62 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020turret that looked like it had been
through battle. The main avenues
were bleak expanses of concrete,
lined with billboards. There were gas
stations every few blocks, and the sky
was smudged with brown exhaust.
The pedestrians looked like the
working class anywhere in Mexico:
wearing jeans and sneakers, carrying
backpacks or plastic bags, trudging
to the bus stop or buying food from
street vendors. Despite the neighbor-
hood’s forbidding reputation, there
were few obvious signs of organized
crime. Joaquín indicated a handful of
chacas, or crooks, hanging out on a
street corner, but to me they looked
more pitiful than intimidating. “The
really bad guys come out at night,”
Pelón said. Robbery is the most per-
vasive crime around here. “With a
gun, not with a knife,” he added.
Whole blocks were closed off by
barred gates, and in the parking lots,
cars were locked in cages. I saw only
one drug dealer, an old man in filthy
clothes crouched on the sidewalk
methodically wrapping rocks of
crack cocaine in aluminum foil. If he
wasn’t worried about the police, it
was likely because he had paid his
weekly bribe of 2,500 pesos, about
$140. “There may be a city in Mex-
ico where the police aren’t corrupt,”
Pelón said. “I don’t know where, but
it’s possible.”
We passed a series of pulque stands,
a soap factory, auto shops and garages,
and an overpopulated graveyard
where faded pinwheels spun. A sad
little garden plot in the median of the
road had a hand-painted sign that
read: no se roben las plantas (“Do
not steal the plants”).
Other than palms, the only trees
were invasive eucalypti and china-
berries that looked dusty and sick.
Bougainvillea was a colorful relief,
as were the street murals. One next
to a mechanic’s shop depicted frogs
and birds and jaguars arrayed
around an indigenous warrior in a
headdress, a spray-painted memorial
to the pre- Columbian paradise that
once existed here. It wasn’t a coinci-
dence that every feminist I met in
Mexico was also an environmental-
ist. A few days earlier, I’d seen graffi-
ti scrawled across the side of a build-
ing in Mexico City: “The killing ofMother Earth is the biggest femicide
of all.”
Now in Jardines de Morelos, we
slowed to a stop in front of a plain
concrete house near a vacant lot.
On the sidewalk down the street was
a taco stand where a man in a soiled
apron was chopping raw chicken on
a table. As we got out of the vehicle,
my guides traded jokes about canni-
balism. This used to be the home of
Juan Carlos Hernández Bejar, better
known as the Monster of Ecatepec,
and his accomplice wife, Patricia
Martínez Bernal. The pair killed at
least twenty women—the real num-
ber may be closer to fifty—some of
whom they cooked and ate.
We stood on the far side of the
street, wary of getting any closer. We
had all read about the Monster of
Ecatepec in the tabloids. Long before
he was arrested, in October 2018, the
neighbors had noticed strange things
about Juan Carlos and Patricia. They
had almost no furniture, just card-
board boxes and black plastic bags.
They came and went at odd hours,
sometimes pushing a stroller. A bad
smell hung over the empty lot
nearby. Reeking fluids sometimes
trickled into the gutter. They made
money selling secondhand clothes
and used cell phones.
There are serial killers every-
where, but Mexico’s homicide crisis
gives them cover by greatly reducing
the chance that any given murder
will lead to an investigation. When
the couple’s next-door neighbor, Ar-
let Samanta Olguín, went missing in
April 2018, the police made her
mother, María Guadalupe Hernán-
dez López, wait three hours to file a
report. Then they saw her for five
minutes and told her to come back
the next morning. Three months of
bureaucracy, delay, and inaction fol-
lowed. “From April to June, the story
was, ‘Don’t worry, we’re working on
it,’ ” María Guadalupe told me. “But
nothing happened with the file.”
Another young woman who lived
nearby disappeared in July, and a
third in September. “Three cases
with the same pattern of characteris-
tics,” she said: “Young, single moth-
ers, all of them dark-eyed brunettes
with long hair.” María Guadalupe
learned from a local tabloid reporterFRANKLINSQUARE
PRESSDISTRIBUTED BY MIDPOINT
TRADE BOOKS, A DIVISION OF IPGIn NEW YORK REVISITED,
first published in 1906
by HARPER’S MAGAZINE,
Henry James describes
turn-of-the-century
New York in vivid detail.
It is as pertinent today
as it was more than a
century ago.Enhanced with period
illustrations and an
introductory essay by
LEWIS H. LAPHAMORDER AT STORE.HARPERS.ORGNew York Revisited
BY HENRY JAMES
**