Comandantes & Federales

The front cover of Juan Ochoa’s novel Mariguano features a Latino man sporting a white cowboy hat and a shiny blue guayabera shirt. On his knee sits a girl of four or five years. She wears a white dress as does the other small girl entering the picture at left carrying a pink plastic Easter egg. The man’s face spreads in the broad grin of a proud papa or abuelo. The viewer may not notice immediately that the girl on the man’s lap is playing with a pistol.

Such is the world of mariguano (pothead) Johnny in which the promise of violence is as much an expected part of childhood as a father’s love. In Johnny’s Mexico, drugs are central to everyone’s life. Either you’re a comandante like Johnny’s father who orchestrates drug deals, weapons trades, and payoffs; a cop or federale taking those payoffs and making the occasional arrest to demand a bigger payoff; one of many underlings whom the comandante employs in a mafia-style hierarchy in which a misstep can make you a bloated corpse in the Rio Grande and a few pesos can guarantee that no one will be prosecuted; a doper who’s as likely to offer his dealer an hour with a little sister as pay cash for a bag of mota; or simply a member of the neighborhood who makes extra money by seeing nothing.

Johnny prospers in that environment not only because of his father’s power but because he has learned his lessons well. At thirteen he was taught by his father how to drink shots of tequila and shoot from a moving vehicle. From his father’s associates he learned “always to be wary of the kindness of strangers and never trust a guy who says, ‘Trust me.’” He’s also a good student in the ordinary sense and dreams of attending law school, but he’s painfully aware that a “normal” life may be only a fantasy for him. At any moment the tenuous strings of the corruption system could slacken, and Johnny could land in jail on either side of the border. (“The only difference between buying an American cop and buying a Mexican cop,” he tells us, “is that the American cops are a whole lot cheaper.”) Worse, someone higher in the drug trade pecking order could decide to flex his muscles, and Johnny may be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all, “for Dad and every other Mexican in the world, success ain’t shit if you can’t use it to step all over people.” Worst of all, he could make a wrong move and suffer the wrath of his father—a volatile man who fires a few rounds inside the home for fun—like the time he ducks his dad’s fist only to find that his father pulled his pistol. “The unmistakable click of a safety being dropped fills the room. I feel the front of my pants grow warm then cold as my boots fill with piss.”

Ochoa never lets us forget that Johnny is at home and perhaps trapped in this violent, mad world, and on occasion his style rises to poetry to when he presents Johnny in a moment of self-realization. When Johnny takes a rare trip out of his home town Reynosa and through the desert, he sees even the gorgeous landscape as a dark symbol: “Rocky mesas lie in the distance, and all kinds of cactus guard both sides of the road from the paddle leaf nopal to organ cactus, barrel cactus, and flowering Judas trees. It’s like God made a beautiful garden of things, all with thorns.” After the election of a new Mexican president, the corruption system is thrown into disarray largely because of the sort of trust Johnny warns us about early in the novel, and the drug lords are running scared. Johnny takes refuge in the vecindad, a poor neighborhood where even the impoverished are affected by the shakeup of the system...