Wrapped in a multicolored shawl, Araceli Aguirre stamped her high heels on the tile. Méndez couldn’t tell if she was reacting to the cold or the anticipation. She leaned against him with a giggle and whispered, “We might as well just move my office into the prison, we spend so much time here. This is a human rights apocalypse.”
The deputy warden led them down a hallway. The noise got louder. In the watch commander’s office, two guards studied a bank of video monitors. A third stood by a sliding gate with a shotgun across his chest. The chunky, shaven-headed watch commander slumped behind a desk, blowing listlessly into an empty paper cup. He glanced at them, unimpressed. He nodded at the guard with the shotgun, who unlocked the gate.
The prison yard was reached through a cage filled with relatives, lawyers and other visitors, the red stamps on their hands distinguishing them from the inmates, who were also in civilian dress, on the other side of the chain-link fence. Méndez’s expeditionary force advanced to a second gate. They were met by a lanky inmate in a San Diego Padres cap and a leather coat. Méndez recognized him as a former state police detective whom the Diogenes Group had arrested along with the Colonel.
“Rico, you probably remember Licenciado Méndez,” Aguirre said without a trace of irony, as if they had run into each other in a supermarket. “Shall we?”
Four grim-faced prison guards led the way. Whenever Méndez entered the yard, he felt as if he were stepping into a hallucination. It resembled the plaza of a bustling and thuggish village. A basketball court was surrounded by two-story blocks of housing called carracas with spiral staircases leading to outdoor catwalks. The walls were painted in green, orange and maroon and decorated by murals of historical figures, religious images, zoot-suited pachucos, Aztec monarchs, Border Patrol helicopters swooping over figures running through canyons. Most of the buildings were occupied on the ground floors by ramshackle businesses with hand-painted signs: restaurants, grocery stores, a barbershop.
Years earlier, the prison administration had found itself overwhelmed by an excess inmate population of migrants from all over Mexico. Politics had made the federal government disinclined to lend a hand; the opposition party was strong in Baja, so the mess at the prison had been a perennial weapon for the ruling party of that era. The authorities decided to let the inmates fend for themselves. The inmates created their own businesses and mafias, built their own homes-townhouses that sold for forty thousand dollars, cubicles that sold for two hundred. A microsociety blossomed within the walls. At night, the guards only dared to venture into the internal “streets” the way the police entered the toughest colonias of the city outside: in platoons and girded for combat.
It took longer than Méndez had hoped to get to the Colonel. The Saturday crowd was thick with strolling families, timid backcountry migrants, tattered heroin addicts who prowled and scratched and hustled. The phalanx of VIPs caused a commotion. A human whirlpool encircled the human rights commissioner. The inmates shouted her name or simply “Doctora.” They jostled close to shake her hand, appeal for help, steal a moment of her time.
Méndez realized that Aguirre was not going to brush them off. She was unruffled by the size and noise of the swarm. She inched forward, the shawl draped over her willowy long-backed frame. She hoisted and inspected a toddler with a respiratory disease. She nodded gravely at the semicoherent patter of a bleary-eyed convict on crutches who wore multiple vests, a watch cap and an Artful Dodger overcoat that looked as if he slept in it. Aguirre was doing her job.
Athos stayed by Méndez, AK-47 at the ready, eyeing the crowd, the balconies and rooftops. Porthos shadowed Aguirre, shoving away inmates violently but surreptitiously, his hands low so the human rights commissioner wouldn’t notice. The crowd ebbed and swirled. A group of women shouldered forward. They had an elderly female inmate in tow-bent over, gray-haired, grandmotherly-looking. They wanted Aguirre to see her: Exhibit A for the injustice of it all. Can you believe they arrested this poor old comadre for smuggling drugs, Doctora? She was just in the wrong car at the wrong time. Can’t you do something for her, Doctora? Aguirre pulled the woman aside, a comforting arm around the frail back in a mangy green sweater. Aguirre and the woman took turns speaking into each other’s ears, straining over the noise. Aguirre pulled out a pad and took notes.
Athos sidled up to Méndez and murmured: “Listen, Licenciado, perhaps it would be best to cut short the tourism, what do you think?”
Isabel Puente’s look suggested wholehearted agreement.
Méndez shrugged. “What do you want me to do? Every time I came here when I was commissioner, it was the same. They all want you to make them a miracle.”
Aguirre leaned over a counter into a wooden hut that was a handicrafts store and, judging from the mattress and bassinet on the floor, a tiny residence for the inmate entrepreneur and his family. The ponytailed owner was an artisan who decorated belt buckles with images of curvaceous women, AK-47s, marijuana leaves. After handing Aguirre a folder containing documents about his court case, he tried to make a sale.
“Perhaps your husband would like another one, Doctora, or one of the gentlemen with you,” he said in what sounded to Méndez like the cadences of Michoacán. “This is really a complicated design, I call it the Sinaloan Phantom, the skull with the cowboy hat requires an infernal amount of detail…”
Méndez noticed a scraggly inmate with buzz-cut hair and a cotton workshirt shoving his way toward Aguirre, rasping her name. The inmate wore a necklace with a bullet as a medallion. Méndez did not like what he saw.
“Porthos,” he called.
The big commander was way ahead of him. By the time Méndez reached them, Porthos had intercepted the inmate and applied a crushing one-handed grip to his throat. Clearing a path in the crowd with his free arm, Porthos pinned the inmate to a wall beneath a dragon painted on a food stand run by Asian smugglers.
The inmate squawked and gurgled. Porthos tightened his hold. Some inmates laughed, others yelled insults. Méndez cursed. They were like hyenas in here.
Méndez fought his way to Aguirre’s side and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Araceli, please,” Méndez said. “I would gladly spend the entire day here, but…”
They followed Rico down a narrow walkway behind a cell block to the Colonel’s compound. It was a cement yard half the size of a tennis court: two picnic tables, barbells around a weight bench. A slobbering pit bull strained a leash. The open space fronted a two-story block of housing that had been custom-built for a drug lord years earlier and purchased by the Colonel for himself, several of his imprisoned former police officers, and henchmen and servants he had hired from the inmate population.
Two stern inmates in cowboy hats manned the gate of the compound. Two more stood sentry on a second-floor walkway of the building. Like Rico, they wore long coats or bulky jackets. Several did not bother to conceal the pistols in their belts, declaring to the world that the prison had turned reality upside down.
The Colonel himself was on hand to greet his visitors. The dutiful host stood at attention in the middle of the cement patio area, arms spread magnanimously. He was resplendent in a brown-and-gold Fila jogging suit with a brown scarf tucked around his throat and into the warm-up jacket. He was thickset, with a long torso, long arms and disproportionately short legs. He wore a baseball-style cap adorned with the English word “Skipper.”
“Doctora Araceli,” the Colonel called, and embraced Aguirre.