Fosforo

Current Scene in Mexican Documentary Film

FILM < MÉXICO < 2016 < DOCUMENTARY

SOLITUDES What is wrong soul that screams / in your own way and without voice? / The paths of life / do not lead to where I’m going / You do not know what you’re gaining / you bear your pain badly / throw your soul on your back / soul and continue with courage / I can not for I went out into the world / and it did not disappoint / I saw a tower, I saw a fountain / I saw a woman, I saw a flower / I felt a song / I saw a bird / I discerned a splendor / The tower was surrendering / the supplies were running out / Flower and woman changed / losing smell and color / the bird shivered / it did not fly, not anymore / Where did the splendor go? / What is wrong soul that screams / in your own way and without voice? / The paths of life / do not lead to where I’m going / We were supposed to live / we were supposed to travel / we were supposed to be happy / live together and everything else.

—ALFONSO REYES

Content Director and Editor Diego Enrique Osorno Translation Ariel Nuncio Chronicle Writers Emiliano Ruiz Parra Alejandro Sánchez González Diego Enrique Osorno Guest Writers Kyzza Terrazas Pablo Chavarría Photographers León Muñoz Santini Christian Rivera Marc Bellver Víctor Hugo Valdivia Israel Cárdenas Alberto Anaya Adalid Bengala Alexandro Aldrete — Teresa Blanco Andrés Clariond — Juan Farré Alhelí Guerrero — Daniela Guerrero Abdul Marcos — Gabriel Nuncio Diego Enrique Osorno — Nathalia Pavón Salvador Reyes — Adriana Rodríguez Editorial Coordinator Nathalia Pavón — Salvador Reyes Editorial Design Sebastián Narbona Cover Photo Diego Moreno Back Cover Photo Israel Cárdenas Copy Editor Abdul Marcos

The paths of life do not lead to where I am going The solitude to which this edition refers to is a wandering solitude.

It is not the abandon of profound and dull sadness that the word solitude reflects when heard hastily. This is the solitude of an outlying and boisterous neighborhood turned into a babel of discriminations, vertex of ignited stories hoping to be extinguished. It is the solitude of entire nations devastated by brutality, or that of savages that govern men by citing dinosaurs.

In this editorial, cinema is explored like a document of protest, like a document of truth, like a document that is essentially human.

The solitude in these pages is the solitude felt when the habitual paths of life are not crossed. When normalcy is avoided. When the paths that are crossed are those conjured by a Colombian cumbia presaged by the wise inhabitant of Monterrey, Mexico, Alfonso Reyes, in a poem.

Fรณsforo shows both works in progress and completed projects, with the intention of opening a discussion about documentary film in Mexico based on narrative and audiovisual elements. Documentary film is not the same as literary chronicle, but there is a mystery that makes these two similar: reality.

Here lies the beginning of the path.

DEO

5

GOLONDRINAS

by Emiliano Ruiz

(The Golondrinas Project)

04

17

LEY DEL MONTE

by Alejandro Sánchez

SOMOS LENGUA

by Kyzza Terrazas

(The Law of the Mountain)

22

(Speaking Tongues)

LAS LETRAS (The Letters)

by Pablo Chavarría

Notes by Pablo Chavarria as he directed Las letras, a documentary that portrays the life of Alberto Pathistan, an indigenous teacher unjustly imprisoned and released years later by a presidential pardon.

Author: Pablo Chavarría

36

46

EL EX ALCALDE

by Diego Enrique Osorno

(The Former Mayor)

UN CABALLERO SE COME AL MUNDO MIENTRAS LO OBSERVA

(A Gentleman Takes on the World as he Observes It)

by Mariana Linares Cruz

INDEX

30

The Golondrinas Project 05

Golondrinas is a slum on the outskirts of Mexico City with about 15 acres and 600 inhabitants. Photographer León Muñoz and writer Emiliano Ruiz Parra began to visit it in 2013. In 2014, following an article published in Gatopardo, a project emerged to turn the story into a documentary with director Pablo Gasca, which is currently in production. In addition to a photo essay and the chronicle that the project led to, we present this unprecedented reflection on the process of its creation.

FÓSFORO

Author: Emiliano Ruiz Parra Photos: León Muñoz Santini

This Is Where We Live?

Every Saturday for thirty-seven years, a program called This Is Where We Live?, hosted by writer Cristina Pacheco, is broadcast on Mexican television. The program’s format is always the same: Pacheco goes to a poor neighborhood in Mexico City and talks with its residents on camera. The people she interviews tell about their lives, joys and tragedies as they show her the neighborhood’s streets and their own homes.

Since the project’s inception, Golondrinas co-director and photographer León Muñoz cautioned the rest of the team: This Is Where We Live? was to be our model for what not to do. Muñoz was referring to the aesthetics of the talking head, but in a deeper sense, the idea was to avoid a complacent, melodramatic narrative that explores painful events without ever inquiring into the reasons or circumstances that led the characters to live in poverty or to suffer, say, the consequences of an earthquake, lack of schools or services like water or electricity.

We responded in two ways to Muñoz’ challenge: a political response and an aesthetic one. Golondrinas is a neighborhood of about 600 residents on fifteen acres, located in the municipality of Ecatepec, 30 kilometers north of the Zocalo (also known as the Plaza de la Constitucion).

Golondrinas is a drop in the sea of 20 million inhabitants of Mexico City (half of whom live in its outskirts).

Yet Golondrinas, as a slum, tells a universal story. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis says that we’re entering a new era: after 2020, the rural population will peak and start to decline. By 2050, most of the world’s population—about 10 billion—will live in cities, mostly in slums. According to Davis, that change will be as important as the Industrial Revolution.

Still, the slum remains invisible. In Spanish, for example, there is no word for it: favela is a recent loan from Brazilian Portuguese, and the Spanish words are almost unknown to Spanish speakers. So Golondrinas (and I now

refer to the documentary project) is about bringing a story that is both local and universal into the light: the strength and dignity, as well as the tragedies and the precariousness of the inhabitants of Golondrinas are identical in Cairo, Dhaka, Istanbul, Nairobi, Cochabamba and Shanghai. The features are similar in all marginal neighborhoods: the invasion of public lands, precarious homemade construction and, in high-risk areas, endless negotiations with politicians or organized crime to provide public services such as running water or electricity.

In the twentieth century, Mexico was ruled by the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) for seventy years (1929-2000). Elections in 2000 gave the country two successive presidents from the rightwing National Action Party, but the PRI regained power in 2012. Enrique Peña Nieto represented the Atlacomulco Group, possibly the PRI’s oldest and most cohesive faction (dating back to the mid-twentieth century), which has long governed the State of Mexico. This is Mexico’s largest province, with the most voters and an economy that represents 10 percent of GDP. It comprises the outskirts of Mexico City. Ecatepec is located there, and inside Ecatepec is Golondrinas.

07 FÓSFORO

I mention this because Golondrinas also offers a political explanation for the return of the PRI. It’s simple: the Atlacomulco Group based its control of the State of Mexico on the exploitation of its slums. Mexico City’s expansion into the provinces that were under its control gave it a source of economic and political wealth for decades—a wellspring of money, votes and political mobilization that was virtually free was placed at its service thanks to the capital’s disorderly growth.

Nothing is accidental in the slums of the State of Mexico. Those who sold the land were either developers or—mostly—organizations affiliated with the PRI that would buy communal farmlands from former peasants in irregular transactions, subdivide them and sell the parcels at ten times the price to impoverished workers with no access to bank loans. The parcels are located on hillsides and lack roads or public services, so after they’re sold the slum dwellers face one, two or three decades of negotiations to make them habitable.

The PRI has trained hundreds of mid-level leaders who act as the link between the slums and the state’s political elites. This middle layer is responsible for ensuring that every penny of the public budget that reaches the slums is traded for votes or attendance at the party’s public events. Want your neighborhood to have water? Then join the party, go to rallies and vote for the PRI. And the same goes for electricity, sewage and paved streets. Party officials would even give out boxes of food with enough to feed a family for a week.

08

The aesthetic and cinematic response must be as radical as the political response. And it should start with various questions, such as: why should poverty be ugly? Or: how do we move away from the topics normally associated with the slum, especially those that end up depoliticizing the inquiry? Middle-class visitors who come to the slum for the first time are fascinated by the energy and strength of its inhabitants. I know that I was. Slum dwellers have unintentionally given me some of my best lessons in morality. Especially their women—mothers with a tireless capacity for work who’ve built their homes with their own hands, have experienced misogynistic violence (sometimes attempted murder) at the hands of their husbands, and have worked as laborers, janitors, merchants, and cooks without taking a single day off for years, in order to give their children an education and the hope for less suffering and more stability.

These are stories of great drama and heroism, but their power and radiance can obscure the political perspective. For a long time, anthropological studies of the slum focused on the resilience of the poor. And it’s true, it is admirable. But if we only look at resilience, though it lends dignity to the subject, we end up ignoring the political history that put them there. If, on the contrary, we tell the political story behind this everyday struggle, it is magnified and becomes a political drama with historical implications—a vision that also accounts for the contradictions within the slum and the web of petty exploitation of its inhabitants—

of landlords and tenants, lenders and debtors, and employers and employees.

This is why Paul Gasca, León Muñoz and I (the documentary’s three co-directors) along with our producers Amaia Aldamiz and Christopher Argudín, decided to avoid the talking head syndrome. The testimonies of the characters are, of course, the main ingredient of the film, but they will be contrasted and challenged by our own visual interpretation of the urban space that is Golondrinas: its streets, the sewage canal that separates it from the neighboring slum (called Luis Donaldo Colosio, after the PRI presidential candidate assassinated in 1994), the contrast of homes made of concrete and those made of cardboard, garbage dumps, the crops planted between the houses, the sheep grazing on public lands, the gang graffiti, and so on. Every visual detail is loaded with political significance, and it is our duty as filmmakers to describe and explain it.

We will develop the narrative without losing sight of the fact that, deep down, our documentary is an exploration of the souls of the inhabitants of the slum. If it is true that we are dealing with a story of universal scope because of its political implications, then it should also be for its human power. The slum is a Darwinian place: those who are less able to adapt to adversity descend into alcoholism and sometimes hunger. Life in the slum is painful and sculpts the souls of its inhabitants in a way that is alien to those of us who grew up in the comforts of the middle or upper classes. Like any testimonial film, this one is built on the memories of its inhabitants. Memories that involve pain. They are experiences that its inhabitants put in the hands of the filmmaker. They give us their lives.

And we ask questions that they’re not able to answer.

For months after my first interview with Leticia Solorio, one of our main subjects, her question still haunts me: “Do you think it does me any good to remember?”

I still don’t have an answer.

FÓSFORO

Slums offer a powerful explanation for the return of the PRI. The sprawl of Mexico City went from being a natural phenomenon to becoming a politically planned act whose perverse purpose was to squeeze political capital and money from slum dwellers. Officials would charge from five to twenty dollars to facilitate residents’ access to water, schools or electricity. The amount may seem insignificant, but multiply it by the millions of inhabitants who have to pay up. This is why the radical answer to Muñoz’ challenge is that people ended up living in these slums because they were pushed into them for the illegal and immoral benefit of a moneyed minority.

09

GOLONDRINAS

Chronicle of a Community at the Margins

Golondrinas is a neighborhood in the municipality of Ecatepec that borders Coacalco and Jaltenco. An open canal—the Cartagena Canal—separates it from the Luis Donaldo Colosio neighborhood. Its border with Coacalco is delimited by a plot of land known as La Laguna.

The periphery of Mexico City has been deleted from the national narrative. More than ten million people live in the urban belt and provide an essential source of labor: construction workers, drivers, employees, cleaners and cooks. But our eyes look past them. They’re excluded from history books, and the press confines its coverage of them to sensational murders and such. Journalists concentrate their attention on decision-making bodies such as legislatures or middle-class neighborhoods. We suffer a centralization of the eyes: a version of Mexico that ignores the suffering and dreams of the millions of residents who live in its peripheries.

Golondrinas is a relatively young neighborhood: its first inhabitants arrived in the mid-nineties to the communal lands of Guadalupe Victoria. The process of turning the collectively owned rural plots into urban housing is still fresh in the memory of its inhabitants. But after that foundational moment in its history, it became a non-place of sorts. Most of its inhabitants are, in the eyes of the law, invaders. New settlers lack certainty as regards their ownership of the land, and the government is hesitant to provide police and other urban services to a community built on a legal grey area.

The precarious legal situation is reflected in government, which for years failed to provide police services and other rights. Faced with neglect, the inhabitants of Golondrinas built their own homes and streets. In some cases, the sheet metal, the banners from political campaigns and the wooden poles gave way to gray concrete blocks. The political calculus is accurately quantified here: x number of people at a rally are worth y sacks of cement and rebar. Gravel, sand and pavement are traded for electoral support. The building of a community revolves around the building of a citizenry.

The history of Golondrinas includes some victories, a few of which were collective ones: the water supply, sewage system and street lights were dragged out of institutional neglect in the past five years. But the epic battle is almost always individual. Surviving poverty and its multiple burdens requires a strong nerve and straightforward morality. A Protestant work ethic develops (seven-day work weeks are the norm), and the sense of good stewardship grows keen. Every extra peso is stored in bricks for the next wall to be erected, and family ties are strong. Parents reason that though they may not have gone to school, their children will graduate from a local high school, and they’ll make a superhuman effort to send them to college.

FÓSFORO

Golondrinas has given its founders a second chance. For Martha Garrido, Golondrinas gave her freedom from her husband, who would show up at night planning to stab her to death. In Golondrinas, Arturo Aguilar found peace after eleven years of fleeing poverty and finally reconnecting with a teenage love. Carlos Guzmán built his version of life in Golondrinas: the art of the barber’s clippers and the love of a parent. Golondrinas is the Spanish word for swallows. Every winter, swallows migrate south in search of warmer temperatures. Golondrinas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexico City, is one of the responses to the economic and moral winter that Mexico represents for millions of Mexicans. It is their opportunity to build a private and collective summer with their own hands, a second chance for the poor after centuries of invisibility.

León Muñoz first embarked on a project to photograph urban peripheries by himself. He began, with Ciudad Juárez, and then took on the portrait of Golondrinas in the urban belt of Mexico City with my help. Besides being a political junkie, photographer and graphic designer, he suggested a phrase that summed up what we were seeing: the architecture of precariousness. I have added the narrative equivalent: the epic of precariousness. While it is true that Golondrinas, like any marginal neighborhood, is inhabited by an urban lumpen proletariat class, it is not even a significant minority. Most of the neighborhood’s settlers are veterans of everyday resistance.

Golondrinas was born doomed to be invisible, like thousands of other communities in the metropolitan periphery that are urbanized and built by their inhabitants. And so they will continue to be unless we undertake a decentralization of history.

La Independencia

For years, the people of Golondrinas lit their homes with candles and oil burners. The residents of nearby neighborhoods refused to let them tap into their electrical posts. When they finally made common cause with other settlers, the sources of electricity were so far away that they required hundreds of meters of cable, which in effect meant a few hours of dim light every day. Since Golondrinas had no running water, people were obliged to wait for the water trucks to come once every two weeks. But many drivers refused to go because their trucks would get stuck in the potholes. “We prayed for rain so we could store the water in drums,” recalls Aidé, who would walk twenty or thirty minutes with a bucket in each hand.

Golondrinas has a neighborhood - within - a neighborhood. In 1996, Imelda Reyna bought a parcel. She knocked on the doors of those who already had electricity, but no one was willing to share their electrical connection, which in turn was stolen or borrowed from other irregular sources. So Imelda and three other families saved money and bought their own hundreds of meters of cable to hang from a municipal transformer. And then there was light. The taste of independence was so good that they baptized a few city blocks as the Independencia district so they would never forget it.

The Geometrism of Carlos “Chuck” Guzmán

He had planned to return to Mexico in three years, but after two years Ivonne asked him to set a wedding date, so he packed his bags and arrived to an unfamiliar neighborhood in Ecatepec at the home he had financed from three thousand kilometers away, where the electricity was so weak that his electric shaver languished at four in the afternoon.

His salon was surrounded by cornfields, and the lack of roads made it nearly inaccessible. He took two semesters of history at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, so he spent his days reading and worrying. He would open the salon at eight in the morning and close it at seven at night. Days would pass without a single customer. Occasionally a young man would wander in. Chuck would spend the ten pesos he earned on tortillas, and if someone else came in, he would buy a couple of potatoes. But he preferred to send the money to his wife and her folks, where it could feed her and she might even send him a taco.

Carlos is a barber with the soul of an artist. Twelve young people from other neighborhoods in the State of Mexico come with a slogan: “Do me up.” His clippers become a stylus that he uses to draw stars, geometrical shapes, cats gazing at the moon, and so on. Customers ask for his signature on their parietal: a fade and two parallel stripes.

Carlos is proudest of a centuries-old barber chair that once belonged to his father and grandfather, who passed the trade on to him.

With his precision and creativity, Carlos Guzmán could work on any local hipster in a gentrified neighborhood of Mexico City and earn as much or more than in Chicago. But he chose to stay at Golondrinas and inscribe his geometric figures on the heads of teenagers who aspire to be—or already are—highway robbers, cops, laborers, or porters. I ask him why. Despite my mistakes, he says, I want to be close to my children, and that’s why I stuck it out here.

If I were to work anywhere else, I’d be a father like everyone else. The barber shop gives me enough to feed my family and spend time with them.

FÓSFORO

Carlos Guzmán bought his land in Golondrinas sight unseen. For two years he would send money to build a house he had only heard about. For Carlos, Golondrinas meant emancipation: he was in love with Ivonne and wanted to marry her but had nowhere to live with her. He chose the more difficult path, but also the most frequent among people from Michoacán: hire a coyote and cross the border.

It was 2001, and the Twin Towers had not yet fallen. Carlos crossed Tijuana with relative ease and, as a third-generation barber, was cutting hair in Chicago three days later. That’s when people started calling him Chuck Guzmán.

Carlos remembers the bleakest week: one Monday, a man came into the salon to have his mustache trimmed. Carlos charged his regular rate: three pesos. He then spent Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday morning doing nothing. On Friday afternoon, the same man was walking casually down the street, saw the barber shop and touched his mustache. He thought he could do with a trim.

That week Carlos earned six pesos and decided to return to the United States.

But the border had changed after the collapse of the World Trade Center. His coyote abandoned him in the Arizona desert. He managed to survive by taking shelter in a mouse nest. Not knowing which way to walk, his instinct led him in the right direction: in a few hours, he was crossing the border back into Mexico. But he kept at it. After twenty-five days, most of which he spent hidden in a safe house where he shared a room and the dregs of instant soup with fifty other undocumented immigrants, he was in back in Chicago.

But Ivonne called him back to Golondrinas again.

She told him that light poles were going up, and once they had electrical service, he wouldn’t have an excuse to stay in the United States. He packed his bags again, took his last paycheck and migrated south. In Chicago, Chuck made nine dollars an hour plus a like amount in tips. In Mexico, each haircut earned him thirty pesos.

11

The last urban service to arrive was a sewage system. Arturo Aguilar unhappily remembers how he had to pay 1,908 pesos to have his septic tank connected to the municipal sewage system.

Still Life

The plot of land retains its ancestral name: La Laguna. None of the current inhabitants have seen any natural body of water here, but there is an oral tradition that tells of a lagoon. The first settlers donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t recall a lagoon, but they do remember a huge cornfield that surrounded Golondrinas. The cornstalks were so high and dense that people were afraid to cross them at night.

Cornfields and alfalfa. Bean stalks and cacti. These four crops populate the memories of the inhabitants of Golondrinas. Human activity emptied the lagoon of legend to convert it into cornfields, and the cornfields remained for decades. The communal lands were called Guadalupe Victoria then, and they were green in the rainy season and gold in the dry season. It was an agricultural oasis about forty kilometers north of the Zocalo.

But the city finally arrived, and these cornfields stood in its way. Planting corn started to become more trouble than it was worth. Subdividing the collectively owned land and turning it into small plots became an easy way to make a few thousand pesos. With down payments of ten, twenty or thirty thousand pesos, the first settlers reserved plots of land in between the cornfields, with each parcel comprising fifty to one hundred and twenty square meters.

Collective memory is constructed of individual fragments, and the battle against nature opens plot lines that branch out. Imelda Reyna, for example, thinks of Golondrinas as a lost paradise. She came to these lands after her twentieth birthday and, when she had no money for food, all she had to do was walk out of the house with a knife and steal some cactus leaves. AidĂŠ HernĂĄndez, who was six when she arrived here, associates Nature with torrential rains and perpetual illness. The land irritated her eyes, the insects pelted her skin and the wind made her shiver.

Like the fictional island of Barataria, Golondrinas was for some years an island on land. The plot of land called La Laguna was a dense cornfield then that blocked the way to the main avenues.

Crossing La Laguna meant plunging into the green darkness of the cornfields and braving the whisper of knives and guns lurking at night.

Nature yielded to the onslaught of men. Today, Golondrinas resembles the surface of the ocean. Unlike the sea, the tide of Golondrinas is not blue but gray and leaden.

Gray are the walls of the houses, the gravel streets, and the roofs that sit atop heaps of gray bricks.

The Justice of Imelda Reyna

Imelda Reyna looks into the eyes of her child’s murderer. He challenges her gaze, swipes his finger across his throat menacingly, holding her gaze for minutes on end.

It is the morning of January 10, 2014 in the visiting area of Chiconautla Prison in Ecatepec. Imelda had promised to produce a new witness, but her sister, who had witnessed the murder, was unable to testify because she would have lost her job at a sandwich shop. The defendant, from behind the grate, looks at the mother of his victim defiantly. The secretaries file their nails, sweeten their coffee, collect fax sheets, and pay no attention to another missed court appearance. The defendant communicates by sign language with his mother, wife and sister, who are just a meter away from Imelda Reyna. The hearing is adjourned and everyone goes home or back to a cell.

In the final hours of September 15, 2011, two brothers came to a family get-together. They were there over a business dispute. Their business was collecting garbage, and one of their clients had told them he wouldn’t buy any more plastic bottles from them. That customer didn’t live there, but his son, twenty year-old Julio César Reyna Gamboa, did.

The brothers returned to the party armed with knives and attacked two men. One of them, Julio César, died on the way to the Red Cross.

An intern lawyer took interest in the case and offered the only realistic alternative: televise the complaint.

They wrote letters, testified, and provided documents and photographs, until one day journalist Jorge Garralda met with them at eight o’clock in the morning. “Don’t give up!” he exclaimed as he pounded the table with his fist. On live television Imelda spoke with the State Attorney, who expressed his skepticism of her story: my agents are there to do justice, not to extort money from people. Suddenly, all the doors that had been closed to her were open.

Even when the police appeared to act for the first time without demanding money, Imelda Reyna had to do their work for them. She followed an anonymous tip that led to a hospital in Balbuena, in Mexico City. Using a tfalse identity, she confirmed that one of the murderers was recovering from a bullet in his leg. She notified the police, and he was finally arrested and taken to Chiconautla Prison.

The other killer is still at large. But justice is stubborn in its ways, and the case went soft again: the crime was reclassified from homicide to manslaughter, as if it had been a fight between gang members, which meant a lesser sentence. Imelda Reyna has since sought to persuade witnesses to testify about what they saw. But even her relatives ask for a few thousand pesos to go to the police.

Relatives of the defendants live a few blocks away.

From time to time they come to her store to offer an out-ofcourt settlement, which Imelda rejects.

Aidé Hernández Returns to the Twenty-first Century

The night Aidé Hernandez came to Golondrinas, the clock turned back a hundred years. Light bulbs, television and radio disappeared from her life and were replaced by candles and oil lamps; paved roads were replaced with narrow sidewalks and cornfields.

That blast from the past was the sacrifice she had to pay to have a home. Until she was six years old, Aidé had lived in Ciudad Azteca with twentieth century amenities, but her father leapt at the chance to buy his own plot of land. A worker at a cement block plant, his salary was not enough to pay both rent and monthly payments on his land, so he took his wife and three daughters to live in a makeshift room with a cardboard roof in the middle of a cornfield.

FÓSFORO

Under the weight of the city, Nature lives on in the cracks. In the rainy season, every evening, a shepherd leads some forty sheep through the streets. His name is Refugio, and he resembles the Marlboro man without a horse. His flock feeds on the wild herbs that grow amongst the rocks and graffitied walls, which resist the advance of progress.

The vestiges of greenery close the cycle: they are devoured by these animals, who in turn will be eaten by men.

Imelda Reyna, his mother, sought justice but instead found extortion. Police would come around the neighborhood, stop at her grocery store and demand travel expenses to search for the murderers—a thousand pesos each visit, two or three times a week, and they never arrested anyone. One police officer showed up one day with an offer: I’ll arrest the murderers if you give me a hundred thousand pesos or sign your home over to me.

13

La Laguna today is a label on the memory to designate a body of water defeated by the needs of men, starting with their need for corn and then for housing.

Today the lagoon is home to piles of discarded televisions and computers, their shredded metal and glass and hundreds of shells witnessing the passage of time. They are not garbage, because in a society of collectors such as Golondrinas, what others would call junk is never discarded.

Instead, it is stored in the open, waiting for the day when it is worth something again and can be converted to money.

Not long after she had given a down payment on her land, Martha Garrido drove four wooden poles into the ground, propped them up with sacks of sugar and used pieces of cardboard as a roof. The spines of vines twisted up through the floor and served as a hiding place for children, spiders and the occasional snake. Wild and lonely, Golondrinas was becoming a refuge.

Martha was married when she was eleven years old to Apolinar Herrera, who was seventeen. She couldn’t read or write. In thirty years of marriage, Martha gave birth ten times; six children survived. At least one of them (she prefers not to revisit the memory) died of blows to her belly at the hands of Apolinar. Martha recalls its little stillborn body completely covered in bruises.

One night Apolinar kicked Martha out of their home in the village of San Andres de la Canada. He discarded her like a fruit peel and brought another woman into their home. Martha paid the down payment on her land (she had lent money as part of an informal lending club, which gave her liquidity), nailed up her poles and began to attract her children to their new home.

As she tells her story, a pot of beans whistles on the stove, a washing machine purrs and a chicken chirps in the yard.

On the bed lies an Arabella catalog, whose beauty products and lingerie Martha sells door to door. On the walls hang photos of the weddings of her daughters taken by local photographer Ismael Montes de Oca, who adds bright green mountains or the pictures of his clients’ favorite celebrities to his portraits.

The walls are no longer made of burlap but gray cement, and the poles gave way to rebar. Martha talks about this transition: a local leader of the PRI, named Inocencio, provided construction material in exchange for her getting people to rallies and assemblies.

Apolinar Herrera reappeared in her life. She remembers her husband armed with a kitchen knife threatening to kill her and demanding that she give him her home in Golondrinas and hand over one of his daughters (one of the daughters of both of them) as his wife. She asked for help at a government agency, but the social worker told her that as her husband he had the right to live in the home with their children.

Martha Garrido resisted. She was unwilling to yield her home or her daughter to her tormentor. She fed her children with a mixture of charity from neighbors and seamstress work. Her catalog sales led her to meet a mason, Florentino, who moved in with her. Don Flor, as she calls him, didn’t hit her and stopped drinking when she gave him an ultimatum: either your drinking goes or I do. She gets up every morning to make peanut porridge for breakfast. I ask her about her dreams, and she responds immediately: “My only dream is to live with this man.”

FÓSFORO

The Dream of Martha Garrido

14

Golondrinas affected Aidé’s skin. The land and the insects plagued her. Moisture and frost turned her into a frail, sickly child. She went to school in the afternoon, so at night had to choose one of two paths back home: the path that would take her through the cornfields of La Laguna or cross the narrow bridges of the Cartagena Canal, an open sewage canal. She almost always chose the lonely darkness of the fields.

Aidé had grown accustomed to getting water and light with a touch of a finger. Golondrinas created new habits in her: carrying water in five-gallon buckets and doing her homework by candlelight. Her parents learned the ethics of overexertion. At four in the morning she would hear her father getting on his bicycle to go to work and coming back home at eight at night with firewood to heat the water. Her mother worked a double shift of sorts, caring for her five-member family and contributing her income as a domestic worker.

Over the years, the house with the cardboard roof became a gray brick house. After tirelessly lobbying city officials, the residents of Calle Hortensias, including Aidé, got lampposts installed and, years later, a connection to water and sewage lines. Aidé began working at thirteen caring for two children not much younger than she was, and at seventeen she was responsible for feeding infants at a neighborhood daycare.

After graduating high school, Aidé left school to earn money for her family. But one day, two years after leaving school, she was handed a flyer advertising a teaching degree at a private university for two thousand pesos a month. Aidé was earning 2,800 pesos a month, which would be enough to cover her tuition and transportation.

She received her teaching degree in June 2013 and became one of the first university graduates in the neighborhood.

By then she was already an entrepreneur. She and her boyfriend were giving private lessons to children who were falling behind in Spanish and mathematics. And soon she got into the information business. Aidé, who in 1996 had come to Golondrinas to inhabit a world without electricity or telecommunications, decided in 2013 to take a leap into the twenty-first century: she opened an internet cafe.

Resistance

There are thousands of communities like Golondrinas in the State of Mexico. They all have one thing in common: they are excluded from the country’s development model. They offer their inhabitants no formal employment, quality education or public safety. They have been abandoned and exploited as reservoirs of cheap labor, mass rallies and votes. Their main feature is their invisibility.

They have been erased not only from the historical and journalistic narrative of the country: the city itself is designed to be invisible. In recent years, Mexico City has encircled itself with high bridges that charge tolls: the middle class can cross into it without being bothered by windshield washers.

The excluded inhabitants of Golondrinas and thousands of similar neighborhoods could choose the path of dejection or crime. Some do, but most opt for the daily struggle, strenuous work and adherence to values. They are committed to life. Their battle is long and just beginning.

About Emiliano Ruiz Parra Author of Los hijos de la ira (2015) and Ovejas negras (2012). His newspaper articles have been anthologized in several Latin American countries. He has a master’s degree in Political Theory at University College London (UCL) and a bachelor’s in Spanish Literature at UNAM. He has been a reporter for the magazine Gatopardo since 2010. He has worked on the Golondrinas project—a portrait of a Mexican slum for a documentary film and book—since 2013.

FÓSFORO

Atlacomulco Group politicians have treated themselves like heroes. Avenues, markets and slums all over the State of Mexico bear their names: Carlos Hank González, Ignacio Pichardo, Arturo Montiel, Emilio Chuayffet, César Camacho. Even mayors (such as former mayor of Ecatepec Alfredo Torres) have been immortalized in the nomenclature of neighborhoods and streets. The State of Mexico has been a bastion of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It is one of the nine states where an opposition party has never won.

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The State of Mexico, which encompasses the municipality of Ecatepec, is home to fifteen million people and accounts for almost ten percent of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP): it is the most populous state and the second richest. The Atlacomulco Group, one of the country’s most powerful factions, was founded in the State of Mexico. Two of its members were elected as president of Mexico: Adolfo López Mateos in 1958 and Enrique Peña Nieto in 2012. Peña Nieto’s home (complete with a swimming pool and private move theater) is in Lomas de Chapultepec, one of Mexico City’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

The Law of the Mountain

A reporter’s exceptional coverage of the conflict that rocked Michoacán leads him to be a finalist for the Gabriel García Márquez Prize. Now he’s in the process of making a documentary about his experience along with filmmaker Mario Mandujano.

Author: Alejandro Sánchez González

After that I accompanied him for nearly a week all day long wherever he went. He would change trucks all the time. In his trips to churches in the region, he would get out of one car and climb into another. I happened to come across him wearing pointy cowboy boots with the brim of his hat cocked down and riding a white horse with a Smith & Wesson revolver tucked in his pants.

“I can’t keep talking to people about God when my flock is being killed. As a pastor, I can’t keep evangelizing, speaking of God and life, when death is in the air,” he said while wearing a cassock.

He would gain the sympathy of the parishioners, who would praise him before he crossed the threshold on his way out. Outside the church, he would cinch his belt and talk like an angry citizen. Like when Governor Fernando Vallejo came to Apatzingán in mid-January 2014 with federal convoys, just days after the population had organized into paramilitary groups and beat the cartel in a fourhour gunfight in Nueva Italia.

“This is just for show,” he said as patrol cars went up and down the streets and helicopters hovered above.

“Everyone knows where Nazario and ‘La Tuta’ are. They’re eating about a kilometer from here! Grab some sticks, axes, pistols—whatever you have—to hunt the Templars down. I already have my gun.”

FÓSFORO

The townspeople had risen up against one of the most feared drug cartels in Mexico: the Knights Templar, which would force families throughout much of the state of Michoacán to pay for the right to work or they would kill the men or take their daughters or wives.

The priest played a key role in the community’s uprising. From the pulpit, in the speeches that I witnessed, he refused to take out the Bible and changed the honeyed voice he normally used to preach on Sundays to preach tough messages like this:

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I heard a rumor that priest Gregorio Lopez of Apatzingán would wear lipstick and a nun’s habit so he could leave the cathedral without being gunned down.

“Not as a nun,” says the priest with a smile that shows off his strong white nutcracker teeth.So how did he dress? But he wouldn’t say. Instead he would pretend he was speaking to the Virgin.

It seemed that the priest had gone mad. La Tuta was the Templar leader replacing Nazario Moreno, known as “El Chayo,” which is who Lopez was talking about. El Chayo was the founder of the cartel and was supposedly dead. The government of Felipe Calderon had reported his death in a clash with soldiers. In December 2010, Alejandro Poire, a spokesman for President Calderon’s security cabinet, announced on national television that he had been gunned down. And so it was that rumors started to circulate about Father Lopez. According to one, he was a jilted homosexual who had been in an affair with a drug kingpin.

Another claimed he smoked marijuana, and that’s why he was off his rocker. But shortly afterwards we would learn that the priest was a sane man who was being made to look crazy.

In Ruana, a town about an hour and a half from Apatzingán, a major producer of limes, farmer Hipolito Mora was the first to conspire against the crime bosses who lived in homes that stood in sharp contrast to those of their humble neighbors. After he had gathered ten men who were willing to face the drug traffickers, the nascent movement was fragmented by an unfounded fear of the criminals.

“Know what, Hipolito? Don’t even say hello to me, man,” said one of them the day after their last secret meeting.

A Templar had sent a message to the man’s home: “Your old ladies gonna die motherfucker if you keep fucking around.”

In one year, the prevailing culture of lawlessness allowed the drug traffickers to reinforce their power base, and they became more bloodthirsty. If a regional boss took a fancy to a high school student, all he had to do was order his gunmen to go to the school and take her away to rape her. They imposed rules for the lemon harvest, causing a domestic shortage and increasing the export price; they charged for home and business “protection”; took a cut of people’s wages; began to measure properties in order to assess levies; and kidnappings, disappearances and murders increased.

Mora, a sexagenarian of few words and no charisma whatsoever, but in search of a better death for himself and his family, earned the leadership of the movement. He wasn’t alone. The misery of being a citizen of Michoacan led more and more people to search for the best possible way to die. “We’re going to fall into the hands of these bastards anyway, but at least we’ll live with dignity and go down fighting,” he thought more than once before playing his last card.

On the night of February 24, 2013, Mora ordered the few men who followed him to ring the bells of the village church (in Mexican communities this is a signal that alerts village inhabitants to go to the center of town and discuss their most pressing needs) to make an announcement.

“Everyone who wants to defend their family and their rights and get the Knights Templar out of here, come up here with me.” He issued his challenge from the top of some planters in the presence of dozens of “hawks” (informants for the drug gangs), and more than 250 people followed him. They gathered hunting weapons and called themselves a self-defense brigade. That was when the community declared war on the cartel.

It was a day when the Templars offered heavy resistance but finally gave up and fled the village in fear.

They found refuge in neighboring communities, where they sought unsuccessfully to reorganize. The victory of Hipolito and his people infected other communities. Suddenly, squads of armed men, peasants, farmers, small landowners, even competing drug traffickers and ex-Templars appeared with an arsenal of military-style weapons.

They were like elite troops that would cleanse villages of cartel hitmen. While national news outlets completely failed to explain what was really happening, the government concealed the uprising with an official narrative that minimized its impact.

The hardest day, when Michoacán attracted international attention, was the afternoon when the banks and businesses of Apatzingán were set on fire to terrorize the populace and prevent the paramilitary groups from approaching the place where—as Father López had predicted—El Chayo was holed up.

The information flowed after that. Perhaps too much information. It raised more questions than answers.

Moved by curiosity and the need to understand what was happening, I came to Nueva Italia on the morning of January 11, 2014, when the Templars were surrounded in the region’s nerve center. It was no longer a secret that Kike Plancarte, the cartel’s financial man, had his hideout there. That was when I understood what the battle represented for either side.

A man who is wearing a white cloth on his head to conceal his identity raises an AK47 after a four-hour firefight. He’s celebrating the fact that the militias, to which he belongs, are now moving into the other territory of the Knights Templar: Apatzingán. In recent days, paramilitary groups that for months have been adding members like Pancho Villa’s army during the Revolution took this county seat and installed themselves just 30 kilometers from Apatzingán. This, they say, is the cartel’s center of operations.

That was the first press release in the two months of coverage I did for different media outlets. Mario Mandujano, a documentary filmmaker with a longstanding commitment to social issues, spoke of the need to film the story about what was happening in Michoacán and capture on camera a deeper look at the issues.

He proposed that we team up to tell the story. We agreed to return to the places he covered in order to gather images and get closer to the characters, recording for hours instead of minutes so as to understand their context without judging (like the Peña Nieto administration was doing). We were on the ground for months in Michoacan to document the fall of the Templars.

At that time the militias revealed the government’s relationship with organized crime, how the acting governor controlled the Templars, their leaders were imprisoned and others were murdered as federal forces allegedly tried—unsuccessfully—to bring peace.

Two years after the overthrow of the Knights Templar cartel, Michoacan’s place as a world leader of avocado, cucumber, canteloupe, lime, watermelon and other fruits is still in tatters. Michoacán has a seaport at Lazaro Cardenas, one of the largest in the world, but it seems to be one of the state’s biggest problems. This is the story they sought to bring to the documentary Ley del monte, which in December received an endowment for post-production from the Mexican Film Institute.

was founded in the State of Mexico. Two of its members were elected as president of Mexico: Adolfo Lopez Mateos in 1958 and Enrique Peña Nieto in 2012. Peña Nieto’s home (complete with a swimming pool and private movie theater) is in Lomas de Chapultepec, one of Mexico City’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

Atlacomulco Group politicians have treated themselves like heroes. Avenues, markets and slums all over the State of Mexico bear their names: Carlos Hank González, Ignacio Pichardo, Arturo Montiel, Emilio Chuayffet, César Camacho. Even mayors (such as former mayor of Ecatepec Alfredo Torres) have been immortalized in the nomenclature of neighborhoods and streets. The State of Mexico has been a bastion of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It is one of the nine states where an opposition party has never won.

21 FÓSFORO

About Alejandro Sánchez González Mexican journalist and documentary maker. He was nominated for the Gabriel García Márquez Award for his coverage of the war between drug dealers and the self-defense brigade in Michoacán, Mexico. He received the Walter Reuter Premio Alemán for Journalism for a profile of the current governor of the Estado de Mexico. He currently works in the realization of the documentary La ley del monte, which is about the self-defense brigade of Michoacán.

Speaking Tongues

The uncommon sensitivity and creativity of this documentary portrays the world of hip-hop as a reflection of this moment in Mexican history.

The following text and photos are by its director.

Author: Kyzza Terrazas

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MCs are artists of the word—through it they have created an aesthetic, appropriating their surroundings, as well as a system of ethics with strict codes of conduct. They use it to discuss the society in which they live, speak of their life, assert their territories, deconstruct the contemporary referential universe and compete for top position. If we listen to the rhymes and flow of American, French, Mexican or Cuban rap, we quickly realize that it comprises a kind of secret history of our times and a clear record of the human spirit at a time like this one that is so dehumanized. Hip hop also serves as a weapon, not only for social transformation, but of survival. We might even say that it has become a kind of “medicine”—a strong network of friendship based on values such as loyalty, the development of skills, rivalry and refinement, which supplant traditional forms of social cohesion and family.

Like other manifestations of popular culture—though in this case with particular eloquence—the world of hip hop offers a testimonial to the historic moment in Mexico. One of the greatest problems in contemporary Mexico is the lack of opportunities for young people and the almost complete absence of social mobility, which is one of the causes of violence in the country.

This film was not intended to be an academic historiography of Mexican hip hop, but rather to show—through the plastic depth of the language of rap, a code of incredible wealth created by young people—the sensitivity and creativity that endure in a place that is plagued by injustice and hopelessness.

FÓSFORO

In a certain region of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, a language developed whose instrument is not the voice but the sounds of drums. It allowed villages that were far apart to communicate. It was more than signals; it was a complex language, a bit like Morse code. All cultures have had, have and use some kind of percussion. The rhythm of the beat is embedded in our DNA. If we add words to those beats, new layers of meaning begin to emerge. In other words, somos lengua (Speaking Tongues). It is in language, through it, that humans live, relate, create, die and record their passage through the world. And rap, though perhaps not the only form of poetry that is alive in our times, is the most pervasive. It is an artistic discipline whose essence lies in orality: in rhetorical and poetic techniques (prosody and metrics) as well as the sphere of staging and, of course, musical language.

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Speaken Tongues Fragments of hip-hop in Mexico Production company: Viento del Norte Cine Co-producers: Cacerola Films, Zamora Films, Mr. Woo, Bambu Audiovisual, Aurora Dominicana, Sociedad Cinematográfica, TV UNAM Directors of photography: Alberto Anaya Adalid, Israel Cárdenas Additional photography: Christian Rivera, Marc Bellver Graphics: Cítrico Gráfico Editors: Yibrán Asuad y Miguel Musalem Direct sound: Emilio Cortés Sound designer: Alejandro de Icaza Produced by: Carlos Sosa, Kyzza Terrazas, Laura Imperiale Written and directed by: Kyzza Terrazas

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About Kyzza Terrazas Writer and filmmaker. He has served as executive producer on such films as Cochochi, Voy-a-explotar and No quiero dormir sola. His directorial debut, El lenguaje de los machetes, was released in 2011 during Critics’ Week at Venice.

Somos lengua—a documentary on rap in Mexico—is his second feature film. He is also developing two fiction films: Bayoneta, a story set in the world of boxing, and Radio Ethiopia.

The Letters

In June 2000, in the Altos region of Chiapas, a group of police officers was ambushed. Seven of them were killed. School teacher Alberto Patishtán, a Tzotzil Indian, was arbitrarily convicted of this crime and sentenced to 60 years in prison.

The documentary delves into this story through its portrayal of Gabriela and Héctor, Alberto’s children.

Author: Pablo Chavarría Gutiérrez

How to unsettle logical-sensory structures?

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How to exercise in the body-film notions such as resistance, justice and freedom that surround the story of Alberto Patishtan, not just representing them through the convention of the event/story that has already occurred and been consummated but rather from this perceptive phase of stimulus-reaction where the facts are known, leading the film to an a priori study: an earlier stage—the biological basis of the imaginary—where the motor precedes the sensory (I think of Brownian motion and the autokinetic movements of animals and protozoa, a “primitive” power that is evidently present in humans), in order to intuit and outline sensitive movements that are not strictly responses to stimuli but rather emotions whose purpose is to create their object to make it possible to chart new paths for perception?

How to unsettle given logical-sensory structures of what exists in, between and around the film based on cinema understood as a creator of existence? Film can free life of its bonds.

FÓSFORO

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About Pablo Chavarría Gutiérrez A biologist who graduated from the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo León. He has made five films, including El resto del mundo (2014) and Alexfilm (2015). Las letras, his latest film, premiered at CPH:DOX in 2015.

The Former Mayor

What happens to the life of the subject of a documentary after it is screened?

Author: Diego Enrique Osorno Photos: VĂ­ctor Hugo Valdivia

MONOLOGUE 1

The only turbulence I encountered in the Lear Jet that was taking off from a private airport in Monterrey was the turmoil I saw on the face of Mauricio Fernandez Garza when he was asked about the new mayor. Today the former mayor, who for three years successfully kept the drug war from reaching the richest city in Latin America, looks upset: a few days ago, the new mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia, his successor, was unable to impose his authority on a group of citizens angry about a newly built pedestrian bridge over one of the main avenues, and he had to announce that the bridge would be demolished. That man, his former deputy mayor, who was supposed to be the bridge to continue his work and style of governing, backtracked on this project, which was designed by an architect who won the National Fine Arts Award, all because a group of citizens thought it was ugly. The people of this city in northeastern Mexico have an average income of more than twenty thousand dollars a year, almost four times that of Mexicans in general and even higher than that of Spain. Besides being the richest Mexicans, they’re often the most demanding of their authorities. A former head of the local police told me

FÓSFORO

TRIP 1

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My hypothesis, which some may find strange and others normal (though it’s all the same to me) is that if I make a city the safest in the world, I’ll certainly have lots of bad guys who’ll want to live here along with many good ones, and I don’t believe the bad guys come to do bad things.

They come because they also value the safety for their own families. Maybe they have a good son, I imagine. If San Pedro were the most unsafe city in the world, not even the drug traffickers would want to live here. Colombian society was less tolerant. They would say, “No, the children of drug traffickers can’t come to school here.” But here they go to the schools, and the schools know that their children are here. With all the effort I’ve made, I don’t feel that I was confronting them, because in this case we all have the same interest: security. I may be wrong. And if I’m wrong, then send me some flowers to the fucking cemetery. But if I’m not wrong, I really think it’s going to be a success because I’m getting to the bad guys at a level we agree on. Besides, as I’ve said publicly, I’ll crush the public sale of drugs and other criminal enterprises as well as the casinos to get them out of here. I know that in other towns, the drug lords seek you out to tell you that you as mayor can’t do that, that the police and the extortion and abduction businesses are theirs.

Stay out of the kitchen, they say. They do that. I believe that organized crime is in contact with all elected officials and anyone who aspires to public office in Mexico. They came to me when I was running for governor, and now that I’m mayor, again. I was offered fifteen million, but I didn’t accept. Nobody can promise me I’ll get out of this alive.

Undoubtedly, these are risky jobs. But we have to do something, and I’ve never seen a war where the good guys win.

In any war, the bad guys always win. The bad ones.

that working there had been a nightmare because every night he would get calls ordering him to release a kid who had been arrested for driving under the influence— always some big shot’s son or daughter. “They all feel important,” he said. “There’s too much influence peddling.” The current mayor, a formal young man with a moderate temperament, was not Fernandez Garza’s first choice as successor. His preference was a charismatic manager of Cementos Mexicanos who was recognized for having led the local soccer team to a national championship after a drought of twenty-nine years. However, Alejandro Rodriguez Miechelsen, the former mayor’s favorite, declined the invitation to govern San Pedro because he had accepted a position with FIFA’s Committee for Club Football. Mauricio Fernandez Garza believes that if Rodríguez Miechelsen had been his successor, today those footbridges would still be there. “If you don’t have the mettle to govern, people take advantage,” says the former mayor in his Lear Jet as it slices through the cold air on a sunny winter day in early 2013. We traveled to a ranch in the town of Lampazos. The former mayor was there to oversee the completion of his new home. He says he plans to spend his retirement there.

The weakness of his successor bores him. Today he’s more interested in other things. In his Facebook profile picture, Fernandez Garza poses with the skull of the monster that decorates his living room and sums up the obsession to which he now devotes most of his time.

It’s the head of a Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s not the only fossilized prehistoric animal he owns. The jewel of his private collection is Einstein, an apatosaurus that measures four meters high and almost twenty long, though his head is barely the size of a football. The name the paleontologists gave it is ironic given its tiny skull compared to the enormity of its body. Einstein was found in a dinosaur graveyard in Wyoming, and Fernandez Garza says he paid twenty million dollars for it. He had to wait three years to get it after the slow process of having the parts of the hundred million-year-old-plus fossil assembled and moved. Fully assembled, it weighs about four tons. Einstein doesn’t fit in the room of a house, not even the former mayor’s house. It was exhibited at Fundidora Park, Monterrey’s most popular, where children and their families visit and take pictures with it to post to their Facebook pages.

As a child, Mauricio Fernandez Garza chased animals that were less awesome than dinosaurs. He escaped at dawn through the window of his room to hunt hares on the hill where, years later, a city would be built with a quality of life that is similar to that of Norway. His fellow adventurers weren’t family members or the children of millionaires like him. They were laborers and workers, all older than him, who worked for his grandfather Roberto Garza Sada, a businessman who would close business deals at the golf course in the garden of his mansion. As a teenager, Mauricio Fernandez Garza expanded his horizons as a hunter, traveling to dozens of villages in

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northeastern Mexico looking for prey that would require greater skill and risk. During those trips, which he made with locals hired as hunting guides, he would hear stories about the abuses of the PRI, Mexico’s monolithic ruling party.

When he returned from Africa, the twenty-something hunter got married and decided to build his house on a hill overlooking the city of San Pedro. Instead of starting construction on the floor and foundation, Fernandez Garza built the roof first. After learning that a New York warehouse had some beams from a Moorish ceiling from the thirteenth and fourteenth century, he reached an agreement with the owners, who were heirs to tycoon William Hearst.

The ceilings were originally intended for the main hall of the castle Hearst built in San Simeon, California (Hearst, we recall, was the man Orson Welles immortalized as Citizen Kane).

Now the former mayor travels in the Lear Jet with his partner, his eldest son, a prestigious psychiatrist who looks into his eyes intently when he speaks. His previous flight was to Mexico City to meet with officials of the new government of President Enrique Peña Nieto to pitch his idea for the Museum of Natural History. “I want it to be a world-class museum,” he told them. “Not just any crap.” Although the current president belongs to another party, the former mayor was promised support for his project. Einstein would be the star dinosaur at the museum. But Fernandez Garza knows that money is not enough: he would need lots of politicians and millionaires as allies. He moves in both spheres simultaneously. He made his debut in politics in the early nineties while doing business in Cuba. He was first mayor of San Pedro before the city faced a war against drug traffickers. Then he was senator and sponsored proposals like legalizing marijuana. It’s likely that he may have lost the gubernatorial race in 2003 because of this. When he took office as mayor of San Pedro for the second time, he told the governor, the president of the Superior Court and the regional military commander that he would assume extraordinary powers to keep the drug wars from reaching his city. He received a standing ovation.

Today they’re at Milarca, which is the name the former mayor gave to his own nearly two thousand square meter palace with nine bedrooms, ten warehouses, two art galleries, a library of old books and an archive of photos and personal documents. At that time his bedside book was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Young Fernandez Garza was so obsessed with the book his grandfather had given to him that he was giving courses on the Carnegie method to other business leaders in the city before he turned thirty, including Alejandro Junco de la Vega, current owner of the newspaper Reforma. As the favorite grandson of the patriarch of business in Monterrey, Garza Fernandez was among the candidates to chair the consortium formed by his family and others in San Pedro to increase their economic power. The Alfa Group’s international businesses run the gamut from sausages to petrochemicals to aluminum auto parts. Instead, Fernandez Garza decided to establish a cigar, beer and telephone business with the communist government of Cuba. He met with Fi-

The collector of dinosaurs created an intelligence group funded with money from the owners of bars and restaurants to protect their business interests against mafia-style extortion schemes. There is no mafia without a nightlife, so he recruited an army of informants to report back to him and identify suspects throughout the city. One day, Fernandez Garza announced that the security he had achieved in the city might even benefit the families of drug traffickers. The reaction was swift. Some of the same people who opposed the pedestrian bridge that the next mayor of San Pedro would demolish were outraged. Towards the end of his administration, while filming El alcalde (“The Mayor”), a documentary about his personality and government, Fernandez Garza said the number of dead in Mexico as a result of the war on drugs was much higher than official numbers suggested: he knew of government and organized crime operations that ended with the unreported burial of corpses on deserted lands. What everyone learned later was that three gangsters who had wanted to kill him ended up dead, and his head of intelligence and chief bodyguard were

FÓSFORO

The teenager advised them to kill the bosses who exploited them. On one occasion, one of the guides told him he had followed his advice: they were going to kill a local chieftain. The boy was thrilled with the news and remembers thinking of himself as a guerrilla. He imagined himself as a vigilante leader who would exact justice against all the tyrants of northeastern Mexico. Later, his father tried to channel his energy and registered him as a member of the nascent National Action Party. He also took him hunting in Tsabo National Park, in Kenya, one of the three largest in the world. In Africa, a young Fernandez Garza killed dozens of deer, zebras, tigers and elephants.

del Castro, whom he still considers a friend, repeatedly. At La Milarca he kept a collection of extravagant objects such as a sword of Hernan Cortes, heads shrunken by the Jivaroans, the skull of a triceratops dinosaur, sculptures by Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, and an old machine gun used by Al Capone. His collector’s obsession led him to found five museums of numismatics, folk art, pottery, contemporary paintings and decorative arts. Now he wants to create the sixth, a Museum of Natural History, which will showcase his dinosaur fossils.

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also killed. The former mayor spoke publicly about the possibility of being assassinated. He said his eldest son, the psychiatrist who is traveling with him in the Lear Jet this morning in 2013, had asked him if he died if he could keep his head to study it. Or to display it in his office like the Tyrannosaur in Fernández Garza’s living room.

MONOLOGUE 2

FÓSFORO

When my grandfather sold his mansion in Monterrey to the Church and came to San Pedro to build a new home and make his golf course, very few people understood. It seemed extravagant to move to a place that was undeveloped. But he told me that the best deals were made at the golf course because they offered a great opportunity to talk with partners and customers. My grandfather told me if I was interested in business, I would have to learn two things: to drink and play golf. He told me that the wonderful thing about golf is that you talk about something, you hit the ball, and all you know for sure is that the balls won’t drop back in the same place, so when you talk with someone you get a chance to talk in chapters and have time to analyze things, so you can think things over while you’re there.

A golf course is the only place where you play for three or four hours and you can have a wide range of assimilating information. The other thing I had to learn for business was to drink: I said it’s idiotic when you go to someone’s office and he’s sitting behind his huge desk and you’re the idiot who’s in front of him. There’s a big difference in the level of who rules, who’s the boss, and who controls the situation. My grandfather told me that when I wanted to do business I shouldn’t meet with people at my office. Go to a bar instead. Of course, don’t knock back the whole pitcher, but have the courtesy to invite someone to a bar as a neutral area. These are two of the thousands of lessons I learned when I was a kid. But the essential thing in my family was not just to give you stuff. You had to earn things—know how to fight for them and educate yourself to get them. It’s a school of thought from a hundred years ago, so my family is unusual that way. It goes against the saying “millionaire father, gentleman son and beggar grandson.”

[MFG. August 2010]

TRIP 2

FÓSFORO

For Fernández Garza, sometimes it all comes down to a game of give and take with the public. Part of the game is saying during your inauguration as mayor that you’ll operate above the Constitution because otherwise you won’t get anything done.

And then other politicians, judges and businessmen applaud you because they do it too or want to but are too politically correct and cowardly. In that sense, Fernández Garza is an anti-politician, though that’s only a euphemism that means another way of doing politics.

The only time the man behind the Tyrannosaur hesitated during the filming of the documentary was after he told the House of Representatives that the official death toll of the drug war was false. Fernández Garza claimed there were devastating military and police operations that were being kept secret. He was afraid of stirring up more anger in President Felipe Calderon’s team. Calderon had ordered judicial and financial investigations against Fernández Garza during his term in office. He’s not the only politician who believes there have been more murders than official tallies suggest, but he is the only one who dared to say it out loud. Three other mayors agreed to tell me how they witnessed mass clandestine graves.

All three asked me not to divulge the details until conditions improve in Mexico. One of them asked me to make it public only if he was killed. In the circuit of daily news producers, especially in the circle that is always suspicious of politicians, what is communicated to the public is an infinitesimal part— the tip of the iceberg—of a world that is increasingly lawless.

Narrating the world of politics requires disclosing how abject it is. After each showing of El alcalde there is a predictable debate between the desperate and the cynical, with one side celebrating everything that Fernández Garza does, and the other side, the politically correct, judging him as a paramilitary leader or a murderer. The documentary portrays only one of the larger-than-life characters that the excessive reality of war produces. No one, after seeing it, has felt alien to that excess. During filming, asked about what he thought about those who view him as a paramilitary leader in northern Mexico, Garza Fernández replied: “Sometimes people think I’m before my time. We owe the last hundred years to great people. The average human is mediocre, destructive and envious.

When it comes to doing something different, they try to smear you, and that’s something I’ve experienced since childhood. If I am, it’s because I see things differently. But it’s never caused me to lose any sleep.” The former mayor’s admirers believe that only someone who pursues his heavy-handed strategy would be able to keep the drug war from devastating San Pedro. Those who, despite his success, still believe in absolute respect for the law regard him as a charismatic savage.

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In the first few minutes of the documentary El alcalde, a local woman tells a television reporter her opinion about the methods of the city’s new leader: “To tell the truth, I think that deep down everyone supports him, because it’s what San Pedro needs and what Mexico needs: to get rid of undesirable people.” In a city that daily witnesses how in neighboring cities drug traffickers hang their victims from bridges along bustling streets, public places are attacked with grenades and shootouts occur near schools, an unhealthy demand has grown that is both cynical and desperate for authorities to exercise a heavy hand to prevent the savagery of the war from reaching them. In 2012, a few months before Fernández Garza finished his term in office,

El alcalde (a documentary I had worked on as one of its directors) was released in Monterrey. All the rooms where it was projected were filled, and film festival organizers had to schedule extra showings. At the end of each showing, the former mayor and the film received the approval of most attendees. Each showing was like a collective catharsis of public support for a vigilante style of governing. While the rest of Mexico accused him of employing paramilitary tactics, in northern Mexico he was seen as someone who was getting something done. Before flying with the former mayor in his Lear Jet, I had presented the film along with my co-directors at the Human Rights in Film International Film Festival in Warsaw. The public reception was chilly, not just because it was fifteen degrees below zero, but because it was so shocking for Poles to be attracted to a character who, although he had some progressive proposals, seemed to invoke an ancient law to end drug trafficking—“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

One of the questions we were always asked at the end of the projections was whether the protagonist was aware of the things he said and did. At the Baja International Film Festival, a rumor got started that writer Barry Gifford, David Lynch’s scriptwriter and inventor of oddball characters such as Sailor or Bobby Peru, had seen the movie and believed that Fernández Garza was an actor hired to say what he said. From Monterrey to Warsaw, one left the theater with the impression that the public, after seeing the film, admitted that the only way to fight organized crime was to unleash the most primitive instincts. My mother, who admires Fernández Garza, said the former mayor reminds her of Charles Bronson, her favorite movie anti-hero, in Death Wish. And the former mayor knows the feelings what he says and does arouse.

Years ago, when I mentioned that several people we interviewed claimed he was crazy, he replied: “Normal? I’ve never been normal.”

In Monterrey there are those who think that if he had won the governorship in 2003, Nuevo León wouldn’t be nearly the narco-state it is today. His controversial proposal to legalize marijuana and combat money laundering are now being debated in Mexico as possible solutions, but he promoted them a decade ago. Violating the established order so as to preserve it is just one way of explaining how millionaire Fernández Garza views public service.

The mentality of the rich is a cliché that is still difficult to understand in Latin America. Filmmakers have managed to show us—through compassion or eulogizing—the Latin Americans who are hungry, but not those who never lack anything.

In El alcalde, we see a millionaire acting in a crisis. While in southern Mexico self-defense groups formed by indigenous and peasant communities proliferated, Fernández Garza seems to be the man appointed to defend the rich in northeast Mexico.

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FÃ&#x201C;SFORO

MONOLOGUE 3

I get bored easily. Once I master something, I try to move on to something else. I believe life is full of generalities and not specialties, and the sum of specialties is what’s best. One of those things is hunting. Hunting is not killing for the sake of killing. When you’re looking for trophies, which are the largest of their kind in a record of one hundred years, it’s something very few people understand. I had to walk eight hours through ashes to find a specific antelope. To hunt you need good eyesight and lots of knowledge.

I get stuck on so many things because I like to master them, since I’ve always believed that if you do things, you should do them well.

When I was at the Tsabo National Park in Kenya, it had the highest density of elephants in Africa, and there was a serious problem of overpopulation, so the government organized a hunt. At that time there were no fences or roads, so when the official slaughter began, the animals left the area where they were and came to a hunting lot where I was. I happened to be between four elephants, and I will never forget that moment: I felt like my configuration was changing.

When people ask me if I believe in God, I say that I know there’s a creation that is more unimaginable than we think. We’re in very different dimensions, and there are millions of things we don’t know for sure. We’re limited to a space we don’t understand. We think too much of ourselves. We think we’re so important, but we’re nothing.

[MFG.Julio 2010] TRIP 3

Today, as the Lear Jet prepares to land in the middle of a vast plain where there seems to be nothing but gray-green mesquite, the former mayor shows me a huge plateau where a man is buried. At Cartujanos Plateau, which is about five hundred meters high and covers ten hectares, there is a chapel where the tomb of Santiago Vidaurri is. Vidaurri was a former governor of Nuevo León, very popular in his day for defending this region from Comanche Indians in the nineteenth century. Vidaurri later fell out of favor when he tried to separate the provinces of northeastern Mexico from the rest of the country in order to found the Republic of the Sierra Madre and decided to support the fleeting Mexican empire of Maximilian I of Mexico. “He’s a fascinating character, very controversial. Later I’ll show you some very interesting letters I have of his, written in his own hand,” says Fernández Garza. Vidaurri’s attempt at independence was fought by Mexican hero Benito Juarez, but it was military man Porfirio Díaz, later Mexico’s dictator, who had him shot and virtually erased from official history. Hardly anyone remembers that Vidaurri is still buried there. From his jet, Fernández Garza shows me the tomb of the antihero, as if to reveal not a coincidence but the fact that destiny has led him to build his home in front of the tomb of a rebel forgotten by official history.

The purpose of the trip there is for the former mayor to supervise the final details of the construction of what will be his retirement home. According to popularity polls, if he wanted to, the former mayor would win the election for governor of Nuevo León

today, but he’s more interested in creating his Museum of Natural History and spending time at this property. The thought of governing a territory other than this piece of land where he wants to retire holds no interest for him.

The pilot of the Lear Jet makes landing maneuvers to test a new dirt airstrip on Fernández Garza’s ranch. Before this strip was made, the former mayor had to ask permission from his neighbor, a former governor of Nuevo León, to land on his strip. The ranch of the former mayor of San Pedro adjoins that of family members Zambrano, shareholders of Cementos Mexicanos, and Milmo, Televisa shareholders.

They all share land in El Jabali, as they call this arid and remote area of the city, in the town of Lampazos, where the population is less than five thousand inhabitants. Intriguingly, San Pedro’s rich and powerful have chosen this dry, remote place to build their retreats. When the Lear Jet lands, a van with two bodyguards awaits Fernández Garza, who drives alone in another pick-up to the place where bricklayers are putting the finishing touches on his new home. Building a house in the middle of nowhere is another new specialty of the former mayor. He designed them without being an architect. The walls of his mansion are a showcase of dissimilar trophies, including everything from stock shares in nineteenth century European and Mexican companies to the stuffed head of a bull, the last of the animals he claims to have killed. Last year, during a party at a friend’s ranch, the bull got out of control, and when he was about to ram a laborer, the hunter instinct surfaced in the former mayor, who grabbed a gun and shot it. Now, that animal’s dead eyes seem to be watching us.

In the main room of his retirement home, there is no skull of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Just prehistoric fish mounted on the walls as if they were in a stone pond. They are marine animals from the Cretaceous era. The former mayor owns one of the four most important collections of its kind in the world. His fondness for paleontology is recent, he says, as he explains in detail the history of each fish on his wall. “Much of my paleontology is mounted more like art,” he observes. Outside his home, though the sun is harsh, it still feels cold because the wind is unhampered by walls in this arid landscape. The most valuable landscape there is the plateau where the man who tried to make Nuevo León an independent country is buried.

To some northern businesspeople, Santiago Vidaurri means what Emiliano Zapata meant for the peasants of the South: a symbol of inspiration and autonomy. But they’re careful not to say so publicly.

Zapata’s memory rests in the Olympus of Mexican history; Vidaurri, in a hidden tomb protected by an inaccessible plateau.

In hundreds of years, perhaps, when another meteorite like the one that ended the reign of the dinosaurs on Earth crashes into the world of men, future paleontologists may discover the bones of other human beings on this plateau. One, at the express request of his psychiatrist son, will be headless, and no one will know his name was Mauricio Fernández Garza.

About Diego Enrique Osorno Journalist, writer and filmmaker. Co-director of the documentary El alcalde (2012) and director of El poder de la silla (2015). He is the author of five books: Oaxaca sitiada (Grijalbo, 2007), El CĂĄrtel de Sinaloa (Grijalbo, 2009), Nosotros somos los culpables (Grijalbo, 2010), PaĂ­s de muertos (Compilador, Debate, 2011), Un vaquero cruza la frontera en silencio (Conapred) and La guerra de los Zetas (Grijalbo, 2012). His most recent book, Slim, is a political biography of Carlos Slim Helu, the richest Mexican in the world (Penguin Random House, 2015).

A Gentleman Takes On The World As He Observes It

Who is the strategist behind v, the documentary that Tatiana Huezo took to Berlin?

Author: Mariana Linares Cruz

Prolific, tireless, referential, a must-see, young promise of Mexican cinema. These are some of the words that in recent years have surrounded the name of Nicolás Celis in the film world. Specialized publications, new directors and high-risk films are constantly seeking him out because of it. Some numbers are in order here to explain the adjectives: ten years dedicated to audiovisual production, seventeen feature films, seven short films and thirteen television series; a production company (Pimienta Films) that works 365 days a year; and three films which in 2016 will compete at the world’s best-known festivals: Tempestad, by Tatiana Huezo, La región salvaje, by Amat Escalante and Soy Nero, by Rafi Pitts; and one unfailing partner, Sebastián (“Tian”), his older brother. All this before Nicolás’ thirtieth birthday.

There’s another adjective that doesn’t appear in festival catalogs but that describes Celis in one word: gentleman. Strictly speaking, a young gentleman who matches the dictionary definition: “behaving with distinction, nobility and generosity.” It’s an adjective that breaks the stereotemtype of the standard producer who holds power, pounds the table, cheats, and smacks of arrogance and selfishness.

Celis is a gentleman who arrives on time for appointments,

With that approach, without thinking, while his family was going through a long and painful farewell, Celis came to the life of director Tatiana Huezo in 2009. “A few weeks before shooting my first documentary, El lugar más pequeño, my producer pulled out. The Film Training Center, which served as producer, proposed Nicolás to me. He was a 23-year-old boy—skinny, blond and with the face of a chicken. Could it be that this boy would have the ability to push this tremendous adventure through? I had lots of doubts, but there was no other choice.” What the director said years ago is constantly repeated at Celis family meals: “A chicken!” exclaims Graciela, Nico’s mother, to tease him and show how proud she is. A chicken.

El lugar más pequeño (The Smallest Place, Mexico, 2011) was made in nine weeks under conditions involving high temperatures, portable generators in the mountains, long hikes, humidity that would damage equipment, days of unstoppable rain and a rigorous, disciplined director who would follow the work plan. Celis, whose only reference was his work with directors Elisa Miller (Ver Llover and Roma) and Jorge Michel Grau (Somos lo que hay), pushed the team through and finished one of the CCC’s most awarded productions. “The movie is what it is thanks to Nicolás,” says Huezo whenever she recalls that first time.

After his experience with El lugar más pequeño, the observant gentleman—the man with the chicken face— was ready to take on the world. He covered all the positions a film production requires, including runner, production manager, line producer, executive producer, co-producer, associate producer, and even manager. He took on the world and wanted more. He made fictional films (The Broken Tower), documentaries (Las sufragistas, Llévate mis amores), several debuts (Mi universo en minúsculas, Las horas contigo, Semana santa) and entered the ring with renowned directors like Amat Escalante (Heli) and Jonás Cuarón (Desierto). That was when Huezo reached out again: “Can you help me?”

Tempestad is the result of that collaboration between Celis and Huezo. “I knew Tati had been working for some time on something big. When she called, I was ready for action.” This is what Celis says a few days before goin to the Berlin International Film Festival with Tempestad

FÓSFORO

Observer. Nicolás Celis López watches his neighbors through his new binoculars. It’s not on his to-do list, but the Mexican producer reserves a certain time of day to observation. He takes in the stories of Mexico City from a newly acquired apartment on Avenida Reforma. It’s his home, his new refuge. Young Celis watches, focuses the lens, finds a volcano, takes a picture, and looks again. The to-do list, meanwhile, grows, becomes more urgent, makes his cell phone vibrate. Nico, hearing his name called during the shoot, resolves conflicts in his head during those minutes of staring out the window. It’s a necessary pause to juggle strategies for the many movies he makes in a season.

His phone rings. It’s the only call that can draw him out of the pleasure of observing. He answers: “Tian, what’s up?

Did we get those plane tickets?”

47

answers his phone and emails, and looks people in the eyes.

A gentleman who likes to do whatever he can to help make movies, so that directors feel comfortable while they’re filming, the crew handles things on their own, and the location, actor and timing are all right. “What I want is to make things easier for the film to get made, and that can mean filming in a cenote in Cancun or finding the best nanny so the director can work at ease. Everyone should be comfortable so things can get done.” He is a gentleman who is attentive to the needs of others.

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under his belt. Slowly, as he eats a pulled pork sandwich, he tells how his job that time required crossing Mexico by bus, from Tamaulipas to Quintana Roo, for three consecutive months to secure accommodations for the small crew in desolate towns and cities bristling with police and military checkpoints, confirming and reconfirming all the permits the film needed.

“Tati doesn’t even know whether I’m the executive producer, line producer or manager. She assumes that, along with the rest of the crew, we’re working together and following the plan.” Between mouthfuls, he tries to explain how he works with the director: “I admire her so much that I’m unable to give her any directions. She knows every second of the film; she has a plan.

My job is simply to make it all work to achieve her goal.”

The plan for Tempestad was to tell the story of two women whose lives are fractured as a result of the violence and lawlessness that are common in Mexico. Ernesto Pardo’s camera shows them as they travel through a ragged, desolate land that is fertile ground for fear. What needs to happen for something different to occur in this country? “I come from a family where justice is something to struggle against. Filmmaking for me is about trying to transform something—reality—even a little, from the trenches. You can sow a seed in the audience. Show injustices to try to end them.” A gentleman with a memory and the desire to transform reality.

Besides a sense of justice, his family gave him two sisters and a brother, Tian, a physicist from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who is also his business partner. “There came a point when I had to share my dream. Who better than my big brother to do it with? At first it was weird, but we complement each other.” For Nico, Tian is someone he can be honest with and tell bad jokes to. “He does the comic relief and sociability, and I work with the directors.” Pimienta Films belongs to both of them. Today it’s one of the most prolific production companies in Mexico—”one of the top three,” according to Variety magazine. The young producer has built the brand as he perfects his beloved hobby: observing. It’s not about wasting time; it’s about focusing his gaze where it should be.

FÓSFORO

About Nicolás Celis Producer. Founder of Pimienta Films. He’s participated in about thirty audiovisual productions, including short films, feature films and documentaries, as well as television series. His most recent films include work with directors Amat Escalante, Tatiana Huezo, Rafi Pitts, Jonás Cuarón and Alejandra Márquez.

About Mariana Linares Cruz Journalist. Author of the book The International Film Festival of Morelia. Más de diez años haciendo historia (Matchbox, 2014) and editor of the book Bertha Navarro a Journalist without Borders (Universidad de Guadalajara, 2007).

Fellow of the New Iberoamerican Journalism Foundation and special mention of the 2012 New Pens contest. She has worked for Mexican film festivals staged in Morelia, Guadalajara, Universidad Autonoma de Mexico and the Mayan Riviera.

FILM IN

MEXICO

The Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), through the Mexican Film Commission (COMEFILM) provides information, recommendations and assistance to producers looking to shoot in Mexico.

IN MEXICO YOU WILL FIND: • All kinds of amazing natural landscapes • Magic towns • Cosmopolitan cities • All weather conditions throughout the year • Professional crews • State of the art equipment

AT COMEFILM YOU CAN FIND: • Mexican Film Commissions Network • Institutional contacts nationwide • Specialized guides for producers • Professional attention as well as all the required information in order to film in Mexico

PRODUCING AND COPRODUCING IN MEXICO: • Funds and incentives • ATA Carnet: Duty-free and tax-free temporary imports and exports for up to one year.

Simplified customs border crossings by allowing importers and exporters to use a single document for all customs formalities.

Templo de Santa Prisca de Taxco, Guerrero

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