Abogado Alex April 6, 2018
Alex is a homegrown attorney in Cancun and my best source for inside information regarding the diseased heart of the beast, the Mexican Judiciary. She is a chief lieutenant in the Office of Attorney General, with a suitably illustrious title, Directora Juridica de la Zona Norte de la Fiscalia General del Estado de Quintana Roo. If she had a calling card, it would wrap around her hand.
Today my informant tells me that she has not been receiving my reports for two months, ever since the security officials seized her computer and extinguished her Facebook, email, etcetera, purportedly for her own protection. She is consigned now to to an isolated office in the complex, with a single government server and an account encrypted by a Canadian security firm. For a forty-year-old with a social life, this is equivalent to an Alcatraz sentence.
She raises her two girls in what she calls Las Periferias of her native Cancun, the outskirts, among the many poor who will never know another lawyer. Alex often gives legal advice in shopping lines, at the school carpool lanes, or wherever else someone shows up with a question regarding the byzantine justice system—she is always willing and available to shine a light—but she definitely does not advertise. With an exploding, high-profile caseload of extraditions and political prosecutions, as well as heightened paranoia in the AG’s office following the assassination attempt, Alex barely even gets to see her friends.
“The pay is not great, but the burden is heavy,“ she confesses, on one of her rare beach days in Puerto Morelos with her daughters. “I have no freedom.“
Alex did not exactly choose this path, and she still wonders how it came to be. A year ago, she had been toiling away in a small firm, practicing tax law, when some government apparatchik approached her with a prestigious offer difficult to refuse, especially given her ambition to eventually work her way out of this snake-nest altogether.
“How did they even know me?“ she asks, flattered but suspicious. Exactamente. She has extended family to consider, as well, in her new position of prominence. Others clearly are aware of this collateral. She feels watched.
The State offered her a nice place to live in the gated Zona Hotel, but her pre-adolescent girls wanted none of that sterile-sheen, soulless, artificial paradise—they wanted their friends and grandparents, their school and community, and so did their mama. So, instead, Alex commutes from the periphery, where the majority of the city’s crimes are committed—not murders, as popularly advertised, but store robberies. The thieves do not come for the money, as if there were any to take—they come for the food.
“We live in a surrealistic country,“ she muses on the sand. “Here it is possible to die by suicide with three bullets—one to the arm, one to the leg, one to the head. You decide the order.“ She recalls this from an autopsy report.
What is really happening in Cancun subverts any hope for justice. After the capture of Doña Leti last month, the Zeta Cartel unleashed a firestorm on the city, detonating grenades outside Plaza de Americas, shooting up the streets from motorcycles, and leaving bombs in potted plans on Zona Hotel, but this synchronized mayhem was a diversion from the real mission, which was to free Doña Leti and to murder her disobedient prosecutor.
The evidence is beyond dispute, but the local drug kingpin was released anyway, if only to end the latest terror campaign. Meanwhile, Jalisco Nueva Generacion takes advantage of the standoff to sink its talons deeper into the coastal communties, including a shooting spree outside the Puerto Morelos 7-11, near the police station, in broad daylight, without given chase. Lawlessness is what Attorney Alex thinks it represents, but, for the sake of her family, she remains circumspect. “You must remember,“ she says, “here the truth is an insult.“