Mexico: Grenades and Gangsters

Note: I wrote these blog posts in December, the month that I traveled to Mexico to report on the Craig Petties story. Now that we are ready to publish our articles on the case, we are posting them.

Sunday, Dec. 13 (cont.) - After we visited the chapel of Saint Death, (see previous blog post) we stopped to eat at a nearby restaurant. Our guide, the journalist Rafael Pinzon, suggested we order some cow stomach soup, and we received bowls of hard, rubbery chunks in a reddish broth. Photographer Alan Spearman and I didn't like this, but fortunately, there were also quesedillas.

The big question that day was whether to visit the city of Celaya in nearby Guanajuato state. Celaya is just 25 minutes by car from Queretaro, where we had been staying, but it is much more violent.

The interviews that we had done over the last few days have suggested that Queretaro is a "treaty city," an area that the traffickers have set aside as a safe place to live.

This is impossible to prove, of course, but many people believe it, and in fact, Queretaro is usually quite safe. By contrast, Celaya has had several bloody incidents of cartel-related violence recently, and there have even been grenade attacks on police. I'm a cautious person by nature, and it seemed like a bad idea to visit a place where gangsters throw grenades at cops. I thought about some of the crime scene photos that local reporter Alejandrino Hervert had showed us days earlier. One showed a man whose face and head had been blown almost completely off, and another one showed a half-naked man stuffed into a car trunk. These killings had taken place around Celaya. But Alan wanted to go, and Rafael convinced me that we could make a visit safely. He even made a quick call to a police commander and arranged for us to get a police escort. This was one of countless ways that Rafael helped us during our visit, and I am grateful.

We rode in Rafael's car into Celaya, where we met up with the police. I moved to the back seat to let one of the police officers take my place in the front. He was a quiet young man with a bulletproof vest. Another police unit followed us as we rode on. It occurred to me that in a place where police are targets, it might not be the best idea to be close to them.

We continued, passing schools with names like "Westminster Royal College" and "Universidad Continente Americano." There was much more graffiti than in Celaya than in Queretaro, and we saw a Chinese restaurant, something which we hadn't seen in the other city. Then we finally got to the police outpost where the explosions had occurred.

It wasn't a police station, but rather an outpost or meeting point. It was a simple concrete building, like a big, orange upside-down "U" placed on the ground. Someone had hurled grenades here on Nov. 19.
One grenade blast had gouged out a few inches of asphalt and sprayed shrapnel into the concrete face of the building. It had chipped the orange paint — nothing too dramatic.

The second grenade had landed near the right side of the building, punching a softball-sized hole in the sidewalk, spraying a concentrated blast ofshrapnel into the concrete wall, and tearing up a nearby tree. It had also blown the glass off a utility meter. No one was hurt in the incident, and the police said it was an effort by criminals to intimidate them.

Officials with assault rifles were standing on nearby corners, and I spoke with a 33-year-old woman walking by named Maria Garcia. "You're more afraid to go out on the street, because there's no security," she said.

We took some pictures, and soon it was time to go. On the way out, I saw a female police officer and thought about how it was her job to work and live here all the time, while I was nervous even to enter the town. On the return trip to Queretaro, I used Rafael's cell phone to thank the police commander who had helped us. In hindsight, I had been overly cautious, but there was no way to tell in advance.

But I still refused Rafael's suggestion that we stop at his favorite restaurant in Celaya before we went back to Queretaro.