Portrait of a killer: art class in one of Mexico’s most notorious prisons
After two decades working in some of Mexico’s toughest prisons, warden Ángeles Zavala thought she had seen it all. Then one morning in 2016, she arrived for work at Puente Grande prison to find a local artist waiting for her. The man had recently completed a few workshops with inmates in another part of the prison, and had a proposal. Speaking in rapid-fire bursts, the artist told Ángeles he wanted to move into the maximum-security prison and live there for six weeks, in order to teach some of the country’s most dangerous inmates how to paint. Through art therapy, he would help them change their lives. And he wanted to start with the veteran narcos of Mexico’s violent drug war.
“I was thinking: ‘What is wrong with him?’” Ángeles said later. “‘Everyone is trying to get out and César wants to live here?’”
César Aréchiga, then 36, had achieved a mild degree of regional renown for his realist paintings the size of barn doors. He was a bear of a man, but with his artistic verve, clear-framed glasses and pack-a-day smoking habit, he seemed more at home in Guadalajara’s trendy coffee shops than in a prison full of gang members. Ángeles was intrigued. There are almost no art programmes for Mexican prisoners; few people are brave enough to teach inside the prisons. If César was crazy enough to try, why not see what might happen?
Ángeles started drawing up a list of inmates, and chose 15 who were either clinically depressed or had a record of fighting. If César was looking for a challenge, she reasoned, she would send him those who seemed most in need of change. “To be honest, my first thought was: ‘All his art supplies will be stolen, and that will be it.’”
César grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico’s third-biggest metropolitan area and a narco stronghold. His life had been marked by the violence plaguing the country as rival cartels vied for control of the lucrative drug trafficking routes into the US. In 1993, when César was a boy, he and his family were caught in a shootout at Guadalajara’s airport. They hid behind a ticket counter, the sound of gunfire and screaming reverberating around the terminal for what felt like hours.
“More than anything, I remember the panic on people’s faces,” César said. A Mexican cardinal was killed in the shootout, which was subsequently seen as a harbinger of the violence that would come to consume much of the country. Later, as a young man, César was on his way to school when gunfire erupted on the street around him. A few feet away, a man crumpled to the ground as the shooter sped past on a motorcycle.
Mexico’s murder rate has more than tripled since 2007, shortly after the military began an offensive against the cartels that have supplied the US’s insatiable demand for cocaine, heroin and cannabis. More than 350,000 people have been killed and 72,000 disappeared in the years since. César painted wounded flesh and the outlines of missing people, incorporating statistics on crimes and fragments of police reports on his work. His first exhibited work, titled Numberless Victim, depicts a young person, bound and gagged, but looking defiantly at the viewer. It was this work that introduced him to Puente Grande prison: he won a contract to paint a large outdoor mural there in 2016. It was a difficult process. As he tried to work, prisoners crowded around him. One inmate asked him how much he was getting paid for the gig, a hint of menace in his voice. Another prisoner said if he really wanted to help, the artist should teach them to make handicrafts to sell instead. Under the blazing sun in the open air courtyard, the idea grew on him: why not teach inmates to paint and sculpt?
“Killers, that was my idea,” he said. It would be therapeutic. He would give people who had used their hands to destroy an opportunity to create.
It was, in many respects, a ridiculous idea. César wanted to enter the prison with scissors, knives and sculpting gouges. But he had an uncanny knack for convincing people, and eventually got permission from the authorities.
César assembled a small crew to help with his project and film the result – because, he figured, no one would believe him otherwise. None of them had worked in a prison before. One of the first people he turned to was Patricia Ortiz, an actor and old friend. Patricia has elfin features, a pale complexion and long brown hair. She has a tendency to speak in stories, her expressive face coming alive as she recounts a previous job working on a theatre project in Tepito, the historic home of gang activity in Mexico City.
When César told her about his art therapy project, she jumped at the chance to be involved. They are the same age, but Patricia speaks of César with a loving frustration usually reserved for wayward younger siblings. From her perspective, her role was to keep him in line. She knew his impulsive nature and stubbornness had got this project off the ground, but she feared it could also get them into trouble. “César lives a life of extremes,” she told me. “When you’re beside him you can experience incredible things, but also some of the worst things in your life.”
***
On an autumn morning in 2016, Claudia Becerril was at her therapist’s office in Mexico City talking about the six weeks she was about to spend working in prison. Small but tough, with a broad smile, she was the only woman on her university cinematography course. One tutor tried to haze her into quitting by giving her the heaviest equipment to carry. A keen rock climber, Claudia managed just fine. Her doubts about working in prison were less about the inmates than herself. Fresh out of a long-term relationship, she was feeling a little fragile. Was a maximum security prison the best place to get over a breakup?
A few months earlier, César had come across Claudia’s reel from film school and noticed how she had expertly filmed sculpture using close shots of hands at work. He decided she was a perfect fit for the project, and asked if she wanted to join him at Puente Grande. She said yes immediately. She believed in rehabilitation, and jumped at the chance to understand what drove the violence that was scarring the country. Like César and Patricia, she was part of a generation of middle-class Mexicans who grew up in the shadow of the drug war. What better way to understand the seemingly senseless violence than to go to prison?
On the first day of the project, César, Patricia and Claudia were still a few miles from the prison when they started losing phone signal. (The prison’s signal blockers are supposed to make it impossible to reach the outside world.) As they rounded a bend, Puente Grande’s hulking grey outline came into view. In the car park, throngs of vendors hawked goods as family members queued at the gate to bring food to loved ones inside. With more than 10,000 inmates and a constant flow of visitors and staff, the Puente Grande complex felt more like a city than a prison.
Puente Grande is, for many, a symbol of successive governments’ failure to control organised crime as well as crime’s power to corrupt authorities. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán escaped from the prison in 2001, purportedly in a laundry cart. (According to another version of the tale, the guards simply opened the doors and he walked straight out.) In 2016, Mexico was approaching the 10th anniversary of the disastrous “war on drugs”, and the country’s murder rate was surging toward an all-time high. Whatever the authorities were doing, it wasn’t working.
Entering the prison was like going into a labyrinth. Accompanied by two security guards, the three artists walked down concrete passageways as clanging doors reverberated loudly in the enclosed space. When César entered the communal area, he could glimpse daylight from windows at the top of high walls. He waited in an empty room as guards led in the inmates, shackled at the wrists and ankles. Lined up in silence, the inmates listened as César made his pitch. He would move his apartment into the prison, he said: “I’ll be in your house, and you’ll be in mine.” The inmates just stared.
One Honduran American inmate, Parvis – then in his early 30s with a boyish face, short hair and tattoos creeping up his neck – had spent the best part of a decade in prisons in the US and in Mexico. He recalled the curious sight of seeing an educated, well-spoken man who appeared to have wandered into their world by mistake. “He was very sincere,” Parvis said of that first meeting, “but you could tell he was afraid. He was shitting bricks.”
The prisoners had doubts. Art classes, cameras, women in the prison? It was all hard to believe. More importantly, they wereconcerned that by appearing on film, they risked revealing to their enemies where they could be found. “I didn’t know if as soon as I got back out I’m going to die, if they’re going to pick me up, chop me up and kill me,” said Parvis. They also didn’t know anything about César and his crew – who were these people, and who had sent them? To assuage those concerns, César promised that once the course was complete, he would return to the prison and show them the footage before he showed it to anyone else. If the prisoners didn’t like some parts, he would delete them. They had power of veto.
Despite their misgivings, the inmates agreed, eager to do anything that got them out of their underground cells. Taking part in the workshop could also help their cases before the Parole Board. César and his crew began moving his furniture and art equipment into the prison. He brought sofas, armchairs, coffee tables, rugs, plants and a chess set from his home. Then came the turpentine, paintbrushes, easels, two tonnes of dried clay, staplers, sculpting tools and scissors for workshops. The guards scanned and inspected each item for hidden weapons or drugs.
The first day of class was on 1 November 2016. Hands manacled behind their backs, the men were led single-file out of their underground cells and up to the hall. The doors opened and the prisoners stared at the furniture bathed in sunlight. As the guards uncuffed the men, César stood waiting to shake their hands, as though he was welcoming them into his home.
One prisoner plopped down in César’s chair and exclaimed to no one in particular: “It’s been 15 years since I’ve sat in an armchair.” Another stretched out on a sofa and promptly fell asleep.
César tried to sound upbeat, and began showing the men all the material they would be using: canvas, clay, paper. It was hard to tell whether they were interested in the work, but the men revelled in their status as the privileged few allowed to spend hours out of their cells. Behind them, inmates not in the workshop pressed their faces up to the glass to watch. As César gave instructions, he was interrupted by shouting outside. Turning, he saw a gigantic figure banging on the glass and demanding to be let in.
The next day, the giant returned and again asked to take part. César asked the warden about him. “He has the worst disciplinary record in the prison,” Ángeles told him. “He won’t be able to do the workshop.” But César insisted, impressed by the man’s enthusiasm, and eventually Ángeles relented. Better known as “Escalera” or “the Ladder” for his towering 6ft 6in frame, Enrique was charismatic, funny and had the square jaw and strong features of a Hollywood leading man. But he could also be unpredictable, aggressive and deceptive.
* * *
César thought clay would be a good place to start. As he poured dry clay and water on to a large tarp in the middle of the room, he told the prisoners to take off their shoes and use their feet to mix the materials. “We’re not allowed to take our shoes off, it’s against the rules,” one prisoner replied as guards watched from a distance. César waved away their objections. “Just do it,” he told them. A few minutes later, he watched as two members of rival cartels gleefully stomped up and down shoeless in the dirt alongside each other, orange uniforms rolled up to their knees.
“We were like little kids running around,” Parvis said. “Outside, we were enemies. We would probably have killed each other as soon as we saw each other, but here we were having fun in the mud.”
When it was time to make sculptures with the fresh clay, a diminutive man with salt-and-pepper hair and a wide, infectious grin quickly demonstrated his passion for the task. He would ignore the surrounding chatter and become absorbed in the work. “I’ve spent a long time looking at my hands and how they have changed over the years,” he said while holding them up, his face alight with the pleasure of recognising this newfound talent. Claudia, the photographer, said: “Only later did we learn he used to make bombs.”
Claudia had been warned to avoid divulging personal details in case it made her an extortion target. But as she sat around the dining table where the crew and the prisoners shared meals, she was honest when answering the prisoners’ questions. When they asked what she earned in a month, she hesitated a second before telling them. The inmates just laughed. “I used to tip that much in the bar!” Enrique said, howling with laughter.
Parvis – despite being in his 30s and having eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids, and what looks like an anchor on his right cheek – had a youthful enthu
siasm and openness that made him seem more like a teenage rapper than a prison veteran. When César had the inmates cover the prison’s brick walls with huge sheets of brown paper and paint over them, Parvis began drawing the anarchist circle-A, a large version of the tattoo he got on his hand as a rebellious teenager. Then he added multicoloured handprints and hearts.
One prisoner, a small man with a downturned mouth and penetrating gaze, recalled his life before prison while César painted his portrait. As a young man he had planned to follow in the footsteps of his upright, hardworking father who had waited tables and washed dishes until he eventually ran a restaurant. “I saw how people looked down on him for being a worker,” he said. “At that point I get this rage inside me, this bitterness.” He realised that whatever his father achieved, people wouldn’t respect him. “Then I got tired of serving. And I wanted other people to serve me,” he said. “That’s why I did certain things.”
Enrique, the towering troublemaker, turned out to be César’s star pupil. The two shared a dry, sometimes dark sense of humour. Through Enrique’s jokes about corrupt politicians and bribing judges, César felt like he’d glimpsed the truth about how Mexico really worked. And in return, Enrique threw himself into the work, quickly demonstrating an eye for painting. For the first few weeks, the inmates kept up their tough-guy facades when talking about the past. Enrique was the first to open up.
That moment came in the third week. During a break between classes, Enrique sat on the floor, sketching an outline of his cell for César. There was a brief silence as the conversation dwindled. “I have kind of a dramatic story,” Enrique said, long arms hugging his knees.
“What’s that?” César asked.
“I’m only here because of some stupid shit,” Enrique replied. He explained that he had attended one of Mexico’s best universities in Tijuana, and had been studying to become a dentist. One day in his second year of college, Enrique heard from a friend that another student had grabbed his girlfriend’s butt. Enrique punched the guy so hard the man stumbled backward, fell from a second-storey balcony and died. As a result, Enrique served a year in a notorious maximum-security prison near Tijuana. “And that’s when I got connected,” he said. “The truth is, this is Harvard, this is the university of crime.”
For César, the conversation was a revelation. In Enrique’s story he saw the tragedy of the criminal justice system. But it was also personal. In Enrique’s version of events, where one mistake threw his life off course, César saw himself.
Years earlier, César had seemed bound for a promising career in the US. But while returning from a visit back to Mexico, he was questioned by US customs officials over apparent irregularities in the sale of several of his works in New York, where he’d been living for five years, rubbing shoulders with the art scene’s elite. Adamant it was a mistake, he says he tried to explain away the issue, grew frustrated when he couldn’t, and raised his voice. Next thing he knew, he was in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention awaiting deportation. That was the moment everything went wrong. His assets frozen and art contacts suddenly worthless, in a matter of days César Aréchiga went from being a fast-rising artist in New York to being broke, banned from the US and forced to move back in with his parents.
Ultimately, he got back on his feet, though not back to New York. César was middle-class and knew how to speak to the rich and powerful, but he knew that one mistake could change everything. “I saw those guys in orange,” César said, “and I felt that fear, that, for some stupid shit, I wouldn’t get out of there.”
***
Enrique deputised himself as César’s right-hand man. When the others remained stretched out on the sofas after lunch, Enrique would stand up and say: “Let’s get to work.” And they did. No one else would get away with this, but from Enrique they tolerated it.
When a gouge for sculpting clay went missing one afternoon, Patricia started to worry.It could be used as a shiv, and they had to find it – the project depended on it. At the same time, if they accused the inmates of stealing and the gouge was merely mislaid, the crew could ruin the delicate trust they’d built. Then Enrique stepped in. “No one leaves here until we find it,” he announced. They all searched the room, and the gouge reappeared.
Patricia’s role was to build trust with the inmates. She made a point of showing that she wasn’t scared of them by making eye contact and engaging them in small talk about their soccer teams or home towns. When it was time to start a new project, she would guide them with a gentle hand on the shoulder. As the prisoners painted, she would circle the room and ask about their work, which often led to other topics.
Santiago, a middle-aged man with a fatherly air, was initially reserved, but began opening up as he painted a scene from his home town. “You listen. You talk to us like normal people,” he said, by way of explanation. Parvis, in particular, spoke for hours while he worked on landscapes. “You can’t talk to another cartel member and tell them ‘I feel bad about what I did’,” Parvis said. “You don’t do that. You just don’t do that.” With a 36-year sentence hanging over him, he wasn’t sure he would ever get out. But the interest César and his team showed encouraged Parvis to keep thinking about what had led him to this point.
Over long afternoons painting and talking with Patricia, Parvis could almost forget where he was. He told her about the tough years he spent in
Honduras as a small child amid worsening gang violence; how the family was forced to flee when his father was threatened, making the perilous journey through Mexico and into the US. They settled in Arizona, but when his father was arrested, Parvis was placed in a group home. He joined a gang soon after.
As Patricia listened, she thought how easy it would be for anyone who had grown up like that to make the same mistake. But then a thought occurred to her: “I love this bastard, but I knew these eyes that I was staring into were the last thing someone saw before he killed them.”
* * *
Enrique mellowed as the weeks wore on. Talking about his estranged family seemed to help him find a new, more sensitive side of himself. When he arrived one day looking morose, he said simply: “I miss my kids.” The structure of the classes also helped him find purpose. “Normally people like us don’t like to work,” Enrique said. “But this teaches me to keep going. I look at myself and I like what I see.”
When guards handed Enrique a stack of letters from his family, going back months, he flew into a rage, convinced they had been intentionally withheld as punishment for fighting. But César managed to calm him down. By the end of the day, Enrique and César were laughing, smoking cigarettes and reading the letters together.
With their newfound liberty in the classes, the prisoners also began to reexamine the hardships of prison life they had become accustomed to – and the contrast could be brutal. After a day painting landscapes or talking about his childhood, Parvis began to resent the pat-downs, daily searches of his cell and having a camera watch him every moment of every day. For the inmates in César’s programme, each search threatened to cut short the time they could spend in the workshop. “When the guards start getting a little strict with you, you’re like: ‘You know what, I could end up killing for this moment, dude, because I’m probably never going to get it again,’” he said.
The growing bond between crew and inmates caused other problems, too. With the attention and special treatment they lavished on the workshop’s chosen few, the crew had inadvertently destabilised the prison’s balance of power.
Things escalated one lunchtime. The crew and inmates were lined up to eat together, as usual. One by one, they were handed trays of food by the guards. But when Patricia arrived, they told her there was none left. Something had gone wrong with the order, they said. The inmates were used to this: Santiago, the normally reserved older prisoner, offered to go without so Patricia could eat. She snapped. “We want food for everyone,” she yelled, now surrounded by other prisoners.
“We’ve had enough, you bastards,” a prisoner yelled. A chair went flying. Patricia saw Santiago, surrounded by other prisoners, his face filled with rage.
Fearing a riot, César pulled Patricia aside. “What are you doing?” he hissed. She caught herself and backed down. Patricia asked Santiago to help her, while César herded the inmates back to the workshop to avoid further confrontation.
“It was stupid,” Patricia said. “I was able to walk out the door and eat in a hotel, and they would end up in the hole.”
After several weeks, Enrique was so trusted that no one questioned him putting himself in charge of helping to collect supplies at the end of the day. Then one evening after packing up, a crew member told César some paints were missing. He suspected Enrique was stealing them to trade for cigarettes. César was initially disappointed, but decided not to immediately confront Enrique. First of all, he didn’t want to alienate a man who had become the poster boy of his art therapy workshops. But he later chose to believe that the theft signalled something else: others in the prison wanted to paint enough that they were willing to trade cigarettes for art supplies.
At times, this growing closeness made the crew uncomfortable. While chatting in a group, one inmate made an offhand comment about another, a younger man who kept to himself. “He’s the one who killed those students,” the first prisoner said. When she left the prison later, Patricia couldn’t stop thinking about it. She felt the dissonance of going from protesting against the 2014 disappearance (and presumed killing) of 43 students, an event that shocked the world, to teaching art to someone who had apparently committed similar crimes against other student demonstrators. She thought of the thousands of people looking for their disappeared relatives in mass graves, then saw herself teaching those responsible how to paint: “I started to ask myself whether we really were doing something to benefit people, or if we were led by our egos or a romanticisation of art.”
At the end of the course they ate a last meal together, and said their goodbyes, hugging like old friends.
* * *
About a year later, César was painting in his studio in downtown Guadalajara. Outside, trucks carrying riflewielding police in body armour trundled through the oppressive traffic. His phone bleeped – it was Enrique. He was using a Facebook profile under a different name, but César recognised his photo. “What’s up fatso,” wrote Enrique, who, despite his affection for César, was never exactly polite. Enrique was out, he explained, and back living with his wife and children, fixing up motorbikes. “I’m trying to make this work,” he said. He sounded happy.
On the walls of César’s apartment hung portraits of the inmates he had painted. There was Enrique, looking dashing, and Parvis. Santiago’s clay sculptures, of birds and people in Aztec and Olmec styles, stood on a table in his living room. Cesar felt hopeful that his project had made a positive impact, at least for someone.
A few weeks later, César got another message from Enrique’s profile. “Hi César, how are you?” it said. He knew immediately something was wrong – Enrique was never this well mannered. It was Enrique’s wife. He had been kidnapped by rivals in the drug trade, she told him. A few days later, the prosecutor’s office called. César listened as the man told him that Enrique had been found dead.
Not long after, César finished work on a documentary about his time in prison, exploring the artistic process and redemption. It premiered to acclaim at the Guadalajara film festival. For César, it was a bittersweet moment. He was proud, but the person he had most wanted to see the film, Enrique, never would.
Visiting her home town in northern Mexico for Christmas some time later, Patricia made an impromptu stop to buy a sweater. She was inside the changing room when her phone rang. “Number unknown” flashed up. She answered and a familiar, playful voice spoke: “Can you guess who this is?” It was Santiago. He was just calling to say hello, he said, and made small talk. She inferred immediately that he was back with the cartel. It saddened her to think that he had picked up right where he left off. Patricia suddenly felt that the workshops alone were useless: they had been trying to fix a few cogs of an unimaginably vast machine.
Meanwhile, César still hasn’t finished the portrait of Parvis. For a while they swapped messages, then Parvis disappeared again. Recently César heard his old student is out and living in a medium-size city somewhere in Mexico.
In a tree-covered garden earlier this year, Parvis took a rare break from his busy schedule to talk to me. A short beard partially covered his neck tattoos. For the first time in a while, he thought back to that time spent years earlier with César, Patricia and Claudia in the prison. Lately, he has been teaching his kids to draw. Sometimes, he thinks about going back to the US.
Every day, Parvis picks up the phone and dials the US, where he calls clients in English and Spanish for his work at a paralegal firm. It’s still a struggle sometimes. He heard what happened to his friend Enrique. But he cites his time with César as important in leaving his old life behind. “If that project hasn’t changed everyone,” he said, “it has most surely made a difference in my life and in my children’s lives.”
Some names have been changed. This piece first appeared in Epic magazine on Apple News+.Footage from the art project was edited into a documentary called 45 Days in Harvar
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.