The Vargas family broke its silence in late August 2008, hanging an enormous five-story banner over Paseo de la Reforma, featuring a photo of Silvia and a toll-free number. PLEASE GIVE ME BACK MY DAUGHTER SILVIA the banner read. YOU SHALL BE REWARDED. They were determined to make the case of their missing daughter a public matter.
Days later, Vargas called his first press conference. He wept uncontrollably before a wall of news cameras. He pleaded with investigators and the news media to do everything possible to locate Silvia. It had been months of agonizing silence for his family, he said. They followed all the instructions given to them by Silvia’s kidnappers, and then one day, the family just stopped hearing from them. While Miss Escalera, long separated from Nelson Vargas, was reserved in her press appearances, Mr. Vargas allowed his grief to be a painfully open affair. Here was a grown, gray-haired, distinguished bureaucrat weeping and cursing his way through the intolerable nightmare of having a daughter snatched away from him. The press was riveted.
Vargas—who has bushy, gray eyebrows and wears thin spectacles, and almost always appears in public in a suit and tie—was then featured on the cover of the high-society glossy Quién, or Who, alongside the quoted words “I am dead in life.” This was unusual for a magazine that normally publishes puffy profiles on prominent politicians or celebrities. The piece on Vargas included photos of Silvia as a small girl, taking swimming lessons, along with revelations by Vargas that he had three meetings with President Calderón himself over the case, as well as numerous face-to-face interviews with the public security secretary and the attorney general. “I have access to that,” he told the magazine. “But imagine those who don’t, they are truly screwed.”
Vargas added, “Society has no idea how much evil can exist in this country. We are inhuman.”
As summer and fall wore on, little progress was made in locating Silvia, but her name remained in the news. By October, Nelson Vargas, apparently frustrated with the pace of the official investigation, called yet another press conference. This time he presented the findings of his investigation into his daughter’s case, which implicated his family’s former driver, Oscar Ortiz González, in the kidnapping. González’s brother was a member of a kidnapping gang known as Los Rojos, or the Reds. Vargas told reporters he had alerted the authorities about the connection but was essentially told to butt out. At the press conference, the grieving father vented his rage. “The authorities have told us that we have nothing that may lead us to Silvia. If this is nothing, a man who worked for almost two years for our family, who we know is related to a gang that has already made abductions, that’s not having anything? That’s not having a mother!”
You could almost feel a ripple of scandal sweep over the city after Vargas’s outburst. In essence, he called the investigators motherless bastards—an especially emphatic slur in mother-obsessed Mexico. To the public, a grim truth emerged. For all his connections to friends in high places, for all his public pleas, Nelson Vargas was powerless to save his daughter. Her rescue was completely out of his control. And in the hands of Mexican law enforcement, the case was more or less a lost cause. We had all known this since the beginning. That is the sad part. Where it gets weird, I realize, is in the collective response, the way the psychosis of the Mexican elite can play out in the public sphere, trickling down into our brains.
The trend—if it can be called that—started a few weeks before the Silvia Vargas case went public. Another well-connected member of Mexican society, Alejandro Martí, owner of the Martí chain of sporting-goods stores, went to the press with his family’s kidnapping nightmare. His fourteen-year-old son, Fernando, had been picked up in early June, along with his driver, at what was described as a false checkpoint set up by men posing as members of a high-level Mexican investigative agency, the AFI. Weeks later, the boy’s decomposing body was found in the trunk of a car parked on a street in a tough southern D.F. neighborhood. His family had already paid the kidnappers as much as $6 million for the young Martí’s return, according to one report. Adding to the outrage, subsequent arrests in the case indicated the chief suspects behind the Martí kidnapping were federal police officers. The revelations proved so shocking that President Felipe Calderón himself attended an evening mass in honor of the young Fernando Martí. The president sat in the front pews beside the stricken Martí parents, accompanied by First Lady Margarita Zavala.
This made me a little sick to my stomach. The president’s appearance at the Martí funeral was meant to signal to the Mexican public that the executive and his primera dama are concerned about the awful kidnappings and killings of children in Mexico and are committed to doing something about it. But this was apparently more urgent now that the elite were becoming so public about their plight. Which begs the question, as Nelson Vargas himself imagines in his glossy magazine interview, What about those who are not rich and famous, those who do not have a platform on which to transmit their case? The missing are ever present in Mexico. Missing-person signs adorn the public-announcement panels in metro stations and government buildings like flapping black-and-white sheets of wallpaper. But where are the public and political displays of empathy for thousands of nonwealthy families who are suffering the same nightmare? Where are the cameras and heads of state at those funerals?
In the days after Silvia Vargas’s body was found, this discrepancy was overlooked by just about everyone. The Martí and Vargas names, and Silvia Vargas’s innocent face, saturated our visual landscape. The media continued to stoke the flames of selective outrage. Anger swelled. New groups on Facebook channeled it: “ENOUGH! No More Violence in Mexico,” “For a Secure Mexico,” “Let’s Make an Anti-Kidnapping Squad,” “Yes to the Death Penalty for Kidnappers and Killers,” and the darkly humorous “I Don’t Put My Photo on Facebook for Fear of the Kidnappings.”
As he mourned the loss of his son, Alejandro Martí took his considerable assets and connections and transformed himself into a high-profile antikidnapping activist, speaking before lawmakers and government panels. He founded SOS, a civil group meant to lobby for solutions to the kidnapping wave. But he was not alone. Members of the general public began joining him in taking a stand. Some began calling for capital punishment for convicted kidnappers. Joining the chorus was the Mexican Green Party, a move that critics in the left called cynical and politically motivated.
In this atmosphere Martí and his supporters called for a massive march in Mexico City against “inseguridad,” in August 2008. On a cool night, under a purple sky, tens of thousands of people clad in white clothing marched from the Angel of Independence monument to the Zócalo. They held candles in memory of the victims of Mexico’s crime wave. I wandered around the plaza, listening, looking at posters, signs, and photographs of the missing. A middle-aged architect named Juan Manuel in a plain shirt and jeans told me he has been held up twice recently. “The authorities need to see how many people are upset by this,” he said, holding on to his ten-year-old daughter. Before, he added, “You could walk at any hour of night, houses didn’t have bars on their windows. Even the muggers were more decent, in some form.”
“What can be done?” I asked.
Juan Manuel paused. He searched the plaza with his eyes. “What can you expect if the police themselves are involved?”
I ran into a friend named Jorge, a D.F. native who has an office job in a foreign embassy. I was surprised to see him at the inseguridad march. Ordinarily Jorge is a fun-loving, joke-telling person I see at bars or parties. Tonight he looked furious, and a little nasty. I approached him and said hello. “Enough, enough, enough,” Jorge was saying to the person standing next to him. “We’ve had enough.”
We chatted. “What can be done?” I asked.
“Death penalty,” Jorge said flatly, his eyes locked upon me.
Mumbling a good-bye, I backed away. I felt as if I were entering a twilight zone. Around us, people holding small Mexican flags were chanting in unison, “Pena de muerte! Pena de muerte! Pena de muerte!�
� as if “Death penalty!” were a college sporting cheer. I began feeling claustrophobic—more so than usual when the Zócalo is choked with protesters. It was not the crush of people that was making me panic at the moment, it was the type of people on the plaza. I looked around. I noticed a certain class stature to the demonstrators. People were in white, as planned, but it is mostly what I’d call designer white. Chanel, Gap, Dockers. Shopping-mall white. A goodly amount of these marchers were taller and paler than the average Mexican, a characteristic that is difficult not to notice in a Centro so identified with its poorer, more racially mixed residents. Several homemade signs openly blamed leftist mayor Marcelo Ebrard for the spike in crime. Demanding answers, they chanted the exact message that teary-eyed, white-haired Alejandro Martí transmitted to authorities as he buried his fourteen-year-old son: “If you can’t do it, resign! If you can’t do it, resign! If you can’t do it, resign!” Do what, exactly, was never made clear. I wonder who would take the place of resigning politicians unable to magically obliterate the criminal threats. More politicians?
As I struggled to make it out of the plaza, it hit me: Most of these marchers must be conservatives, National Action voters, PAN people. These had to be panistas, people who in a lasting stereotype live in walled mansions and rarely travel away from their guarded neighborhoods, people who read Reforma. With their slogans and signs, the marchers did not aspire to anything beyond seeking revenge or justice for their particular cases. These are Mexicans who insist on wearing class blinders.
There was virtually no discussion in the inseguridad protest movement of the need to address or tackle the root causes behind the kidnapping wave. No talk of the crippled public education system, which almost guarantees a dead-end path for millions of young people. No talk of the corrupt and stagnant justice system and its army of police officers who are so severely underpaid and undertrained they see taking petty bribes as a necessary slice of their monthly income. And certainly, no talk of an economic and tax structure that overwhelmingly benefits large companies and the extremely wealthy, leaving millions of working-age men and women on the margins of Mexico’s development and with no other option but to flee for work in the United States—or to stay in Mexico and join a gang of pirating, extorting, drug-smuggling, kidnapping criminals.
In Mexico’s cycle of corruption, marginalization, and crime, its actors were oblivious to the social inequalities that breed criminals and criminality and to the instincts of greed and self-preservation that perpetually feed the cycle with new victims. Standing in the Zócalo that day, watching the protest, I wondered if it will ever be broken. I wondered if we will ever stop feeding ourselves sad tales of the Silvia Vargas variety. And I wondered what purpose those tales truly fulfill.
The Panteón Francés San Joaquín is known for services with prices that guarantee a certain uniform pedigree among the interred. The decaying, old mausoleums inside are laid out in orderly concourses, offering a parade of names that have had their hand in shaping contemporary Mexico. Familia Haddad Asha, Familia Nader Carrillo, Familia Julian Slim, Familia Dessafiaux Sánchez. It is a week since Silvia Vargas’s body was found. I arrive in time for the mass of the ashes in her memory, following in a couple holding hands and dressed in white to a large stone chapel in the middle of the cemetery, Capilla Lorraine. Mourners have been gathering since morning. President Calderón stopped by before noon.
The mass inside is officiated by Father Mario Contreras Martínez and is broadcast from speakers directed at the outdoors, as though overflow crowds were expected. But the only people outside are members of the press and a few curious passersby. Every so often someone strolls out of the chapel in sunglasses to get some air or to walk a restless child. I merge with the reporters behind a grape-colored velvet rope that marks an indistinct boundary between the press and the mourners. I sit on a curb, shielding my eyes from the sun with a notebook. Photographers angle for a useful shot. Radio reporters toy with their equipment. More than anything else, the reporters around me seem bored.
A Milenio scribe is sitting beside me. “Here we are again,” he says gruffly under his breath. “And we will be here again, and again, and again. In six months,” he adds, standing up to stretch, “I’ll see you here again for the same kind of story.” He whistles. “The truth is, it’s embarrassing, man.”
The high valley sun shines hard and bright, maximizing the visual effect of the mourners’ attire. Except for a woman dressed in purple and gold and a few men who wear jeans or track suits, all the mourners are dressed in white, just as the Vargas family requested. Many wear it from head to toe. White loafers, white sundresses, white dress pants on the men and women. The reporters and onlookers outside watch in silence. I am struck by a sensation that the mourners are fundamentally alien to us, with their unshowy yet self-conscious markers of wealth: jewelry, heavy makeup, oversize $1,000 sunglasses. The fully assured gait of privilege of Mexico’s rich, even in mourning, unattainable behind the purple velvet rope.
It sounds like a beautiful mass. There is music, prayer, reading of Scripture, and a poem read by Silvia’s mother. When the priest bids the mourners to “go in peace,” many more people emerge from the chapel than I imagined were inside. Some immediately light cigarettes. Fashionable women gather in clumps, talking on cell phones. Young men stand in groups talking. One teen with intensely curly yellow hair and rosy red cheeks catches my eye as he walks briskly out. He is clearly rattled by the service and disappears into the passenger seat of an SUV, a stone-faced driver behind the wheel. I am thinking about Silvia Vargas, wondering if in her life she ever went to the funerals of kidnapping victims.
A few media celebrities catch the attention of the waiting reporters, who rush to capture their reactions. One is the track athlete Ana Guevara, a silver medalist in the 400 meters at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, and recently an officer in the national sports commission along with Nelson Vargas. The Olympian, with her pronounced features and baritone voice, is a favorite of reporters in Mexico looking for a juicy quote. Guevara wears a tight-fitting white suit and a white turtleneck underneath. Video cameras, microphones, and tape recorders crowd around her face. I duck into the huddle and crouch near Guevara’s left leg, balancing a small recorder upward.
“Ana,” a male voice calls. “You’re a public official. In whose hands is the city, in the hands of the delinquents or the authorities?”
“In the hands of the authorities,” Guevara says firmly. “But I repeat, many of these things shouldn’t be happening, and they wouldn’t happen if there was more citizen participation.”
“Who is failing?” asks a female journalist.
“There are failures on both sides,” Guevara answers. “So many theories are out there, that it’s coming from inside the prisons if it is gangs, that it’s coming from inside the very government or the authorities. What has happened here should really open our eyes. We’ve seen two stories in these past months of well-known families, distinguished figures from the business community, that have made a lot of noise. But what about the families also that don’t count with the economic means, what about the families who remain with a permanent complaint, still waiting for an answer, for the bodies of their loved ones?”
I move away. Everyone here is playing his or her role: media, mourner, politician. Since the case broke, I had believed that I could separate myself from the frenzy of coverage on the Silvia Vargas kidnapping and not be engulfed by it, but here I am, both covering the story and wearing white myself. I had told myself while getting dressed this morning that a white shirt might better my chances of getting inside the Panteón Francés San Joaquín in the event that access was restricted. The rationalization is now unconvincing. I am unwittingly a party to the mourning and to the media storm. The kidnapping story has kidnapped me.
Reporters are now preparing for the golden shot at the front of the Capilla Lorraine. We move back to our proper place behind the purple velvet rope. The family spokeswoman has informed us t
hat the Vargas family will come out and release a flock of white pigeons. There is to be no formal statement to the press. The stage is set. Videographers jostle into position. Given Nelson Vargas’s tendency for outbursts, every cameraman wants a choice shot. Momentary chaos. “If you’re not here working, then you should just go home,” one photographer proclaims out loud to no one in particular.
When the family and its closest friends finally emerge through the glazed-glass doors of the chapel, Nelson Vargas is among them. The old man seems calm and at peace as a cage full of white pigeons is placed before a gaggle of screeching toddlers, all dressed in white. Vargas makes an effort to acknowledge those who have closely followed his story, taken his photograph, called out questions.
“Thank you for your solidarity!” he calls to the reporters, raising an arm. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
The crowd of mourners behind him breaks into applause. When the cage is opened, most of the birds are too bewildered or undernourished to do much besides flap their wings. A few fly off only to land a couple meters away, near the media photographers. We dutifully keep documenting.
8 | The Delinquent Is Us
“I am a delinquent.” (Photo by the author.)
It’s back in the summer of 2005. I am visiting Mexico City from Los Angeles for a short vacation. I want to see friends that I miss. I take a day to visit the Uruzquieta family in Iztacalco, and that’s when I witness my first Mexico City street fight. It begins with a couple of guys after somebody who owes them money. It happens in the middle of the street, by the graffiti-scrawled gymnasium and soccer field in the middle of Colonia Zapata Vela. The fight is sloppy and rowdy, happening right in front of us as we visit the home of Don Alfredo’s brother around the corner. A few more young guys run toward the commotion and try to step in. Another one comes to defend the one in the middle of it. Whistling cascades down from the narrow concrete streets, and more men rush out of doorways and driveways and into the fray. In seconds the fight is a hollering brawl. We watch as a single police patrol cruiser rolls into the scene, turning on a lazy siren warning. The fight continues. We stand inside the house watching from the living-room window. The children are outside watching blankly from the covered driveway, as if this were television. The police officers finally catch on, leave their patrol car, and rush over.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 11
