‘Dinero, dinero,’ they said, when my turn came.
‘I’m sorry I don’t speak Spanish.’
An acne-scarred, smirking boy with a machine gun held Valentina’s tampons up for all to see.
‘Where do you put these? What else do you hide up there?’
A Venezuelan mother, travelling without her husband, was forced to knife open the teddy bear of her sobbing three-year-old daughter, to prove no drugs were inside. A Brazilian businessman who objected to being searched was ushered inside a hut by three soldiers and emerged, half an hour later, looking pale.
‘Those sons of bitches took my watch,’ he said in the silent interior of the bus as we rolled away from the checkpoint.
A few months ago, R and I chanced upon a food truck operated by a Venezuelan couple, Jorge and María, near our home in Brisbane’s inner south. It stood bright-lit in the summer dusk on the asphalt outside a mechanic’s workshop. Since the baby was asleep in the pram, we decided to stay for arepas. Jorge sat at the table with us as we ate.
‘Mexicanos,’ he said. ‘I can tell by the accent.’
‘I’m Australian actually, but my wife is Mexican, so I sound like her. And you’re a real Venezuelan? You’re not like these Salvadorans who keep opening Tex-Mex places because Aussies don’t know the difference?’
Jorge looked genuinely wounded. ‘How can you ask? Of course I am Venezuelan.’
‘I visited your country ten years ago.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Caracas mostly. I also saw a little of the south.’
‘You were in Caracas? You’re lucky to be alive.’
‘What part of the country are you from?’
‘Caracas.’
He told me they’d been in Australia five years. His daughter circled on her bicycle, her pigtails flying behind her. She would have been nine or ten.
‘Elena can barely remember Venezuela.’
I didn’t have the heart to tell Jorge that this rundown industrial street corner, with two brothels nearby and a perpetual traffic jam at the lights, seemed like the closest thing to Caracas you could find in Brisbane. I tried to think of something to make him feel better.
‘The south was beautiful.’
‘You saw the Gran Sabana?’
‘Yes.’
‘They say it’s the most beautiful place in the world.’
‘You’ve never been?’
‘I always thought I’d go when I retired. I guess I’ll never see it now.’
I was too ignorant of history and too self-absorbed, in 2007, to predict that the exiled Jorges and Elenas would soon number in the millions. A few weeks in the country wasn’t long enough to recognise the symptoms of a broader slide into chaos. Since then, hyperinflation and a crash in oil prices has left the Bolivarian Republic unable to feed itself. President Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, have consolidated state power by removing presidential term limits and cracking down aggressively on opposition media. There’s been blood on the streets of Caracas again these last few years, from clashes between pro- and anti-government protesters. Nowadays the country looks more like a failed state than a regional powerhouse. I didn’t foresee any of this. I certainly couldn’t have guessed hungry people would one day break into the Caracas Zoo and butcher animals for food. All the same, my hopeful view of Bolivarian socialism had evaporated by the time Valentina and I crossed the border.
I had two eyes and two ears, and I could sense the wheel turning.
We Want Them Alive
Ayotzinapa is shattered. Mexico is shattered.1
– Elena Poniatowska
Mexico City was a dream half remembered. Since our last trip, the legend had eroded the real memories, replacing them with volcanoes and earthquakes and pyramids and cathedrals and 20 million souls 2000 metres over sea level. But now I saw familiar landmarks and street corners: the post office at Echegaray where I once mailed a box of books home, the mini-van with smashed windows taped together that I took to Chapultepec every day for a month. Bouncing over potholes on the way to my in-laws’ house in the northern suburbs, I rolled down my window to get the full effect of the foul air and snarling traffic. The tricolour flag fluttering over the ash-grey overpass, the fire twirler hustling motorists at a red light, the scent of charred pork wafting from a taco stand – every impression brought back the real city I’d seen, four years ago.
My mother-in-law turned in her seat.
‘Hija, how was the flight? Will they extend your work contract in Australia? How long until James finishes his doctorate?’
R’s father glanced back at us in the rear-view mirror.
‘They look exhausted,’ he said, sounding the horn at a car changing lanes. ‘Stop bothering them. Let them eat something and have a rest.’
‘Are you hungry?’ asked R’s mother. ‘Did you eat on the flight? Do you want chiles rellenos for dinner? Should we go out?’
‘Whatever’s least trouble, suegra.’
R and I had only been engaged two months, but I’d been calling her parents my suegros since we started living together in Australia – somewhat scandalously – about five years earlier.
It wasn’t long before my mother-in-law asked to see the engagement ring, a cheap brass thing from the Oxfam store made of the recycled casing of an American bomb dropped in Cambodia. We’d chosen it because, like us, it was an exploded thing remade. On seeing it, she clasped her daughter’s hand with the kind of fierce love that’s difficult to distinguish from fear. Her brown eyes glistened.
‘So it’s true?’
Her hair was grey now, cropped shorter than last time. She’d stopped dyeing it when she retired from medical practice. Since then, she’d been taking courses at private colleges around town, studying frantically for a few months, jumping to the next thing: psychoanalysis, homeopathy, landscape painting. It wasn’t hard to see how her oldest daughter settling permanently in Australia might represent a loss to her. Her husband had been slow to leave full-time work; no grandchildren had yet arrived; her other two adult children lived in the USA.
‘Yes, it’s true,’ I told her. ‘But we haven’t set a date yet. We wanted to talk to you first.’
It was nearly midday by the time we awoke. From the upstairs bedroom, we could smell wet eucalyptus leaves in the park behind the house. We might still have been in Australia. But downstairs, the smell of frijoles and corn tortillas on the stove brought us unmistakably into the here and now.
As we ate breakfast, the drizzle subsided, and humming-birds buzzed around the feeder in the garden – our parting gift last visit. Once we’d eaten, R and her mother let Lola the bulldog out; they raced into the garden, flipped her on her back in the damp grass, tickled her tummy. Her father and I watched through the window, washing and drying the dishes between us.
‘I hear you’ve stopped teaching.’
‘Yes, a couple of months back. The maths department at the Politécnico gave me a nice send-off. Thirty years is a long time.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘The city isn’t a good place to retire: the pollution, the traffic, the insecurity. We’ve been talking about moving to a smaller town, but we can’t agree where. You remember how she was nagging me about Acapulco? She likes the warm weather. But Guerrero is very dangerous right now. I’d prefer Pátzcuaro.’
‘Isn’t Michoacán dangerous, too?’
‘Well, at any rate, we need to wait for my pension to be approved before we can decide.’
We sat down to drink café de olla at the kitchen table, the progressive newspaper, La Jornada, spread out before us. Since retiring, my father-in-law had read it from cover to cover most days. He discussed the news in long, immaculate Spanish sentences, as if leading a class discussion.
‘You’re visiting us at a very difficult time,’ he said. ‘It would be better if you didn’t go out this afternoon.’
He warned that clashes between police and protesters might make it dangerous for us to
revisit Mexico City’s historic central plaza, the Zócalo, as we’d planned.
‘Are the marches about Ayotzinapa? I’d like to go.’
‘It really isn’t safe. Protests here aren’t like in Australia.’
R had told me that in 1968, as a young university lecturer, he’d defied his own father to participate in Mexico City’s biggest ever demonstrations. Forty years on, though, his first instincts were protective.
The protests were about Ayotzinapa. On 26 September 2014, in the state of Guerrero in Mexico’s south-west, municipal police picked up 43 young, male student protesters from the Ayotzinapa Normal School. They were never heard from again. The mayor of Iguala, where the mass disappearance took place, skipped town in the aftermath. He was accused of masterminding the attack, motivated by a long-standing grudge against activist students from the all-boys school. Mass graves were then discovered in the hills. But forensic testing revealed none of the remains corresponded with the missing students.
By late October, when we arrived, the federal investigation into the mass disappearance was being criticised just as harshly as the complicity of municipal authorities. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto dragged his heels for nearly six weeks before agreeing to meet the disappeared students’ parents at Los Pinos, his residence in Mexico City. The meeting took place at about the time our flight was landing. In footage leaked online, one father, Felipe de la Cruz, can be seen standing over the seated President and his colleagues, furiously berating them into a microphone. He describes how his 19-year-old son, Ángel, narrowly escaped the fate of The Forty-Three. The boy hid behind a truck as police shot his best friend dead and loaded the rest into patrol cars. Later, when Ángel took another wounded friend to hospital, they were refused treatment, and soldiers told them: ‘This is what you get. This is what happens to you for doing what you’re doing.’
‘We’ve reached the limits of tolerance and patience,’ de la Cruz shouts at Peña Nieto in the video, the President nodding along like a scolded schoolboy. ‘We are demanding an immediate response, as Mexicans, from you, our President…Now that you’ve seen the anger of each and every parent, I hope that, like us, you can’t sleep soundly at night.’2
There was no immediate response.
Following the meeting, the other parents voiced their anger to reporters:
‘¡Hijo de su puta madre!’ cursed Mario César González. ‘They say our boys are dead. It’s a sick joke.’ 3
‘I’m pissed off with this fucking government,’ said another father, who didn’t give his name. ‘And with all the people who are still asleep because nothing has happened to them. They’re crouching down, hiding, letting it happen.’
But Mexico was beginning to wake up. As the November Day of the Dead festivities approached, solidarity marches demanding Peña Nieto take action were building in numbers around the country. ‘Vivos se los llevaron. Vivos los queremos,’ the protesters chanted, carrying stark, banner-sized, black-and-white portraits of the 43 missing young men: ‘They were taken alive. We want them alive.’
R and I did go out that afternoon, but not to the Zócalo. Instead, we borrowed her mother’s little grey Chevy and drove to University City in the far south. Behind the wheel, she leaned forward, concentrating on the traffic and potholes, following an especially circuitous route to avoid avenues often blocked by protests.
‘I know you think they’re exaggerating, but they feel responsible for you because you’re not from here. Worrying is how they show they care.’
‘I don’t think your mother’s forgiven me.’
‘Give her some time. She’ll come around.’
R’s alma mater, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) is the oldest and most prestigious public university in the country. Each year for the Day of the Dead, the various faculties celebrate the life of a great Mexican. In 2014, the students decorated the rim of an extinct volcano on campus with enormous, brightly coloured reproductions of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, made of rice and beans. References to the disappeared students were woven throughout: ‘We’re missing 43.’ Framed in this way, Kahlo’s stillborn children, twisted bodies and gaping wounds gestured outward, beyond the campus. Everywhere we went in Mexico, we couldn’t shake the sense of something terrible happening offstage.
The 43 young men whose disappearance in 2014 sparked Mexico’s biggest protests for 40 years were from a very different background to my father-in-law and the urban university students who protested alongside him in 1968. This time the protesters were trainee teachers (normalistas) at a rural school in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states. Normales Rurales (normal schools) like Ayotzinapa have a long tradition of social protest that extends back through the guerilla struggles of the 1960s and 1970s to the 1910 revolution. Their demands echo those of Emiliano Zapata in the twentieth century’s first revolution: agricultural assistance, land redistribution, universal education and suffrage, and eight-hour workdays.
The poor have long had to fight for these things in Mexico, but protest has become more dangerous recently, with civilians often caught in the crossfire between the drug cartels, their rivals and the Mexican state. Since 2006, more than 200,000 people have died in the so-called drug war.4 In addition to the horrifying number of extrajudicial killings of civilians by Mexican security forces, human rights groups have criticised the widespread use of enforced disappearances and torture.5 More than 30,000 Mexicans are missing as a result of the conflict,6 which has cost the US government more than $2.5 billion in military aid.7 It is astonishing this kind of money continues to be thrown at the Mexican military given their abject failure to shut down the cartels and their history of excesses targeting civilians.
In 1968, during the infamous massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City, army and government-supported paramilitaries opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing as many as 300 people. In the 1971 Halconazo, outside the Santo Tomás campus of the National Polytechnic in the capital, about 120 unarmed protesters were gunned down. Annual memorials for Tlatelolco and the Halconazo often spark fresh violence between protesters and authorities. The night the Ayotzinapa students disappeared they were collecting donations and organising transport for a trip to the capital in October to attend a memorial for the victims of the 1968 massacre.
Given this history, when federal investigators cleared the military and federal police of all responsibility in the 2014 Ayotzinapa case, few Mexicans believed them. Authorities blamed the disappearance and presumed execution of the 43 students on members of a local drug cartel and a few rogue elements in the municipal police. But everyone knew the corruption ran higher than that. The slogan ‘It was the State’ was soon daubed on walls across the country.
After leaving the university, we met a couple of R’s old work colleagues at a cantina, a cavernous place full of dusty bull-fighters’ outfits in cabinets, where the waiter brought a tray of quesadillas every time you bought a beer. María and Lupe were tough, worldly, no-nonsense Mexican women in their fifties, both divorced and remarried with mixed families. They were not going to be easily charmed by a green-eyed foreigner. When R disappeared to the bathroom, they pounced.
‘Marriage, huh? I hope you’re serious this time,’ said María, slicing a threatening finger across her throat. ‘If you break her heart again, we’ll take you out cartel style.’
‘I guess you heard some bad stories about me.’
‘We heard you freaked out when she wanted to get married. We heard you called the whole thing off after four years living together.’
Lupe scowled and pounded the knuckles of her right hand into her opposite palm. She took a long swig from her foaming pint glass, smacked her lips.
‘We took her drinking at this very cantina, when she came home. We were ready to kill you. It isn’t too late.’
‘We have a second chance now. Things are better – even our therapist says so.’
‘Your therapist?’ said María. ‘What about her parents? Have you explained w
hat happened? Have you explained why they should trust you?’
‘How?’
Lupe slammed the tabletop, slopping our beers.
‘You can’t pretend it didn’t happen. You have to reassure them you’re going to take care of their daughter…I assume you asked her father’s permission before you proposed?’
I stared at them in guilty silence.
María shook her head. ‘They must think you’re an hijo de puta.’
‘I think her mother does. But what can I do?’
‘It’s very important in Mexico to ask your suegros for their daughter’s hand,’ said Lupe.
‘Isn’t it too late?’
‘Hombre, this is the perfect time,’ María broke in. ‘You must buy them a very expensive bottle of tequila.’
‘Yes,’ said Lupe. ‘You must say to them: “Estimadísimo señor, estimadísima señora, I have learned it is the custom in this country to ask the suegros for their daughter’s hand. Forgive my impertinence. Please accept this humble gift.” ’
When R returned, Lupe and María explained they were coaching me on how to smooth things over with my parents-in-law, and how to court a Mexican woman properly. They started requesting romantic songs from a trio of old-timers with guitars who’d come into the bar, and they improvised an elaborate speech to my in-laws over the music, riffing off the song lyrics:
‘Your daughter is a precious stone, señor, a jewel of incalculable value. Give me her hand, I beg you…’
Once the scolding was done, we laughed, drank and sang together for hours. By the time we tottered home, they were teasing us about our wedding night and listing names for our firstborn.
R’s parents were relieved when we returned home that night. A car had been set alight downtown. Demonstrators insisted that the masked perpetrators had been paid by police to justify dispersing the crowd with water cannons. Bigger protests were expected any day. It was a good time to leave. Next morning, we’d set out early to drop Lola the bulldog in the care of relatives. Then we’d make a road trip together, all four of us, to Pátzcuaro, my father-in-law’s hometown, 350 kilometres north-west of the capital, where we’d pay our respects to the ancestors during the Day of the Dead.
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Page 4