Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Words on the street
Angel Gurria-Quintana
Financial Times, March 3 2006

The back of a police motorcycle speeding through the outskirts of the world’s largest city is not the most obvious place to discuss one’s favourite books. Yet I am doing just that with Benito Espinoza, commander of the motorised patrol group in Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, a tumultuous municipality on the eastern fringes of Mexico City.

Clinging tight to his holster as we ride past drab brick housing covered in gangland graffiti, I ask if he has a preferred read. The Art of War he replies, citing the Chinese classic written almost 2,500 years ago by Sun Tzu.

It seems an appropriate choice for a police officer in a place that has long been a byword for urban squalor and poverty. More than two million people live within the 64 sq km of what was once Mexico’s most formidable shanty town and is today a teeming conurbation that still evokes nightmarish visions among city dwellers.

Named after the 15th-century poet, warrior and philosopher-king who lorded over the shores of ever-dwindling lake Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl - commonly referred to as Neza - once claimed the dubious honour of having the highest crime rate in an already crime-ridden metropolitan area. In recent years its infamy grew as it was revealed to be home to some of the country’s bloodiest kidnapping gangs and drug cartels.

Policing Neza has never been an easy job - especially since a notoriously corrupt police force was part of the problem. “The institutions meant to provide security and justice are infiltrated by delinquency and corruption,” admits Jorge Amador, Neza’s chief of public security. “Instead of security and justice, they create insecurity and impunity.” Amador has made the eradication of corruption his main concern since 2003, when the leftwing Democratic Revolution Party was voted into power in Neza. He now presides over a force of 1,200 officers, most of whom are new recruits.

In their struggle to keep poorly paid officers on the right side of the law Neza’s authorities are employing an unlikely weapon: literature. Earlier this year the municipal president, Luis Sanchez, launched an initiative aimed at making Neza’s policemen better citizens. One of its cornerstones is to stimulate reading among them. Although book groups and programmes to encourage reading in jails are not uncommon, this is one of the rare schemes aimed at the people in charge of law enforcement.

To begin with, a list of “suggested books” was circulated. It included Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century classic, Don Quixote de la Mancha, as well as 20th-century Mexican novels such as Juan Rulfo’s unsurpassable Pedro Paramo and Carlos Fuentes’ gothic novella, Aura; it listed such highbrow texts as Nobel laureate Octavio Paz’s essay on Mexican culture, “The Labyrinth of Solitude”, alongside modern classics including One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Among other “recommended authors” were Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mexican detective fiction writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Behind the surprising initiative lies an assumption that has been at the heart of western thinking about the arts since the Enlightenment: that literature, somehow, improves people. It is an idea that has been questioned by critics such as John Carey, whose recent polemic What Good are the Arts? casts doubt on the argument that art can make us better in any way.

Neza’s chief of police, however, believes that reading will improve his officers in at least three ways. First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary. “A policeman is responsible for communicating fluently. He must be able to speak well, even with delinquents. As his use of language improves, so will his efficiency.” Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. “A police officer must be worldly, and books enrich people’s experience indirectly.” Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. “Risking your life to save other people’s lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.”

Nowadays, applicants wishing to join Neza’s police force are expected to have at least nine years of schooling. But functional illiteracy, Sanchez admits, is still the main stumbling block. In a country whose inhabitants read, on average, less than two books per year according to Unesco figures, demanding that policemen read a minimum of one book per month seemed like a radical gesture.

There were, Amador concedes, two hitches in the original scheme: time and money. Officers were expected to work 24-hour shifts followed by 24 hours off-duty. “There wasn’t much time to recover, much less to read a book.” Now his officers do 12-hour shifts for every 24 hours off-duty. “We hope they will use some of the extra time to feed their minds.”

For a policeman on the beat earning 5,200 pesos ($490) a month, however, books remain an almost unaffordable luxury. “We are creating police libraries through private donations. In the same way that we have armouries, we aim to have book deposits at every police station.” In April, Neza’s municipal government published a volume of short stories to be distributed for free among its police officers. The stories, selected by Neza-born writer Juan Hernandez Luna, revolve around the topic of justice. They include two American authors, Howard Fast and Raymond Carver; Brazilian ex-policeman Rubem Fonseca; Germany’s Bertolt Brecht; and three Mexican writers - Edmundo Valades, Juan Villoro and Eduardo Antonio Parra.

The volume is the first of six to be published specifically for Neza’s police force (the next will be a short novel by pulp author Jim Thompson). To complement their readings, officers are encouraged to join fortnightly workshops where they discuss the stories with a specialist. Attendance is not compulsory, but is taken into account when considering promotions. So far, the programme has met with apparent success.

“I liked the tale about the man whose job is to spy on another, and who begins to see the world in the way the other does,” says officer Rafael Ramirez, referring to Howard Fast’s “The Police Spy”. “It shows us that there are different sides to everything.” For Israel Perales, a recent recruit, it was Raymond Carver’s chilling story of two life-long friends escaping humdrum domesticity, “Tell the Women We’re Going”, that was most affecting. “It’s about getting away, isn’t it? And that’s what reading these stories is good for. The workshops too. For at least a couple of hours every fortnight we can think about something other than our daily routines, and all the unpleasant stuff we see. So I get home and I’m more relaxed.” Commander Espinoza is succinct: “It’s a good way of becoming un-bored.”

Neza’s is not the only plan conceived to foment reading habits among Mexican urbanites. Last year, Mexico City’s transport authorities came up with the idea of lending books to commuters travelling on one of the capital’s busiest underground lines. The experiment, which is being replicated in cities as far away as Bogota, Colombia, illustrated how widespread interest in reading really is - even if it was deemed a failure of civic spirit (most of the 450,000 copies were never returned).

Nor is this the municipality’s only claim to promoting the arts: on the day I visited Neza, I found Luis Sanchez nervously observing the hoisting of a giant reed statue of Don Quixote on to the flat lorry that would take it to the National Palace, in Mexico City’s main square; earlier that day he had awarded prizes to a sculptor of miniatures and to a local poet.

The novelty of the Neza scheme lies in the fact that it is the first to target policemen, often perceived as unmotivated, corrupt and incompetent. “Books change lives,” insists Sanchez. “It doesn’t matter whether they choose to read the Bible or the Kama Sutra. Once they start reading, they become more aware. Some officers have even said that they would like to start writing.”

Commander Espinoza confesses he has struggled with the excerpts from Don Quixote that group commanders have been assigned to read. He does, however, feel his vocabulary has been improving. I mention that, like him, the chief of police also chose Sun Tzu’s The Art of War as the book he would most recommend. “Every policeman in the world should read it,” he says, shouting over the motorcycle’s engine. “It teaches you how to think better when dealing with conflict. And that’s what we do every day. We deal with conflict.”

It is a hot summer day, and dust is blowing into my eyes and my mouth, and I would rather not be speeding around Neza on the back of a motorcycle. But, for a moment, I am reassured to think that the future of crime fighting - at least in this corner of the world’s most sprawling metropolis - is in the right hands.