To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  “Everyone knows who owned the body shop,” Alma Trinidad said. “If you ask the ice cream man, ‘Hey, who owns that car shop where they killed those nine people?’ he’ll tell you. The attorney general seems to be the only one who doesn’t know. That’s Culiacán. The supposed owner was just a name on paper. The real owner is another, a real heavy other. They say that the killers went to heat up his territory.”

  At first she pronounced the name in public protests and interviews with the press until someone suggested she omit that one detail. Now she says, “You can’t say his name here. You can’t name him.”

  And yet everyone knows. There is even a narco-corrido about Macho Prieto’s proclaimed pain and suffering upon learning of the massacre and his commitment to vengeance. The song, La mente en blanco (My Mind is Blank) by Voz de Mando (Voice of Command), can be heard on YouTube. Here are a few key verses from the lyrics:

  My mind is blank

  They have touched my blood

  I can barely hold back the tears

  The damage is irremediable.

  […]

  How my blood boils

  It hurts what they did to me

  They will pay for their treason

  They will have to deal with this

  I am enraged

  Why did they provoke me

  I’m already in the ring

  They killed innocent people

  Who were not involved

  And for this they will pay.

  […]

  I am ready for combat

  I have the highest-quality weapons

  More than 300 people

  Are under my command

  With anti-tank guns, bazookas,

  Bulletproof vests and AK-47s

  To fuck them up

  There will be no peace

  I am not a traitor.

  I am Mayo’s blood [Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a leader of the Sinaloa Cartel]

  With the boy [El Mayo’s son, Vicente] I remain firm

  I hang in Culiacán

  Where I was born

  And where I’ll die

  I’ve got all my boys

  And we’re well armed

  Do not forget this

  I am Gonzalo

  My code is The Eleven

  I am Macho Prieto

  The song makes clear that the attack was against Macho Prieto, though the gunmen also killed innocent people. But it is just a song. It is not an official government document in the case file of a homicide investigation. In said case file the name Gonzalo Inzunza Inzunza, El Macho Prieto, does not appear.

  And yet Alma Trinidad wants to know why not. She wants to know why the homicide investigators cannot find the supposed owner of the Mega 2000, and why they aren’t looking for the real owner. She wants to know why five federal police vehicles were being repaired at a body shop owned by a high-level Sinaloa Cartel hit man. She wants to know who took those federal police vehicles there for repair and who authorized that repair.

  The investigators do not want to know these things. They want the federal anti-organized crime investigative unit, the SIEDO, to take the case off their hands and make it go away.

  “Look Ma’am, the truth,” the investigators told Alma Trinidad, “we’ll tell you, we’re scared to get involved on this one.”

  “Is that so?” she responded. “Well, kid, if you’re scared, what are you doing here? Why don’t you go look for another profession that doesn’t scare you? Leave this to someone who has the courage to actually do the work. Because if you’re just sitting here acting stupid so they’ll pay you. . . .”

  “No, Ma’am, you don’t understand.”

  “Oh, yes I do, I do understand.”

  “No, you don’t know. You haven’t gone out to where the body shop was and seen the cars that are parked outside there.”

  “Well, if you know those cars are there, why don’t you do something about it?”

  Alma Trinidad knows the answer. Yes, they are afraid, but that is not the full reason.

  “The authorities are good for nothing,” she told me. “But I would also say they are involved, because how else can you explain that two years have gone by and they’ve done nothing? For them it’s ‘They already killed your son; now go home and cry.’ Why? Why do we have to do that? If that’s the case then they should leave too. If they are so useless, they should get out of here.”

  And yet she finds the same response everywhere she goes. The judges in charge of the case told her early on, “Don’t get your hopes up.” But she continues.

  She and César went to the state office for victims of violent crime. They had an appointment with the staff psychologist. The waiting room was empty. When the psychologist came out and ushered them into her office she said, “Let’s make this quick, because it’s not free. And no tears.” She then gave them a food basket with cooking oil and rice, valued at about ten dollars. Alma Trinidad looked the psychologist in the eyes and said, “You know, if you actually helped people the line would stretch out this building and down to Obregón Avenue. But people must know that you are useless and that’s why you’re alone here.” She and César left and sought help from a private psychologist.

  She filed a complaint with the Sinaloa State Human Rights Commission. The result?

  “The State Human Rights Commission forged my signature on a document officially closing my case as resolved, as if I had been fully informed and in agreement that they close it,” she said.

  The state human rights workers forged her signature? I asked her what happened next.

  “Nothing,” she answered. “Nothing happened. Here in Sinaloa nothing happens. Come on, they kill us and nothing happens, what’s going to happen with a forged signature?”

  Once when she went to review her son’s case file the homicide detective said, “Ma’am, we’ve now identified the weapons that killed your son in the workshop.” It turns out that those same weapons have been used in another twenty-plus crimes and killed more than sixty other people.

  Alma Trinidad was not impressed. “How can you not be ashamed to tell me that? How can you not be ashamed? What do I gain with you having identified the weapons if you haven’t arrested the killers? They’re out there killing and killing. What are you waiting for, for them to show up and kill someone here? Or what are you waiting for? How is it possible that you know they are out there killing and killing and you don’t go arrest them?”

  For Alma Trinidad learned, through her dogged reading of case files—which as the relative of a murder victim she has full access to under Mexican law—that the authorities actually know the names and addresses of her son’s killers. In one of the sworn testimonies in another unsolved homicide case involving the same weapons, the brother of a murder victim testified who the killers are and where they live. No arrest warrant has been issued for these gunmen; no homicide detective has gone to pay them a visit, ask them a few questions.

  “There is no law here,” she told me, “Culiacán is a place without law. Or rather, there is law for the highest bidder, for whoever can pay the most. Justice for the highest bidder.”

  She knows this and still she demands that those who speak in the name of the law do their jobs.

  Alma Trinidad together with other mothers of other young people gunned down in the streets formed a nonprofit organization called Voices United for Life (Voces Unidas por la Vida) to demand justice for their children. In one case the attorney general claimed that the young man in question had committed suicide.

  “They said that he killed himself,” she said. “They found him wrapped in a blanket and black tape, and the boy committed suicide. I mean, they think people are dumb. They think people are stupid, that they are dealing with people as idiotic as they are, because you can’t describe them any other way. Come on, they say that the boy committed suicide when someone had thrown him in a canal wrapped in a blanket and electrical tape. Suicide. The boy shot himself, wrapped himself up, and threw himself into
a canal. Yes. Just like that. Really.”

  She and the other women began to march, hold rallies and protests in front of state and municipal government buildings, and every two weeks go there to demand progress in their investigations. “Even if we just go to say hello, because they never have any new leads in the case, never have done any work, we don’t stop going. Every two weeks.”

  They spent two years requesting an interview with Sinaloa governor Jesús Alberto Aguilar Padilla before his office granted them a meeting. “We thought that if we were able to speak directly with him, then perhaps things would change a little bit, that they would do something about catching the criminals. But now we see that no. We had the meeting and things are exactly the same.”

  They requested a meeting with the famed senator Rosario Ibarra de Piedra. Ibarra de Piedra became an activist in 1974 when federal agents “disappeared” her son, Jesús Piedra Ibarra, who was accused of being a member of the urban guerrilla group Communist League of September 23. In 1977, Ibarra de Piedra founded the Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, the Persecuted, the Disappeared, and Exiles, known as Comité ¡Eureka!. Ibarra de Piedra was an icon of resistance to the PRI regime and fought for years against the official cover-up of those killed and disappeared during Mexico’s repression of both armed and unarmed protest movements in the 1970s. In 2006, Ibarra de Piedra became a senator under the Mexican system of assigning a certain number of seats in the senate and chamber of deputies based on the number of seats won in the election. So Alma Trinidad and her colleagues saved up, scrambled to get a week off from their jobs and from the chores of their homes, and traveled to Mexico City. Ibarra de Piedra received them in her office, gave them the numbers of her legal team, and said good-bye. When the mothers of Voices United for Life called the numbers, they received only two alternating kinds of advice; leave a message or call back later.

  “Well, we thought of Rosario Ibarra de Piedra as a mother,” Alma Trinidad said, “because she lived through a situation similar to ours, they disappeared her son, we thought she would help us, but no. And so we understood that the lady is no longer a mother; now she is a senator.”

  So much rejection, so many closed doors, so many months and then years that go by with nothing to show for their efforts. “It is demoralizing,” she said, “And I think they do it with this in mind. They want people to see that there are no possibilities. They want them to go off and stop looking for justice. Why should people go on if the authorities will do nothing? It is very difficult; it is not easy at all.” Several of the other women in the group, in fact, have started to pull away; they do not want to go on.

  Alma Trinidad goes on. On the two-year anniversary of the Mega 2000 massacre she held a rally in Culiacán’s main square. She printed a black banner with dozens of names in white: all innocent people gunned down in the drug war in Culiacán. She baked a three-tiered black cake with red candles and called it the Impunity Cake, for the only thing the government has given them to celebrate, she said, is impunity for the killers.

  Some people tell her that she should give up too, for her own safety, and that anyway, “God will do justice one day.” To this her response is vehement.

  “Well, what do we want justice on Earth for, then? If we’re just going to sit around and wait for justice in heaven, then what do we want these good-for-nothings here for?” she says of the detectives and lawyers, judges, state psychologists and human rights commissioners, senators and governors, attorney generals and presidents, people who cash their paychecks in the name of justice on Earth. “Well, even if all is lost, I’m going to make their lives impossible.”

  Here is the genius of Alma Trinidad’s rebellion in the land of impunity: where everyone tells her justice is impossible, she says okay, then I will continue to insist on justice, and in so doing make your life impossible. That spirit is what hope looks like in a place where murder is the local, everyday by-product of the global industry that caters to people who get high.

  Alma Trinidad’s rebellion began on the day of her son’s murder. She rebelled against the mutilation of her son. She refused to look at Cristóbal, to identify him, see him in the morgue, or see him in the coffin. Not after what they did to him. She refused to let the bullets tear into her son’s tender 16-year-old face a second time, in her memories. The gunman, possibly the same age or only a few years older than Cristóbal, had shot him through the hand, which apparently Cristóbal had extended to stop the bullets in a desperate last clinging to life. The gunman then shot him at close range in the face and head, with high-caliber bullets, the impact of which can lift your body in the air and toss it to the ground. César had failed to notice at first due to the way Cristóbal had fallen and then finally collapsed. When he went to lift him up, he saw.

  “I didn’t want to see Cristóbal,” Alma told me. “I wanted to remember him as he was. I felt that if I looked at him as he had been left, that I would have been worse, that I would have gone crazy. I think it is the best thing I could have done. Now my son comes into my mind with a smile, as he was, a beautiful boy. That’s how I remember him.”

  THREE

  The city belongs to them.

  —Rafael

  BEFORE THE COMANDANTE SAID, “Take these guys and ice ’em,” before they put a black hood over his head and closed the doors, before they forced him down and placed the barrel of a 9mm pistol against the back of his head, before that moment, Rafael still had hope. And hope is everything.

  Everyone was talking about Reynosa, the city of half a million people across the border from McAllen, Texas. There were tales of roadblocks and gun battles, tales of executions, of bodies in the streets. It was February 2010 and gun battles, executions, and dumped bodies had become the norm in many parts of Mexico. Something different was happening in Reynosa. All the talking took place inside a chamber of silence. There were no official statements, no local news reports, and no national or international correspondents on the scene, no photographs, no radio interviews, no documentation, only talk. A friend said the city was under siege. A friend of a friend said people were afraid to go outside. Someone heard that the schools were empty; parents terrified that their children would get caught in the crossfire on their way to school were keeping them at home. In late February 2010 the U.S. Consulate in Reynosa closed its office until further notice. Reynosa residents anonymously posted accounts of gun battles on Twitter. Everyone was talking about Reynosa, but the talk was all off camera, off the record. The governor of Tamaulipas said that “collective paranoia” was to blame. A woman then posted a video recorded with her cell phone to YouTube. Off camera the woman said, “The government says it is paranoia.” The video showed two lifeless bodies, shot-up SUVs, hundreds of bullet casings on the pavement, deserted streets and stores, and in the distance Mexican soldiers standing by. A reporter told me that the woman was later dragged from her home and killed.

  Rafael is not given to paranoia. At 30 he carries himself with an unusual air of sustained concentration. When you speak with him, you can see him thinking. He works for Milenio TV in Mexico City and is an exhaustive reporter. He is in Monterrey, Mexico’s northern financial capital and the city where he earned an undergraduate degree in journalism and worked for several years. He is on vacation; his mobile phone rings, and he answers. His boss is on the line and says, “You know what, man, there have been a bunch of shoot-outs in Reynosa, but nobody knows what’s going on. We want you to head over there and document what you can.”

  Rafael takes a bus to Reynosa. On the way into town the bus stops at a police roadblock. Several officers board the bus and scan the passengers. The only person they speak to is Rafael.

  “Identification, please.”

  Rafael hands them his ID and press credentials. He thinks, “Why just me? Is it the way I look?”

  The police hand him back his ID and press card, get off the bus, and wave it on.

  The bus pulls into the station and Rafael is gathering his bags when
his cell rings.

  “Rafa, are you in Reynosa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Um, well, we want to let you know that Multimedios has a problem there in Reynosa,” says his boss. Multimedios is Milenio TV’s parent company. “There seems to be a cameraman on staff there who works for . . . the bad guys. We just wanted to give you the tip so you can take precautions.”

  Rafael hangs up. He knew he was traveling into a place controlled by the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, but he thought he could at least count on the national media company he works for to provide support and contacts via the office in Reynosa. Not so. He calls the Milenio news director in Reynosa, a friend whom he knows to be an honest reporter, and says, “Hey, I’m at the bus station. Come pick me up.”

  In the car they talk. The news director says things are very heavy here. Milenio, along with the other news outlets, he says, has published next to nothing about it. The cartels control the local media. Not all reporters are on the take, but those who are honest are terrified. Drug lords impose censorship with cash, fear, or death, but whichever way it’s done, it is absolute. What cannot be said is never said. The news director confirms that the cameraman in question works for a cartel. Milenio has sent a cameraman from Mexico City who will be arriving at the Reynosa airport shortly. Rafael decides not to work out of the Reynosa office. He decides to stay at a different hotel each day.

  Rafael has not accepted the reign of censorship. His editor sent him to Reynosa to document what he can. He is a reporter and that is what he has come to do. He is not careless, nor fearless. He does not have a death wish. He is not an adrenaline junky. He is a measured person. He is not a war correspondent; he has never been to a war zone. But now his editors have sent him to report on gun battles that no one else is covering. And he plans to do so. But he is not stupid. He knows that you cannot be seen reporting on a gun battle, you cannot stand on a street corner with your camera running. If you do that you will be shot dead if you’re lucky, taken off and put through hideous torture and then killed if you’re not.