This is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor

Author:Fernanda Melchor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811228060
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:01+00:00

III

Shadows

Don’t Mess with My Boys

(Notes for an article on the arrival of crack in Veracruz)

For Iván and Chelsi,

wherever you are

On October 4, 2009, the Veracruz drug trafficker Lázaro Llinas Castro was sentenced to thirty-two years in prison. These notes recount his rise and fall as a drug baron in the so-called first port of Mexico. They also tell the stories of several addicts who survived the terrible vice commercialized by Llinas Castro: crack cocaine.

Fed up with the heat, the meals based on fried corn tortillas, and the stench of armpit inside those airless quarters, Veracruz’s Secretary for Public Safety shakes off the goon employed to protect him and heads for the city in his car. He hasn’t seen his family in weeks, not since the telephone threats began.

Somewhere around Rinconada, under a stubborn drizzle, two black pickup trucks flank him on either side; a third vehicle emerges from a side road and boxes him in. Four men with hoods pulled over their heads point their rifles at him and order him out of the car.

“I’m going to ask for your boys not to mess with my boys,” is the first thing the sicario boss said once they managed to wrestle the secretary into one of the pickup trucks. This message was followed by his wife’s full name, their family home address in Xalapa and the timetables of his children’s private schools.

The view from Doctor Careló’s yard in the Pocitos y Rivera neighborhood stretches all the way to the port facility and, on a clear day, even the sea. Doctor Careló has put some plastic chairs in his otherwise neglected garden. Sitting pensively in one of them, Pancho Pantera rolls a joint. He’s grown a mustache and dyed his hair black — to avoid being recognized on the street, he says.

“I have to think carefully about how I’m going to get those fuckers,” he schemes to himself.

Pancho Pantera has just been released from the Ignacio Allende prison, having served a five-year sentence for offenses related to organized crime. He was a legendary thief, famed for cheating the local mob, passing himself off as a sales representative for the cartels, selling cocaine at wholesale prices to local businessmen. He would go to the arranged meeting with a bag full of white lime, and just as the packages were about to be opened to test the quality of the merchandise, a dozen armed heavies dressed in PGR T-shirts — but who were actually Pancho’s security unit — would raid the place and confiscate the “drugs” and money, offering in return to let those present go free. Pancho would keep half the cash and the rest would be distributed among the team of hired muscle.

But by the time he got out of the slammer, Pancho Pantera could no longer make his living this way. Now Los Zetas controlled everything.

“Those guys aren’t looking for partners, they want bodies on the payroll,” Careló says, reading Pancho’s mind.

“I have to find a way to get those fuckers .

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