So Far from God

Chapter 16: The way of the Mexican world

Photo by Jorge Zapata on Unsplash

Hola Amigos!

There are so many ways to live as a stranger in a strange land. You can sit on a beach all day. You can hang out with other expats and speak in your native tongue. You can immerse yourself in local community projects. You can go loco and open a business. Ex-patism is on the rise—North Americans of a certain age are on the move—Mexico and Italy playing favorites at the moment. As early arrivals to Mexico’s expat scene we were the anomaly. Our pueblo had few English speakers and in order to have conversations we had to dive into the language. In so doing, we were befriended by locals who walked us through nuances of daily Mexico life. In Chapter 16 of Where the Sky is Born, I relate a story told to us by one of our dearest amigos. I hope you like it.

That Easter week was a montage of meetings at the work site and late night discussions with Joe Marino about the direction we would take on the house’s interior design. We pulled up at his compound late one afternoon after a serious shopping trip in Cancun.

The dusty street was empty except for a battered white pick-up parked by the garage. Sitting in the truck, a round-faced man with jet black hair was reviewing a sheaf of papers. He looked up and when he saw us, flashed a wide smile. I smiled back. He was nimbly out of the truck before we turned off the motor and parked at the curb. Wearing jeans and a Forty-Niners tee shirt that just covered his ample upper body, he moved with uncharacteristic grace for a man his size. In a second he was standing by the car door.

“Hola,” he said, the universal Mexico greeting. “Soy Arturo.”

“Arturo? Do you work with wood?” I asked, practicing my Spanish.

“Si,” he said, looking pleased that I recognized him to be the carpenter whose skills approached artistry.

I had been admiring his mahogany windows, doors and closets in Joe’s house for the past six months and it seemed I was always asking who created this drop-dead woodwork.

“And who are you?”

“Juanita y Pablo.” During our Mexico travels we’d always gone by the Spanish equivalent of our names. In our early travel days it just seemed appropriate.

“Seguro!” Arturo responded. Of course. He excitedly shook our hands in rapid succession, leaning over me to grab Paul’s.

He immediately rattled off a long paragraph in Spanish and at that moment I promised myself I would learn the language. I would sign up for yet another community college Spanish class when we returned to California. I wanted to communicate in my soon to be adopted country. To my surprise, I was the exception rather than the rule. Among my acquaintances, I counted only a handful of gringos who spoke passable Spanish. Odd, when considering the insistence Americans placed on the need for perfect English from any foreigner arriving on US shores. Mexicans, on the other hand, gave wide berth to foreigners lacking Spanish language skills.

Even though my Spanish was limited, I decided to practice what I knew with Arturo. I brushed aside my shyness and attempted to tell him why we were in Mexico—to check the status of the house construction—and how pleased we were with the results. By the time Joe arrived, we were old friends.

“I see you’ve met Arturo,” he said as he got out of his car. “We’ve known him for years. He first began working for my father while he was still living full time in Merida and now he works with me. What began as a one-man show has blossomed into a 10-man crew, and they’re all related.”

“Great,” I said, nodding my approval.

I noticed Arturo was trying to follow Joe’s conversation. “Hablas inglés?”

He responded that he was trying to learn English as I was attempting Spanish. At that point Joe intervened and suggested Arturo and I work on our Spanish skills together. We were both at the same entry level, and he assured me it was an effective learning method.

I quickly agreed and as the years progressed and my Spanish improved, I found Arturo to be not only a prized language instructor but also an apt tutor in Yucatán history.

First though, he told us how he’d become a carpenter, or maestro de madera, in Puerto Morelos, after working in management 12 years for a large bank in Merida, the banking capital of the Yucatán.

Arturo had worked as a loan administrator and at the time there was a lot of graft going to various bank employees in exchange for favors granted. Others in his department had put loans on hold for weeks, even months, feigning too much work. But actually, he explained, they were shiftless.

Sometimes this delay would work in the bank employee’s favor, however. If a loan package lingered too long without approval, some clients would come up with a gift, regalo, to entice the loan officer to finalize the paperwork. In one instance, Arturo recalled his entire department accepted individual gifts of one thousand hectares of land in exchange for completing illegal paperwork. (Land was plentiful and cheap in those days). This particular client pursued Arturo’s acceptance of the plan relentlessly, but Arturo refused. He explained he knew illegal proceedings were taking place but hoped by doing his work and looking the other way, he could avoid any connection to the fraud. He needed a job; he was stuck.

Six months later, federales stormed into the loan department. Everyone was arrested that day except Arturo. He resigned later that week, deciding he’d rather be unemployed than incarcerated.

In Mexico, he explained, governors became very rich by calling in favors owed to them. Oftentimes their compensation came in the form of prime real estate holdings. So as not to be obvious about the amount of land they owned, they would use people who were referred to as presta nombres. Presta nombres would sign land titles on these called-in favors, using their name rather than the governor’s, so the governor did not attract scrutiny by showing up as title holder on too many pieces of property, all acquired during his term in office.

Their reward for signing came through land acquisitions or cash. The presta nombres got rich along with the governor. According to Arturo, governors in all Mexican states became wealthy on illegal land dealings. Mario Villanueva, governor of Quintana Roo until 1999, was a perfect example.

His notoriety came from selling off one thousand hectares of federal land in the Riviera Maya south of Cancun—prime beachfront no less—to Spanish hotel chains for the construction of all-inclusive resorts. As a final coup, he attempted to sell off land at Xcacel near Tankah, one of the last known sanctuaries for green and loggerhead sea turtles. Fortunately this fraudulent sale was put on temporary hold in 2001 when environmentalists sued the company. The chain had plans to build a thousand room hotel next to the spot where the turtles bred and laid eggs in the summer, according to a New York Times article.

But Villanueva’s corruption didn’t stop at nefarious land dealings. He was later indicted in a New York federal court for helping to smuggle two hundred tons of Colombian cocaine into the US from Mexico, with his fee at $500,000 per shipment. Villanueva was arrested in Cancun in 2001. He had been on the run since his timely disappearance from Cancun only nine days before his term as governor ended in August, 1999.

During Villanueva’s reign a mysterious luxury yacht showed up off the Palancar Reef in Puerto Morelos one morning in January 1999. When the Mexican Navy went to investigate, they found the 70-foot craft floating with no one on board. They also found 60 empty barrels—30 white, 30 blue. Puerto Morelos is 30 hours from Colombia, and the white barrels filled with diesel would have been just enough fuel to transport the million dollar vessel to our port town. The blue barrels contained cocaine, we were told.

Apparently smuggling coke was so lucrative that million dollar yachts could be scrapped as part of the cost of doing business. We were told a handoff probably took place at night with the coke being transferred to a less conspicuous vessel. The yacht disappeared a few days later. No one in our port authority knew where it went, but that winter, local businesses ended up with blue garbage cans salvaged from the mystery ship, including the bookstore.

Former Mexican presidents have clocked in as some of the wealthiest men in the world. Carlos Salinas’s example still stands as proof that political leanings in Mexico have big payoffs. In the case of Mexico’s 60th president, his entire family profited. However, his brother, Raul, was detained for 10 years in a Mexico City prison on a 50-year sentence for his involvement in drug and money laundering cases. These occurred during his brother’s presidential tenure.

Raul Salinas was also implicated in two political murders but no evidence could directly link him to the crimes, our friend, a local newspaper editor, told us. She said at least some justice was served. Meanwhile, ex-president Carlos resided far from the hand of justice in Ireland for five years, a country that refused extradition to Mexico, directly after leaving office. He presently lives between the UK and Spain, where he has citizenship since 2022, proving Sephardic Jewish ancestry, according to the newspaper El Pais.

After the federales stormed the bank’s offices and Arturo left their employ in need of work, he applied for a job painting houses in Merida with a contractor named Estafen. At the time, Estafen was working for Joe’s dad in Puerto Morelos. Joe Senior asked Arturo if he knew how to paint and Arturo assured him he did. After a few successful jobs, Joe Senior asked if he could manufacture 10 hardwood doors, explaining he desperately needed the doors within 48 hours as another contractor had failed him. Arturo assured the older man he was as good as his word.

Two days later the doors were finished. Joe Senior was surprised that his deadline had been met and insisted on seeing Arturo’s workshop. At the shop, he was shocked to find only basic carpentry tools, nothing electrical in the lot. Arturo had met the schedule by hand-manufacturing the hardwood doors in record time.

“How can you work like this?” Señor Marino asked. “Listen, I’ll buy you the electrical equipment you need, then we’ll see what you can do.”

With this invitation, Arturo and Joe Senior began a long-lasting friendship.

Arturo’s personal history often gave us insight into the country we were adopting and his anecdotes mirrored the workings of a society. Over time, more stories would be told, but in that first meeting, we’d established a camaraderie and friendship of our own.

The Caribbean Sea off Isla Mujeres. Photo Tony Garcia

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MY BACKSTORY—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland made it easy to pyramid hop on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids and the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.