The Cartels
For the past three Januaries, Rebecca and I have been guests in a complicated country. We’ve rented an apartment in San Miguel, a city of 170,000 people northeast of Mexico City, marked by the purple arrow on this US State Department travel advisory map.
The yellow-coded areas suggest vigilance, with the orange a warning to stay away. The color admonitions covering the entire country give one a visual image of the Mexican cartels’ tentacles throughout this country of 133 million, which includes, each year, 20 million travelers from the USA and 3 million from Canada. Roughly 20% of San Miguel’s residents are ex-pats from the USA and Canada.
So I’ve paid close attention to news from Mexico since Mexican government security forces killed ‘El Mencho,’ a top Cartel leader, four days ago in the state of Jalisco, just west of San Miguel’s province of Guanajuato, with reports of flight cancellations at the Guadalajara Airport and ‘narco-blockades’ throughout Jalisco and several other states.
An excellent source of non-sensational reporting is the English-language Mexico News Daily. This article is a good summary of what has occurred.
John, a retired minister from Washington, DC, who settled in San Miguel two decades ago, told me in an email that schools were cancelled on Monday, some businesses closed, and many were ‘sheltering in place,’ as Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum counseled.
By Tuesday, everything seemed back to normal. According to John, there have been no reports of cartel-related incidents in San Miguel.
Calle San Antonio
A week before we departed, in a rumor that was later confirmed in a news report, two young men were executed in mid-afternoon in a cartel-related action on San Antonio, the street in the first photo, and an avenue we walked every day.
Here are two more photos of this major thoroughfare.
A Mexican friend of Rebecca said she walked by the scene of violence an hour after it happened. The bodies had been removed. The police were present. Rebecca’s friend, a teacher, was followed up the street by two large men. Unsure and worried, she popped into a pharmacy and hid in a back room. Later, to Rebecca, she said, “These men likely wanted information. They aren’t interested in and won’t bother tourists. It’s Mexicans that are in danger.”
Calle Aldama
When friends ask what we do in San Miguel, our short answer is we walk, around 9000 cobblestone steps each day. San Antonio is our second-favorite street; Aldama is our first. In the photo below, you see a bird’s-eye view of our daily destination, San Miguel Arcángel Catholic Church, from our apartment rooftop.
We see you have the right kind of shoes with thick soles. Follow us. We’ll give you time for photos.
“On your right, Buenos Dias.”
Rebecca at the halfway marker.
A sandwich and a cookie at Parque Juarez.
Meet our old friend. He’s a constant at this sentinel spot across from Juarez.
His owner sells beautiful pottery.
Would you believe it? Three years and not a single honk.
The Aldama two-step: learned behavior. We can live together!
You saw it here, first.
Our destination, El Jardin, the central plaza. A Mariachi Band will be by in a moment.
Sorry, on the return trip, it’s all uphill.
San Miguel
Two weeks before we left, a neighbor told us three women had been robbed by two masked men on motorcycles at knifepoint around 9 PM on Aldama. This was confirmed by two Mexican friends who said it’s likely these guys came in from a surrounding village where the poverty rate is much higher.
On that Friday evening, a younger male friend had accompanied Rebecca and me as we walked up Aldama from Johnny’s Piano Bar, across from El Jardin. Apparently, the attack occurred about 30 minutes after we passed that spot. Our friend, an artist, wanted some fresh air before he went home to work. None of us thought about danger.
Like the USA, Mexico is a complicated country. If one looks closely in both countries, there’s a lot of nastiness.
We will return to Calle Aldama next year. In fact, we plan to arrive in mid-December to experience Christmas in San Miguel — to see this tree go up as well as come down.
I don’t know enough about Mexico to put the right words to why I always feel I am a better person after a month in San Miguel. In our experience, walking San Miguel’s streets, the good overwhelms we see overwhelms the bad we don’t.
But I’ll let another American, Katherine Corcoran, speak for me. Ms. Corcoran has written a poignant and informative book, In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, A Cover-up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press, about the killing of a Mexican reporter.
I’ll leave you with her words.
Mexico was so antithetical to the American emphasis on getting ahead and a lifestyle that made me feel I was under constant stress. Among the middle and working class there was zero sense of entitlement. To an outsider, Mexicans lived in the moment. They seemed to wake every day looking not for ways to get ahead , but rather, for the necessities to survive, which made them infinitely more gracious.
