A photographer kidnapped in Mexico, part three
Dawn arrived like a gray, contaminated tide, and brought in new men who nudged us awake with kicks and gun barrels. My friend later told me I’d slept a little. She’d heard me snoring.
It had been 20 hours since that battalion of gunmen had stormed my friend’s apartment, kicked the hell out of me and dragged us to this place, which would ironically be called a safe house in the press that followed.
The gunmen took us downstairs to a much larger room. I was shirtless, as I was then they’d dragged me here the day before. A cool breeze blew through the room chilling my skin. They seated us apart against three different walls.
I heard men covering the floors and walls with sheets of plastic. I heard them tearing off strips of duct tape to hold them in place. I could look up from under my blindfold and get glimpses of what was happening but I had to be very careful. I’d already been reprimanded with kicks to the head for doing just that.
Soon there was only one young man left in the room. He had a machine gun strapped to his back and was lugging in firewood and rolls of some kind of thick, wrinkled plastic. He was working at a fast pace to get everything ready before the boss arrived.
Earlier, the kidnappers had removed my handcuffs, put my hands in front of me, and put the cuffs back on so I could go to the bathroom. Which is no small trick. It’s almost impossible to piss when you’re cold and almost naked and some asshole is nudging you with a gun saying hurry and don’t get any funny ideas.
Funny ideas like what? Spinning around and dribbling three miserable drops of piss on the dude’s boots?
They forgot to cuff me behind my back again. Or else they didn’t care. I asked for a cigarette and one man let me take two drags off some cheap cancer stick. It was like giving a guy with the DTs two drops of whiskey.
Plastic sheeting on the floor is never a good sign. I remembered all the acts of cruelty by cartels I’d reported when I was a journalist. Innocent people forced to fight to the death, cut themselves at gunpoint, or kill each other a thousand different ways. I’ve written dozens of stories about kidnappings. It was always an empty word. I empathized with victims, but I’d never meet one, and certainly never become one. I thought, to quote the Ramones, that I was too tough to die. Nobody would kidnap me. Ever. And to make sure, I used to walk the streets of cities in Mexico with a can of tear gas spray in one boot and a knife in the other.
More than once I’d mouthed off to cartel foot soldier who tried to intimidate me out of taking pictures at some bar or on some corner. You act tough enough and 99 percent of the people you meet will back down, even people who really are tough.
On January 8 and 9, I met the other one percent.
As if weapons or poker-faced toughness would have helped me the day we were taken away. Even if I’d had a machine gun I never could have escaped. Not at the house when the men came in, and not from that torture chamber and temple where we were later held. I am OK with a handgun. Nobody is OK with a handgun against 16 people with machine guns and two more waiting in cars outside. There might have been even more watching from across the street or on the street behind the house. And I was fairly certain they’d been spying on us for days. Nobody sends sixteen men into a house they haven’t cased out.
An underworld-connected friend later told me that the cartel had been watching me for weeks, and may have been watching my friend for years. For reasons that remain unclear, they thought we were important. They accused both of us of everything from funding rival cartels to killing members of theirs — the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion. And if they sent 12, 18 or 25 henchmen to get us, they thought we were armed and dangerous. They may have been disappointed.
In that room at the safe house, blindfolded but able to look around a little, I didn’t know what was coming but I knew it would be bad. It would be cruel and end in my decapitation or worse. What I could not have imagined was how strange it would be. Being in a cartel and having an unlimited supply of brain altering drugs turns freaks into super freaks. They become devil-worshipers, and unlikely priests and adherents to religions invented by people who sell candles, T-shirts and figurines of La Santisima Muerte, Jesus Malverde, and San Judas Tadeo at every market from Nuevo Laredo on the border with Texas to Nicaragua.
Which may not be entirely fair. To many people, those pseudo saints (with the exception of San Judas, who was Christ’s cousin) are the real center of their faith. And I imagine they were created out of sincere but dark spiritual experiences. I knew a small-time dealer in Mexico City who told me he sprinkles his shrine to la Santisima Muerte with a little bit of cocaine every night. A witch from whom I rented a room in Monterrey once said, “God takes the good, the Devil takes the bad, and Death takes everyone else.”
The one man who was still in the room was a true believer. I watched him take a clump of pot out of a bag, stuff it in his mouth, chew it up, and spit it in the four corners of the room. He muttered something about the four winds from four directions and mumbled some dopey prayer to La Muerte, also called la Flaca and la Guapa. His routine started to entertain me. Exhaustion was turning me into a freak, too, and part of being held captive for almost two days meant dealing with cruelty, but also, long hours of boredom. At least I was getting a little voodoo sideshow out of the whole thing.
He lit votive candles printed with the image of La Santísima Muerte on the floor next to each of us.
Then, one by one, at gunpoint, he made us inhale long lines of what he said was crystal meth — known on the streets as “cristo,” which would give even Pope Francis a giggle.
“This will burn your nose and loosen your tongue,” he said, pressing a pistol to my head and handing me a rolled up banknote and a plate with neat, little lines on it. He spoke with the tone of a priest offering a communion wafer to a child.
Meth burns like holy hell. It makes your eyes water worse than any chile and sets your sinus passages and throat, on fire.
But just for a second.
Then, it gets into your veins, hits the central nervous system and BAM! What have I been missing? Give me some more, brother. I think we’re starting to understand each other. Pass me a Corona, Frito Bandito, and turn up that funky accordion music with the circus beat. Let’s get wicked, ‘mano, but could you loosen these cuffs a notch and maybe put the guns away?
Less than 24 hours earlier I’d taken a Klonopin, prescribed to me for anxiety. I think it shielded me from the edginess and itching meth users describe. It made me euphoric, not antsy or nervous. I’m also descended from a long line of addicts and alcoholics. My father once said, “I just don’t feel like I’m in control of my actions when I’m not on something.” I may have a genetic resistance to narcotics.
The weirdness was now reaching Jodorowsky levels.
A half dozen gunmen returned. I could smell incense, pot and the burning candles, as well as a free and seductive breeze from a window somewhere far away. The pot-spitter walked over to a jukebox and changed the tune to some dark, piano music that might have made Nosferatu swing.
He told my friend and the carpenter, both of whom were itching, wired and tearfully begging to be set free, to lay on the floor in the middle of the room. He rolled them up together, back-to-back in big sheets of that thick plastic.
What the hell was the plan? I was way past worrying about dying but I was scared for them.
First I thought they were going to blow our brains out, that the plastic sheets were to make clean-up easier. Now I thought they were going to burn us alive. But why the other two and not me?
The sicario-priest who’d drugged us spoke up.
“Ah, I almost forgot the most important person — the gringo,” he said.
He grabbed me by the chain between my handcuffs and dragged me to within a yard of the two people eerily wrapped in plastic. I was no longer the child at communion. I didn’t care about being dragged. I was not in my right mind.
Apparently, I was good at hiding it.
The pot-spitter lifted my blindfold. He was wearing a mask so that I couldn’t see his face. It was a “ghostface” mask inspired by the movie Scream, which was itself inspired by the legendary Edward Munch painting. A few men who’d interrogated us the night before had worn the same kinds of masks, some of them with little boxes that distorted the sounds of their voices.
One of them would turn the voice box on, yell at me and hit me. Then he’d leave the room, turn the box off, come back in and treat me nice, promising to protect me from the “other guy.” One guy playing both good cop and bad.
This particular ghostface stared into my eyes.
“Hey, this fucking Gringo’s immune to cristo!,” he shouted. “He’s gotta have more.” He came back with the plate and bank note and gave me a far heavier dose.
Which I like to believe was God’s will. Whatever was coming was best faced in an altered state. That’s not some gonzo journalism idea. I didn’t want to feel or see or think anything. I once read that during the time of Jesus, women would give men set to be crucified some kind of wild plant that acted as a painkiller and let them die more peacefully.
I was drugged and in deep trouble but it didn’t bother me as much as it had 15 minutes earlier.
The piano music was playing, the room was spinning and I suspected there was, to distort Shakespeare, a lot of madness cut in that meth. The more of it the better, I thought. An overdose would would bring a quick end this Fellini snuff film.
Suddenly there was silence, someone killed the lights, and with all the ceremony of a king arriving at his court, the boss walked in.
This character, a regional or national chief, was one self-made piece of work. All eyes were on him so I was able to look around as much as I wanted. He was in his late fifties, a bit heavy and had white hair. He wore newish jeans and a button down shirt and walked with an air of Darth Vader majesty. Because he was a Mexican king he had a belt buckle the size of a hub cap and snakeskin boots worth the price of some cars. I wished I had my camera. He was flanked by shirtless young guards carrying machine guns and wearing their own absurd Halloween masks.
Caligula had nothing on this cat, who had clearly seen the Godfather too many times.
This may sound like the babble of a guy who was as higher than a kite but you could feel the fear this man inspired in his soldiers. It rippled through the air. I could feel it and almost hear it. This was a cartel like any other but its structure was a cult of personality. Someday I’ll know who that man was. He will show up in some newspaper, a disgraced, bullet-ridden former senator or local businessman, and he will have been a famous narco whose name was not yet known. So far, I don’t know anything about him.
My friend later told me that Rubén Oseguera Cervantes was among the men who interrogated us. She had been taken into another room, politely, several times, for one-on-one interrogations and likely had more information — or misinformation — than I did. The man they called jefe was not “El Mencho” as Oseguera is known. But the fact that Mexico’s most wanted and mysterious man may have been there and that I didn’t know it seems to me — a photographer and writer — like a huge, missed opportunity.
In fact, the boss looked a hell of a lot like “El Menchito,” Oseguera’s son, who has been captured by Mexican security forces, released, re-captured and released again. I suspect the boss was part of that sadistic clan and so was El Mencho.
“This is a guy who’ll execute your entire family based on not much more than a rumor,” a source told Rolling Stone reporter Josh Eels. “He just has zero regard for human life.”
Not much more than a rumor. That probably accounted for our kidnapping. Or maybe not. Maybe they knew my work. Maybe it worried them. Maybe this whole show was a warning to me to steer clear. If so, it wasn’t necessary. One guy with a pistol could have delivered that message and I would have left town.
A DEA analyst interviewed by Eells confirmed what I have observed: Oseguera and his people, who have built an empire selling and inhaling crystal meth, are cruel, backward and bizarre.
“The problem with meth guys is that they’re unhinged,” the analyst said. He called them “hillbilly, backwoods guys who made their reputation crushing up pseudoephedrine. … They’re not sophisticated. They’re very rough.”
A perfect description of the people who kidnapped us.
At the time I didn’t care who they were. Nobody had to tell me I was in the clutches of ruthless, psycho tweakers. I just wanted out.
It was silent and cold in that room. Somebody handed “the boss” a microphone wired to a jukebox so that people could sing karaoke. That place was full of jukeboxes.
He smiled like a car salesman you’ve been doing business with for years. He spoke with the casual attitude of a local businessman at the Wednesday Rotary lunch in Anytown, Iowa or Michigan. The dude had swing. I bet my bottom dollar that like Manson decades earlier, he’s never committed a crime with his own hands in his life.
“Good morning,” he said, and I recalled the comforting voice I’d heard on the phone the night before. “I want to apologize for arriving in these old clothes. I usually wear fine, black pants and a good, guayabera. I arrived this morning in haste in these jeans and this shirt. In any case, please enjoy your breakfast.”
Everything he said seemed nuts. The carpenter, my friend and I were his intended audience and he believed we couldn’t see him. Why would we care about his clothes? Narco-narcissism? Was he preaching for his disciples and not for us? His comments, given with the tone of I’d-like-to-apologize-for-not-having-prepared-a-speech, made no sense. Nothing was being cooked. Nobody was being fed.
But in the middle of the room a man was stoking a fire beneath two people wrapped in thick plastic on top of more plastic in a circle of logs that smelled like mesquite.
Who are these freaks? I asked myself. Drug lords, devil worshipers or cannibals?
The idea that my friend was going to be cooked and eaten — a message clearly intended for me — scared me more than all the guns in the world.
John Sevigny is not a photojournalist but a fine arts photographer whose work is rooted in 19th Century Realism, Baroque painting, and draws on his own experiences. He lives wherever he can. See his work at www.johnsevigny.org
