The Taken by Javier Valdez Cárdenas

Author:Javier Valdez Cárdenas
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780806155760
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2017-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Dying for Good, Forgetting

DON’T LEAVE ME HANGING

His passport, a little notebook, the tape recorder, credentials, and a date-book that he used every day—there in his miniscule backpack, he carried his life and also his death. It was everything that he needed if the moment arose and he had to flee: one of his feet, one of his hands and arms, one of his eyes, half of his existence was always on the other side, thinking about saving himself, getting the hell away from the bullets and gun battles, the police blotters, the executions, and the terror.

He was afraid that they’d turn him in, that police or government officials or reporters, even those from the newspaper where he worked, would put him out. And so, surrounded by detractors and immense craters of mistrust and doubt, he decided to leave. He left, and they took him. Now no one knows where he is or whether he’s alive or dead.

“Hey, cabrón, don’t leave me hanging.” That was his expression, the one he used the most, when he talked with his friends, the close ones anyway. He didn’t do it with everyone. He asked them not to abandon him, not to leave him alone. “Hey, cabrones, assholes, don’t leave me hanging.” He insisted. He repeated it and repeated it. It was almost a plea, an endorsement of friendship and solidarity, in the presence of a death that was always close by, that he could feel. That’s why he was always smiling, or half-smiling, like he was making a face.

But it was also an acknowledgment of the sharp and cutting mistrust that always accompanied him. Fear wasn’t hard to come by. It was with him always.

Alfredo Jiménez Mota was born in Hermosillo, in the border state of Sonora. He was eighteen years old when he began to study for his degree in Culiacán. He lived on Constitution Street, which for a long time was called Nicaragua Street, about a half a block from Jesús G. Andrade Avenue and the Ángel Flores baseball stadium, in the Miguel Alemán neighborhood, a central section of the Sinaloan capital. He started out at the School of Social Communications in the University of the Occident, because he wanted to be a journalist.

He was tall and overweight. His smile, which came with ease, rose rapidly across the rest of his face, all the way up to his eyes. Hopeful sparkles, tenderness, innocence, goodwill, honesty, and humanity, all were reflected in those eyes, in that smile.

The seal of death

Alfredo was at the daily newspaper El Debate in Culiacán. He’d worked in the field, for the newspaper Noroeste, cutting his teeth as a reporter on the police beat. He’d soaked up the tricks of the trade from his colleagues in the crime section for covering these things and getting the facts, but he also went much further: the street, the night, the radio frequencies of the police departments and the Red Cross, the law enforcement operations, the code words used by the police, the movements and reactions of their agents.

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