The governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz. Check out the thickness of that glass.

We had beers last night two tables over from Ulises Ruiz, the governor of Oaxaca.

“What would he do,” I asked, “if I walked up very nicely and politely, this wide-eyed innocent little blonde girl, and said in a deferential señorita voice, ‘Sir, I’d like to congratulate you on your impressive human rights violations and on brushing off a Supreme Court ruling declaring you responsible for the violence, repression and disaster behind the 2006 social movement in Oaxaca.  I’d just like to shake your hand as a gesture of thanks for all those protestors you kidnapped in white vans, took to the Sierra, and tortured.  Feliz Navidad!”  Jorge then pointed out thirty-five bodyguards.  I relented.

Jorge, being the non-confrontational and rational one, suggested we just go.  Who can sip a beer when the sleaze factor is so palpable it makes you nauseous?  But I found it too fascinating, too bizarre, to exquisitely disgusting to walk away from.  After all, this is part of the fabric of Mexico – a central part of it.  And as a writer, I want to write about these stories too, not just the kindly popsicle man and the piles of exotic fruit at the market.  So the closer we get, the better.

Thus we made a mission out of trying to pick out more bodyguards, like finding the hidden objects in one of those mazes on the back of a cereal box.  When I found one, hulking in the shadows in a vest, the story possibilities started forming on the spot.  What are these guys’ lives like? Do they have families?  Do they eat dinner with them?  Go to the beach in swim trunks?  Have dogs?  They seem to exist as constant shadowy figures in the background somewhere waiting to shoot or tackle someone or be shot or tackled.  It’s always the bodyguard, after all, that gets screwed in the shuffle while the gov wipes the dust off his linen shirt and adjusts his glasses.

Looking around the Zocalo I could  – with the aid of Jorge’s trained journalist’s eye – spot dozens of these guaruras, completely obvious with their earpieces and cell phones, on benches or having their shoes shined.  Sound like some Hollywood CIA flick?  Yeah, well, it looks just like that.  I had my plan all worked out for the shootout.  I was going to dive into the shelter of the fluorescent Sushi Itto and watch from behind the fish counter as they duked it out at Terranova.  Jorge could snap pictures with my digital camera and it’d be our big journalistic break.  Then I could write that story about bodyguards and I would be off and running, New York Times Magazine, Harpers…

That was somewhere around the second michelada.  But for better or worse, the bodyguards seemed bored, and the meddling German tourists with their white hairy feet in clumsy sandals obviously weren’t about to whip out an Uzi on Ulises.  I wished someone would at least throw an egg at him.

“There!” I kept saying.  “That girl is DEFINITELY hiding an egg…wait for it…wait for it…no.  Damn.”  I found it horrifying that someone of his caliber, with a Supreme Court resolution declaring him guilty of human rights violations, who has sent henchmen to small villages to pick porros (the closest translation would be “thugs”) to come and kidnap, harass, torture, and shoot randomly at protesters, could be luxuriating right there at an outdoor cafe in the Zocalo.  This guy was sipping a little shooter glass of mezcal in his white shirt with his bulbous nose like a grotesque, limp proboscis.  All fat and lumpy in expensive shades of white and black.  Laughing.  Safely nestled in a group of men with the same black clumpy mustaches and white shirts and the same slimy laughs, the political class of Oaxaca that recently criminalized abortion.  A law which occurred to me as a new set of kids came up to the table every 2.5 seconds to sell some China-made piece of crap; whistles that sounded like dying pigs, little pieces of brightly colored plastic, dirty friendship bracelets.  Following them were all the beggar kids, tattered and with their put-on pity-me faces (“I got 3,000 pesos off a drunk gringo once,” one told me proudly) and then the tattered beggar women, perhaps the saddest and the most desperate of all.  One of these women approached Ulises’ table and I arched my head to see what would happen.  If there was any better scene to epitomize Oaxacan politics, I can’t imagine it.

A beggar woman comes up to a table of greasy, white-shirted politicians dripping in corruption and wealth and sleaze.  All men.  All old.  All fat.  All looking cheap as hell beneath all their pricey drapings – looking like cheap, classless Latin American dictators.  The woman puts her hand out to them – she doesn’t even seem to know who they are (“they’re your representation in government, honey!  Congratulations!”) and all ignore her.  Then one who was in the bathroom comes back, pats her on the shoulder in a little gesture of paternal condescension, and sends her on her way.  Go on, sweetheart, let us get back to business here.

I was torn between the urge to vomit and the urge to race over and wring the deputy’s neck.  I’d bet you all the money it took to plant thousands of poinsettas in the Zocalo that that woman, or one of her kids, is going to appear within the next few months on some government billboard about how Ulises gives blankets to the indigenous.

But what can you do?   What can you do??  I wanted to scream.  Give your life over to activism?  Live in a permanent state of self-righteous anger?  Gloss it all over with bitter satire?  Let yourself fall into a grim depression about the state of the world and spend forty-eight straight hours following link after link on Twitter?  Lord.  Sigh.  I don’t know where the balance is between all of the possible reactions.  I just wish SOMEBODY would’ve thrown an egg.  Really, my  heart feels like a shrinking balloon when Oaxaca’s premier scumbag can enjoy glass shooters of mezcal in the town plaza while roving bands of kids go begging and thirty-five bodyguards stand watch.

I feel I should end on an optimistic note here.  It’s Christmas!  Poinsettas!  Golden Christmas trees!  Punch!  Parties!  Gifts!  Cheer!  Baby Jesus!

And the hope, oh God, the hope that next year when the Oaxacan elections come round something, anything, just the slightest little thing, will shift the balance of power, will throw an egg – literal or figurative – in the face of the mustachioed gov and his seedy little cronies.