The New York Times 2025-01-02 00:10:42


A Mayor’s Odyssey: From Undocumented Migrant to Cartel Target

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Simon Romero

Simon Romero traveled to Alcozauca in the remote mountains of Guerrero, a Mexican state ravaged by drug wars, to report this article.

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Crispín Agustín Mendoza had just announced he was running for mayor of Alcozauca, a remote hamlet in the strife-torn mountains of southwest Mexico. Then, in the middle of the night, the gunmen arrived.

His wife and children screamed in fear as the men sprayed their home with gunfire in a failed bid to kill him. Undeterred, Mr. Mendoza stayed in the race and won. He is among the politicians who somehow survived assassination attempts this year in one of the most violent election cycles in Mexico’s recent history.

But Mr. Mendoza stands out for another reason. Smuggled as an adolescent into the United States, he lived undocumented in Silicon Valley’s shadow economy well into adulthood, only to follow his star back to Mexico, start his own thriving business and try his hand at politics.

Now, he is getting a frontline glimpse of the cartel turf battles overwhelming Guerrero, a Mexican state of 3.5 million known for exceptionally brutal attacks on public officials in recent weeks: like the beheading of the mayor of the state capital, Chilpancingo; and the fatal shooting of a judge in Acapulco in broad daylight.

“You have to assume one day you’ll be attacked and killed,” Mr. Mendoza, 41, said nonchalantly in lightly accented English, which he frequently peppers with Californian slang, during a recent interview in Alcozauca’s Town Hall.

A security detail of six soldiers accompanies Mr. Mendoza 24 hours a day. He faces both the challenge of staying alive and political shifts in the United States that could potentially upend towns like his own.

Situated in mountains that until a few years ago were blanketed with opium poppies, the plant used to make heroin, Alcozauca is an eight-hour drive from Mexico City, the last leg on spine-challenging washboard dirt roads.

But the rise of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid produced in makeshift labs in northern Mexico, laid waste to Guerrero’s heroin trade. With few other employment options, many people in the state migrated to the United States.

Remittances sent home now support the economy of Alcozauca, a town of about 3,100 people, and Mr. Mendoza himself, who builds homes for Mexicans who hope to return one day to their hometown.

“I build their dream houses,” Mr. Mendoza said. “That means I depend strictly on the U.S. economy.”

Reflecting on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s promise of mass deportations, he sighed, concerned about potential disruptions to remittance flows to Mexico, which amounted to $63 billion in 2023 and represent one of the country’s primary sources of income.

“Things are obviously about to change,” Mr. Mendoza said.

Mr. Mendoza has been dealing with shifts in migration dynamics nearly his entire life. His parents left for California’s Bay Area when he was an infant, leaving him to be raised by his grandparents. He said he rejoined his parents in San Jose, Calif., at 14, when he was smuggled across the border near Tijuana in the trunk of a Ford Taurus.

While attending Leland High School in San Jose, he excelled in English, cross country and academics, drawing inspiration from leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and the U.S. farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez.

Mr. Mendoza described his further education at Chico State in Chico, Calif., and De Anza College in Cupertino, Calif., where he earned a degree in university studies, as particularly enlightening. A course taught by a professor who specialized in Brazil’s Indigenous peoples deepened his understanding and appreciation of his own Indigenous Mixtec heritage.

Mr. Mendoza said he originally planned on attending law school to find a way for him and others migrants brought to the United States as children to legally remain in the country.
Instead he joined a construction crew that was flipping houses in California’s booming 2000s economy.

Then came the financial crash of 2008. When construction work dried up, Mr. Mendoza decided to return to his hometown for a few months of vacation, with plans to return to California.

“Then I met my wife and fell in love,” said Mr. Mendoza, now the father of three. “To my family’s surprise back in California, I decided my life was here.”

With the skills he learned in the construction trade in the United States, Mr. Mendoza went to work as a developer, building houses for other migrants living north of the border. The homes sell in Alcozauca for the equivalent of about $150,000.

Then, Mr. Mendoza decided to go into politics, initially for Morena, Mexico’s leftist governing party. But when Morena supported another mayoral candidate, he joined the smaller Guerrero Wellbeing Party.

That was about the time in March, when assassins targeted his home. As his wife and children hid under a bed, Mr. Mendoza said, he grabbed his revolver, which he carries nearly everywhere, and returned fire from the roof of their home.

He said he landed at least one shot on the sedan carrying the assailants but was unsure if he wounded anyone. Afterward, a profanity-laden screed handwritten on a sheet appeared in Alcozauca, attributing the attack to operatives loyal to a shadowy crime boss called “El Señor.”

Mr. Mendoza said he believed the attack might have been orchestrated by a cartel supporting a rival candidate in Alcozauca’s mayoral race.

“Being a mayor is very good business for a lot of people,” he explained, describing how elected officials often skim money from public works projects, pocketing some while distributing percentages among allies.

Beyond such corruption, Guerrero is known for jaw-dropping lawlessness. Cartels in the state have started using drones to drop makeshift bombs. Discoveries of bodies dumped by roadsides are a regular occurrence. In La Montaña, the mountainous region where Alcozauca is, political assassinations are routine.

The state is a center for organized crime, with dozens of relatively small cartels battling one another to control extortion rackets, smuggling routes and trafficking of illicit drugs, mainly crystal meth.

These groups require cooperative officials at the local level, Mr. Mendoza said, adding, “When I got into politics, I never thought it would be like this.”

To this day, Mr. Mendoza refuses to sit at the mayor’s desk in the Town Hall, saying that doing so would bring him closer to the corrupt practices of his predecessors. The man who held the post before him faced claims that he had physically assaulted his wife and a municipal official in separate episodes.

Some in Alcozauca have a hard time believing that Mr. Mendoza, or any mayor for that matter, is clean. , Social media pages are filled with unsubstantiated accusations against the mayor and other political figures.

But others laud Mr. Mendoza for his business instincts and generosity, after he became known to townspeople for helping out of his own pocket with emergency expenses like medical care or funerals.

Josefina Reyes, 45, said Mr. Mendoza came to her aid when her father died. “He helped us with the transportation of the body, donated the coffin and provided supplies for the wake,” she said.

Mr. Mendoza insists his goal is to avoid getting tangled up in the criminal feuds around Alcozauca while responding to shifting political and economic winds. While he doesn’t agree with Mr. Trump’s view of migrants, Mr. Mendoza said he understood where such sentiment came from.

“Biden permitted a lot of people to come into the U.S.,” he said. “That affected job opportunities for a lot of people already there since a lot of businesses have more than enough labor,” he added, referring to the effects on his own longer-established relatives in California.

Still, Mr. Mendoza said his top priority is the safety of his family. The soldiers sleep on mattresses in his garage.

He plans to finish his three-year term as mayor with the aim of improving life in Alcozauca, then drop politics for good. In the meantime, he said, he understood the risks.

“This is the real Mexico,” he said. “What can I do — I’m in and I have to learn how to survive.”

Lenin Mosso contributed reporting, and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

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There’s a good chance that many first-time visitors to the Trevi Fountain in Rome know the drill. To ensure a return to the Eternal City, the legend goes, stand with your back to the water and toss a coin with your right hand over your left shoulder.

The ritual became famous around the world thanks to the 1954 film “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and its eponymous song — recorded by Frank Sinatra — which won the Oscar for best original song.

The coin throw is such a popular item on tourist itineraries that even a recent three-month restoration that cut off direct access to the 18th-century fountain was not a deterrent. Visitors still crowded in front of the transparent panels protecting the work site to lob coins — about 61,000 euros’ worth, or $63,000 — into a squat utilitarian tub.

“The tourist is going to toss a coin, they don’t care about construction or no construction,” Fabrizio Marchioni said on a chilly December morning a few days before the fountain’s reopening.

He should know.

For 13 years, Mr. Marchioni’s principal job for the Roman Catholic charity Caritas has been to collect and count the coins tossed into the fountain.

“These are coins of solidarity,” as “they’re put to good use,” said Giustino Trincia, the director of Rome’s Caritas branch. More than 52,800 meals were doled out at Caritas soup kitchens in Rome in 2023, just one of many projects the charity runs.

The coins are claimed by Rome’s municipal administration, but it has donated them to Caritas since 2005. The proceeds in 2023 were close to 2 million euros.

The recent cleanup of the fountain, 10 years after a major restoration, came just in time for the start of the Catholic Church’s Jubilee Year on Christmas Eve. With some 32 million visitors expected over the next year, Rome is in a state of busy preparation, with dozens of monuments being cleaned and polished.

The fountain’s temporary closure also allowed city officials to test out controlling visitor access. At the reopening, just before Christmas, officials announced that only 400 people at a time would be allowed into the sunken area in front. Visitors will enter at one end of the basin and exit on the other side, with monitors keeping watch during daytime hours.

“The goal is to allow everyone to enjoy the fountain to the fullest without the crush, without confusion,” Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, said at the reopening. The city is also considering charging a nominal fee, he said.

Rome has a plethora of fountains, the public, decorative faces of aqueducts that were originally built by the ancient Romans, but none match the fame of the Fountain of Trevi. In the early 18th century, “a practically unknown architect,” Nicola Salvi, replaced a more modest iteration of the fountain with the monumental work that reaches nearly 115 feet in height, arguably “the best known monument of modern Rome,” said Claudio Parisi Presicce, Rome’s superintendent for cultural heritage.

Celebrated in a symphony, as well as in artworks over the centuries, the fountain became a cinematic star in the 20th century, most famously in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” where Anita Ekberg throatily called to Marcello Mastroianni to join her as she waded in its waters (an act that would be much frowned upon in real life).

Fresh fame came via the 2024 season of Netflix’s series “Emily in Paris,” after the protagonist, Emily Cooper, made the fountain one of her first Roman stops.

The coin-tossing ritual began at the end of the 19th century, when German academics studying in Rome reprised an ancient Roman practice of throwing coins into water for good luck. It quickly caught on.

Over the decades, the coins — and people sitting on the marble edge of the fountain (another definite no-no) — have contributed to its wear and tear, especially as visitor numbers have risen sharply in recent years.

“These are magnificent, enormous monuments, but they are very delicate,” said Anna Maria Cerioni, who has overseen many of Rome’s fountains for three decades in her role as head of restoration for the city’s art superintendency.

The minerals in the coins often leave marks on the product used to waterproof the basin. Specially developed for the fountain, it is known as “Trevi White,” and periodic maintenance is necessary.

The fountain is still supplied by the Aqua Virgo, built in the first century B.C.E. and the only one of the 11 aqueducts built by the ancient Romans that has remained almost constantly in use, said Marco Tesan, who oversees the maintenance of some of Rome’s fountains and aqueducts for the water and electricity utility ACEA.

Twice a week, the utility’s workers use a machine developed for swimming pools to suck up the coins from the basin. During the maintenance phase, brooms and dustpans sufficed, “though you still feel achy at the end of the day,” said Luca Tasselli of ACEA.

At the fountain, the collected coins are weighed under the oversight of city police officers before Mr. Marchioni takes them to Caritas offices. There, they are first washed under tap water, then laid out on a towel-lined table so that impurities can be removed. Along with other stuff.

Larger objects commonly found in the fountain, like bottles, umbrellas, fruit and drinking glasses, are removed directly by ACEA workers. Mr. Marchioni and the volunteers who help him root out smaller items.

Recently found: religious medals, guitar picks, subway tokens, keys, marbles, shells, and pins of all shapes and sizes. Bracelets and rings were also common, and Mr. Marchioni surmised that they might have fallen off during particularly enthusiastic tosses.

Expensive-looking jewelry is turned over to the police.

Because there isn’t a market for coin-drying machines, Caritas tasked a company that makes machines to dry cutlery with converting one for its purposes. The coins are dried and then passed through a machine that separates euro coins from everything else. It’s so sophisticated that it even detected a bunch of fake two-euro coins that were making the rounds in May and June.

Foreign currency is sent to a company to exchange, which can get troublesome, said Mr. Marchioni. “Let’s say that tossing euro coins is best,” he said.

The proceeds are used for a variety of projects, from youth activities to care programs for people with Alzheimer’s disease. Mostly, Caritas helps needy families make ends meet, reaching almost 10,000 people in 2023, said Mr. Trincia of Caritas.

He added that he hoped tourists visiting Rome were aware of the good they are doing through the fountain. “Poverty doesn’t go on holiday,” he said.