It was one of those carefree summer days of my youth. I was stretched out on my back in the cool grass of my neighbor’s backyard. The cicadas buzzed happily from their hidden spots in the garden. The deep, blue sky was augmented by the thin, wispy strands of a cirrus cloud.
I could hear the bells of the ice cream truck tingle as it turned the corner to my street. Ordinarily, this would send me on a mad dash for my house, shouting for my mother to give me a quarter for the ice cream man. But there would be no ice cream for me this day. I couldn’t interrupt my repose. Literally, I couldn’t get up. My neighbor Edward, three years older than I, was sitting on my chest with his knees on my arms, pinning me to the ground in a helpless position.
The summer sky was suddenly blocked from my view as his pimpled, teenage face filled my entire frame of vision. The comforting sound of the distant lawnmower was muted behind Ed’s out of tune rendition of the Buddy Holly song, “That’ll be the Day.”
“That’ll be the day-ay-ay,” he sang, “When you die!” And then he tickled me under my armpits until I was sure this would be the day that I died.
Finally, he stopped. He didn’t let me up, mind you. He just stopped tormenting me with tickles and let me catch my breath. We had some friendly banter that led me to believe he might roll to the side, allowing me to get up and run like hell towards home (I was faster than he was). Instead, synapses fired in his adolescent brain telling him that I had recovered enough, and he did his best Buddy Holly imitation and tickled me some more.
Ed had me pinned there for what seemed like a week. Where were my parents? Didn’t they wonder why I didn’t come home for dinner at night? Why I wasn’t in my bed at lights out? Who was eating my breakfast?
I can only guess that because it was the simpler times called the 1970’s, they assumed there was no chance I had been kidnapped; they had little concern I was barricaded in a dark room playing Atari Space Invaders for 13 consecutive hours; and heaven forbid they even considered that that nice boy Edward could be bullying me. They probably just thought I was on a bike trip with my friends to Niagara Falls.
My mom being attentive
In truth, my parents were attentive parents, Ed was usually a good friend and neighbor, and I did have a lot of carefree summer days in my youth where I whiled away the hours chewing Bazooka bubble gum and daydreaming over my Garbage Pail Kids sticker collection. But to pretend that my childhood was nothing but strawberries and cream would belie the fact that there was a darker side. Being tickled to death by Edward, for one. And I’m not even going to get into the times when that crazy kid Ronald from around the block cornered us and pelted us with crab apples.
When we moved to San Miguel de Allende from Virginia almost two years ago, it had been ranked the number one travel destination for several years running by a number of magazines that you may have thumbed through while waiting to see your dentist. It’s recently been featured in the L.A. Times.
It has a perfect climate, great restaurants, picturesque streets and colonial architecture, a thriving artist community, lots of culture, and it’s affordable. In short, it is paradise.
Sun sets on paradise
All those things held up for us when we got here. Plus, R and I don’t have to work as much to make ends meet so we had more free time to meet like-minded people who agreed a weekend spent popping the cork on cases of Costco wine and playing Cards Against Humanity was the fulcrum of evolved human existence. And these people had children who were pretty good kids who became friends with our kids. Everything seemed to be going so well. And then a few weeks ago a decapitated head was found in a 12-gallon cooler like you would fill with adult beverages and sliced turkey breast to make sandwiches and bring to a picnic.
This cooler was strategically placed in the street so it couldn’t help but be found. A few days later, while friends and family of the body that the head belonged to were holding a funeral procession, a pick-up truck drove by and its passengers opened fire on the mourners, killing a bunch more people. A few weeks before that, two police officers were killed while responding to a call about a domestic disturbance. A few weeks before that, someone was killed in the flower market. One Saturday morning while I was walking the dog, a man was shot dead in a drive-by near our street. One night, police found several decomposed bodies in an abandoned building near our friends’ upscale hotel. I’m not suggesting our friends killed hotel guests who helped themselves to a second serving of chilaquiles from the breakfast bar and dumped them across the street. Rather, I think it was more of a coincidence that the bodies were found near their hotel.
Overall in San Miguel - with a population of 140,000 people, approximately 30,000 of whom are octogenarian gringos who only leave the house on Friday nights when Mi Bistrok is open and serving dinner - there have been more than 70 murders this year.
Shortly before we left the U.S., there was a murder in the sleepy little park behind our house in Alexandria. The following night, the chief of police attended a neighborhood meeting to explain the troubled past of the victim, the reason he may have been killed, and all that the police department was doing and planned to do to apprehend the culprit. He drew a diagram of the area, brought in a veteran from the homicide unit to assure us this was an isolated incident that didn’t require us all to buy an assault rifle at Walmart, and, if I recall correctly, even led the group in a round of pat-a-cake.
The police are cute, but not very effective in a law enforcement way.
The police in San Miguel are not held to the same level of accountability. Details of who the victim was and why he was targeted are often sketchy, if given at all. No one expects that the crimes will be solved. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine less vigorous police work. A few months ago when I was about to walk into a storm drain that runs under the city with several teenage boys (my son and his friends) there were two police officers standing in front of the tunnel. I thought they would stop us, or at least question us, but instead they looked at us and walked away.
Media accounts report that cartels are battling for control of the drug trade in town and that the murder victims are soldiers in that war. The reason there is a drug trade in town is at least partly because San Miguel is a weekend destination for wealthy Mexican out-of-towners, and apparently they like to do blow (slang for cocaine) in da club. And someone needs to sell it to them.
Maybe some of the older white crowd shuffling around town also use drugs that you can’t get over the counter and that contributes to demand. My generation (forty-something) is in that in-between stage of drug use - we used in our twenties and maybe our thirties, but now we have kids in the house and we aren’t old enough to not give a fuck. For once, I’m not part of the problem.
The state of Guanajuato (GTO), where San Miguel is located, has also seen an increasing murder rate as several groups battle for control of cartel business - including the drug trade, car theft, and fuel theft from distribution pipelines. Media accounts report that the state government is siding with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) (like it’s some kind of sporting event where you root for your favorite team) in a cartel war that it estimates will take two to three years. The theory is that if CJNG prevails, the violence will subside. The media account does not state why the government believes this to be true.
The brutality is not limited to GTO. In neighboring Guerrero state, 13 police officers were killed purportedly “trying to do their jobs;” nobody is sure whether this meant taking bribes from the cartels or refusing to take bribes from the cartels.
In the state of Michoacan, cartels are extorting avocado farmers for monthly protection payments. If the farmer doesn’t pay, he may be kidnapped or killed. Now, whether you like a nice, firm avocado slice as an accompaniment to your tuna sandwich, prefer your avocado mashed with just the right amount of cilantro, lemon juice, and salt to scoop onto a tortilla chip, or don’t dig “green gold” at all, you have to be concerned about the effect this disruption to global avocado distribution while have on an already destabilizing world. Is the end of the world the only thing that will quench the cartel’s thirst for illicit profits?
At the macro level, just last week, the Federal Government ordered the release of a son of one of the most notorious cartel leaders (El Chapo) because the cartel declared that if the police continued to detain the man, it would mobilize its fleet of armored vehicles with machine gun nests and its legions of infantry armed with military grade automatic weapons to slaughter military, police, and civilians alike, and lay waste to large swaths of Northern Mexico.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe that releasing the younger El Chapo is evidence the government is in cahoots with the cartels or just believe it shows the government is not able to go toe to toe with a force as well-armed and organized, or perhaps even more well-armed and organized, than it is. The only conclusion to be drawn is - what the fuck is going on?
Crime in Mexico, like electricity, is complicated.
We’ve always known there is a high level of unrestrained criminal activity in Mexico. But throughout our travels in Mexico and other Central American countries plagued by gang violence, we’ve always been assured that tourists are off limits. Because we have white skin we fall into the category of “tourists.” And we’ve always felt it was more likely we would get gunned down at the Post Office in Alexandria by some deranged guy with an automatic weapon than run into that sort of trouble in Mexico.
It’s like this: if gangs allowed violence against tourists, tourists would stop coming to gangland and spending money. The businesses that gangs extort money from would have no money for gangs to extort. It’s a lesson in simple supply and demand economics. We supply money to the businesses and the cartels demand it from the businesses.
While there are occasional deviations from this rule, it makes sense and we’ve found it generally to hold. We’ve certainly never been kidnapped or killed by a cartel. But, along with the rise in deaths among Mexicans, there seems to be an increasing level of criminal activity against gringos in this town, as well.
Anyone who has ever been to resort land knows that while tourists are not often killed, taking their property is not off limits. That’s why you put things in your hotel room safe and don’t leave your camera and wallet in plain view on the beach while you go for a dip.
The same thing holds true here. Even though nobody wants to kill us, they will take our stuff if we make it easy for them. We know a few people that have been knocked on the head with a rock while walking home drunk late at night. There are home break-ins. Cars are stolen or broken into and trashed during a search for valuables.
Fortunately, we haven’t experienced any of this ourselves. We are still basking in the lazy, carefree days of summer. We are still listening for the tingle of the ice cream truck. But we’re walking and listening a little more warily. We know there’s another side to paradise.