On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  Somerset Maugham visited Mexico for a magazine assignment in 1924, at the same time as D. H. Lawrence, with whom he quarreled. He later wrote a few downbeat, Mexico-inspired short stories, but no book. When Frieda Lawrence asked him what he thought of the country, Maugham said, “Do you want me to admire men in big hats?”

  Hatred or contempt for Mexico is a theme in Evelyn Waugh’s obscure and rancorous travel book, Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object Lesson, and in Aldous Huxley’s better-known Beyond the Mexique Bay. Waugh: “Every year [Mexico] is becoming hungrier, wickeder, and more hopeless.” Huxley: “Sunrise, when it came, was a vulgar affair,” and “Under close-drawn shawls one catches the reptilian glitter of Indian eyes.”

  Mexico books continue to appear, many excellent ones: books about the cartels, the stupendous ruins, the border, the savage drug trade, Mexican art and culture, the food, the politics, the economy, get-acquainted books, picture books, guides to hotels and beach resorts, books of tips and hints for potential retirees, surfing guides, books for hikers and campers, books that prettify the country, others that are prosecutorial and full of warnings, such as the helpful 2012 guide Don’t Go There. It’s Not Safe. You’ll Die, and Other More Rational Advice for Overlanding Mexico and Central America.

  However bitter the foreign writers, no one is more antagonistic toward Mexico than the Mexicans themselves. Carlos Fuentes (the best-known Mexican writer to non-Mexicans) was so conflicted and abused by his fellow writers, he moved to Paris. Other Mexican writers routinely seek jobs in American universities, or expatriate themselves to other countries. You can’t blame them: money is a factor. There is a long, sour shelf of lamenting works, epitomized by the hefty, informative compendium The Sorrows of Mexico: An Indictment of Their Country’s Failings by Seven Exceptional Writers. The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz’s reflections on death and loneliness, masks and history, is pitiless but also one of the most insightful books I have read on Mexican attitudes and beliefs. (“No,” says a Mexican friend whose views I respect, “it’s a tissue of stereotypes.”)

  But I have not found a traveler or commentator, foreign or Mexican, who has been able to sum up Mexico, and maybe such an ambition is a futile and dated enterprise. The country eludes the generalizer and summarizer; it is too big, too complex, too diverse in its geography and culture, too messy and multilingual—the Mexican government recognizes 68 different languages and 350 dialects. Some writers have attempted to be exhaustive. Late in her life (she was seventy, but still game to travel) Rebecca West began to accumulate notes for a book that she hoped would be as encyclopedic about Mexico as her vivid, 400,000-word chronicle of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Though she abandoned her Mexico book, the parts of it, pieced together and published posthumously as Survivors in Mexico, are illuminating and at times spirited and insightful.

  An implication in all books about the country is that, though Europeans successfully emigrate to Mexico and become Mexican, no American can follow suit: the gringo remains incorrigibly a gringo. In practice, this is not a hardship but amounts to a liberation. Consider the ritualized banter of the sort that social anthropologists describe as “the joking relationship.” This foolery is practiced in Mexico to a high degree of refinement. Mexicans allow gringos the singularity to be themselves by trading jolly insults in order to emphasize differences, using the humor of privileged disrespect to avoid conflict. Or, as the anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (the definer of this social interaction) put it, “a relation by two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and in some cases required, to tease and make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offense.”

  Owing to Mexican generosity and good humor in a culture that values manners, especially the manners that govern jocular teasing, an American who accepts the role of a gringo is licensed in his gringoismo. A gringo who doesn’t abuse that status is given the latitude to be different. Most of the time Mexicans use the word “gringo” without much malice. (Gabacho is the insulting word in Mexico for gringo; in Spain, it is a way of rubbishing a French person.) And so the tradition of gringos finding refuge in Mexico is old, and especially now there are permanent communities of gringos all over Mexico, retirees and escapists who have no plans ever to go home, who find it very simple to show up and stay for years. This Mexican hospitality to gringos is in ironic contrast to the present ubiquity of Mexicans who are demonized and fenced in, stamped as undesirable, considered suspect, and unwelcome in America.

  Glaring paradoxes like that, and the repetition of stereotypes, also provoked me to take this trip, hoping for more insights in the foreign country through the doorway in the high fence at the end of the road. And there was my anxiety that my driving days are numbered, that my writing life had stalled, that I kept being reminded I was old, and I knew that a road trip would lift my spirits and release me from the useless obsession of self-scrutiny and induce in me (as the English writer Henry Green put it in Pack My Bag) “that blessed state when you forever cease to give a damn.”

  What I intended was a jaunt from one end of Mexico to the other, the opposite of a downfall, which is a dégringolade; rather, a leap in the dark, driving away from home, to cross the border and keep going until I ran out of road. Even the most lighthearted journey to Mexico becomes something serious—or dangerous, tragic, risky, illuminating, or at times bowel-shattering, and in my case it was all of those things.

  But no sooner had I gotten behind the wheel than a feeling came over me that was like being caressed by a cosmic wind, reminding me of what travel at its best can do: I was set free.

  “Don’t Go Thar! You’ll Dah!”

  It took me four and a half days to drive from Cape Cod to the border. I had left home in a hurry, midafternoon, on a sudden impulse the day before I’d planned to go, impatiently emptying my refrigerator into a big box of food to shove into my car, to eat on the way. I made it to Nyack, New York, by nightfall. Six hundred miles the next day through the mild Dixie autumn, the sadness of southern scenes, melancholy for being overlooked, but familiar to me, like the face of an old friend for the two years I had spent driving on the back roads for my book Deep South. Five hundred miles on my third day had me outside Montgomery, Alabama, microwaving noodles in my motel room late at night and watching a football game.

  From the supine, somnolent South, I headed to the Gulf, past Biloxi and Pascagoula and New Orleans, puddled with bayous, to Beaumont, Texas, where every motel, big and small, was filled with people who’d lost their homes in the recent hurricane. These were the displaced: shirtless youths and families sprawling in the lobbies, smokers conferring in the parking lot, not desperate but lost, pathetic, fatalistic, like doomsday refugees, a glimpse of what the end of the world will look like: poor, hungry people hunkered down in overcrowded motels with nowhere to go.

  Nearer Houston—the wide spot of Winnie (pop. 3,254)—well off the main road, I got a room and a drunken lecture from a motorcyclist who’d ridden there from Billings, Montana.

  “Billings, nice? Haw, no, it ain’t. But you say you’re going to the border? I was in Laredo once. Took the wrong damn road. Seen a sign up ahead ‘To Mexico’ and just swung my bike around—a U-turn on a one-way, the hell with the cops. I ain’t goin’ near that fucken place. Mexicans would steal my bike and fuck me up. No way am I going to cross that border.”

  All but toothless, tattooed, greasy hair, round-shouldered from hugging the handlebars of his Harley, leaning on his hog and swigging a beer in the motel parking lot, he was the toughest-looking man I had seen all week—streetwise, knowledgeable about flying saucers and chain saws and back roads, and familiar with life’s reverses. He had just picked up his son in a Montana prison (“He done a year and a half—it’ll follow him the rest of his life”), and he left me with the thought, “Driving into Mexico? You gotta be out of your mind, man. Don’t go thar! You’ll dah!”

  Another lesson: it’s a mistake to disclose that you’re passionate about going anywhere,
because everyone will give you ten reasons for not going—they want you to stay home and eat meatloaf and play with a computer, which is what they’re doing. I heard that refrain again in Corpus Christi the following day, bleary-eyed from the scrubby desert past Victoria and Refugio, having taken a wrong turn and asked for directions to McAllen at a filling station.

  A stout squinting man, another tough guy, but sober, gassing up his monster truck, whooped in discouragement, saying, “Do not cross at Brownsville. Do not cross at all, anywhere. The cartels will eyeball you, they’ll follow you. If you’re lucky, they’ll strand you by the side of the road and take your vehicle. If you’re unlucky, they’ll take your life. Stay away from Mex.”

  But curious to see the fence, I drove to the Rio Grande Valley, south to Harlingen, over to McAllen, and down Twenty-Third Street to International Boulevard and the frontier at Hidalgo, where the thing was obvious, ugly, and unambiguous. Marking the edge of our great land, it loomed behind a Whataburger stand, a flea market, and a HomeGoods store, an ugly steel fence you might associate with a prison perimeter, twenty-five feet high, like nothing I had seen in any other country. A Texas congressman had called it “an inefficient fourteenth-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem,” which was accurate because, like a medieval wall, it was merely a symbol of exclusion rather than anything practical, and easily climbed over or tunneled under. In an age of aerial surveillance and high-security technology, it was a blacksmith’s barrier of antiquated ironmongery: old rusty ramparts running for miles, a visible example of national paranoia.

  “They’re only killing ten people a day,” Jorge (“Call me George”), the waiter at the hotel breakfast in McAllen said, turning his cadaverous face on me.

  “That was in Juárez,” I said. “But I heard it’s calmer there now.”

  Tales of bloodthirsty Mexicans are as old as its earliest chroniclers, such as Francisco López de Gómara in his Hispania Victrix (1553), quoted by Montaigne in his essay “On Moderation,” mentioning how “all their idols are slaked with human blood.” But like many excitable commentators today, Gómara never traveled to Mexico, and all his information was secondhand and questionable. The same is true for Daniel Defoe, who in Robinson Crusoe (1719) wrote of Spanish “barbarities” as well as the “idolators and barbarians” they massacred in America for being “idolators . . . sacrificing human bodies to their idols.” Crusoe says, “The very name of Spaniards is reckoned to be frightful and terrible.”

  “And that lady who crashed,” Jorge added, wagging his finger, “because the corpse hanging from a bridge fell on her car.”

  “Tijuana,” I complacently observed. “And not recently.”

  “Those forty-three students who were kidnapped and killed in Guerrero.”

  “I get the point, George.”

  “Take a plane. Don’t drive.”

  “I’m crossing. That’s my plan.”

  “But why, in a car?”

  “Lots of reasons.”

  “Mucha suerte, señor.”

  “There Is No Business Without Terror”

  I put Jorge’s warning down to the conventional “Be careful,” a platitudinous formula all travelers hear when they set out—words that often sound to me empty, resentful, and envious, the sort of precaution that licenses the sullen stay-at-home slug to gloat at some point much later, “See, I told you so!”

  “Me vale madre,” I said to him, claiming I didn’t care, in a coarse Mexican way that made him laugh, then groan, then shake his head. He guessed I was foolhardy.

  And he was right, because really, I knew nothing, or very little, of the mayhem. Many people had been killed by cartel violence, everyone knew that, but the brutal facts and particularities had eluded me. Or maybe I had ignored them so that I would not allow myself to be deterred in my trip. What I am writing here is all hindsight. The simple statistic, for example, is that more than 200,000 people have been killed or have disappeared since December 2006, when Mexico’s government declared war on organized crime. I did not know, when I set out early in 2017, that in the first ten months of that year there had been 17,063 murders in Mexico, and Ciudad Juárez had recorded an average of one a day—more than 300 when I set out, because the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels were vying for dominance in the city, in a turf war to control the drug trade. By the end of 2017, Mexico would record 29,168 murders, the majority of them cartel related.

  And in Reynosa, just over the border from McAllen, Texas, where I was standing, oblivious of all this, the violence was chronic, the streets dangerous with crossfire from sudden bloody skirmishes—kidnappings and murders—and a tactic that had become common, the narcobloqueo, a roadblock made of hijacked vehicles, sometimes set on fire, to serve as a barricade to protect narcos under siege by the police or army. “Reynosa Dawns with Narcobloqueos, Persecutions and Shootings” (“Reynosa amanece con narcobloqueos, persecuciones y balaceras”) was a headline on the Proceso website at the time of another of my crossings, in May 2018, but I missed the article and all I saw in Reynosa were checkpoints manned by heavily armed police and black-masked soldiers in dark, boxy armored trucks.

  Reynosa was now one of the most violent cities in Mexico because of a cartel power vacuum, the result of the Mexican army’s success in locating and killing two Gulf cartel bosses: Julián Loiza Salinas (“Comandante Toro”), in April 2017; and the following year, the murder by government troops of Humberto Loza Méndez (“Betito”) with three others, in Reynosa, created greater chaos and more infighting.

  Beginning in Reynosa, Los Zetas, who served as enforcers in the armed wing of the Gulf cartel, had been inspired to form their own cartel, and the Zetas gloried in being merciless. Most were deserters from the Mexican army’s special forces, who had turned on their officers and decided to use their killing skills to make real money as sicarios, hit men. This fighting in the streets of Reynosa resulted in as many as four hundred deaths from May 2017 to January 2018, when I was passing back and forth, bumping along Reynosa’s side streets and potholed roads in a car with conspicuous license plates lettered Massachusetts—The Spirit of America.

  I had been beguiled by Reynosa’s facade—its picturesque plaza, its handsome church and friendly shop owners, its good restaurants and taco stands and flourishing market, the sight of schoolchildren in uniforms, carrying book bags. It took several visits to see what lay behind this convincing display of jaunty Mexicanismo: the back streets, the lurking small-time drug sellers known as narcomenudistas near the slums and shantytowns at the city’s edge, the starved barking dogs, the roadblocks—armored vehicles side by side—manned by scowling soldiers with assault rifles and jumpy-looking but heavily armed police, most of them masked so that they could not be identified, ambushed, and murdered later by vindictive hit men.

  Mexican gangs reflect Mexican politics, Mexican states, Mexican geography, and the texture of Mexican life in general, el mundo Mexico. They have too many aspects and moods for anyone to nail it down. The gang violence is not just the government against the cartels, but the cartels against each other, complicated by ideological splits within the same cartel—ideological in a broad and brutal sense, meaning the side devoted to beheadings being opposed to the side that practiced disemboweling or amputating hands and feet, or hanging bodies from lampposts, or migrant intimidation and enslavement, or the newer tactic of scattering bodies on city streets, as happened when Joaquín Guzmán’s goons pushed thirty-five bloody corpses (twelve of them women) off two trucks on Manuel Ávila Camacho Boulevard, near a shopping mall in the prettier part of the port city of Veracruz one day in September 2011, to terrorize their adversaries and show them who was boss. The lack of control by a single cartel meant many contending mobsters and more violence than ever.

  Mutilations send a message. A severed tongue indicates someone who blabbed too much, and because dedo (finger) is a euphemism for traitor (“He fingered that guy”), the corpse of a betrayer will have a missing finger. And more, as a forensic patholo
gist elaborates in Ed Vulliamy’s Amexica, the definitive book on the borderland cartels: “Severed arms could mean that you stole from your consignment, severed legs that you tried to walk away from the cartel.” Beheadings are an unambiguous “statement of power, a warning to all, like the public executions of old.”

  And why such bloody competition among the cartels? Because a successful Mexican drug gang can generate an annual profit calculated in the billions of dollars. The more enterprising cartels reinvest the money in infrastructure. Before he was captured the second time, Guzmán, known as El Chapo (Shorty) for his small stature, ran the largest airborne operation in Mexico; he owned more aircraft than Aeromexico, the national airline. Between 2006 and 2015, Mexican authorities seized 599 aircraft—586 planes and 13 helicopters—from the Sinaloa cartel; by comparison, Aeromexico had a piddling fleet of 127 planes. El Chapo’s flights (and he claimed to own submarines, too) mostly serviced the drug habits of Americans, who are the world’s largest consumers of illicit drugs, spending more than $100 billion a year on cocaine (including crack), heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamines smuggled across the border, according to a 2014 RAND Corporation report.

  Two former allies in the Zetas were themselves rivals now, the Vieja Escuela Zeta (Old School Z) fighting with the Cartel del Noreste (Northeast) faction for control of the main human trafficking and drug routes. What made the Zetas dangerous and unreadable was not only their vicious methods of killing, but also that they were untethered to any one region—unusual for gangsters in Mexico, where villains tended to make trouble in their own territory or on specific routes or plazas. Plaza, in narco-speak, means turf that is valuable for trafficking. Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana are regarded as coveted plazas, thus the mayhem there. The Zetas were everywhere, people said, even in Sinaloa, where they were at war with the Sinaloa cartel, fragmented and in disarray after the arrest of El Chapo. In Amexica, Vulliamy quotes a knowledgeable businessman in McAllen saying, “As things are, Los Zetas and the cartels are infiltrating the US side—they’re in Houston, they’re in New York City, they’re all over the Indian reservations.”