The woman stops walking and says, by way of conclusion, “do you realize where they are standing?”.
It is a rhetorical question that she immediately answers: "The connectivity they have with water is extraordinary."
She mumbles, she doesn't want anyone else to hear.
The woman, who prefers that her name not appear in these lines, speaks of a generic them.
They, crime, those who kill, those who throw bodies into the canal that is right behind them, the Olympic canoeing track.
“Do you realize?” she insists.
It is a sunny and cool morning in Xochimilco, the lacustrine south of Mexico City.
One of those miracle-days that occur with divine accuracy every year in the rainy season.
Some canoeists paddle on the track, among the herons, and it is strange to hear of murders, missing persons and criminal groups, among so much beauty.
“This area and the neighborhood we have passed through before are very connected to the piers, Caltongo, Cuemanco, Belén, there are several,” he lists.
The woman, aware of the local dynamics, has offered to go through this labyrinth made of water and chinampas, alleys, stories of the underworld.
She walks past the rowing canal.
She goes to La Pasada, two trajineras that cross another channel, in a constant crossing towards a different space, a neighborhood of narrow streets and dead ends, dotted with altars to the Virgin and San Judas.
The boatmen move their boats by holding on to two ropes that hang above, tied to a log and a house.
"Let's go to El Infiernito," says the woman, "nearby is where the last one they seized from Los Rodolfos operated."
La Pasada connects the canoeing track with El Infiernito. Rodrigo Oropeza
In the criminal genealogy of southern Mexico City, the Los Rodolfos group is one of the most distinguished.
Dedicated to the trafficking and sale of drugs, extortion, prostitution and murder, his moment came after the fall of Felipe Jesús Pérez, alias El Ojos, killed in a gunfight with the Secretary of the Navy in July 2017. Until his death, El Ojos had built a small criminal empire in the south of Mexico City, based in the neighboring district of Tláhuac, supported by thousands of motorcycle taxi drivers and the silence of a frightened population.
The Rodolfos came to occupy a space that until recently did not even seem to exist.
For years, the government of the capital had denied the presence of organized criminal groups in the city, but the response of the El Ojos army, which after his death blocked the district's main avenue, burning trucks and buses, made any denial obsolete.
Organized crime existed in the capital.
And with El Ojos out of action, the doubt pointed to his new form, his geography.
In Xochimilco, Los Rodolfos gained momentum.
In February 2020, a year and a half after the disappearance of El Ojos, the newspaper Milenio published, citing reports from the local Prosecutor's Office, that the Xochimilco criminal group controlled 200 drug sales points in that district, in addition to the neighboring Milpa Alta, Tlalpan and Tlahuac.
Throughout these five years, the confrontations of this group with authorities and the deaths and arrests of characters linked to the group have been constant.
Many have happened precisely in these hybrid places, half city, half lagoon, the case of El infiernito, San Diego neighborhood, neighborhood 18, San Lorenzo, the canoeing track, names that weave a hallucinated landscape of beauty and horror.
One of the ends of the canoeing track, in Xochimilco. Rodrigo Oropeza
The woman who guides the tour also talks about cases of young people who have disappeared in recent years in these neighborhoods, events that she links to this constant rearrangement of crime, which from so much movement begins to configure a strange and macabre normality.
Since the end of 2018, cases of disappearance in Mexico City have skyrocketed, and Xochimilco has been no exception.
The district has 94 missing persons, almost half between the ages of 15 and 29, according to data from the National Registry of Missing Persons.
"In January or February a girl disappeared," says the woman.
“The day she disappeared she was with someone.
They got into the conservation land there,” she adds, referring to an illegal settlement built on one side of Barrio 18, on top of the chinampas, very close to the canoeing track.
“When they came out, they went to the Olympic track.
She didn't go out anymore, but he did, ”she explains.
The woman was found dead, naked, on the track, on February 24.
The local prosecutor's office said that she did not appear to have suffered any violence.
Daisy flower
The above case is just one of several recorded in recent months on the canoeing track.
Dead that appear floating in the waters.
The Political Animal portal, which has followed the findings, has counted five since November.
Of the five, the City Prosecutor's Office only considers one to be violent, a man who appeared on the channel on March 31.
The rest, deaths by drowning.
Given the number of cases, also known the presence of criminal groups in the surroundings, the attention of relatives of disappeared persons in the area necessarily turns to the runway and the neighboring Cuemanco pier.
This is the situation experienced by the Cuevas Suárez family, who are desperately looking for Margarita, a 20-year-old girl who disappeared on Saturday, June 4.
An altar placed by the family of Margarita Cuevas Suárez in their home in Mexico City. Rodrigo Oropeza
In an interview with EL PAÍS, his mother, father and two of his sisters explain that the first search was carried out precisely there.
“She and I had arranged to see each other on Sunday in Cuemanco.
We were going to leave for Tlaxcala”, explains Alejandra, her sister.
At about 6:30 in the morning, Margarita, who had gone out with some friends, sent him a message to tell him that they would see each other at 10:00.
It was the last communication from her.
Margarita didn't show up and her phone stopped working.
So far, they have not heard from her again.
Alejandra explains that the search in Cuemanco responds to the anxiety of the first days.
When Margarita told him that they would meet at 10:00 at the pier, she was already in the area.
She used to play soccer early in some fields that are there.
"It seems that the communication was reflected and those of the Search Commission thought that Margarita had made her last communication from there," she explains.
But no, it was Alejandra's phone number that was there, not her sister's.
The news of bodies found on the boating trail supported the idea that Margarita could have ended up in her waters.
The family now wonders where the girl ended up.
The Saturday of her disappearance, Margarita went to have micheladas with a friend from high school at Santa María Tepepan.
While there, another friend wrote him messages to meet.
"I had been writing to her since the day before," explains her father, Roberto Cuevas.
"It's that my sister is very partying and they told her to stay," adds Alejandra.
Margarita got together with her other friend, as well as more of his friends, and they returned to the micheladas.
A tarpaulin placed near the home of Margarita Cuevas, in Xochimilco. Rodrigo Oropeza
"The version of the lady who attends the micheladas is that these new boys were very aggressive, they even pulled out a gun and that is why they no longer wanted to sell to them," adds Cuevas.
Margarita left there with the new boys.
"She went with them to calm down," she says.
It seems that from there they went to San Mateo Xalpa, a town in the south of the district.
"Because of the telephone antennas, we now know that she was in San Mateo until 6:30," explains Alejandra.
The family received this information from the Prosecutor's Office days after the disappearance.
From San Mateo, Margarita communicated with her sister, who was in the Cuemanco fields.
Alejandra, her parents, siblings, and friends went to San Mateo in the first weeks of June, carrying flyers with a photo of Alejandra's last friend, Giovanni, who later came with other people to the micheladas.
“We showed the photo to neighbors and they said yes, that they were bad people.”
They found out which house they had arrived at, they asked that the security cameras in the area be checked and they were able to see Margarita enter a closed street with Giovanni and another person.
In the cameras they also saw that the two men left later, but not the girl.
As in hundreds of cases of disappearance throughout Mexico, the family assumed leadership of the investigation.
One part was posted next to the house where Margarita entered before disappearing.
They had discovered that it was Giovanni's home and they thought that soon too late, the boy, a minor, would have to leave.
Others dedicated themselves to distributing flyers with the girl's face and blocking roads to pressure the authorities.
Detail of the room that belongs to Margarita Cuevas Suárez in her house in Mexico City. Rodrigo Oropeza
With the days, Giovanni left.
He “he approached where we were and said that he was going to testify.
I had to take him because the police didn't want to!” exclaims Roberto Cuevas.
In his testimony, Giovanni says that yes, they were at his house, but when they arrived, he went into the bathroom, then went to sleep and did not know what happened to Margarita.
"They didn't question anything," laments Lupita, Margarita's mother.
The other young man who was with Giovanni is missing and nobody finds him.
Days later, the authorities searched the house and, according to Margarita's family, they found traces of blood.
"They took DNA samples from her mother and me," says Roberto Cuevas, "but more than a month has passed and they haven't told us anything."
neighborhood 18
In El Infiernito there is a bridge that crosses another channel and that, on a bright morning like this, with the Ajusco mountains in the background, suggests different latitudes.
The leafy vegetation, the delicate flow of trajineras, offers scenes worthy of the most bucolic of Hayao Miyazaki's films.
That's what one thinks of, when suddenly two policemen in an ATV approach and ask the photographer what he's doing.
“Abused”, alerts one, without listening to the answer, “because this is a point”.
It is not clear whether the policeman's comment is an alert or a threat, although it does seem clear that staying there, on top of the bridge, taking photos, is not a good idea.
Before, the woman who has guided the tour explained that in the streets that go down from El Infiernito to the center of Xochimilco, Los Rodolfos had their refuge.
Not that it's any secret.
A few days ago, when the last of their leaders, César N, alias El Negro, was arrested, the Prosecutor's Office reported precisely that this tangle of alleys that communicate with the runway and the canals make up their base of operations.
View of the canal from the El Infiernito bridge. Rodrigo Oropeza
But it's not just El Infiernito.
All these neighborhoods attached to the Cuemanco pier and the canoeing track have their history.
On the other side of the track, in the 18th neighborhood, the streets keep the memory of a number of criminal events.
The woman guides the passage through the "conservation ground", a dirt track that separates the neighborhood, with its paved streets, its lights and sewage network, from the "chinampería", a neighborhood built irregularly during the last quarter century, on islets that were once cultivated fields.
“Look, see that stump?” he says.
The trunk of a dry tree languishes on one side of the path.
"That's where they killed El Chaparro," he adds.
In May 2019, police officers from the capital shot a suspected drug dealer there, who ran a drug sales point just behind the stump.
In the notes of that time, the press reported that El Chaparro's henchmen escaped by swimming through the canals.
More than a dozen companions of this man were arrested months later in the neighboring neighborhood of Santa Cruz Xochitepec, in one of the most important operations of the authorities against Los Rodolfos.
"Oh and about Felipillo!" Adds the woman, referring to the son of El Ojos, arrested in a nearby neighborhood, in March 2019. "They arrested him there, but they had been following him from here," she says.
The path on the conservation ground leads to a ramp that gives access to the canoeing trail.
There, some gardeners cut the grass.
In the background, canoeists hurry paddling under the sun.
The woman talks about two cases of missing young women, between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, in Barrio 18 and the neighboring neighborhood, San Lorenzo Cebada.
One of them was called Daniela Ortiz and the last time she was heard from was in May 2019, when she boarded a taxi in San Lorenzo.
Apparently, the taxi driver left the route that the young woman had requested and went to Cuernavaca.
She has not been heard from again.
"The other was the girl they found in the regulating vessel," says the woman, referring to the reservoir that stores water in the rainy season on the other side of the neighborhood.
The girl in question is Leslye Hernández, she was 18 years old and disappeared on November 10, 2018, when she left her house on a bicycle, in the 18th neighborhood. In January she was found dead and, months later, her boyfriend, who was investigating the case He was shot to death in the area.
The Mexico City Prosecutor's Office has not resolved any of the three cases.
"There have always been cases like this around here," says the woman, "only before he was silent," ditch.
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