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By Root 1447 0

when the then-president of Mexico descended like a god with an entourage and massive security. The poor fled into their huts until it was over. The streets emptied, and when the president did a staged stroll to greet his subjects, no one stood on the sidewalks except party hacks. Just as when I attended the fiesta for the official candidate for the state governorship (a man who had spent most of his years in Mexico City and far from his claimed home), the campesinos had to be bused in by the government and given free food and, even with that, proved so listless the crowd seemed to be on sedatives. Every Mexican learns early on, by watching the elders, to retreat or cower before authority and to lead very private and quiet lives. Mexican literature is rich with recording this obliteration of public self and sequestering of private self amid the illusion that family provides security. Mexico’s Nobel laureate poet, Octavio Paz, etched this trait indelibly in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.”

Of course, there are releases from this in fiestas, drinking into the night with friends, and jokes. I have almost never had an intelligent conversation in the United States about what life means. But I have had many after midnight, sitting outside under a tree with a bottle in Mexico. Emilio emerges as a young man in high school with a first-rate mind in a country where intelligence can be a fatal trait.

He learns photography, and when he graduates at eighteen, a new daily is starting in Ciudad Juárez, El Diario, and he gets hired to take pictures. Soon he is a reporter.

He learns corruption almost instantly. He is paid very little, and payday is every Friday. He explains the system in simple terms. Let’s say, he offers, that a reporter earns a hundred dollars a week. Every Monday, a man comes who represents the police, the government, the political parties, and the drug leaders. He gives each reporter a sum that is three or four times his actual wage. This is called the sobre, the envelope.

“Every since I was a little kid,” he continues, “I listened to my parents criticize bad government. We knew it was corrupt.”

Now he is part of a corrupt system.

“Corruption at the paper,” he explains, “was subtle. The politicians would win over my boss with dinners and bags of money. The reporter on the beat would get pressure sometimes from the boss not to report certain things like the bad habits of politicians, the houses they own, the girlfriends. And it was understood that you never asked hard questions. The narcos also gave out money but I was always afraid of them. They own businesses, buy ads, have parties and celebrities and horses and you cover that, they would pay you to cover that, but you never mentioned their real business.”

He sees his Mexico as genetically corrupt. A corrupt Aztec ruling class fused with the trash of Spain—the conquistadors—and produced through this marriage a completely corrupt Mexico. This thesis helps him face the reality around him.

“In Mexico,” he says, “we operate in disguise. There is one face and under that is another mask. Nothing is upfront. The publisher wishes to perpetuate the system. But if it is clear you are taking bribes, you will be fired. You must take it under the table because if you talked about it openly, that would affect the image.”

He is entering a bar one night, when he sees the mayor of Juárez leaving with some narco-traficantes. The mayor pauses by the street, drops his pants and pisses into the gutter. Emilio writes up a little note and puts it in the paper. He is nineteen and he does not understand.

The next day he is called to the mayor’s office.

The man is at a big desk with a check register.

He says, “How much?”

He wants Emilio to publish a story saying his earlier story was a lie.

Gutiérrez does not take any money. He realizes later this is a serious error because he