Chinga la Chota!

Like any skilled predator they snuck up silently, in a pack, under cover of darkness. 3 Monterrey city policia, armed with guns, badges, 2 bicycles, up to 6 months of training, and junior high school educations. I´d knocked on Joel and Paloma`s door, Tuesday evening 8:45-ish. No one home, bueno, I´ll go to the taquerilla myself. Turned around and La Chota were waiting for me. I silently cursed them and the pinche locksmith who charged 40 pesos to make a non-working copy of Joel´s key. All 3 appeared my age or younger, between 5´6 and 5´9, morenos, 2 clean-shaven and flacos, one more muscular with a mustache, none of them gordos. About as nondescript as Mexicans get, verdad? Their questions and actions blurred together in my mind throughout the encounter.

¨Put your hands up!¨ Sure thing, pendej... I mean, sure thing, amigos... Perhaps that was my first mistake. If you don´t speak their language as good and as fast as they do, maybe it´s better to pretend not to speak it at all. Each time I asked them to speak slower so I could understand, the power dynamic tilted further in their favor. ¨Show me your ID!¨ They looked over my passport copy and handed it back. I had no copy of my tourist visa, but that didn´t matter. Having no passport copy wouldn´t have mattered. The only hing that might´ve made a difference would be if I´d asked to call my friends at that point. Maybe make the cops feel they´re being watched, even the playing field a bit

¨Are you selling drugs!?¨No señor. ¨Where are the drugs?!¨ I don´t use drugs. But they did succeed in making me think that the real reason they´d stopped me was to look for drugs. Aren´t I a naive one?... Not necessarily. I knew the basic nationwide story. The Mexican state at war with the Narcos, over 3000 people killed so far this year. While Monterrey had been ¨spared most of the carnage,¨ in the English words of my local friend Victor, it was still the biggest city in the north, just 200 km from both the Reynosa/McAllen and Nuevo Laredo/Laredo (AKA Narco Laredo) border crossings. And the previous week in the city, as the police chased a drug suspect, gunmen simultaneously fired automatic weapons in the air at 5 different locations in the city, causing panic and helping the suspect to escape. I knew about these stories, and even if I hadn´t, I had no difficulty believing they could plant drugs on a lone gringo on a dark street. I was in the Barrio Antigua after all, where the bars and discos are, so I must´ve looked like walking money.

¨Empty your pockets!¨ Here you go. 340 pesos, two-year-old Sony Walkman phone, Ipod shuffle, a pen and a notepad. ¨Blow your breath in my face!¨ If I was a braver man I´d include some saliva free of charge. ¨Put your thumb out so I can smell it!¨ Lord, at a time like this, why must I be from a culture that uses toilet paper? ¨Take off your shoes!¨ ¨Open your bag!¨ ¨Where are you coming from?¨ the Gabriel Figueroa retrospective at the museum in your city´s awesome Parque Fundidora, via the Paseo Santa Lucia artificial river-walk, which as you know, has an exit 2 blocks up on this street. ¨Where are you staying?¨ At that house whose door I was just knocking on. With Joel and Paloma, been there 10 days. ¨What are you doing in Mexico?!¨ Tourismo. Came to Monterrey´cause I was camping and got a ride, still here ´cause I met una Regia medical student named Jedi and we´ve been...

¨Come with us!¨ What for? ¨You´re drunk!¨ My pupils looked dilated when they shined their flashlights in my eye. My eyes weren´t following their fingers back and forth without my head moving. Etc. They showed me their handcuffs. One spoke into his walkie-talkie, saying he´d picked up an intoxicated person on Gomez Farias y Matamoros. They escorted me to the end of the block, then left on Allende. Una cuadra, dos cuadras, tres cuadras, past restaurants and pedestrians, past the history museum. The cuffs, the radio, the walking in custody, these were smart moves on their part, well-thought little details to keep me unsure and afraid. It´s as if I wasn´t the first allegedly drunk gringo they´ve picked up on their beat.

I don´t remember the exact point at which I proposed una mordida, the little bite, as the bribe is called. I do remember mentioning it before they did, and feeling some fear while asking, on the odd chance that they weren´t after money and I was now actually doing something illegal. No worries on that front, although it might have taken them awhile to understand me. That´s because the word for ¨to fix¨is actually ¨arreglar¨, not the non-existent word ¨fixar¨that I was using. Although they probably got the point from my repeated use of pagarte. Eventually one of them cut to the chase, and used the only English phrase of the entire encounter: ¨Five Hundred Dollars.¨ Lo siento, I replied, I can´t give you that much because, unfortunately for you, I was smart enough not to have my bank card, so you can´t force me to go to the cajero to withdraw. His figure made sense, as the daily limit is 5000 pesos, which would be $500 were the peso trading at 10 to 1, as it historically has. That day the peso was more like 13.5 to the dollar. My 340 pocket pesos had dropped in value from $34 to $25.

They took turns talking to me 1-on-1. Another of them made it clear that they´d settle for my Ipod and my phone. I kept from laughing. I was still scared of being taken in to a station, which, of course, is what I should´ve actually insisted they do. But if they wanted anything more than cash from me, they should´ve beat my ass in front of Joel´s house and not wasted our time with the walking. We kept going, the street becoming an underpass beneath a plaza. That was when they saw the pareja. A guy and a girl, lying on top of a flat base of a monument, across from a government building. Students, books open. Kissing, a little bit of what Mexicanos call faje, making out. Busted.

Three chota and three sospechosos now. I was escorted by one of them to the the other side of the monument, out of visual range of the rest of the group. He punched in numbers on his cell phone and threatened to call his boss. ¨You don´t want me to call mí jefe, do you?¨ In my ignorance I told him I didn´t. I should´ve realized their whole plan was to scare me into to giving them my money They couldn´t directly steal it, I guess they were worried about consequences if they took it directly. I´m not sure they´d have been so delicate with a Mexican national, but I´m also not sure they´d have stopped me in the first place had I looked Mexican. Either way, as my friends told me later, there was no police station anywhere in the direction we were walking.

My cop saved the best for last. Upon hearing my request not to call headquarters, he was ready to collect. But instead of sticking out his hand, the chingon stuck out his bike helmet. Innocent in his mind to the end. He told me to put the money in, walk to the next street and turn left. I was so shocked that I forgot to accidentally leave one of the hundred-peso notes in my pocket. Sad to say, I gave the whole amount and walked away without looking back at what was happening to the couple. Still shook, I walked a couple blocks and called Joel, now getting off work. He met me and we walked back to his house together.

Three hundred fourty pesos divided three ways. Not a bad haul for half an hour of work. If i had to guess, I´d say they nearly doubled their official salaries for the night, off me alone. Three hundred fourty pesos can buy three platos of carne asada and two cervezas each. Or a good bottle of tequila añejo in a tienda. The prostitutas often charge 200 each. Or maybe it just went to pay bills, in households (wives and kids, all of them, I´ll bet the whole 340 on it) where the marido might earn less in a month (legally, at least) than I make in a day. Ha. I´m sure they made good use of mi dinero somehow. Whatever they did with it, to quote Cube, Ren and Eazy... Or rather, to mas o menos quote todos de mis amigos de Monterrey in upon hearing the story: ¨Chinga la Chota!¨