The Eagle's Throne

27. GENERAL CÍCERO ARRUZA TO GENERAL MONDRAGÓN VON BERTRAB

My good general, things have reached the boiling point and very soon we’ll have to take action. But please, let it be a joint action, taken by two brothers bound by service like you and me, General. Look at what’s happening. Our president’s celebrated democratic politics are sinking faster than a rowboat caught in the middle of the gulf during a hurricane. Trust the people, he says, civil society will come together on its own to resolve internal strife. Give the people their freedom, he says, and they’ll form unions, cooperatives, neighborhood associations. Like fuck they will! General, loosen up on authority and you create a goddamn void. This country’s never been able to govern itself. It doesn’t have the experience. It doesn’t know how. It has always needed a strong hand, a central authority that prevents chaos and eliminates power vacuums. Just look around you: All over the country those power vacuums have been filled by sneaky local bosses who are always waiting to pounce, like tigers.

I could be talking about a town like Sahuaripa, lost in the desert, where a big shot like Félix Elías Cabezas gains real power in Sonora and exercises it, protected by distance and ignorance, monopolizing the mines, exploiting the export of copper.

I could be talking about a whole state like San Luis Potosí, where a local boss like Rodolfo Roque Maldonado promises Japanese investors order and security so that they can then use San Luis as a launching pad for flooding the United States with technology exports via the Free Trade Agreement. You’ll say that Herrera created the situation in San Lázaro, but the one who took all the credit (and the yens, or whatever those yellow kamikazes used for bribes) was Maldonado, boss and governor of the state. In other words, he lets people think that it was the interior secretary who established order there, but those Japs with their Fu Manchu eyes know better and say nothing. Don Roque Maldonado protects their interests.

And as for the Tampico — Matamoros axis, General, where the drug traffic comes in like Adelita in that old song — if by sea on a warship, if by land on a military train — who runs things there? The president? You? Secretary Herrera? No, the guy in charge is the drug-traffickers’ top dog, don Silvestre Pardo, along with the local boss working for him, José de la Paz Quintero. On the Tijuana — Mexicali strip, the whole prostitution racket is controlled by Narciso “Chicho” Delgado, the big boss who poses as a whale lover but makes a living trading in monkey flesh, if you know what I mean, General.

Shall I go on? Am I telling you anything you don’t already know? Must I tell you that we’ve lost control of both borders, the one in the north to drug cartels, prostitution, and human traffickers; the one in the south to the European revolutionary-tourist trade that inherited those ski mask things from the late (disappeared) Subcomandante Marcos in order to found the Chiapas Socialist Collective, selling junk— balaclavas, huipiles, wooden rifles, manuscripts written by Marcos, condoms with the registered trademark “The Uprising,” Zapatista hats, and miniatures of the Virgin of Guadalupe — to tourists looking for a thrill, and devoting themselves to opening “humanitarian” doors to the Guatemalan Indians fleeing the torture, death, and arson meted out by Guatemala’s elite. Why don’t those white Guatemalans take a lesson from us and promote some interracial mixing so that there isn’t a single pure Indian left? Aside from all that there’s the whole of the southeast, dominated by the sinister “Dark Hand” Vidales from Tabasco.

For fuck’s sake, General! For fuck’s sake! Are we going to let things go on festering like this? Or are we finally going to take action, you and I, to save the nation through the purifying work of the armed forces, the last stronghold of Mexican patriotism? Are we going to sit through that endless electoral process that will drag on for almost three years? Are we going to let a couple of damn lapdogs like de la Canal or Bernal Herrera get into Los Pinos so that they can string us along even more? Or are we going to find the way, General, to replace President Lorenzo Terán, who has been badmouthed by the press and the general public as an ineffectual bureaucrat with a cushion stuck to his ass? Are we going to find the way, General, to get ourselves a president with a strong hand and a tough character, who can get this damned country in order?

I know you don’t write letters, not even condolence cards, or Christmas cards, but give me a sign, General, my good friend, one little sign — I’m real good at reading them. .