Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

The Plutarco’s and their three glorious Saturdays

Fulano’s note: Fulano translated this from the original story in Spanish. The author is anonymous, but leaves this comment:

“This story was shared by the boy’s family caught in this endless war. The names and places were changed to protect their identity and for their security. Permission is granted to reproduce this.”

At 43 years of age, he was a man with balls. No one had seen him cry. He suffered, but did not cry. Not when his first girfriend left him back in childhood. Not when his parents died.

This day was different. He wept like a child. He pounded his fists on the wall of the funeral home until they bled when they handed him his son in his assassin’s coffin, two months and 14 days before his 18th birthday. He could only see his closed eyes, because a blue cap covered his face, or rather what was left of his face after two hollow-point bullets entered his head and out his mouth. He saw those eyes that once had a face, and cried.

His son is called, or was called — not knowing how it is said correctly — Plutarco. Like him, like his grandfather.

Plutarco finished elementary school with good grades. He only completed his first semester of middle school and never returned for the second. At 16, he got a girl his age pregnant and took her to live in the house of the Plutarcos, as it was known in their neighborhood, which was called colonia Gobernadores. His baby son was also named Plutarco.

Ever since taking his wife into the Plutarco home, he had to work: in a beer dispensary, in an Oxxo quickie mart, washing cars, sometimes as a day worker. He earned, on average, $50 per week. Sometimes he earned a little more. Enough to eat poorly. Not enough for diapers. Even less for beer.

Plutarco did not have many ways to improve his situation. It was not possible to return to school. Or work or study. He had to work. You will have to excuse the irony, but he had no politically connected relatives to get a state government job. Nor could he hope for a clerk’s job or a taxi permit like others.

Saturday, after work, a cousin invited him for a night of drinking. They ate seafood. His cousin offered Plutarco a job. $170 a week. A car. A cellphone. A pistol. Easy work. No violence. Go, see, report. That was the job.

“Don’t answer me now, tell me next Saturday,” said his cousin when he left him at home in his little 2002 Toyota, big stereo, music of Los Tigres playing, not loudly so as to not cause a problem, to not attract attention.

“You’re an idiot, they’ll kill you. What do you know about these things,” his wife told him on Sunday when they were watching an El Santo movie.

“If you take care nothing will happen,” he said Monday after talking with her about seeing a baby stroller at the store.

“Promise me you will not touch the gun,” she begged him on Tuesday after he said that in December they would be able to go on vacation with her sister to the Riviera Nayarit, where she once worked as a housekeeper in a small hotel owned by a town employee who in three years earned a respectable enough amount of capital to become a businessman.

“With your first paycheck, buy me a cellphone,” she said on Wednesday.

The next few days they did not speak about the new job, as if this silence was a solemn pact between the two.

That Saturday his cousin waited for him at 1 o’clock as he left work. He drove him to a street in colonia Amado Nervo. He gave him the keys to a 2006 white car, washed and freshly waxed, the smell of cinnamon and apples in the interior, a good stereo. A Nokia cell phone. And a gun.

“You don’t know me. They’ll call. They’ll tell you what to do. You go to where they tell you to go on the cellphone. Someone will pay you early on Saturday. $170, like we said. Don’t be stupid, only do what they ask,” said his the cousin and then left. Plutarco took the car and parked it outside his house.

The story he told to everyone was simple and believable. A crony in the government had given 10 Riviera Nayarit and Tepic taxi permits and and he would be a driver of one of those. The car he had was going to be painted for that purpose. He did not know if it would be painted red or yellow.

Hiding the gun was no problem. He always wore loose shirts that were not tucked in. He had no idea how to handle the gun, but it was a dizzying thrill to go into the bathroom and look at it, smell it, and point it as if there was an idiot in the sights.

He received no call or Saturday, Sunday or Monday. It was not until Tuesday at four in the morning. He ate an Emperador cookie, drank a Pepsi and left. He returned about 11 o’clock in the morning. He said nothing to his wife and she didn’t ask. From that day on, he came and went. Only he knew what he was doing, he said not one word to his wife.

On Saturday, he came home at 3 pm. “Let’s go eat,” he ordered his wife. They went out to eat. “We don’t have enough to buy the cellphone or the stroller,” he said and took her to buy diapers, cookies and sausage. He grabbed a bottle of Presidente to give to his grandfather as a gift. And beer for himself.

Three great Saturdays. To many it may seem a little thing, but Plutarco never could afford such luxuries. Nor his father. Nor his grandfather. There still was not enough for the cell phone for his wife, or for the baby’s stroller, but there was food, diapers and a few drinks. That, believe me, is a great Saturday for the vast majority in Nayarit.

The third $170 Saturday he took dad, grandfather, two brothers and the wife out to eat. They ate until they were stuffed full. Nobody suspected anything, and if they did they just acted ignorant. It was only his grandfather, who said that when the taxi was ready things would be better. “Because there are taxi drivers who aren’t worth crap and they do OK,” he said between joking and being serious after the third and next to last beer.

At 6 o’ clock in the afternoon they were in the house. Shortly after 7 o’ clock Plutarco received a call and left. He never returned.

They called his cell phone Sunday afternoon and he did not answer. On Monday, an acquaintance brought a newspaper to the Plutarco’s. He showed it to the wife without saying a word. “They destroyed his face,” read the headline. They went to the internet cafe to see pictures from the Internet. It was Plutarco’s white car. And the plaid shirt he had on when he left on Saturday.

They held a wake for Plutarco in his aunt’s house. His father’s sister, in a neighborhood in Xalisco. His family knew that the white car was not a taxi but nobody wanted to know more. They knew that he had been killed that way for obvious reasons. They were afraid that somebody would come and spray the wake with bullets, as had happened here and in other states, according to the television news.

They held a funeral and buried him under rock and mud. No one has come to the door. Not even the police, to investigate the cause of the death of this boy who for a frigging $510 and three glorious Saturdays lost his life behind the wheel of a white car that was not his nor would ever be a taxi here or the Riviera Nayarit.

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all

Previous article

A rope course designed to resemble the Giant Dipper at Belmont Part

Maruta Gardner Playground - a parent's playground
Next Article

Ian Anderson’s apogees

The best eating of ten-ish years

Fulano’s note: Fulano translated this from the original story in Spanish. The author is anonymous, but leaves this comment:

“This story was shared by the boy’s family caught in this endless war. The names and places were changed to protect their identity and for their security. Permission is granted to reproduce this.”

At 43 years of age, he was a man with balls. No one had seen him cry. He suffered, but did not cry. Not when his first girfriend left him back in childhood. Not when his parents died.

This day was different. He wept like a child. He pounded his fists on the wall of the funeral home until they bled when they handed him his son in his assassin’s coffin, two months and 14 days before his 18th birthday. He could only see his closed eyes, because a blue cap covered his face, or rather what was left of his face after two hollow-point bullets entered his head and out his mouth. He saw those eyes that once had a face, and cried.

His son is called, or was called — not knowing how it is said correctly — Plutarco. Like him, like his grandfather.

Plutarco finished elementary school with good grades. He only completed his first semester of middle school and never returned for the second. At 16, he got a girl his age pregnant and took her to live in the house of the Plutarcos, as it was known in their neighborhood, which was called colonia Gobernadores. His baby son was also named Plutarco.

Ever since taking his wife into the Plutarco home, he had to work: in a beer dispensary, in an Oxxo quickie mart, washing cars, sometimes as a day worker. He earned, on average, $50 per week. Sometimes he earned a little more. Enough to eat poorly. Not enough for diapers. Even less for beer.

Plutarco did not have many ways to improve his situation. It was not possible to return to school. Or work or study. He had to work. You will have to excuse the irony, but he had no politically connected relatives to get a state government job. Nor could he hope for a clerk’s job or a taxi permit like others.

Saturday, after work, a cousin invited him for a night of drinking. They ate seafood. His cousin offered Plutarco a job. $170 a week. A car. A cellphone. A pistol. Easy work. No violence. Go, see, report. That was the job.

“Don’t answer me now, tell me next Saturday,” said his cousin when he left him at home in his little 2002 Toyota, big stereo, music of Los Tigres playing, not loudly so as to not cause a problem, to not attract attention.

“You’re an idiot, they’ll kill you. What do you know about these things,” his wife told him on Sunday when they were watching an El Santo movie.

“If you take care nothing will happen,” he said Monday after talking with her about seeing a baby stroller at the store.

“Promise me you will not touch the gun,” she begged him on Tuesday after he said that in December they would be able to go on vacation with her sister to the Riviera Nayarit, where she once worked as a housekeeper in a small hotel owned by a town employee who in three years earned a respectable enough amount of capital to become a businessman.

“With your first paycheck, buy me a cellphone,” she said on Wednesday.

The next few days they did not speak about the new job, as if this silence was a solemn pact between the two.

That Saturday his cousin waited for him at 1 o’clock as he left work. He drove him to a street in colonia Amado Nervo. He gave him the keys to a 2006 white car, washed and freshly waxed, the smell of cinnamon and apples in the interior, a good stereo. A Nokia cell phone. And a gun.

“You don’t know me. They’ll call. They’ll tell you what to do. You go to where they tell you to go on the cellphone. Someone will pay you early on Saturday. $170, like we said. Don’t be stupid, only do what they ask,” said his the cousin and then left. Plutarco took the car and parked it outside his house.

The story he told to everyone was simple and believable. A crony in the government had given 10 Riviera Nayarit and Tepic taxi permits and and he would be a driver of one of those. The car he had was going to be painted for that purpose. He did not know if it would be painted red or yellow.

Hiding the gun was no problem. He always wore loose shirts that were not tucked in. He had no idea how to handle the gun, but it was a dizzying thrill to go into the bathroom and look at it, smell it, and point it as if there was an idiot in the sights.

He received no call or Saturday, Sunday or Monday. It was not until Tuesday at four in the morning. He ate an Emperador cookie, drank a Pepsi and left. He returned about 11 o’clock in the morning. He said nothing to his wife and she didn’t ask. From that day on, he came and went. Only he knew what he was doing, he said not one word to his wife.

On Saturday, he came home at 3 pm. “Let’s go eat,” he ordered his wife. They went out to eat. “We don’t have enough to buy the cellphone or the stroller,” he said and took her to buy diapers, cookies and sausage. He grabbed a bottle of Presidente to give to his grandfather as a gift. And beer for himself.

Three great Saturdays. To many it may seem a little thing, but Plutarco never could afford such luxuries. Nor his father. Nor his grandfather. There still was not enough for the cell phone for his wife, or for the baby’s stroller, but there was food, diapers and a few drinks. That, believe me, is a great Saturday for the vast majority in Nayarit.

The third $170 Saturday he took dad, grandfather, two brothers and the wife out to eat. They ate until they were stuffed full. Nobody suspected anything, and if they did they just acted ignorant. It was only his grandfather, who said that when the taxi was ready things would be better. “Because there are taxi drivers who aren’t worth crap and they do OK,” he said between joking and being serious after the third and next to last beer.

At 6 o’ clock in the afternoon they were in the house. Shortly after 7 o’ clock Plutarco received a call and left. He never returned.

They called his cell phone Sunday afternoon and he did not answer. On Monday, an acquaintance brought a newspaper to the Plutarco’s. He showed it to the wife without saying a word. “They destroyed his face,” read the headline. They went to the internet cafe to see pictures from the Internet. It was Plutarco’s white car. And the plaid shirt he had on when he left on Saturday.

They held a wake for Plutarco in his aunt’s house. His father’s sister, in a neighborhood in Xalisco. His family knew that the white car was not a taxi but nobody wanted to know more. They knew that he had been killed that way for obvious reasons. They were afraid that somebody would come and spray the wake with bullets, as had happened here and in other states, according to the television news.

They held a funeral and buried him under rock and mud. No one has come to the door. Not even the police, to investigate the cause of the death of this boy who for a frigging $510 and three glorious Saturdays lost his life behind the wheel of a white car that was not his nor would ever be a taxi here or the Riviera Nayarit.

Sponsored
Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

San Diego author's African-American family surrounds dying brother

Big brother says goodbye
Next Article

From the human misery files

It was one week before Thanksgiving in 2013 and Ron felt more alone than usual. He was 51 then, and he was relying on the kindness of friends and relations.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

This Week’s Reader This Week’s Reader