On the Plain of Snakes Page 16

  “Give me fifty.”

  “Fifty pesos?”

  “Fifty dollars.”

  “I don’t have fifty dollars.” I took out my wallet. I had a twenty, some smaller bills, and a thickness of pesos. “Here,” I said, and offered him a twenty-dollar bill.

  Flicking it with his leather fingers, he said, “I want three hundred.”

  “You said fifty.”

  “It’s now three hundred.” His teeth were square and stained, his fat face pitted and crusted with badly healed acne scars.

  “What’s your name, sir?” I had found that sometimes that works to lower the temperature in a confrontation.

  He screamed, “Antonio! Three hundred dollars!”

  “Thank you, Antonio. I’m Paul.” He had not seen any of my papers, nor asked to examine my license. “I am visiting Mexico. I have a visa and a vehicle permit. I am a pensioner. I don’t have a job. I’m an old gringo—a gabacho. I’m not rich. I don’t have three hundred dollars to give you.”

  “You have cards in your wallet”—silly me for opening the thing. “Use the ATM machine.”

  “Not possible.”

  He was breathing hard. “Go to a bank!”

  “I can’t do that.” And the very idea of finding a bank in this squalid corner of Mexico City seemed laughable.

  This provoked him to shouting, untranslatable fury, and I thought: He has the gun, the cuffs, the truncheon. He is the law. He can arrest me on any charge, or invent one. He can plant drugs on me. I can be locked up and lose my car.

  “Excuse me.” I got out of the car.

  He did not back away, he hovered, and now the bystanders who had lingered to gape hurried off a little distance and eavesdropped on the scene from behind piles of rubbish and the tenement fence.

  I went to the trunk of my car and, concealing my movements, slipped a fifty-dollar bill out of an envelope in my briefcase. I locked the trunk and handed him the fifty, the twenty, and some smaller bills.

  “I said three hundred!”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Get it! Go to a bank!”

  It was past four o’clock on a hot afternoon in a Mexico City slum, and though I was being browbeaten by a cop on a side road, the roar of traffic on the overpass beyond the ruined buildings was unnerving—the beeping, the banging. And the number of bystanders had grown, the poor people fascinated to see a gringo offering a cop the equivalent (in Mexico City, at the lowest level, which this neighborhood was) of an average worker’s three months’ salary—and the cop slapping it away. I was fascinated but anxious, because this crooked cop was someone to fear, the embodiment of what all Mexicans fear: corrupt authority.

  Meanwhile, I had gotten back into my car. I repeated that I was a pensionado and did not have the cash. He repeated that he wanted three hundred dollars, and his anger had not diminished, as with spittle on his discolored teeth he threatened me again with the corralón and the torture of endless litigation and documents.

  Why did I not hand over the three hundred? I had, under pressure, handed over bribes many times before. Nothing moves in India without a bribe, and bribes had been demanded of me in China, Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, and Turkey. As I was seated in a cubicle in the immigration office of Ngurah Rai Airport in Denpasar, Bali, a frowning man in a uniform loomed over me and said, “Give me what I want or I put you on the next plane to Kuala Lumpur.” (I gave him $120.) I’d had my wits about me in those places. But here I had become disoriented and somewhat irrational. I had forgotten the right answer. I was anxious, my senses assaulted, my heart fluttering, existing in a distorted reality in which time was suspended, as near to a surrealistic dream as I had ever experienced in travel.

  And more (as I concluded later): I was too fearful to change my story of not having the money; and, of course, I did not trust him. If I gave him three hundred, he would demand more. Nor was I smart enough to figure out that his shout of taking my car and putting it into a corralón was a common threat, often acted upon. I can do anything was worrying, but for the moment, in the blur of my fear, my numbness of mind, I was too slow to react, and I suppose it seemed to him like stubbornness.

  About fifteen or twenty minutes had passed—not a long time, normally, but a tortuous length of time in an intimidating interrogation endured in a back alley in a Mexico City slum.

  Finally, in frustration, he screamed, “Su billetera!”

  Wallet. I produced it.

  “Open it!”

  I opened it, and as I did, he put his stubby fingers in and took it all—the ninety or a hundred dollars, the thickness of pesos, perhaps two hundred altogether. He jammed it into his pocket.

  “I want a receipt, please,” I said.

  He obliged, because this was a usual thing, and even the thievish police have rules, preventing a second cop from shaking you down. He took a scrap of paper and wrote: XL-TOTAL. DF-OMEGA, and the date and time. He handed it to me and rode off.

  I sat quaking in my car for a while, and I was trembling and a bit breathless as I drove away. Stunned, in my delirium I took the wrong road. I kept driving, to calm myself, and I ended up two hours later on the road to Toluca, beyond the western edge of Mexico City. Because the cop had taken all my pesos, I could not use the toll road (cost: 40 pesos) that would have sped me back into the city.

  So I followed the line of dawdling cars in the traffic jams that led to my hotel, La Casona, in the Roma district, arriving six hours late.

  “I’m so ashamed,” the hotel owner said when I arrived and told him my story, which he listened to, clucking. His name was Rudi Roth, from a Swiss family, but born and educated in Mexico. Rudi was an adventurer who said he liked my books, but he was braver than me—a yachtsman who had sailed alone across the Atlantic, a pilot who had flown solo all over Mexico in his small plane. He had suffered a debilitating stroke just a few months before and was now confined to a wheelchair. Sympathetic, highly intelligent, and courageous, he became a good friend. “But this does not happen very often.” He was a cazador—a hunter.

  Yet it did, again, not far from the hotel. Headed three blocks away to find the apartment house where William Burroughs had lived in 1950, with twenty-eight-year-old Jack Kerouac as his pot-smoking houseguest (at work on an early version of On the Road), I turned into their street, Calle Medellín, and did not see the DIRECCIóN úNICA sign. I went perhaps fifteen feet into oncoming traffic and, promptly realizing my mistake, began to make a U-turn. As I was turning, a young policeman approached. He told me to wait. He beckoned another, older policeman, obviously his superior.

  The senior officer was armed and well built, and he spoke to me in reasonable tones.

  “You have broken the law,” he said. “This is a one-way street. I can take your car. I can put it in a corralón. You will need to pay a lot of money to retrieve it, and it will require special papers and an attorney. I could also arrest you for breaking the law. A fine would be involved. You must realize how serious this is.”

  I did not challenge him. This was perhaps an intimation of what many people of color in the United States experienced from arbitrary stops by some police. I did not say that I was a pensioner, an old gringo without a job, wandering in his wonderful country. I said, “Cómo podemos resolver esto?”

  He said, “Two hundred and fifty.”

  “Pesos?”

  “Dollars.”

  I went to my hidden stash of money. I counted twenties into his hand. When I got to $240, he said, “Two-forty, okay,” and stopped traffic so that I could complete my U-turn. And to my list of the inconveniences of life endured by Mexicans, I added: police.

  My experience with the police was a piddling example of corruption, but a good lesson. Mexicans acknowledge that the police force in many towns is staffed by narcos, who extort and murder with impunity. The historian and anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz has written that the Mexican state exists on bribery and coercion. In a brisk, persuasive essay Lomnitz suggested three causes for this cr
isis of corruption. The state was weakened and bankrupted in the nineteenth century by fighting small, costly wars with Spain, France, the United States, and with its own indigenous peoples. Mexico’s financial instability carried over into the twentieth century and beyond the Revolution of 1910.

  So how is the country sustained? By informal trade—folks working outside the law—that dominates as much as two-thirds of the Mexican economy, and its improvisational infrastructure. This involves minor infractions, on the whole, millions of them. “But informal economies can only be regulated with petty corruption—by police who are bribed to look the other way.” This corruption has become systemic, a way of doing business. Cops make money by shaking down anyone they can.

  The narrow tax base is the second cause of corruption. Mexico, like Saudi Arabia, essentially a petrocracy, survives because 30 percent of its tax revenue comes from one reliable source—Pemex, the national oil industry. Most people don’t pay tax, either because they are too poor or because they exist outside the system. “Such a narrow tax base fosters low levels of accountability.”

  “Mexico’s quagmire of impunity has also been affected by the American drug and gun control policies.” The border is historically lopsided, Lomnitz writes, describing the third reason. The US has criminalized the economy that services its vast appetite for drugs. This means that because Mexican law enforcement is weak and corrupt, “the temptation to outsource illegal activities is natural—even perfectly predictable.” Border traffic is stimulated, too, because guns are banned in Mexico but sold freely in the States. The consequence is that Mexico pays “a disproportionate share of the cost of the American gun and drug habits,” further weakening the state and creating paradoxes that are clearly apparent on the border.

  For example, in the year Ciudad Juárez had a higher murder rate than Baghdad, El Paso, just across the river, was ranked as the second-safest city in the US. “But where did Juárez’s drug gangs purchase their guns? El Paso. And where did the drugs that moved through Juárez end up? El Paso.”

  “You must be careful, Don Pablo,” Rudi Roth said at his hotel. “Mexico is surrealistic.”

  Gabriel García Márquez, who had lived not far from Rudi’s hotel, called Mexico City “Luciferian” and “as ugly a city as Bangkok.” Leonora Carrington, an English expat, writer, and surrealist painter, whose studio was four streets south in this Roma district, on Calle Chihuahua, once said, “I felt at home in Mexico, but as one does in a familiar swimming pool that has sharks in it.”

  Juan Villoro: The Massacre

  In the plaza in San Luis Potosí, the defiant woman, loudly denouncing the government for not investigating the murders of the forty-three students in Ayotzinapa, had acknowledged that the writer Juan Villoro had written extensively about the massacre. Villoro was my friend, and soon after arriving in Mexico City we had dinner to discuss the teaching I had promised to do.

  Tall, bearded, an athletic sixty-one, Villoro is one of Mexico’s most accomplished and respected writers, a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and journalist. He writes about books, sports, politics, and rock music. He has a weekly column in Reforma, Mexico’s largest newspaper, as well as a monthly column in Madrid’s El País. He explained his work ethic and his being prolific as the necessity of a freelance writer in Mexico. “To make a living we have to keep writing.”

  A modest man, he deferred questions about himself and told me about his father. Luis Villoro was born in Barcelona in 1920 and began his study of philosophy there. In the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, he moved to Belgium, where he continued his studies. Aware of the approaching shadow of World War II and the impending invasion of Belgium by Germany in 1940, he set his mind to emigrate to Mexico. Settled in Mexico City, he finished his degree in philosophy. He had written on Descartes, Wilhelm Dilthey (German philosopher, 1833–1911), Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, political and medieval philosophy, and the ingredients of ideology. A close observer of the people in Chiapas, he wrote the seminal book on the consciousness of indigenous people, The Major Moments of Indigenism in Mexico. One of his books on systems of belief has the untranslatable title Creer, Saber, Conocer. These are subtle variations on the Spanish verb “to know,” for which we have only one English word, with multiple shades of meaning.

  “An amazing man,” I said. “A great mind.”

  “With an eye for the ladies,” Juan said. “He had five wives. My mother was his first wife.”

  Juan was reluctant to talk about himself, but I had read his work and knew he was well read and widely traveled, and having lived and studied for periods in the United States, he spoke English with casual fluency, often using colloquialisms he picked up from his knowledge of rock music. The author of more than thirty books, he has won a number of literary awards, notably the prestigious Herralde Prize, for his novel El Testigo (The Witness). A collection of short stories, The Guilty, and a novel, The Reef, have appeared in translation.

  “Welcome,” he had emailed, when I told him I’d arrived and explained the circumstances. “You can always count on the Mexican police for an illegal surprise!”

  We met at La Casona—Rudi Roth was his friend and former schoolmate—and walked to a restaurant nearby called MeroToro. We shared the specialties, the hog jaw (quijada de cerdo) and the fettuccini with rabbit, and then—this being Mexico: tasty food, grisly murders—he told me about the fate of the students from Ayotzinapa.

  “I have to go back a bit and explain the school,” Juan said. “Lázaro Cárdenas, our best president, in the late 1930s, was deeply interested in education and encouraged the growth of rural schools. For many years we had escuelas normales, which were meant to prepare teachers to go to the countryside, to teach in these schools. In the beginning there were thirty or more escuelas normales, but these days there are only thirteen.”

  Now he smiled a grim smile and shook his head, so I asked the obvious question: “Why so few?”

  “The Mexican government began to close the schools for various reasons—in any case, rural schools are not a priority in this country. Teachers in the schools criticized the situation, because the reasoning behind the closures was so unfair.” He leveled his gaze at me and said with conviction, “The government, so corrupt.”

  Juan had impressed me in years past by speaking publicly of government corruption in Mexico, and had repeated the assertion in his newspaper columns. His straightforwardness, imaginatively set out, is but one reason to value Villoro’s work.

  “As a result of this government attitude, many rural teachers became social activists—and some even became guerrilleros, including some of the teachers and students at Ayotzinapa. This happened early. One teacher was Lucio Cabañas, who was kidnapped and killed. Another was Genaro Vázquez Rojas, who was also killed. Both of these murders were in the 1970s.”

  “What had they done to be singled out?” I asked.

  “They wished to change the rural schools, like the other teachers, and to liberalize education.” He smiled again, and a smile from Juan Villoro always seemed to introduce a contradiction. “But consider this. After 1968 there was a lot of rhetoric by the government calling for an open country. At the same time they were repressing social activists in the state of Guerrero.”

  “Why there exactly?”

  “The rural schools,” he said—implying new ideas, a kind of enlightenment. “Education in Mexico turns people into activists. They see problems. But in Mexico it’s very hard to find direct solutions to problems.”

  “You mean solutions arising from the government’s actions?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The idea is usually, ‘Let them solve it themselves. Give them time. Ignore them.’ Look at the Zapatistas. After all this time”—he meant since the uprising by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994—“they now have health, education, and welfare. They have created a country within a country.”

  It seemed he had gone off on a tangent, because he had started by saying that the escuelas no
rmales, which produced teachers for the rural schools, had become fewer and fewer. How had that happened?

  “Okay—there’s an unwritten law that if a school has no new students, the school has to be closed. ‘We have to close the school,’ they say. ‘There aren’t enough students to justify keeping them open.’”

  “But that makes sense. If there are no new students, why should the school be kept open?”

  Juan raised his hand in a cautioning way and said, “But why are there no new students? The reduced numbers are caused by various means—lots of obstacles. The government ‘forgot’ to send applications, or ‘forgot’ to process them. Or they ‘lost’ the applications. Or they simply ignored the whole application process.”

  “Suppressed the entry of students,” I said.

  “Exactly. The students had to fight for their education, and when this happens a fighting tradition is developed in which social struggle is part of their education. Fighting against poverty, they become social activists simply by being students. Their enemies are the corrupt politicians and drug lords”—he smiled again and paused for emphasis—“who are often the same. The real owners of the state of Guerrero.”

  I said, “It’s as though it’s a settled belief by the Mexican government that any defiance is subversive. The poor, objecting to being poor, are subversive.”

  “Especially in Guerrero.”

  Guerrero may not be widely known to non-Mexicans, but many of its cities and towns are, notably the coastal resorts on the Pacific: Acapulco, Ixtapa, and Zihuatanejo, the luxury hotels and the beaches. The tiny town of Ayotzinapa, however, was in the poverty-afflicted hinterland, the mountainous dead center of the state.

  “I am the grandfather of this generation,” Juan said. “I try to guide them. They are fighting for the right to study, and in the process they become activists. For example, as a protest they closed the main highway to Acapulco—the Autopista del Sol, and in that action, two students were killed by police—Federales.”