Category: ~ Mexico’s Struggle for Democracy

Día de la Mujer, Guanajuato, 2011 – Las Mujeres no son vacas

Posted on by sterlingbennett

(La conferencia que no dí)

Las mujeres no son vacas, ni mascotas, ni juguetes para humillar, dominar, y controlar

Tú lo sabes, pero muchos hombres no.

Porque no se sienten merecedores algunos hombres tienen que robar y violar.

Y no solamente a las mujeres adultas.

Por Lydia Cacho conocemos la extensa explotación sexual de niños, desde los seis años de edad.

Por Digna Ochoa (Octubre 2001) sabemos que la valentía moral es sumamente peligrosa y que muchos hombres no saben toleran una justa y oportuna aplicación de la ley.

Los que necesitan de la impunidad no saben querer, ni otras, ni a sí mismos.

Por Atenco (Mayo 2006) sabemos que la policía, es decir, algunos hombres sin mucha auto-estima, tienen que robar y humillar. De otra manera, cómo se explica su comportamiento:

“Me metía los dedos en la boca y en la vagina y me obligó a hacerle sexo oral, me echó su esperma en mi suéter blanco. Y vino otro policía y lo mismo, me agarró mis pechos y dijo: ésta está bien buena y está amantando (sic), ¿verdad? Puta perra!

Las mujeres no son vacas.

Los hombres con frequencia son perros.

Pero esta encarnación no es obligada.

En mi opinion no deberíamos celebrar el Día de la Mujer.

Mejor celebrar a la mujer misma.

Pero cómo, si no sabemos siquiera celebrarnos a nosotros?

Mi experiencia de 30 años en grupos para hombres me dice que éstos no se conocen a sí mismos.

Han aprendido solamente dos opciones en sus relaciones con mujeres:

Golpearlas o alejarse haciendo pucheros.

No sabemos que en nosotros está disponible toda la gama de emociones que tienen las mujeres.

No sabemos hablar con mujeres, porque ellas tienen más habilidad táctica en esta area – la de sobrevivirnos.

Pero los hombres pueden aprender a defenderse, con palabras y no sentir pánico ni rabia.

Pueden aprender a sentir emociones.

Pueden aprender paulatinamente a reconocer su decepción, su enojo, su miedo, su profunda y sepultada tristeza por muchas cosas, especialmente por la distanciamiento con su padre, que también se sentía solo.

Pueden aprender a respaldar a otros hombres, en vez de competir con ellos, y hablar de qué es esto de ser un hombre en este mundo.

Y cuando descubren que tienen emociones de que no hay que avergonzarse, pueden ser menos dependientes, emocionalmente, de mujeres.

Van a saber que no hay garantías de lealtad, y que toda forma de dominación, que toda presión, toda presunción de lealtad hace imposible una madura y satisfactoria forma de amor.

Y quizás vayamos a descubrir que las mujeres no son vacas y que nosotros no somos perros.

For Someone Watching Our Cameras from New Hampshire

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Regarding the cameras, the one called 1) Jardin (garden) is looking at the green gate on the left. Up a little higher on the left is the door to C’s house. Sometime you may see someone lower a little basket on a string or the just the key, when someone wants to get in. Someday you’ll see a bent white-haired women come out or go into that door. She is B and must have been a great beauty when she was young. I think she’s about 78. We don’t really know the people who come and go from the green gate just below. Right across from C’s door is our garden gate. Higher up, above the green gate is where

Camera 2) “Christina” is located. It looks down the steps from about the level of our garden gate. Our wall on the left stops at some corrugated roof overhang. That is P’s house. She and her son clean, water our plants, and watch over us and our house. They are 110% reliable. On the lower right, you see a white jar cap and the jar beneath it. The bottom has been cut off and it serves to shield a light bulb. The pole next to it is the street lamp. When the latter’s bulb fails, the people behind the green gate turn on the jar light street lamp. On the right a little lower is a vacant lot. At the lower end of the vacant lot is where we were mugged. We are now recovered from that event, although I still carry pepper spray whenever I step out of the house, and we use a bodyguard or taxi to return home at night. The taxi drops us off a S’s store two blocks higher up. Our bodyguard M brings us to our garden gate just above the mugging site.

Camera 3) “Frente” (front) is mounted on the front of our house, upper end, just to the left and above our front door. The door to the left is R’s little tienda (store). During the attack on the police, the latter fled into her tienda, although they were armed. Human rights laws do not permit police firing at attacking youth. To the right of her door, on the left, you see her altar, which is lit up at night. There is a doll-like virgin inside dressed like Marie Antoinette. The blue house on the upper left is where M lives. He is D’s best customer for her children’s books lending enterprise. I pump up soccer balls for him. You will see him hanging out a lot the this area. His parents or parental figures neglect him almost entirely. He is eight or nine. D is like his aunt. You will see some of the gangbangers hanging out here too. They usually wear white baseball caps and white baseball shirts. You may see them selling drugs. When they are high on paint thinner and other stuff, they stagger around with jerky-jivy movements.

Camera 4) Tienda” (store) is mounted on R’s store, to the right of her door. It shows our front door on the green-gray wall on the right. On that wall, you can see a French cave horse and an antelope which I drew in chalk, along with M and his friend J, in a demonstration of mural drawing. In a recent confrontation with the gang mothers (molls), one of them pointed to my animals and said, “Look, you make graffiti, too.” Beyond our door, there is a slight overhang separating the wall from the old rock wall below. At the end of that, C and A’s house begins. C and D form the Nr. 2 Women’s Detective Agency. Because they don’t like to walk up the alley in front of their door when the gangbangers and their friends are out drinking and acting out, we have cut a hole between their roof and our terrace. They now have a key to our garden gate across from C’s door visible in camera 2) and can pass through our garden, climb the steps to our terrace, step through the new gap in the wall and reach their azotea (roof), from which stairs lead down into their house.

I hope that helps those of you who are watching from thousands of miles away. We have not heard anything from the police about any of the events. I read a graph recently showing that 25% of crimes are reported and 2% are prosecuted in Mexico. Very, very few result in convictions—the theory being that this kind of impunity has led to a great rise in delinquency.

Gang Mothers Threaten Rape

Posted on by sterlingbennett

The doorbell rang around six pm. D looked through the wooden door flap. She decided it’s okay to unlock. It was, after all, only the mostly absent president of the neighborhood committee, L the mother of the most dangerous gangbanger, and E the aunt of the next most dangerous one.

I decided to step outside, too. It was one day after the bangers mentioned above ripped down two surveillance cameras that had been attached to two other houses—and I was a little angry.

We stood outside in the callejón, just outside our front door. We had never met L before. D had tried to talk to her many times before but always got the brushoff. I introduced myself. She took my hand—almost no grip—but would not look at me. We got down to business quickly. The president, who had given up trying to get D and C to stop being co-leaders and strong women, had also, it appeared, given up being the local cacique, boss, only interested in his own power. He was now a conflict resolution expert.

“I have a proposal that might calm the situation,” he said.

“You want us to take down the cameras,” I suggested, probably with sarcasm.

D probably interrupted him at that point and continued to address L and E. No, sure, she said, she would be glad to take down the (remaining) cameras when there was no trash in the alleys, when the thick, ugly graffiti all around us was painted over, when everyone could pass through the allies without being threatened, menaced or intimidated, when illegal drinking and drug taking no longer dominated the callejón, when that activity no longer drew in all kinds of people from other barrios (attracted to the same behavior), when the revelers no longer pissed in the alley, kept the neighbors awake and fearful, when their sons and nephews behaved with respect for the Commons, the public space, when they behaved with courtesy and respect for the all the rest of us, when they no longer threatened her personally with kidnapping and rape, and, finally, when their mothers and aunts took responsibility for teaching the boys the above-mentioned civic values.

The president tried to continue with me. I cut him off.

“I’m listening to them,” I said, too forcefully. He, after all, was supposed to have been in charge of security, a role which failed to perform in any fashion. And now he was essentially representing the gang and their mothers.

L had a position. “Me ofende que las cameras están espiando a mis hijos….” Her meaning: It’s offensive that you have these cameras aimed at my innocent sons.

D lets her have it again. I let her have it. I am pissed. What in god’s name are you talking about. There would be no cameras if you had control over your sons, your nephew. E glares at me. I glare back her, too long, too pissed. D does it much better. She is clear and respectful. Still you can hear the trace of scorn in her voice.

This is a tricky situation. We are two Ph.D.’s; E and L have very little education. L lives with her husband and three sons in little more than a shack, probably with no more than two rooms, at the most. There is a class difference. They—including the president—invoke the foreigner rule: You are not from here and do not understand our ways. We are permanent residents, in fact. That doesn’t matter. There is a web of confusion, assumption, non-understanding. There is also a generational factor. Gang culture and activity is often handed down through generations, and carries with it its own assumed ethic. Such as: the public space is not public—not when we claim it. L’s husband was in prison for murder; it is said he lived with a woman who was selling herself. That may or may not have been L. He came home day and found her with another man, whom he killed. It is very possible he learned such solutions from his father, and his father before him. It is possible that L’s husband is involved in things, like our Nemesis in the privada. One could say they belong to what you could call a bandit class. Let me explain.

There is a long history of banditry (el bandido) in Mexico. It is an activity you could characterize as social/political (take from the poor, give to the rich) or professional (straight out bank robber), or shades of both.

The concept overlaps with caciquismo (el cacique), the activity of a local political boss). This type of bandit operates inside or outside of the local governmental structure. But there’s nothing like getting your hands on the people’s money, the public coffers.

Then there is caudillismo (el caudillo), the activity of a political-military leader in an authoritarian context. He (or she: Eva Perón in Argentina) is supposed to control banditry’s impact on society, but he will enlist bandits of all types to further his own political power. Mexican governors and presidents, for example, reach accommodations with the leaders of cartels.

There is a fourth category that has no word for it that I know of, and that fact says something about the challenges for women who are the mothers, aunts, wives and girlfriends of the various kinds of bandits. They are not soldaderas like the women that fought in the Mexican Revolution). It is about the women who navigate to survive in circles of banditry, caciquismo and caudillismo. They do this by being the spies, propagandists, lawyers and lobbyists for their bandit males. There used to be a word for her in the U.S. during the Twenties: the moll. Hollywood depicts her more as the plaything of the gangster, but I suspect she was, at times, also his advisor and partner in crime.

The complement to banditry is the feeling of helplessness in the face of arbitrary (usually) male claims of power and violence. Which is to say, the citizenry, even the molls, find themselves trapped in social dilemma—how to find accommodation with the local cacique and his strongmen, even the latter may be living in one’s own family.

L and E and C, I have decided, are molls. They are part of the bandit group. They had come to our front door to 1) find out what we knew about the attack on the police and the destruction of the two cameras, 2) to argue our otherness and lack of understanding in things Mexican, 3) to deny the facts (everything is fine), 4) to plead the innocence of their sons and nephews, and 5) to point out the dangerous provocations coming from us.

“Outsides can come in here, you know, and some of them are men who rape,” said L to D.

“All the more reason for cameras,” said D, without missing a beat. She had been walking past L’s house one day recently, and Y, L’s youngest son, seven or eight years old (who used to borrow children’s books from D and who D found out could not read) had said, “You know, the cameras really aren’t such a good idea. They’re thinking of kidnapping you.”

L and E and C are women who have to go along with the bandit culture and worldview. They are part of it. Thinking any differently from their men could turn out to be very dangerous for them. We do not know to what extent they have already been abused and brutalized. They are the molls of the neighborhood, and their lives cannot be easy.

Masked Revolutionaries

Posted on by sterlingbennett

I have wondered how what follows has anything to do with the struggle for democracy. But it does, if we talk about democracy in our own little barrio. Last night, with faces covered by bandanas, the Usual Suspects inched along the top of an unfinished wall—like the Siamese cat Ratón during Monday night’s invasion by police and Army—and tore out T’s camera, which had been guarding the vacant lot. The theory is that certain parties hope to claim that lot eventually and, I suppose, feel possessive of what is and is not seen going on in the lot. The lot is also the escape route for the gangbangers when the authorities come in hot pursuit.

The masked Usual Suspects, and their little gang, are terrorizing the neighborhood to some extent, to some extent just being extremely uncivil. As a friend recently said about her neighborhood in Mexico City, “Lo que falta es el civismo,” what’s missing is a sense of civic responsibility, public spirit. That is the case with our little friends. The neighborhood wants law and peace. The gang wants only their law—their negative anarchy. They are what plagues Mexico on many levels, from the narco world to the business monopolies to the political gangs—all of whom don’t particularly care about the public or the public space, the Commons.

After ripping out T’s camera, the Suspects, masked, openly exited their privada, climbed up in front of our front door, and threw a cotton long-sleeve shirt over the camera that guards the camera closest to their privada. The shirt, successfully placed, blocked the camera so it could no longer see. Then, one standing on the other, they ripped out a second camera, the one closest to their privada.

So now they have done something stupid, aggressive and war-like, leaving us citizens (I use that word loosely) in somewhat of a dilemma: How do you defend against Masked anti-social Revolutionaries?

The Police Retreat

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Right on schedule the weather changes. It’s not even February and it’s suddenly warmer. For two days, people have been hanging out in the callejón, alley, right at the entrance to the privada, the side alley where much of the trouble seems to focus. A lot of drinking, a lot of hand motions while talking. We try to identify the figures through the closest camera. We can’t figure out why the sudden activity. Young men with a lot of swagger, more when they’re drinking. M and Q are among them.

Today, at the end of the second day, someone called the police.

D burst into the room. “A bunch of people just ran up to our door, then ran back down,” she said.

I went up to the roof. Just as I got there, the troops arrived. Maybe twenty men, some in dark blue with combat helmets, one of them with a dog; the rest in camouflage. They are worked up. But it’s like coming into the middle of a movie; you don’t know what came before. They storm into the privada where the trouble brews. I watch the wall that the gangbangers usually use for an escape. No one drops down from it, escaping the police-Army, whatever they are. For all we know, Army has been integrated into the Seguridad Pública, the local police.

In the midst of all the excitement, I see a movement. It is the neighbor’s Siamese cat Ratón—mouse. He is a private, somewhat aloof, mostly outdoor cat that has survived all kinds of hungry street dogs. He is walking along the top of an unfinished wall in the vacant lot, stepping carefully over curved re-bar, getting himself nearer to the helmeted troopers. It is, after all, his territory. He watches from close-up the whole time they’re thrashing around looking for the gangbangers.

Then, surprisingly, another twenty or so men arrive, from uphill, all in camouflage. They rush down to the privada, then rush back up past our door. One of them kicks opened the locked metal door to the vacant lot. Breaking a entering into private property—a technicality of lesser importance since the registered property owner is dead. They search the lot, then the woods adjacent to the lot. One man in blue spends a lot of time looking down onto the roof of M’s aunt’s house.

It is hard to keep track of all the platoons of troops. They are upset about something.

I open the door and tell several troopers how the boys escape each time they’re pursued. I have done this before. They thank me. I am closing the door when I see Buddha Comandante passing—joining the attack.

“Comandante,” I say. He turns toward me. “Buenas Noches,” I say, and smile at him and wave.

He recognizes me and smiles back, from under his helmet. “Buenas Noches,” he says, and charges on down the callejón.

D goes to the computer and finds the recorded event that triggered the whole invasion. We see three troopers walking quickly up from the privada. We see a group of about seven gangbangers mill around, then charge after the troopers. The latter rush into R’s little store ten paces from our front door. Several boys—young men—are throwing rocks, a few of them bricks at the store’s open door. Then the punks—high on thinner—turn around a run back down the alley toward the privada. The three troupers in camouflage come out of R’s tienda, stand in front of our door and shout down at bangers, “We know who you are!”

That was the part we missed. We don’t know why the three were in the privada in the first place. I guess it doesn’t matter in this pageant. Now there are police and/or soldiers swarming all over the place. We play the digital tape over and over. We recognize a few of the stone throwers. Others, we don’t. They are outsiders, perhaps from another gang from another part of the city.

The doorbell rings. D opens the little wooden flap-door. It’s a man in blue. He asks if he can come in. D unlocks, the officer steps in. He wants to know if we saw what happened through the cameras. D—thinking much quicker than me—says yes but he will have to look at the recording in the offices of the Seguridad Pública; he shouldn’t see the recording at our house because it compromises out own security. Politically, it would be unwise. We tell him C, who installed our cameras, is in contact with the Seguridad Pública and has told them how to access the recording through the Internet. We give him the exact time: 19:47, military time.

He tells us the gangbangers injured one of the three, of which he claims he was one. I am a little confused. I thought there were three police in camouflage. He is wearing dark blue, with flak jacket, radio, the whole works–very professional looking.

I tell him I have a question.

“Why is it you flee?” I ask.

He pulls his jacket away, showing us his automatic.

“If I use this, there will be no end of trouble for me. There are human rights laws. I can’t use this.”

I nod, and pull my canister of pepper spray out of my pocket. It is pink, the most popular offering on Amazon.

“What about this?” I say.

He pulls his jacket away from a different spot. He plucks out a canister four times the size of mine.

“That’s aggressive, too,” I say.

He nods. Clearly, they don’t use it. D and I figure it would not be a good idea to give the bangers the same idea. If one of the police got sprayed and was rendered vulnerable, they might do terrible damage to him with a brick or two.

He introduces himself. We introduce ourselves. He thanks us. His behavior contradicts much of what you’ve heard about police behavior in Mexico. There are other police where you would be right—but not in our neighborhood. When the door opens, another trooper calls out “Good-night!” in English. A few non-police, neighbors, I hope, are watching the policeman emerge from our door.

We think there may be some good news in all of this. We think we did not see either Q—or M, to whom I sent the offer of university tuition help in among the attackers.

That would be very good news, I think.

The phone rings. Q’s mother, who has rebuffed any number of D’s offers to talk, wants to talk to D.

“Why now?” I ask.

“Because she knows her children were involved (the middle boy) and that the cameras recorded it.”

D makes an appointment to talk to her in three days. We are very busy until then.

“She’ll have to stew a bit,” says D. “Think a little bit about her three boys—and about what they’re doing.”

The Offer

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Coming up the last part of the 203 steps to our place, just below the garden gate, we run into M’s mother C—with whom he doesn’t live. We don’t know exactly why. He lives next door with his aunt E. C is spiffed up for some event. She looks quite lovely.

We exchange impressions. Yes, the neighborhood seems calmer. M. is hanging out less with Q, she says. We say that’s wonderful. I’m not sure we talk about the cameras, six of them on four different houses. He’s more serious about his studies, she says. We say that’s wonderful. I say then, if he goes to the university, perhaps we can help (with the costs). I believe she internalizes my remark. We say good-bye, she going down the steps, we up.

I wonder whether the information about our offer will filter through to M, whether it will make a difference, change the equation. In the days that follow, M appears several times in front of our door, sometimes with Q, sometimes without him. The lads choose to have their conversations right in front of our door, they don’t appear to be high on paint thinner etc. Their behavior, we think, is different. Is it the holidays, the cold winter nights, is that why it’s so calm in the alley? Is it also that the message got through? Is that a possibility? Does M know perhaps that tuition will not be the reason he can’t go to the university? We watch all this on the cameras—like looking into an aquarium of somewhat less madness. We wait to see what happens next.

The Woman inside Me

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I woke up more than once last night to consider who was speaking inside me. Three men had been walking out along a point of land, toward a drop-off. It is rainy and cold. The men wear jackets. Two of them hold a woman between them. She is dressed in a long T-shirt—nothing more. Her hair falls across her face. She stumbles, barefoot, over things that hurt.

It is a garbage dump, at night, perhaps an hour before dawn . Depending on your understanding of the world, at some point you realize they are going to execute her. She is slender and young and at a time in her life when she could, if she wanted to, start a family. She has already suffered. I am wondering how long it will be before a she realizes what they are going to do. Her two escorts release her arms and drop back away from her. She picks her way forward, unsteady, docile. She reaches the edge of the place where trucks, by daylight, puffing diesel, stop backing up and dump the city’s waste.

I want her to jump, dive over the edge, take her chances, roll, fall, plunge this way and that, down, down, head over heels, too far down, behind too much debris, maybe buried by a wall of rot, old beer and diaper shit, and out of sight.

And she lies still, and the three men—with skin brown like hers and speaking the same language—decide, “Fuck it, we’re not going to ruin our clothes going down there.” And so they fire a few bursts with their AK 47s at the spot they figure she is, then walk back to their pickup, vowing to do it differently next time.

“Arrodíllate,” says the one man coming along behind her—almost gently. Kneel. But she turns around instead and faces him. The T-shirt clings to her body, to her private breasts and a her private belly. She pushes the hair out of her face. She is already half destroyed. “Okay,” says the man, “it’s alright”—and stands sideways, as if it’s Saturday morning and he’s at the shooting range. Except that he’s standing six feet away from her and lifts a .45, .38, .32, .22 or 9mm, pointing over her head, then brings it down, starting to pull the trigger just as the Sig Sauer, Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Colt, Glock, Springfield, Remington, Mauser, Browning, Walter, Ruger, or Luger is almost level with the top of her head.

Nothing happens. Perhaps he is reconsidering, reading her blood- and snot-smeared, non-reacting face. She reaches up to wipe her mouth. Her hand trembles too much. She brings it down. Maybe he tells her to jump backward over the edge of the garbage drop-off. Save yourself, girl.

The gun jumps instead, there is a black hole in her forehead like blackberry crushed flat, without juice. She leans backward, a gymnast starting a backward flip. The man lowers the .45, .38, .32, .22, or 9mm. She arches—a summer girl letting herself fall backward off a warm rock into a clear river pool.

She lies on her back, floating on garbage. The shirt no longer covers the dark hair where her legs meet. I know if I walk closer, after the men leave, I will see they have destroyed her twice-over.

I roll over and rest my leg on the woman I live with and love. She sleeps deeply, floating on her back. The weight of my leg does not interrupt her sleep. She is warm, and smooth, and as troubled as the rest of us. If I try to switch positions and move my leg away, she reaches up out of her sleep and holds my knee where it is—above the dark hair where her legs meet.

I try again—having the young woman awaken from her stupor and leap over the edge. She tumbles down through the shredded plastic and soggy cardboard and pig shit, down through the fleeing rats and styrofoam and rotten vegetables, that have not yet been found and eaten. The bullet sends her reeling backward, and I turn, carefully, so that I don’t pull the covers, and lay my leg over my love. The pigs listen. There may be more to eat.

The horror is deep, my love is warm. I almost fall asleep. He still hasn’t reached her. I urge her to save herself, but when they have you, there is seldom any escape. “Wake up,” she mumbles, as if she has rocks in her mouth, weeping. “See the moment of my extinction, see the dark stump of the tongue they have cut from me…and the mouth below—made for love of my choosing—ripped by their anger and triumph. Watch how they raise the gun, bring it down, and take my summers away from me forever.”

Flowers and Cameras ~ The Threat Diary ~ January 2, 2013

Posted on by sterlingbennett

The cameras are up, six of them, on four different houses, covering sections of four different callejones, alleys. It is like looking into four different aquariums of madness. You turn off the monitor. It is too much to watch. But the cameras go on watching, and the black box goes on recording.

There’s a knock on the door fairly early one morning. S is an attractive, alert young woman, with an intelligent face, probably in her late thirties, maybe a bit more. D opens the door after hesitating a little, first talking to her through the wooden door flap, digesting the woman’s request, the story the woman is telling.

Some young people were throwing rocks down at her house that same morning, she says. Very early. Four-thirty, la madrugada. She and her husband suspected the usual suspects. (I have been instructed not to objectify them by calling them gangbangers; I am not sure I will be able to comply).

Her husband followed one of them in the direction of our house. The husband has some experience in the world of forensics. I am not supposed to say more. The couple knew about the cameras. Would it be possible to check them? the young woman asks. D says, of course.

A few hours later, D calls up C, our direct neighbor. They are the conspiracy of sisters, now about to be joined by this third new one: S. At my computer, in my debris-strewn studio, D and C do the initial research. They play back the black box’s digital tape. We know the rock throwers, if they are the usual suspects (maybe I will call them the Usuals, but that’s more reification), will pass through the alley crossroads in front our house. At least one of them will. We watch the camera screen called “Frente,” front—covering the crossroads in front of our front door.

At 04:38:30 a figure appears at the top of the alley directly in front of us. “There he is!” all of us say at the same time. What we mean is, “Caught in the act!”

It takes the figure about fifteen seconds to pass by the camera, enter another camera’s view, and descend the callejón toward the thieves’ den.

As the figure approaches camera “Frente,” he holds his arm across his forehead, so the camera cannot identify him. The camera is placed too high; the young man is also wearing a white baseball cap. The height of the camera makes him shorter and fatter. We play the tape over and over. From the way he walks and the way he wears his hat, I am quite sure I am seeing M, one of the two Usuals, the less dangerous of the two. He also turns into his own privada, blind alley—which kind of gives it away.

S’s forensics husband confronts M’s aunt later that day. He knows M and his gang of Usuals. M lives with his aunt, next door to his mother’s house. Aunt E denies it is M; he was in his bed all night long, she tells the forensics husband. Denying is a default reflex is this neighborhood, maybe in the whole country. Forensics says his twelve-year old daughter sleeps just below a window. The rocks—thrown wildly—came close to that window. The rocks and the shattering glass could have hurt her badly. Yes, yes, says M’s aunt, but it couldn’t have been M.

We call the camera installers back and lower several of the cameras to make the angle better for identification. I know the correction will provoke a response from the Usuals, because now the cameras are more within reach. I also know any action the Bangers (sorry) take will come at night. I watch them, the Usuals, Q and M, pacing back and forth at the entrance of their privada, glowering up at the closest camera, camera C, on C’s house. Camera C beams its outrageous little red light right back at them, unblinking. A few nights pass. There are posadas in various neighborhood, celebrations, reenactments in the more elaborate ones of Joseph and Mary looking for a place where Jesus can be born. Or there is just punch and beer, sometimes with little bonfires, people sitting around on rickety chairs in the alleys, enjoying the punch and the fire and each other. Sometimes there is singing.

On the third night, I am still awake at 11:45. I hear the Usuals’ unique call, a series of same-note whistles followed by a rising then falling final note. It is the signal that something is about to happen. I get up and stand in front of the monitor, flipping from screen to screen. I watch M and C in their dance of madness, M clapping his hands in some dark individual joy related to nothing—acting out being cool to no audience at all. I watch him kick at the metal door to the vacant lot in front of us—not to get in but just to show his defiance of barriers and limits, maybe acting out something he’s seen on television a thousand times. The boys are unsteady on their feet, their judgment flawed. These are the characteristics of people on inhalants.

I watch them pick up something. It is hard to see. There is some kind of shadow in that area a few steps above C’s camera, almost level with it, fifteen feet away from it. The picture on C’s camera wavers, distorts, flashes white and dark, and something explodes around the camera—which I am looking through—like a cloud of white flies or ocean luminescence. They are, I learn later, exploding fragments of brick. The camera jumps again. The Usuals are stoning C’s camera and being recorded by another camera, the one attached to the little store kitty-corner from our front door. That camera is called Tienda, store. It tries to look into the dim area where the stone throwers are jumping about

Eventually the Usuals leave. Apparently undamaged camera C watches them enter M’s privada. The next morning I go outside and inspect camera C. I pick up the pieces of brick lying below it. I place them on a napkin in our kitchen. They represent some kind of evidence, at least to myself. That afternoon, through Camera Tienda, I see C and her husband out in front of their house, the next one below us on the callejón. I carry the handful of brick fragments down to them—mounted on the white napkin.

A, C’s husband, is too upset to speak. He is repairing a front door light, so there will be better illumination in the area. C already knows about the attack on her camera. She too was watching on her own computer while it happened. If you know the site and have the software and the codes, you too can watch the cameras—from anywhere in the world.

As I am speaking to C and A, banger usual M appears at the entrance of his privada. He is chief suspect in the 04:38:30 stoning of S’s house and last night’s attack on C’s camera. He wears more expensive clothes now: clean, oversized white sneakers, a dark earring, and a clean white baseball cap. He is actually a handsome kid, except that his face is twisted a little and hardened by his iron defenses.

Without thinking, I greet him as he passes, walking uphill, toward our house. “Mira,” I say, look, and I hold out my napkin full of brick fragments. “These are for you,” I say.

His expression says, How so?

“So you can throw them at the camera,” I explain tightly, as I sputter out my sarcasm.

He shrugs and continues.

“They cost 3,000 pesos apiece,” I call after him. “Each camera.”

“Congratulations!” he throws back over his shoulder at me, and struts on, climbing the steps.

I immediately think better of several things. The provocation in my voice, my pique, plus the tipoff as to the cameras’ worth. I imagine them all disappearing during the coming night. The next day, in the evening, the doorbell rings. E, M’s aunt is standing in the callejón. I don’t quite catch watch she’s saying through the flap door. I step outside in my slippers. Then I get it.

“M says you said he stoned a camera,” she says—a good citizen trying to clear up a misunderstanding. I have been watching “Bramwell,” an English television series about a young doctor who defies the sexist hurdles placed in her way. I am coming out of a different world, one fraught cognitive dissonance into another one exuding the same phenomenon. I am not sure where to begin. It is the first time I’ve had a conversation with M’s aunt. I mutter something about the crazy energy M and Q display at night when they’re on inhalants. She introduces me to the woman beside her. I put a name to a face for the first time. It is the stone thrower M’s mother, C. A girl of about thirteen stands beside her, perhaps M’s sister. They are returning from a posada and are interested in clearing up the misapprehension I appear to be harboring. As we are speaking, a troop of gangbangers ages twelve to eighteen comes clumping around the corner and down the callejón, flowing past us, assertive as elephants. Maybe ten of them. Some of them I have never seen before.

I am alarmed. “What’s this?” I say.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” says M’s aunt, whose eyes seem glassier than normal. I wonder if she has been drinking.

M glowers at me as he passes, at the head of the pack. The last to pass is Q’s (the dangerous one’s) younger brother. He used to borrow books from our little lending library—until he discovered inhalants. M’s aunt calls after the younger brother, “You aren’t on inhalants, are you.” A supportive statement. Younger brother turns around. He is four or five long steps lower now. “Y qué le importa!”—“And what’s it to you?” The defiance aimed at me. Then he hits the inside of his elbow with the palm of his hand, his forearm raised in a fist, to say Fuck you, old man. The whole troop has stopped on the steps and turned around, to consider the moment, whether to rush back and trample me to death. But younger brother turns away from us and, taking his signal, the whole herd continues their downward clump.

I know D is waiting for me to rejoin her to continue watching Dr. Eleanor Bramwell’s brave battle with English sexists of all stripes in the safe and well-regulated virtual theater of British television.

M’s aunt is asking me what time M was supposedly throwing pieces of brick at C’s camera, the closest one to their privada. I know the precise time. Eleven-forty-five, I say. Oh, no, it couldn’t have been him. No, not at that hour. He was with me. At home. No, it couldn’t have been him.

I need to get back to the virtual world of 1895 London. We say Buenas Noches. I go back to Bramwell, locking the front door firmly behind me.

The next day, the phone rings. It’s S on the line. She and her forensics husband would like to inspect the digital record of M and Q’s attack on C’s camera. I do not know how she knew about the attack. D is down with the flu. We put S off for a few days. She and her daughter come by anyway with a bowl of fruit for D, to take the edge off her suffering. A heartening gesture.

Another few days pass, then the Neighborhood Ladies’ Detective Agency meets again. This time S is a member, too. I have made an effort to do some vacuuming ahead of time. I go down to my favorite café to write. The Detective Agency works for some three hours. There is now a thumb drive file showing things I hadn’t seen before: M and Q clearly and repeatedly throwing stuff at C’s camera, the camera bouncing in response, the shattering pieces of brick flashing on-screen like an explosion of white flies. M and Q staggering around clapping their hands in dark joy, kicking at the metal door to the vacant lot, as if demanding to be let out of, or into, jail. They are completely unaware that another camera is recording everything they do.

The evidence is direct, clear and damning. S’s husband says he is going to invite M’s aunt to come over to their house and watch the clips. We are told a video recording of a crime is considered prima facie evidence. Also, that attacking a security camera is a crime. We’ve also been told by several people that the cameras mean nothing if misdemeanors, or worse, are not acted upon. At this writing, forensics husband has not confronted M’s aunt and her cognitive dissonance. The Christmas holidays have intervened.

On Christmas Eve day, I am down in my favorite plaza, writing in my favorite café. D’s is still sick with the flu. I decide to take her flowers. Somehow, another idea appears in my head. I’m not sure where it came from. It’s to also take flowers to M’s aunt, M’s mother and, while I’m at it, to the wife of our main nemesis, whose commerce I am not supposed to describe.

I pack my things together and walk across the plaza to the flower lady. There used to be another flower lady, who had gold caps on her two front teeth, took very short steps when she walked and was a beautiful Indian, from what group I never knew. She has disappeared after many years’ presence. Otherwise, I would have gone to her.

I buy four bouquets, each one with four roses. I calculate the meaning of colors. One bouquet will be for the chief neighborhood spy, the wife of Nemesis. I decide her roses should not be red, supposedly the color of passion.

I walk up the side of the canyon with my four modest sprays of roses wrapped at the bottom with tin foil. I have never been down the privada, the dead end alley, toward the dragon’s den, from which seem to flow various mind-altering concoctions, consumed by a parade of mind-altered  clients, and which emits insane teenagers. By daylight, it is empty and innocuous. The idea that seems dangerous is bringing flowers to the Others: M’s aunt, M’s biological mother, and Spy, wife of Nemesis.

My mounting adrenalin takes the pain out of the two hundred some stairs. I turn in to the privada. I pass Nemesis’ door. Everything is quiet. I turn left at A’s door, the porter without education, possibly with some brain damage. His house is a shanty with a metal lamina roof. He lives with his mother. There are rooms like rats’ nests with only gathered rags and newspapers filled to head high, with no room to move about. I know from lingering strong body odors they have no water. I have no idea how they handle human waste.

I turn right and come to an attractive iron gate, the entrance to a kind of outdoor vestibule for M’s aunt’s house, which is bourgeois and colorful. I ring the doorbell on the gate. A woman approaches. It is C, M’s biological mother. I do not know if she lives there too. She greets me with a pleasant smile. I ask if M’s aunt is home. She is, she says, but she’s sick with the flu. I take that at face value. I mention that D, my partner, also has the flu. I say the flowers are for her and her sister, as well as one for A (spy and wife of Nemesis). She opens the gate. I say Feliz Navidad and tell her she has first choice of colors. There is no discussion of why I am giving her flowers. The event seems like the most natural thing in the world. Later, it occurs to me she thinks I’m doing an errand for my D. Either way, she is happy, smiling broadly, appreciative. I not sure how many people ever bring her flowers.

She takes a spray. I tell her to choose a bouquet for her sister, M’s aunt. She chooses another. Then she leads me to A’s door, where Nemesis lives and presides and does business. There is no answer to the doorbell. I ask C if she can give A her roses. She says she can and receives them cordially. I say Feliz Navidad again and find my way back through the alley—not running into anyone I wouldn’t want to run in to.

The whole thing was easier than I thought it would be, entering the lion’s den. What I found instead was a woman happy to be receiving flowers. I decided not to worry about what she thought I or the act represented. I do not think she was faking her friendliness. She had not treated me as the Other, though I am sure in some sense I am. But not in that moment. I also had no idea how the event might be discussed by the three woman, Nemesis and M—who is the next-to saddest rock thrower of them all, with Q taking the absolute first prize for being both dangerous and a lost soul.

The Threat Diary

Posted on by sterlingbennett

The Threat Diary

Morning, November 25, 2012

~ Death threats. I have talked before about not understanding when it comes to culture. I suppose this has to do with any culture, including your own. It is good to arrive at a point where you know what you don’t know. I did not know to what extent we were touching up against dangerous elements in Mexican society. I still do not know. But this morning we found, slipped under the door, written death threats directed at us.

Background: The barrio organizing neighbors had held an election, and a man was elected as president. His approach is authoritarian: the law is the law—no drugs, no drinking in the alleys. The women (D and C) who started the whole barrio organizing had argued for talking to everyone, minimizing harm (drugs, alcohol, inhalants that destroy brains), not forbidding anything, simply trying to bring peace and security to the neighborhood. Ironically, and dangerously, those two women (and I) are the objects of the death threats. Next step: Try to talk directly to those who are issuing the threats—because they too probably feel threatened: their boys are out of control, their husbands sell drugs and therewith feed the family, they feel disrespected, they fear the army and the police. Breathe deeply. Be kind.

Evening, November 25, 2012

~ There is an emergency meeting of women, I think four, in our house right now, trying to deal with the death threat letter. It turned out to be only three. One of them may be (was) the aunt of the letter writer. The men have screwed this up up to this point. Conflict resolution always has to start at zero, just the way education has to. Assume nothing regarding what others understand or know, including oneself. Positive social anarchy, to use a friend’s phrase, appears here to start with women…

Morning, November 26, 2012

~ At the women’s meeting yesterday evening, E. read the threatening letter very closely and pointed out that it was really directed at the whole organizing committee, plus at D. specifically, and at a young man who lives kitty-corner from us. He is the lad who was involved in the brick fight some time ago. He received a death threat earlier, and we think we know what direction that one came from.

I have been counseled not to use the phrase “death threat.” I suppose because it might get the attention of people who make a point of killing people, as in the narco battles. Henceforth, maybe, I will not use that term and simply write the word “threat”.

Needless to say, we had a hard night. Threats put a strange strain on a couple: “Your activities have put us in this position;” “Your writing about it puts us in even more danger.”

But we have received support from various sources, as well as admonitions from friends to remain safe. The woman who gives me massages is an experienced neighborhood organizer. This morning she gave me good advice. While trying to organize her neighborhood, she and two other valiant women received threats. There was an illegal bar close by where you could buy women and drugs. Men and boys, drunk and high, trafficked the place and menaced the neighborhood. The community began to say the behavior in the alleys had to stop. People wrote her threatening letters with chicken blood, smeared blood on her door, threw mutilated chickens into her house. There were many threats—the usual ones of rape and murder (and implied mutilation). The women were not intimidated and continued organizing. The whole point, my friend said, was to paralyze me, make me stop, put fear in our hearts, shut us down, use threats to get their way—drugs and prostitution. The women made everything public; they went to the Presidencia and therewith put antecendentes in place, building a paper trail, so that if something happened the police would already know what was going on and who to look for.

Everyone feels impotent in this society, said my friend. Everyone feels menaced. When they feel pressured, they threaten those who are pressuring them. What you have to do is continue on. Furthermore, she said, this city is still “virgen.”

One weighs all this good advice against all the incidents of threats that are carried out here in this country. A person weighs and weighs. We are not investigating anyone. We are not trying to take your narco routes or markets. We just want a clean, beautiful, respectful, hopeful (for the children), and safe environment. Surely, you’re not going to kill us over that, are you?

At noon today, D. and I went to the Presidencia. We bumped into another couple from the neighborhood that had just come from there. They had dropped off a copy of the menacing letter. They are fine people; they are afraid but fearless at the same time. D. and I entered the great room where heads of departments hold court. We were soon in front of a young woman who represented Seguridad Ciudadana, public security. She was smart and welcoming. Things are already in motion. The Buddha-like comandante who came to one of our neighborhood meetings will be at the open meeting this afternoon, to calm things and to offer protection. The young woman also said there were agencies that could talk with the menacing parties. I mentioned that some of them were probably involved in illegal activities to feed their families and that we had no interest in interfering in such activity. She seemed to understand that.

So that’s where it stands. Threats, serious or not. A community that wants less police presence inviting the Comandante again. Neighbors that will send what in effect are spies and from whose corner will come more threats, until either we or they give up. And it won’t be us….

November 27, 2012

Yesterday, the neighborhood met. Fewer people came than ever before. The president of the steering committee, who is a man, overrode the method D and C had used, which was the personal touch: handing out flyers and talking to people. The president simply wanted them taped to telephone poles. He said that would suffice.

The second reason for the lower attendance may have been the threatening letter, whose existence was likely broadcast far and wide. Threats have an effect: fear. If you attend the meetings now, you may receive a threatening letter.

There is probably a third reason. The flyer—written by the president—was only about security, with no mention of community building. What was new and revolutionary, the idea of trust-building, had given away to the old authoritarian structure, which people know well and which they distance themselves from—for being more oligarchic than democratic. The old model of does not touch their hearts and minds, whereas trust building and community is something I think people yearn for. To correct matters, D and C have decided to form a “commission,” which will serve the committee but in the manner which will emphasize dialogue and reconciliation.

The president had also neglected to specify when the meeting would begin, and so people straggled in from 5:30 to 6:30 pm. One of the first to arrive was Cesar, a bright young fellow, who came to tell us about security cameras. He slipped off his motorcycle helmet and began to talk in a strong articulate voice. A minute passed before the four policemen came down the stairs on the callejón, preceded by the crackle of their radios. Alas, the Buddha-like Comandante was not among them.

In mid-sentence, Cesar stepped to one side. The police’s leader launched into a soliloquy in language the likes of which I have never heard: fast burst, then long streams, jumping this way and that, whirling in circles, every six or seventh word recognizable in the sense that the others, though audible, seemed not to be necessarily words at all, rather sounds the man had made up himself.

D and C showed him the threatening letter. He read a few of the disturbing lines about rape and murder then began his rambling again. He mentioned detectives and handwriting experts. I had never heard anyone mention detectives, even in newspapers. He said the letter was legal evidence. Everything seems to be careening in the direction of the heavy hand of the police, and away from D and C’s open palm. He said we had to go to the Ministerio Público and present the letter as an antecedente, prior evidence of a peaking behavior that—after the rapes and murders, I assume—would show premeditation.

I interrupted him to protest that the Ministerio Público wouldn’t do anything if the offenders’ names were unknown. No, a denuncia needed names, not a antecedente, said the president of the our committee, in a voice so soft that perhaps three people could hear what he was saying.

At about this point, the two probable letter writers strutted down through the meeting, doing a kind of gangbanger walk, throwing one shoulder then the other forward, dressed in white baseball caps and long-sleeved white baseball shirts, perhaps for the first time gracing us with their albeit moving presence.

The police had already deployed—three of them at a slight distance, as if in a combat zone. One looked down the callejón, another looked up it, and a third looked along a third vista, guarding our flanks from a not improbable attack. This was the attack, or at least gangbangers showing the flag. M had to pass very close to the lower policeman. As M passed him, the policeman looked at him the way our cat in California once observed a bobcat passing close by—without any reaction at all, but probably with complete recognition. I greeted M as he passed me. He started to mumble something; I greeted Q as he passed; he moved his head to look a little more away from me.

Cesar interjected, and the police leader stepped back. Cesar brought out his laptop. He gave it commands with his iPhone. He showed us what cameras could see by daylight and at night. The men especially gathered around. I did too. Then Cesar left.

A drunk came roaring up the callejón where the bobcat-observing policeman stood. Seeing the assembly and the four police, the drunk put his hands in the air and kept them there the whole time he protested his right to be where he was. The police treated him gently and finally got him to move along. Then the police moved along.

I had gone in our front door, returning snack bowls, a stool, and the plywood easel. I heard an angry voice and went back outside again. After all, the police had left, and I knew D and C were exposed. The broad-shouldered uncle of one of the gangbangers had appeared. He always sounds angry when he talks, whispered the president of the committee, but he’s all right. He got into an argument with an older woman wearing a poncho that I knew sold illegal beer from her front door. He claimed she had insulted his niece. When he wasn’t shouting at her, he stood like a French wrestler with his legs apart, his small feet shod with something like mountain climbers’ slippers, in below-the-knee trousers, tilting his head back like Marlon Brando and looking downward at no one through his squinting eyes, as if at any moment he might still leap forward and eat someone. He finally left with a woman that was either his sister or his wife. I still don’t know which.

I went in the house again for something but then decided I should go back out. Just then chief suspects Q and M came strutting up the callejón from the direction of M’s privada and passed through us leaving a wake of marijuana fumes and disdain. Another showing of the flag, but a little bolder this time, and slightly menacing—after the police had left. A., our local Herculean cargador with little or no education, plodded along behind but without being able to pull off either the disdain or the menace. I released my hold on my pepper spray. When I commented on their passing, quipping, “Ay, mariguana,” D and the president shushed me. “Don’t provoke them.” The gangbanger in me had slipped out for a moment.

November 28, 2012

Yesterday, we went as advised (by the young woman at Sequridad Ciudadana and others) to the Ministerio Público and made a denuncia. There were no good choices: do nothing would imply that it was all right to make threats; or bring the matter to the MP and, in essence, stand up to the people making the threats who then might become more desperate.

The MP took an extensive report. Did we have suspects in mind? they asked. Yes, but we had no solid evidence. Were we afraid seemed to be the key factor. We said, not really. Then I said, “I am concerned for D’s safety. One of the young men we suspect shows a violent streak. I once stood right next to a neighbor, after the brick fight, and Q came up to him and, without warning or provocation, struck him four times on the forehead with a piece of conduit pipe.”

When I explain this, the investigator nodded his head and said the document had now become a denuncia (and not an antecedente). I asked whether a threatening letter was considered a crime. He said it was. D asked what the penalty was. Prison, said the MP man. How long, a year? “Years,” he said. “And then they will come out even more angry and alienated,” I said. “Yes, crime school,” by which he meant prison. D asked whether there could be an alternate treatment. There could be restitution instead of prison. What restitution would look like in the case of threats, we don’t know.

Outside, D told me she thought it was likely the suspects would disappear for a while. The detectives/investigators would find no one home—and then what? Would the detectives just go away?

Now it’s dark and cold; the mountain winds are blowing, and I for one do not feel particularly safe thinking about people who are not completely rational and whose next steps we can’t really predict. By now they must have heard that the written threats are going to bring trouble, and because they are not completely rational they will look around for someone to blame, and they will decide the people who brought the denuncia are the problem—which could end up making us victims twice over. Not exactly the kind of conflict resolution we were hoping for.

November 28, 2012

I woke up this morning in good spirits, thinking about painting lines on the vacant lot, graffiti-covered walls to indicate soccer goals, for kids in the alley. I thought of restoring the basketball hoop I put up several years ago and which the adolescents destroyed, even though younger kids had loved using it. Planning renewed efforts on behalf of the kids in the neighborhood felt empowering.

We are also planning to put up eight surveillance cameras in our immediate neighborhood, and we will have a few of them guarding any new basketball hoop. Cesar, the cameraman, has worked out municipal wrinkles whereby the police can also see what the cameras see. He is also installing forty cameras on a street called the Calzada de Guadalupe (and other streets and alleys), so students can reach the University of Guanajuato without being mugged.

My writing partner and wise Mexican friend R. quickly analyzed the threat letter and declared the writers one adult and two pandilleros, which I loosely translate as gangbangers or wannabe gangbangers. There is really no good, respectful word. Teenagers? He did not sound worried. He counseled showing respect, cordiality, and kindness, no matter what happened. And I agree with him…mostly, since I still don’t know the exact parameters of danger.

November 29, 2012

The doorbell rang right on schedule, just as I was closing my eyes for an afternoon siesta. I looked out the kitchen window blinds, just to check on who was at the door. It was Manuelito, the boy no one washes—although I must admit his ears look cleaner these days. I think it was D, as I remember now, who told him he needed to wash one new part of his body each week if he was to continue borrowing books.

He held a beat up soccer ball. I pumped it up. That is my chief function here. D lends books to the boys (Manuelito is the only taker now), and I pump up destroyed soccer balls.

Jesús sat on one of the steps of the callejón, a little higher than us. He had a blank look on his face. I greeted him. I asked him if he was bored. He said he was. They’re both about 8, 9, or 10. I can’t tell.

I walked toward Jesús.

“How would you like to draw a picture on this wall?” I said, pointing to the nearby graffitied wall of the problematic vacant lot?

Jesús hesitated one beat, and then his mouth widened in a smile and his eyes lit up.

“How about you, Manuelito?” I asked.

He said he wasn’t that interested. I turned back to Jesús. “We could paint a landscape or people. We could paint faces,” I said, and I made a circle gesture around my face. Jesús beamed.

“I like to draw,” he said.

“I could do it with you. We could do it together. I can buy paints.”

I was making it up as I went along. I ran my hand over the rough brick face of the wall. To hell with a finished surface. We’ll just start painting. We will be muralists. And they will be young Mexican muralists, and I will show them examples from Diego Rivera and Siqueiros.

“I will get paints,” I said.

“I know how to paint,” said Manuelito. I already knew that. He had drawn pictures twice at the neighborhood organizing meetings.

We will start graffiti-style, but with paper masks as well as spray cans. We’ll make birds and horses like in the Chauvet Cave in France and Mexican Americano hens running with their heads down and portraits of Ratón, the Siamese I try to pet every time I climb up the steps of the callejón. And we’ll paint the things that are bumping around in Manuelito and Jesús’ heads—and mine, and all of Mexico’s.

December 12, 2012

Each morning now, I’ve stepped outside our front door to see if someone—especially the usual suspects—has destroyed Manuelito, Jesús and my mural efforts: a rabbit, a cougar, a French cave painting horse, and a similar elk.

Two days ago, I heard P. whooping out on the callejón, followed by loud cordial greetings to passers-by, who carefully maneuvered around him. He is a man of indeterminate age—but below forty, who long ago destroyed his mind with inhalants. He probably is also bipolar and a few other things to boot. He lives in a dark world most of the time, with brief breaks of drinking and exuberant mania. He lies on the alley, or stumbles around with a mad look on his face, unwashed, his pants dirty and falling down over his behind. Everyone avoids him, except for the person who gives him a home during his dark periods.

I noticed that my copy of the Chauvet cave horse was smudged. I looked closer. Someone had placed their fingers on the horse’s body, then pulled downward, as if to test the material used in the painting and leaving vertical chalk smudge marks. Or, someone had reached out to touch art, as a wise friend suggested.

A vandal, I think, would have rubbed his palm around in a smearing effect. Or sprayed a gang symbol across the horse and the deer, in black paint. But I suspect P. and I think he reached out to touch the image of the horse—not to destroy art.

There is another mystery. Why didn’t the gangbangers attack the animal paintings? I have a theory, and that is that Mexicans of all sorts have a certain knowledge of and respect for art. They know about the tradition of Mexican murals. They may not know the names Diego Rivera or David Sigueiros, but they know about artists who paint on walls. And I like to think that somehow the animal images that the gangbangers saw us painting on the wall penetrated, in some way I don’t understand, into their alienated and disaffected brains. That is the only way I can explain it.

December 12, 2012

(or as they say: 12 12 12, but not yet the end of the world)

I have lost count of the number of yesterday’s neighborhood meeting. Six, seven, or eight. Fewer people come now, possibly because word got around about the threatening letter. People don’t want trouble.

As far as I can see, no one from the Ministério Público has come to investigate. The steering committee president seems to have dropped out. His approach was authoritarian, and he could not tolerate D and C’s insistence on inclusion and reconciliation. Their two positions are, in my mind, emblematic of the on-going struggle here in Mexico: top down, or bottom up.

On Saturday, we had breakfast in a restaurant in the Jardín, the center of the old city. The restaurant’s clients are middle and upper middle class Mexicans. On her way out, an acquaintance approached our table. She introduced a man in her party–the mayor of Guanajuato. She mentioned that he was following our case. He said he was monitoring its progress. We thanked him and shook his hand. He is a pleasant, handsome man. I did not believe him.

A PEN friend recently told me that during Calderón’s six-year presidency, some eighty journalists were assassinated. Not a single assassin has been convicted. Some 300–600 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez over the last five or six years. Very few of these cases have been solved. Top down does not work very well when it comes to law enforcement. 60,000–90,000 people have died in the drug wars during Calderón’s six-year term; there is a long list of the disappeared during the same period.

Largely, no one bothers to investigate these murders—partly because it’s dangerous to do so and partly, I suspect, because the field of investigation—social and family relationships (narcos, Army, police, government, everyone)—is impossibly complex and dysfunctional, where no one can or wants to tell the truth, and where everyone already carries a quiver-full of remembered insults and slights.

The last thing on anyone’s mind is reconciliation. The mixture of remembered insults and alcohol (or certain drugs) can lead to havoc and mayhem—all fueled, of course, by the unexamined conviction that the other person is wrong.

Dianne was reading the accords that neighbors were to sign: “I agree that we want a clean and safe neighborhood”—an agenda they think better of now. The usual spies were in attendance. There was some movement from the troubled area down the callejón–a spike in foot traffic, a child or two running out in front.

At this moment, K—our chief neighborhood nemesis—stormed around the corner and leapt the two steps into center stage in the middle of the alley crossroad, waving his beer bottle and bellowing insults in all five directions. At his house, they had been celebrating the christening of his granddaughter. Just before the beginning of the meeting, D had called down to him, “Felicidades, abuelo!” Congratulations, grandpa! He had looked up, at first puzzled, then gave her a broad smile.

Now, minutes later, fortified with a mix of alcohol and victimhood, he was roaring with outrage. A menacing moment, where we all sat around like rabbits, frozen, hoping the pissed-off hawk wouldn’t notice. He wheeled back and forth, calling us putas, pinche perras, maricones, perros, pointing at people and spitting, “You have offended my family, it’s my house, you have no right…!”

K, with flair and emphasis, bent over and set his beer bottle on the pavement in front of him, with a force that should have made it break. A moment later, when he wasn’t looking, his wife and chief spy whisked it away. K mainly confronted women, accusing them of a whole long line of affronts toward him and his family, as if these women were the cause of all the neighborhood’s troubles—when it was quite the opposite, as all of us knew.

It was a menacing moment. I was sitting next to S, who is on the committee and runs the tienda at the top of the callejón. Handsome and tough, he isn’t afraid of anyone. After a five minutes or so, he got up, shook D and C’s hands and left. I was disappointed. I had felt safe sitting next to him. D deduced afterward that S had gone to the tienda to call the police, and last night he told us he had.

The women K harangued began standing up to him. They denied his accusations. A young woman with a baby gave it back to him. K said she had insulted his family. “You called my son a mariguano….!” Fearlessly, she put the tip of her finger under her right eye and said, “I saw him, he saw me.” That’s all I got of it; I didn’t have the whole history. No one was speaking high Spanish. Her baby started to cry and she left.

More people came up from K’s side-alley. A, the gorilla-like porter with little education, took up a position leaning against Manuelito, Jesús, and my chalk copies of the Lascaux and Chauvel cave paintings—the horse and the elk. He wasn’t going to miss the show.

K’s son T (the alleged mariguano) arrived. His hair was spiked and his appearance was newly gangbanger-ish. Which worried me a little. I had thought him the most level-headed of the at-risk lads. He kept coming closer to his father, in alliance, I thought. Two smartly dressed policemen appeared from the other downhill alley, climbing slowly, in no hurry, sort of easing into the theater, assessing the situation—the kind of social explosion they see all over the city.

Now things took another turn.

The young woman who have left with the crying baby and who had stood up to K now returned with her father, the man with similarities to a French wrestler who, if you remember, “stood with his legs apart, his small feet shod with something like mountain climbers’ slippers, in below-the-knee trousers, tilting his head back like Marlon Brando and looking downward at no one through his squinting eyes, as if at any moment he might (still) leap forward and eat someone.” He walked right up to K and, to my astonishment, began reasoning with him. French Wrestler is the uncle of the most dangerous of the gangbangers, a boy of sixteen who is already the father of a very young baby and who has already badly damaged his brain with paint thinner and glue.

Four more policemen, smartly dressed and professional looking (a new concept for Guanajuato), without guns or dogs or bright lights, descended from the direction S had gone to call them. One of them was our Buddha-like comandante. He seemed happy to see us. He greeted us and then watched as K’s wife and son tried to move K away from French Wrestler and from the stage in general. K resisted them, they grabbed him, he threw them off—a wildebeest not giving in to the lions.

I did not see what happened next; D and C did. K’s son T picked up a rock the size of the palm of your hand. Facing his father, he raised the rock high enough to bop his father on his head. A woman came up from behind and snatched it out of his hand. The tug of war continued.

What exit was there for K, trapped as he was in his outrage and injured dignity?

I am not a hero rabbit, and I am not young. But I stood up and walked slowly over to K, took his hand in mine and put my arm around his shoulder. I have known K for years, and we have greeted each other cordially for all these years. As his wife and son pulled at him, I held onto him and told him he didn’t have to leave this place. They pulled at him. I told him he didn’t have to go. I told him he was a leader in our neighborhood (I didn’t say he had been meeting his responsibility) and that I respected him and that we all wanted peace. His family pulled. I told them K didn’t have to leave.

K calmed down, and I honestly think he felt supported by the oldest guy in the neighborhood. He was not losing face. I think he knew I was speaking from the heart. I have always liked him, and if we do not respect each other—porters, gangbangers, rabbits, do-gooders, and grudge-holders all—then there is no hope for us. And K—the man who may have been one of the authors of the threatening letter—finally let himself be led down the two steps, exiting stage left, staggered around the corner, past the Chauvet elk and horse (now smudged by crazy A), past the other A, the carrier with no education, down the callejón to his house, guided by his chief spy wife and their patricidal son, K’s dignity partially restored, and the curtain closing for—proabably—anything but the last act.

D and C were in shock. The police walked over to look down the callejón on which K and his family descended. Later, unwisely I thought, they descended toward K’s domain, and I like to think they went right on down to the city center without bothering him further.

I was pleased, I said to D and C. The man we had not known how to (or dared) approach had presented himself of his own accord and, in a sense, joined our meeting. I like to think also that he and his family saw that we were not really their enemies. I do not know whether K, after the alcohol wears off, will remember that he left with a certain measure of dignity. I hope so. In the meantime, the elected president of the committee has not written or shown up—unable to grasp D and C’s concept of compromise and reconciliation, and we are all left once more with the possible promises of good-willed social anarchy as a way of bringing peace to our troubled community. In a few days, five cameras will go up on four different houses. And it remains to be seen how K and his kingdom will react.

December 14, 2012

After two full days of laying cable, planning, and figuring angles, workers finished putting up five surveillance cameras on four different houses. It remains to be seen how this affects the neighborhood dynamic. The installers’ manager returns tomorrow to adjust angles and teach us how to access and use the system. I’m not sure how I feel about it. Except that I prefer possible predators feel observed, and it’s not just me alone who has this experience. I have also decided—given the statistics cited by me above about the longevity of journalists—not to make accusations about people’s livelihood or night-time occupations. That’s because there are now a lot of people who can read what I write on both Facebook and my blog; and who knows who can find their way to this information, who also know English, and who might mention something to someone, who then mentions it to someone else, like in a game of telephone—but the consequences unpredictable. So, if you find me talking around issues, you will have some inkling why.

A Fiesta Without Violence

Posted on by sterlingbennett

Two of the neighbors, both women, were afraid. They wanted the police to be invited to our neighborhood Iluminación festival for the Virgin of Guanajuato, an event that was to occur just outside our front door. They were not the only ones who thought our local pre-cartel paint thinner sniffers might disrupt the gathering—I was another one. But the barrio steering committee persuaded the two women that police presence would destroy the whole purpose of neighbors coming together to honor The Virgin of Guanajuato, eat together, and build Solidarity. Plus, the event would occur between 4 and 6 pm, before it got dark, and the usual suspects did not start winding up their anti-social engines (on vapors) until darkness gave them cover.

Still, proceeding with the event took some courage on everyone’s part. No one could tell to what extent community organizing might draw a response from people at a somewhat higher pre-cartel level. We knew from previous experience that our locals could, and had before, called in other gangbangers from outside our barrio to signal their control over our public space.

D. and I had come up behind two of the principal local gangbangers that morning. They were climbing the stairs in front of us toward the upper ring road. They said, yes, yes, they would come to the celebration. As they walked ahead of us they kept looking back. I asked D. why they kept looking back; what was the psychological explanation? It is hard to know anymore when the glue and paint thinner sniffing has done its damage. Already, their motor coordination was disturbed; already they staggered and had trouble lifting their legs for each new step. Their looking back was the automatic behavior of disturbed, deeply frightened animals.

At the same time, community organizing had been under way for the last six weeks, with D. and C. talking to all the mothers and some of the men in the neighborhood, for hours at a time. D. read books on Conflict Resolution in Spanish, drew graphs, and condensed her reading into summarizing handouts. The principal graph took the form of a triangle. The lower levels described the foundation for the tip of the triangle: action. That is to say, the community could not correct matters regarding trash, graffiti, drinking and drugs in the alleys, social respect, and safety if action was not first based in conflict resolution and trust building—and simple agreements like not calling the police before talking to one’s neighbor or to the steering committee.

At first, we weren’t sure if anyone would come. A couple from the organizing committee hung a sheet over an ugly graffitied wall, then hung a framed picture of the Virgin of Guanajuato from a nail. They placed two plastic pails with flowers just below her. People stretched strings of small triangular yellow flags across the intersection of two alleys. Then, the neighborhood’s families began to trickle in. In the end, there were more than fifty people—including two of the drug-dealing families (i.e. mothers or aunts), but not the drug dealers themselves.

In what appears to Mexican style, family groups sat with their own; the most alienated—the drinking and drug dealing families—sat at the fringes but were still present and observing. K., a very experienced young friend, conducted a drawing workshop for the children at a table a little uphill from the food tables. She asked the kids to draw their own house, then people the picture with anyone they wanted. I stretched a clothesline between two concrete nails hammered into the front of our house, over the little table with the CD player and speakers—a spot I thought would attract the most attention, and we hung the kids’ drawings on the clothesline as–I like to think–an indication of what was most important to all of us: guiding the next generation of youth in a different kind of direction.

Some eight women spread food out on the tables where they filled chalupas, sopes and other kinds of baked or deep-fried formed tortillas with bits of ham and rice. Women who have feuded for years stood next to each other, smiling, serving the food. The president of the steering committee handed out plates of food. I brought cups of hot ponche – non-alcohol punch made from cinnamon, guava, tamarindo and carmelized sugar – to the outliers, the shy, the most alienated, to emphasize that they too were included.

Most of these people—the most alienated—sat around a corner from the main scene but were still able to see the CD player and the art wall. Three of these men had come to drink beer—one of the few ways for them to be present in a social setting. One of them was very drunk already. I brought him a chair; I brought him punch; others brought him food. He was shy and inarticulate; still, he wanted to be near the party.

One of the other two drinkers – a cargador – a man who carries heavy things (bricks, sand, bags of cement) up and down the canyon’s sides – approached R., a small woman, who was seated on the front steps of the entrance to her tienda – store – situated twelve strides from our front door. Just above her and to one side of the door she had opened the hinged glass window to her niche, in which was enclosed another Virgin of Guanajuato, illuminated by two votive candles and framed by flowers. R. was ladling out her own version of the Iluminación ponche. I was sitting right in front of her, so I heard what happened.

The beer drinker cargador, a man of essentially no education whatsoever, huge, rough and unwashed, asked R. to sell him a caguama – a liter bottle of beer. And R. said, very sweetly, “Ah no, Sir, I am not able to sell you one because we want it to be tranquilo here.”

He repeated the request.

She repeated her gentle refusal. The cargador lost a little face and retreated. Soon after a man came looking for him for a carrying task, and he left the gathering with a flash of recovered pride in his eyes.

R. the other beer drinker–a former glue sniffer who has somehow escaped from that circle of hell–held a caguama in his hands for at least a half an hour, but I never saw him drink from it. Perhaps he realized he didn’t have to drink to have a good time and probably because I and others had fussed over him, trying to show him we considered him one of us.

At one point, the very drunk man ghosted through the crowd, pushed open the door to the walled off vacant lot behind the food women and went in to pee. It took him a long time to reemerge and shuffle back around the corner to the margins of the festival.

People ate chapulas and drank ponche and looked at each other, even at other family groups, and smiled. I played CD’s of Cuban music and rustic music from Veracruz that included a harp. The first plucked notes of harp in the first song brought a small hoop from the abstaining beer drinker R; and I was delighted that there was still a place inside him that resonated with this simple, exuberant folk music.

People continuously passed through the crossroads of the two intersecting allies, on their way up from or down to the city. A few semi–recovered glue–sniffing adolescents bounced through, glad, I thought, to be making an appearance. I tried to detain two of them–boys I had known for years, beckoning them to come drink a ponche, eat a sope or chalupa. They smiled broadly but did not stay. But almost.

The steering committee stood on a high spot and thanked everyone for coming. D. announced that each child that had drawn a picture was to receive a bag of candies (there were twenty-five bags in all, supplied by a woman who could not attend); then the requirement was just being a child; or the mother of a child. The cooks protested that they too were deserving. I lobbied for R., the non-drinking beer drinker, but he was beaten out by another baby and her mother. He took it well, I thought.

Then it was getting dark, and we began to pack up. There had been no disruption from enraged gangbangers, no bouncing hand grenades, no attacks, no violence—no reason for fear. Just by being there, I thought we had shown that we cared about our barrio and were united in making it better—better for the young artists whose drawings hung on the clothesline, and for everyone one else—even for those not present. Word gets around. The report will be that something good happened. And in Mexico, that is always wonderful news.