…the hot-off-the-press news about the body by the donut shop is that apparently the poor guy wasn’t killed by narcos, a jealous romantic rival, or anything like that. It was, they say, DOGS! A pack of street dogs apparently attacked the guy around 2:30 in the morning, chewed him up, cut a major artery and he bled to death. How did he get to be naked? Or WAS he completely nude after all? Everyone around here is saying “WHA’????” Some people did report hearing dogs barking but there are so many dogs around here running around loose in the street that no one would pay any attention if they heard dogs in the middle of the night. It turned out that the victim wasn’t a young guy, but in his fifties, and he lived right around there, he was a laborer. These dogs hang around all the time, so did he goad them somehow? No one can figure out how dogs attacked this guy and killed him without there having been much more of a ruckus as it was right in town — but there you have it. Was he very. very drunk, drugged, just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Pues, pobrecito, it is “destino” if god calls you and it’s your time. Will anyone do anything to deal with the stray dogs? Not a chance.

If it’s true, at least we are saved the inevitable cascade of questions from our friends up in El Norte, saying “omigod how can you stay there when they are killing people right on the street corners??!” Of course it’s also Mexico, who knows if if this is really what took place or not. But — well, for the moment, they say it was a pack of dogs. I am sure that more will come out about this, as far as the police are concerned, I suspect it is case closed, and on to the next weird death for them to investigate. The family is apparently asking for a further investigation but it remains to be seen whether anything will come of it.

Meanwhile the “frente frio” (cold front) we suffered last week — meaning we had to put on socks and sweaters and complain to everyone we see about it — has passed, the gray skies are gone, and it’s warming up here – since we have no heat in our houses that is a welcome development!

Rosa came over, her usual day to clean, and halfway through the day she stopped for a bit and asked if I’d heard about the poor señor whose mutilated body they had found the other day up by the donut shop. I said yes, indeed I’d read about it online and that people had been talking about it. How horrible, how horrible; she said her sister, who lives right there, walked out her  front door early that morning and practically tripped over this bloody body which also had been castrated and left there nude, in the rain. Her sister thought he’d been dumped there maybe around 7:30, just as she normally goes to the panadería to get bread and start her morning errands. She said now her sister can’t sleep because every time she closes her eyes, she sees the same awful sight again and again.

“And the worst”, Rosa added, “is that at 7:30 all the little kids have to walk up that hill to get to school and a bunch of them saw it before the police got there, and those kids are now completely frightened and upset by what they saw, and their parents are at a loss as to what to tell them about what it all means.” She said by the time her sister got back from her errands that morning, the police, ambulances, all that, were there and that they were taking the body to the Forensic Institute in Ocotlan.

Thus far, no one has identified this poor guy, no one has claimed responsibility, and as he wasn’t from our town, no one is certain whether it was cartel-related or he just got sideways with someone over a woman or some other score being settled, who knows. She said the worst is that the fallout from something like this is that everyone who sees it right there in the street is in some small way traumatized and damaged for life. Not unlike my adventure with the carjacking, come to think of it. Of course she’s right and she asked me “why would someone do that to another human being, kill them that way?” I didn’t really have an answer for her but we talked about it for awhile longer, till she noticed it was starting to rain, and she gathered her things and ran out the door to get to the bus stop before the weather got any worse.

Guanajuato

Guadalupe shrine around the corner from our house....

How can we stand it here? Aren’t we scared? Even this evening, I talked to one of my friends back in the States – an old Mexico hand – who said the hysteria being whipped up by the U.S. press about the violence in Mexico is beyond absurd. She’s visited us here a couple of times and during her stay (many of  her friends told her not to come), we laughed about how the only thing we saw rolling around in the plaza — not severed heads — were a couple of little girls on their branny-new pink bikes because it was a couple of days after Christmas.

Still, you can’t blame our Stateside friends for being increasingly concerned. And it is true that while we have been in a little island of delusion here in the gringolandia of Ajijic and Chapala, the narcos are bearing down on us too as they battle for control of the Guadalajara routes and markets. They found a body just above the donut shop today. This is the donut shop where people go for coffee and morning gossip and which, in the days when I was still eating donuts, I was sure made arguably the best donuts I’ve ever had. No one seems to know who it is yet (a young Mexican male) but of course we’ll all know soon, after the police, such as they are, have done their investigations, and the news will be all over town.  We’ve had some police vs. narco “entre ellos”(between “them”) gunfights and the occasional grenade tossed around town but this is the first dumped body right in our village, right on the street we used to take to get up to my mother’s house.

You’d be crazy not to acknowledge that the noose (or whatever it is) is almost surely tightening around us, or so it would appear. But in spite of the near-certainty of the violence worsening here, even if we talk about leaving or doing something else, where would we go? Our lives are here, our home is here, we continue to love so many aspects of the life and culture; the friends we’ve made. If anyone should have fled soon after moving here, it would have been me, who was carjacked at gunpoint a few months after we got here (the subject of another tale, one of these days….) but somehow I bashed through my episodes of PTSD and flashbacks (the guy with the gun pointed at my head and all that…) and convinced myself that “this too shall pass” — which it did, sort of. Sort of is the operative description: I survived, obviously, but became a maniac about locking doors, locking our gates, looking over my shoulder all the time. I drive my husband crazy wanting to add more and more security; he says he doesn’t want to live in an armed camp. And neither do I, really, but I don’t want to be assaulted ever again, either. As if you could prevent it anyway.

I guess the thing that strikes you most (other than whatever injury you may suffer) about an adventure like that is the randomness and suddenness of it all, where someone springs out of the bushes or comes up behind you or however it happens; and that’s what is so scary about the narco stuff. I mean, they don’t put up posters like they do for the community dances that say “x time, x day, there will be a balacera (gun battle) so y’all come”. Some poor devil is on their list and he gets it in the middle of a restaurant where you’ve gone for a nice comida with friends; or on the sidewalk, and if you just happening to be walking by with your nylon market bag full of groceries, it’s curtains for you too, I guess. Hard to adjust to that reality, and to the idea that it’s probably going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

But we have sunk pretty deep roots here in the years we’ve been here, and at least for the moment, and it’s our home. Once I get behind our locked gates and hear the splash of our fountain, though, I do breathe a bit of a sigh of relief. For the moment.