Big City, Huge Problem

It’s probably not a slogan that the Mexico City chamber of commerce would embrace for this grand metropolis, which has a rightful place among the great urban centers of the world. But there it was, in September’s Vanity Fair magazine--a short feature extolling the city’s nightlife, culture and cuisine, and concluding by blithely hailing the city’s “exciting air of lawlessness.”

That “exciting air” is, in fact, a crime wave that dates to the country’s financial crisis of 1994 and that has become a defining characteristic of the capital. Crime and the countermeasures to it are leading topics in daily chitchat, much like politics, the weather and traffic jams.

When you visit Mexico City these days, you notice something: There are heavily armed guards everywhere--at the entries to restaurants, shopping centers and nightclubs, in the aisles of drugstores and music shops. These are not rent-a-cop security guards--though there are plenty of them as well--but municipal police whose weapons are always at the ready.

Preoccupation with personal security is, of course, nothing new in Mexico. The country’s wealthiest families have had bodyguards and armored vehicles and have lived in walled, even turreted, homes since at least the 1970s, when kidnappings were a tactic of revolutionary groups.

But the kidnapping epidemic now affects the middle class, and there is a new type--the “express,” or short-term, kidnapping, carried out for discount ransoms of withdrawals from ATM machines. It seems the entire city has undergone a mass behavior-modification program. Nightclub-goers have long discussed the availability of parking spaces when planning an outing; today they must plan for security as well. Drivers place their hands on the bottoms of their steering wheels so that watches, rings and bracelets are less visible at stoplights and congested intersections. Surveys show that about 70% of the city’s people venture out less often at night.

It’s not just the natives who are constantly wary. Tourism has been slightly down in recent years, and at least some of it can be attributed to fears of crime. People who haven’t visited Mexico City for several years are usually startled by the changes that security worries have wrought. The nicer hotels and restaurants keep their front doors locked. Not many foreigners or prosperous Mexicans take “libre,” or independent, cabs anymore. Today’s style is to hire an “executive taxi”--an armored hack. And cabs leaving upscale hotels have to declare their destinations to transit police while concierges take note of their license plates.

Chauffeurs have always loitered outside major hotels and tony restaurants. But today they are armed, and they do not stray far from their SUVs, which show telltale signs of fortification--a booming business here. Mexican corporations order bulletproof vehicles by the fleet. Dealers for Volvo, BMW, Mercedes and Audi sell armored models from showroom floors.

“We were the second or third company to start armoring cars in Mexico,” says Carlos Nader, sitting in his office at Protecto Glass de Mexico, a firm he started in 1993 after he and his family were victimized. “But now there are about 60.”

I first visited Mexico City in 1953. as a child from a small Texas prairie town, the city swept me away with its pre-Hispanic ruins, murals and crowded streets. Even at a tender age I realized that this was a distinct, special place. Mexico City was, and remains, the capital, not of another country but of a different civilization--imperfect, perhaps, but whole and complete in its way of things.

From my college years onward, Mexico City has been my New York, a place I visit two or three times annually to keep in touch with new fads and ideas. Like any great human undertaking, the city is subject to trends, stages and moods. But over time, one learns not to get carried away by such vicissitudes.

Twenty years ago, for example, the city’s chitchat was all about the Japanese, who had descended to study Mexico’s economic prospects. Prestige hotels added signs in Japanese in their lobbies. Cabbies and prostitutes memorized Japanese phrases, and Carlos Salinas de Gortari, an ambitious bureaucrat who would become the nation’s president, enrolled his children in a Japanese-Mexican school.

But the Japanese vanished as quickly as they came. The word on the street was that they had found the country and its capital too dicey, too difficult to predict, too corrupt, dangerous and insecure.

Not a few Mexicans and some Americans are now saying the same thing, among them my longtime friend, writer Jan Reid. Shot and nearly crippled in an express kidnapping in 1998 (his book “The Bullet Meant for Me” tells the story), he and others have bid adios to the town, reluctant to visit again. Disillusioned Mexicans are taking up digs in safer San Diego, San Antonio or Miami. Mexico City’s dismayed admirers in some ways resemble the New Yorkers who, in 1974, lined up to view “Death Wish,” the Gotham-vigilante fantasy film starring Charles Bronson.

“In 1993, we had 137,568 reported crimes in Mexico City; by 1997, we had 255,572--an increase of more than 80%,” notes Rafael Ruiz Harrell, the dean of Mexican criminologists, who has been writing a weekly column for the newspaper Reforma for nearly 10 years. Furthermore, victim surveys indicate that only 25% of all crimes in Mexico are reported.

The crime rate has declined slightly in recent years, but rising insecurity has persuaded Mexico City’s mayor, a member of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, to step away from the party’s leftish and nationalist principles in pursuit of a yanqui-designed, pragmatic anti-crime program. The crusade is controversial, but any success could transform Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador into Mexico’s next president in 2006. (Indeed, support committees are being formed throughout the country.) The upper and middle classes--swing voters in Mexico City--are tired of feeling helpless before crime.

Most chilangos, as the city’s residents are called (one theory says the term’s origin is from a bird that destroyed its habitat), are taking cues from their mayor. They are exercising patience and a few precautions, such as dressing down and not going out alone at night. It’s part of the price you pay for living in La Capital.

Surveys uniformly show that Lopez Obrador is the most popular politician in Mexico today. The prestigious magazine Cambio named the graying, Clinton-esque 50-year-old as Man of the Year for 2003, and a December poll for the daily newspaper El Universal gave him an 83% approval rating--up from 68% the year before. If the 2006 presidential election campaign were held today, half a dozen polls show that he would lead the race.

Although, as Cambio points out, Lopez Obrador is “a politician of the left who governs from the center,” he won his standing in a typically leftish way--by providing Mexico City residents age 70 and older with a $60 monthly food stipend. But to maintain his place in the polls, he must take on new issues and broaden his voter base.

He is trying to do so by addressing the problem of crime. During three years in office, he says, his administration has lowered the city’s overall crime rate by nearly 20%. Car thefts are down from 120 to 96 a day, muggings from 72 to 62, murders from 3 to 2. Most experts have tentatively accepted his claim. The surge in lawlessness that began in 1994, they say, has crested and indeed may have begun to decline.

“Things are not as bad as in 1997 and 1998,” says Emma Campos-Redman, who monitors Mexico City for Control Risks Group, a London-based business consultancy. “It’s not getting worse,” she cautions, “but the main problems--corruption and impunity--are still there.”

Lopez Obrador is now telling his constituents that his latest crime-fighting plan will punish the city’s rogue cops as well as its hoods. For years Mexico City’s police have been part of the crime problem. A December incident reported in Reforma paints an all-too-familiar picture: A drunken off-duty cop drove his car into an opposing traffic lane and came to a stop against a post, injuring two pedestrians. Two officers in a patrol car arrested him, but before they could haul him to jail, his brother--also a cop--came on the scene. Drawing his pistol on the arresting pair, he forced them to let their prisoner go.

Mario Arroyo Juarez, 35, who last May was the victim of an express kidnapping, is a criminologist who doesn’t mince words about the police: “In theory, the job of the police is to prevent crime, but in practice the majority of them protect criminals and even commit crimes.”

Robert Senseney, 56, whose Mexico City firm, Secure Source Intercontinental, trains bodyguards and drivers, says, “The first thing that prospective clients ask us is, ‘Where do you get your people from?’ If we were to say, ‘Former police officers,’ they’d all say, ‘Bye, bye.’ ”

To counter such perceptions, last year the mayor’s office fired and replaced about 2,000 cops, including district police chiefs, who were suspected of extortion and more heinous deeds. Nobody knows when the purge of the police will end, and ex-police officers are particularly prone to crime, but today both types know that they’re being watched.

“The police are still corrupt, of course, but they’ve got to be more careful now,” says businessman Nader. “When they’re up to things that they shouldn’t be, they can’t trust each other anymore.”

The problem of the police, however, is not only a problem of apples gone bad. Mexican justice is structurally weak, the mayor and other critics say. Government figures show that only about 10% of recorded crimes are prosecuted.

The family of Raul Samano Ramos bravely reported his kidnapping, despite knowing this sobering fact: The first warning that kidnappers give their subjects is that, even after a ransom is paid, if anyone goes to the police, a family member will die.

About two weeks earlier, Samano, a 47-year-old dealer in fruits and vegetables at the vast Central de Abastos wholesale market, had been grabbed as he drove home on the streets of Mexico City’s tough Iztapalapa district. Men with guns piled out of a gray van and surrounded his car so quickly that Samano didn’t have time to count them, though he believes that there must have been half a dozen or more. In a flash, they yanked him from his car, pulled a sack over his head and tossed him onto the floor of their van.

As they drove away, one of the thugs gave orders by radio or cellphone. “Remove the chip from the car,” Samano heard him say; the gang, he concluded, had been using a tracing device to keep tabs on his 1982 Grand Marquis.

From Buenos Aires to Mexicali, kidnapping has become, in the words of the Latin American magazine Gatopardo, “an industry of terror.” Kidnappers are increasingly taking as their targets not the ultra-rich or mafia dons but middle-class businessmen such as Samano. A self-made man, Samano’s flat, oval face, his wispy mustache and copper-colored complexion, his styleless clothing and rough speech all point to ascent from a lower station, even from Indian ranks.

Born in a village outside of Mexico City, he left school at the age of 8 and a year later began working as a porter at the La Merced market, then the center of Mexico City’s foodstuffs trade. Over the next 30 years, he bought a few farms, a dozen trucks and nearly as many “bodegas,” or warehouse units, at the Central de Abastos, which long ago surpassed La Merced.

Businessmen at the Central boast that “more money comes through here than through the Bolsa”--the Mexican stock market. Seventeen bank branches operate within the market’s confines, dispatching golf carts manned by shotgun-wielding guards to collect receipts from bodega owners. But as Samano’s kidnapping shows, at the Central money is safer than its depositors, who have become targets for extortion gangs.

Samano didn’t feel threatened by crime until early last year, when friends at the Central began receiving menacing telephone calls.

“If your wife went out to the supermarket in the morning, they’d call, saying that they had kidnapped her and that if you didn’t wire them $1 million, they’d kill her by noon,” Samano recalls in his spartan office, upstairs from one of his bodegas at the teeming mercado.

To foil the callers, the Central’s shopkeepers gave cellphones to their wives and offspring. But when extortion calls didn’t work, kidnapping began.

It took Samano a while to realize that he, too, was exposed to the threat. He initially felt confident that his penny-wise lifestyle would keep him beneath the notice of hoods. Because they saw no point--but did see danger--in displaying their wealth, for example, members of his family had accumulated several nondescript older cars. Each drove whichever vehicle was handiest at the time.

One afternoon in late June, about two weeks before his father’s kidnapping, Samano’s oldest son, Freddy, was driving the ’82 Grand Marquis home when a van blocked his path. He dodged the roadblock with quick maneuvering. The incident warned the family that it was under scrutiny by a gang, but no one knew precisely what to do. To bolster his courage, Samano took out a gun permit.

It didn’t help. On the day he was snatched, Samano was carrying the permit in a shirt pocket, but had left the gun at his office. For 16 days, Samano was kept blindfolded and bound--a prisoner of warders whom he never saw. They punched at him, seemingly for fun, and once, after depriving him of water for three days, handed him a glass of urine to drink.

Twice they brought him a cellphone for talks with his family, warning him to make no complaint and to demand payment of his ransom, which they had set at 10 million pesos--nearly $1 million. Though Samano owns plenty of property, his family couldn’t tap that amount. Freddy bargained until a compromise of 7 million pesos was reached, and then, to keep the captors from killing his father while he sought loans for the balance, he offered a good-faith delivery of 2.5 million pesos in cash.

During the ordeal, Samano, a Baptist, found solace in his faith that justice would be done--by God, not the police. “Throughout it all, I knew that he would be a just judge of things,” he says. “Without him, we are nothing.” Retreating to spirituality is an understandable response in a place where police are often found to be working both sides of the fence. Nevertheless, Samano says, lawmen tracked the hoods who came for the down payment, arrested three of the gang members and set Samano free. But, he adds, the cops recovered less than a quarter of the advance paid on the ransom--or that’s what they told prosecutors, anyway.

Since then, Samano’s family has lived with the specter of having defied the kidnappers by calling the police. It is a legitimate worry: Bodega owners at another mercado report that 16 of their number have been kidnapped during the past two years. Two families informed the police, they say--and both their patriarchs turned up dead.

In 2002, wealthy supporters of the mayor made the suggestion, and even offered to pay the tab, for the city to hire the consulting firm of former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani for advice on how to get a handle on Mexico City’s rampant impunity, corruption and crime. Last August, Mexican police executives received the Giuliani Partners’ report, which included 146 proposals.

The introductory pages trumpet the “broken windows” doctrine elaborated over the past 15 years by American sociologists. The theory holds that disorder breeds crime: If windows in an abandoned building aren’t fixed, derelicts, drug runners and muggers will move in. Advocates of the theory call for strict enforcement of the law, even against minor offenses.

But the “broken windows” theory contrasts with the traditions of Mexican and most American criminologists, whose arguments maintain that the plurality of offenses are committed by young unmarried males, and that crime rises and falls--as even the 49-page Giuliani report notes--in close tandem with jobless rates. If a factory is closed, traditionalists say, the sons of its idled workers are likely to break windows and to commit other crimes.

Mexico’s economy, in a slump since 1982, took a second dip during the financial crisis of 1994, and it hasn’t recovered yet. But economic determinism has little appeal to victims and voters, and the virtue of the Giuliani report--both politically and as a crime-control program--is that its implementation will enhance the powers of the police.

Its downside is that it would accomplish this by interring a part of Mexico’s storied heritage. Mexico’s criminal justice system took form during the 19th century, using as its template a bifurcated Spanish model, itself derived from the system of France, not the more unitary police scheme that is familiar to Americans and Brits.

The difference is that in Mexico, two police forces, one preventive and the other investigative--or “judicial,” as it is called--work the crime beat. Preventive cops, who outnumber judiciales by more than 25 to 1, can arrest only those offenders whom they catch in the act. Because they are forbidden to investigate, they don’t have access to criminal histories, lists of outstanding warrants or other background materials taken for granted in the British and American systems. Like security guards, Mexico City’s preventive police are in many ways mere scarecrow cops.

The Giuliani report recommends giving preventive officers the authority to “stop, ask and inspect” suspects, and boosting the number of judicial police, blurring the line between the two. It also pictures the Mexican process of criminal jurisprudence, based on written motions, as “long, expensive and unjust”--calling for American-style oral trials in its place.

To put the Giuliani judicial program into practice, Mexico will have to tinker with its constitution, rewrite its criminal codes, build large, publicly accessible courtrooms and train forensic stenographers by the score.

Opponents of the plan say it is malinchista, or unpatriotic. But more substantively, they argue that the theory underlying the Giuliani proposals is wrong. It’s a dispute about a political stance--right or left, pro-American or patriotic--and they accuse the mayor of showing deference toward the middle class at the expense of the poor.

Despite flak from criminologists and foot-dragging within its own ranks, Mayor Lopez Obrador’s administration has launched the program anyway, conducting roadblocks to catch drunk drivers, among other initiatives. And in recent months, several ranking judges and President Vicente Fox have endorsed some recommendations for judicial reform. Mexican nationalists may carp, but Giuliani and Lopez Obrador’s wishes are becoming commands.

There is always room to doubt that a country as rooted in its past, and as disorganized as Mexico, can do anything to change its ways. But looking back over the past two decades, that’s not what I see. Mexico may put off taking action, but it doesn’t leave things undone.

It wasn’t always that way. The 1968 student massacre by soldiers in one of Mexico City’s main squares made it plain that the country’s government was neither representative nor benign. Yet opposition was puny. Mexicans accepted tyranny and venality as part of the order of things.

Then came the earthquake of 1985, arguably the worst moment in the lives of Mexico City residents who are older than 30 today. The terremoto, like the crime wave, frightened the city and caught its municipal and federal governments unprepared, unable to protect or provide.

When chilangos discovered that their rulers couldn’t cope with the totality of the damage, they concluded that Mexico’s traditional political class had to go. Mexico City took the lead in casting votes against the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the uniquely Mexican legion that had held a monopoly on national office since 1929. Voters in La Capital began electing non-PRI leaders, and the country finally followed suit with the 2000 victory of the upstart Fox (of the National Action Party).

Mexico and its capital worked this miracle even while hobbled by corruption that to this day hinders police reform. As Mexico City politician Aleida Alavez Ruiz, 30, observes, corruption is “not all up to the police--that would be too simple to say. It is part of our culture as Mexicans, but it’s something that, the people are beginning to see, is of no help with things.” Chilangos can put life into their criminal justice system whenever they make up their minds, she says--and they may have done just that.

Polls by two major Mexican newspapers indicate that a majority of voters, not merely the upper and middle classes, are convinced that reducing crime is the most urgent task confronting the Lopez Obrador administration. Though only 40% believe that the mayor has made any headway, skepticism is on the mend: One year ago, only a quarter of them bought into his claim.

Raul Samano has retired his ’82 Grand Marquis, though it’s not because he’s relying on the mayor, a new program or a political change. Instead it’s because he spent hard-earned money with Carlos Nader’s firm, which now also sells used armored cars. Samano, his wife and son are now driving armored Jeep Grand Cherokees--of mid-’90s vintage, to be sure. But if the Giuliani reforms put a brake on Mexico City’s crime, all that could change. Samano can afford a new car, and he deserves to drive one someday.