The 17 bone fractures that the body of Bernardo Nápoles accumulates have built an interesting philosophy of life for its owner, which consists of saying things in a terminal, definitive way.
"Look, that party room never worked, the simple truth," he says, as he gets on the bike and adjusts his cap.
"The one next door did, because he was a whoremonger, but not that one," he adds.
"Yes, I saw people there once, but it looked like they weren't from here."
Nápoles, 60, begins the march.
He pedals and little by little his figure dwindles.
A dog approaches him, some cows cross the street.
When he passes the salon that never worked, he barely glances at her.
It is a green construction, the hall, which shares a neighborhood with the other one that did work and which now looks abandoned, with a gas station, several cultivated fields, a recycling plant, some houses... It seems a lonely place.
In an hour and a half, a few peasants and a handful of dogs pass by.
In the background you can see the Nevado de Toluca crater, with a spittle of snow on the crest.
It smells of gas and manure.
Words like salon or neighborhood are used here by convention, treasonous to reality.
There is no neighborhood in this piece of the suburbs of Tenango del Valle, in the State of Mexico.
No parties in the hall.
What there are are doubts, questions about how this place has become the center of horror in a country that tells horrors every day.
Last week, the local authorities announced the macabre discovery of a huge clandestine grave in this room in Tenango, a warehouse, actually, a shed on this piece of land that is neither country nor city.
Until last Sunday, experts from the local Prosecutor's Office removed 47 sacks with human remains from the underground.
As of the end of this week, a unit power plant, a refrigerated truck from the morgue and an ambulance were still at the door.
It is not known remains of how many people were buried there.
An ambulance outside the party hall in Tenango del Valle.
Monica Gonzalez Islands
The authorities arrived at the shed by chance.
On Tuesday of last week, agents of the state police and the Prosecutor's Office arrested four alleged members of a criminal group that has been very active in the area in recent years in Tenancingo, a neighboring town.
When they checked their cell phones, they found videos in which these men appeared torturing others.
The videos led the authorities to the warehouse, as reported to EL PAÍS by a source close to the investigations, who was in the warehouse last week, when the local Prosecutor's Office arrived.
Of the four detainees, the authorities pointed to one of them as their leader, Jaime Luis "N", alias El Pozolero or El 666. Nickname known in Mexico, his name refers to a popular food, pozole, a soup with corn grains and chicken or pork meat.
In the underworld, the nickname points to the criminal qualities of the possessor, trained in dissolving bodies in chemicals.
In the absence of new information from the authorities, the rumor these days is that El Pozolero and his men used the Tenango warehouse to hide the half-destroyed bodies of people.
The profound brutality of this assumption, the possible discovery of cooked human remains in an old ballroom, the usual criminal jargon word for these cases, has hardly shocked a country where violence has become the landscape.
In trying to understand the data, the individual statement —a murder, a kidnapping— loses meaning and collective qualifications are imposed, such as a massacre or atrocity.
In Mexico, far from dealing with one atrocity at a time, society lives with several simultaneously.
These days, for example, the case of Tenango has shared space on the news with the discovery of four bodies in Zacatecas, which could be those of four young people who disappeared at Christmas or with the disappearance of two human rights defenders in Michoacán, for not Talk about the trickle of murders, at an average of 90 a day, between shots, dismembered, stabbed...
Residents of Tenango del Valle walk next to the party hall. Mónica González Islas
a mountain of dirt
Once used as a party room, the El Pozolero shed in Tenango these days presents a hole from floor to ceiling in its right side wall.
It was the solution that the researchers found to introduce an excavator, capable of breaking the 20-centimeter plate of concrete that covered the floor.
A mound of dirt now partially covers the hole in the wall, mud that surveyors dug up from the cellar floor last week.
From the top of the dirt mountain you can see the main part of the warehouse, the dance floor, now without the concrete, barely excavated.
The experts focused their efforts on the other part, some rooms that were on the back side of the building.
The specialists located the sacks with human remains between one and one and a half meters deep, although they dug a little more, up to two meters, just in case they found new remains.
In addition, "test pits were carried out in various parts of the land to rule out that there could be remains at a greater depth," explains a source familiar with the investigations.
In the rest of the property, "a georadar was used with the support of the Commission for the Search for Persons of the State of Mexico, which marked the ground with irregularities in a large part of the land, for which the entire floor was lifted and searched in the entire interior of the warehouse”, says the same source.
From the dirt mountain, everything is calm now, as if nothing had happened there.
On the ground traces of a brownish-yellow color can be distinguished, like mature lime.
In addition to the Tenango warehouse, El Pozolero and his men gave the location of two other places they used in their criminal activities, both in Toluca and its metropolitan area, half an hour from the warehouse.
At the moment, the authorities have not reported similar findings at those points.
Nor have they said if there are more than those three.
Given the history of the ballroom, the questions pile up: Why were they hiding them here?
What did they do with those bodies?
Did nobody know anything?
Latex gloves used by forensics during the recovery of sacks with human remains.
Monica Gonzalez Islands
Just like Mr. Nápoles, the peasants who pass by the warehouse street say they never saw anything strange.
"I remember that once some women were leveling the floor of the entrance," says Raúl Rojas, 48 years old.
He refers to the front space, in front of the door, where the ambulance and the rest of the vehicles of the authorities are now parked.
“We pass through here almost daily and it is very quiet.
From time to time a little boy comes to take them here, but nothing, ”he says.
He means a few beers.
Something similar recounts Juan García, 62, who packs grass in a nearby milpa under a vertical sun.
“I am a native of here, from Tenango, and I spend every day at 7:45 to go to work at a ranch over there,” he says, pointing to an unspecified point beyond the highway that goes south, toward Tenancingo.
"And the truth is that I always saw the room closed, I never saw anything," he says.
The investigations continue, so says the State of Mexico Prosecutor's Office.
This week, a judge indicted El Pozolero and his henchmen for drug trafficking.
In the searches of the houses of the criminal gang, the authorities found drug packages.
The judge also prosecuted El Pozolero for kidnapping.
The Prosecutor's Office accuses the alleged criminal of holding a woman captive in Tenancingo in August.
He and his group cut off pieces of the woman's fingers.
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