the way, though sometimes at the hands of fellow migrants. Migrants are kidnapped en masse by Zetas, with the complicity of corrupted and terrorized local authorities, so that their families in their home countries or awaiting them in the United States can be subjected to extortion; while being held, the captives are tortured, raped, and sometimes massacred. Thousands of migrants have been killed or permanently maimed in falls from the notorious freight trains collectively known as “La Bestia,” which they ride clinging to the tops of the cars. The corpses of tens of thousands of Central Americans lie buried along the so-called death corridor of the migrants’ trail.

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?v=kh_RPDgBG5Y&sns=fb

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“The Zetas, where they dominate, dominate everything. They monopolize crime: kidnappings, extortions, assassinations for hire, narco-trafficking, the street trade, pirating, payments from the coyotes who move through their zones, it’s all theirs.” Oscar Martínez, of
ElFaro.net
, in his extraordinary book
The Beast.

3
Mayor Ebrard Drives the Bus

THE LEFT, CITY MAYORS AND GOVERNMENTS
associated with the Party of the Democratic Revolution, has governed the DF since 1998, following the first election in which residents of the capital were allowed to choose their
jefe de gobierno
—before that, the city government’s leader was appointed by the PRI president. I was in Mexico City the night in 1997 when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was elected mayor and the streets filled with the celebrations usually reserved for important national team
fútbol
victories, people waving yellow PRD banners, honking car horns, a crowd gathering at the iconic monument El Ángel on Avenida Reforma. That night I was in a car, headed to an election party, with Cuban friends who’d left Communist Cuba to make their lives elsewhere and to whom the left’s victory seemed ominous. “Change is bad,” one of them kept repeating, though not without a touch of self-deprecating humor, which isn’t to say he didn’t mean it. “Don’t these people know change is bad?” But change, at least for Mexico City, turned out to be good. The successive six-year terms, especially, from 2000 to 2012, of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Marcelo Ebrard, transformed the city. In simplest terms, López Obrador laid a solid foundation of social reform, strengthening and widening the social safety net, in a way that helped to calm the city’s air of perpetual desperation and emergency. López Obrador’s government provided modest monthly pensions to single mothers and the impoverished elderly that allowed them to live in at least austere dignity, and to low-income adolescents to help them stay in school; gifted children were identified and placed in suitable educational programs; unemployment payments were expanded and paired with job search programs; and so on. Ebrard creatively built on that foundation, practically urging a new personality on the city, conceptualizing it as a dynamic modern world city that cannot solve all its citizens’ hardships but finds manifold ways to show that it is not indifferent to them, alleviating hard lives at least a little and providing outlets for diversion and expression, fostering a sense of the city as a spectacle not only the well-off can enjoy. “If you don’t have people using the city’s public spaces, if the public spaces can’t be enjoyed, then you don’t have a city,” Marcelo Ebrard told me when I spoke to him in the spring of 2013. “You have to create conditions so that people feel that they’re part of a community. If you don’t do that, the city doesn’t work.”

The winter skating rink in the Zócalo, with skates provided free, may not sound like such a big deal, but you only have to see the long lines of parents with children waiting their turn to grasp what it could mean for a child from the city slums to ice-skate for the first time, and for a parent to be able to provide that experience. Mexico’s paleontologists were invited to mount a dinosaur exhibit in the Zócalo, and a temporary wooden gallery was built to shelter the prehistoric skeletons and other displays. Six public swimming pool beaches were installed around the city with sand trucked in from Veracruz for poor children who may have never seen the ocean. The exhibit of Rodins and Dalís in the Faro del Oriente in the huge, poor
colonia
of Iztapalapa broke city attendance records, defying, said Ebrard, “the idea that beauty has become classist.” More than three hundred new children’s playgrounds in the parks, and outdoor modular gyms. The free concerts that brought Paul McCartney, Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, and Shakira to the Zócalo. The musical and theater performances in poor neighborhoods. The city’s museums open late and free one night a week. The popular and inexpensive (in pesos, less than twenty-five dollars a year) bike sharing program, sprouting up in one neighborhood after another, including the Centro, though not yet in neighborhoods like Itzapalapa; bike lanes all over the place; major avenues closed off for Sunday biking; late-night group rides—the DF, its traffic hardly hospitable to bicyclers, had nevertheless gone mad for bicycling. Abortion and gay marriage and gay adoption were legalized, over the predictable howls of the Catholic Church hierarchy—when the cardinal at Guadalajara publicly accused Ebrard of having bribed his own government’s cabinet secretaries so that they’d support the reforms, Ebrard responded with a defamation lawsuit. “Our best program in terms of empowering women wasn’t abortion,” said Ebrard. “It was, in its massive societal impact, the 800,000 free mammograms. Why was that so important? Women didn’t use to have their breasts checked; they didn’t think it was in their power to go for an examination, because, let’s say, of conservative cultural ways. We went door-to-door in the neighborhoods. Now they didn’t have to ask their husbands for permission. Women got together with other women in their neighborhoods to go to the clinics. It was a great change.”

None of this is to say that the DF’s recent PRD governments have been entirely free of the ills of institutional Mexico. There is still a great deal of corruption, especially among authorities in the city’s various delegations, manifest in the selling of illegal liquor licenses in exchange for kickbacks, or the frequently and futilely denounced selling of public lands to private interests, and so on. Iztapalapa, which alone packs in two million inhabitants, and other poor neighborhoods regularly endure cutoffs of their water supply, a hardship the city government would never impose on wealthier areas.

Marcelo Ebrard is a descendant of French immigrants, and pursued graduate studies at the École Nationale d’Administration of France. One of the reasons that Mexico City is so distinct from the rest of the country, he says, is the influence of immigrants who’ve settled there over the years, fifty-two separate ethnicities or nationalities from all over the world. Nearly 400,000 Amerindian Mexicans, migrants from the countryside, speaking various native languages, live in the city, and as mayor, Ebrard instituted in his municipal offices weekly early morning Nahuatl classes that he required his two adolescent children and the daily reporters covering him to attend. Ebrard, born in 1959, is a large and imposing man and his head seems especially large, with classic Gallic features, a big sharp nose, a high forehead, vivid brows low over his eyes, and a really Napoleonic chin, and his mouth is strict-looking but also lightly jaunty, just like his manner. When he received me in his private office in the Condesa, he was wearing Bermuda shorts. Mexican men almost never wear shorts, certainly not out into the streets. On a low shelf behind him was a framed photo of Rosalinda Bueso, the beautiful young woman he married in 2011, when she was thirty-three. Bueso is the former Honduran ambassador to Mexico. In 2009, when the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown in a rightist coup, Ebrard, married at the time to a tempestuous former
telenovela
star with a reputation for appearing drunk in public, provided police protection so that Bueso could enter her embassy, and apparently that was how she and the mayor met. It’s the third marriage for each. I’ve been left grinning dumbly the couple of times I’ve found myself in our building’s elevator with Bueso, she so radiates warmth and gaiety. The couple live in an apartment that belongs to Ebrard’s brother while their future house, on the other side of the plaza, is undergoing renovation and construction.