Lazaro Cardenas Street in Mexico City is the unofficial dividing line that separates the Historic Center from the expansive, more modern part of the most populous metropolitan area in the Americas. If you walk just to the west of Lazaro Cardenas, you soon arrive in the broad and beautiful expanse of Reforma, Mexico City’s more interesting, aesthetically pleasing, response to the Champs d’Elysées in Paris.

Close on the western divide, sitting side by each, are the absorbing, persevering Parque Alameda, and the magnificent, marbled Palacio de Bellas Artes. While the Palacio allows visitors of all dress codes to view its elegant interior, on the occasions of its special events, concerts and plays, it is a more formal place. In contrast, Parque Alameda, close to the pulsing heart of the great city, serves both as an end unto itself and a great artery for those passing through to the center.

It is said by the locals that all things are possible in Mexico City. If that is true of the city, then it is especially true of Parque Alameda. Every day, its many tree-lined paths are filled with street vendors, musicians, preachers, lovers, and observers. There are artisans selling their colorful paintings, carvings, and pottery. You will find a wide variety of food stands situated among kiosks offering workout equipment, clothing, religious icons, faux-designer sunglasses, as well as cheap. likely pirated CDs and DVDs. People sell most anything here, in some cases, themselves. If you’re looking to listen, eat, buy, stroll, or get laid, Parque Alameda offers it at a good price, or none.

On the other side of Lazaro Cardenas is the massive, bustling, and for the uninitiated -intimidating, Historic Center. There are over 23 million counted people in Mexico City. If you go there on a Saturday afternoon, you can meet most of them. The Zocalo, or central plaza is second in size only to Moscow’s Red Square. Surrounded by cathedrals and the centuries’ old buildings of the Mexican government, it is the home to great cultural events, light festivals, protests, and concerts. Each Christmas the city constructs the world’s largest ice-skating rink, hockey boards and all. A trip around the rink’s circumference can take the better part of a day. When the is surface is cleared for cleaning, you could land a 747, assuming it had studded tires. When they open the gates and the public tumbles out, it becomes clear they should have built it twice the size. Thousands of skaters, of varying degrees of skill, enjoy the ice beneath them and the bright sun above.

But the Historic Center is more than the grand Zocalo. It was once home to part of the Aztec civilization. You can’t see ritual human sacrifices these days, but you can marvel at the majestic and haunting ruins. Much Aztec architecture remains, confined now, pale in size when compared to what their less than benevolent Spanish rulers built. The Spanish influence, though Spanish rule is long over, is everywhere, from language, to society, to buildings, to religion.

The Center is also an impressive outdoor shopping center and food emporium, a bizarre bazaar, crammed with whatever you want, and things you didn’t know existed. Its many long streets are jammed with shops of all description, often bunched by themes. If you want musical instruments, you will find streets with nothing but. If you want auto parts, or clothes, or computer equipment, it is the same. For blocks, you can walk from one store to the next featuring only that which you came to find.

The competition for business is fierce. Though it may be your first visit to Mexico City, you will soon notice that a lot of people know you. Everyone selling something is your amigo and calls you that. Even if you’re the most miserable and unpopular prick in your home country; in Mexico, especially in the Historic Center, you’ll be hailed constantly by your newfound friends.

Mexico has a growing middle class and is much better off than many of its Latin American neighbors. Its poverty does not match that found in much of Africa and Asia. Yet wealth is still concentrated in the hands of the relative few. Some social safety nets exist, but survival for individual Mexicans depends largely on them. Some have good jobs; some have jobs, and the rest must find various ways to get by. Usually this means they become small business owners. But these are not small businesses with several employees looking for tax breaks. These are families with tents and shacks and stands looking to eke out enough to pass another day. There is no unemployment insurance as the western world would know it. Instead of money, the government gives you space, a spot on a park path, a small piece of a sidewalk, a booth in a row of booths, all so that people can offer their wares or their services, exist and be less of a burden on the state.

In the Center, amidst the cacophony of sound, the cornucopia of color, the aroma of smells, the crush of humanity, the all-out assault on your senses, sits Calle Venustiano Carranza. Intersecting with Lazaro Cardenas, ten minutes on foot from the Belles Artes, it is a street made up almost entirely of sporting good stores. As you make your way from one to the next, it is apparent that many of them bear the same name – Marti. No one is singing Guantanamera, but if it’s sporting goods you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.

Alejandro Marti owns most of the sports’ stores on Venustiano Carranza, and many more throughout the country. If you want to play baseball, there is a store dedicated to that popular sport. If you want to box, there is no trouble finding gloves. If you’re looking for soccer equipment, you need look no further. If it’s sportswear you want, you can shop until you run out of money. Whatever it is – to play a sport, or look like you play one, you need do nothing more than mosey down Venustiano Carranza with your credit card in your sock. Alejandro Marti has it all.

All that is, except a son.

He had a son; a bright, handsome, energetic boy in love with life. Fernando Marti loved wakeboarding, soccer, competing and even had his own musical group. Given the wealth and love of his father, Fernando Marti lacked little. He lived a life foreign to most Mexican kids his age yet wanted nothing more than to be one of them. The pictures of his lively eyes, his happy face don’t necessarily say more than the snapshot of that time. Still, it’s safe to assume that he was content, athletic, curious, and set for life. He was also a target.

The dark side of Mexico is corruption- at all levels. In a country with great contrast in wealth, those that have money, aren’t overly keen on sharing it. It’s easier to buy politicians than pay taxes. Those in the middle, so grateful not to be poor, carry on.  Those with little, desperately, sadly, accept their lot. They are consoled by a conniving church which tells them, without offering proof, they will be rewarded in the next life.

Over the last number of years, recently exacerbated by the deadly battle for control of the flow of drugs into the US and Canada, some not very nice people have taken to kidnapping wealthy, sometimes not so wealthy Mexicans, or members of their families. It is a well-organized industry. The money from such kidnappings allows them to avoid the harder lives of their neighbors. They buy drugs to sell to the lucrative market on the other side of the Rio Grande or purchase the latest weaponry from the great gun dealer to the north.

Like many wealthy Mexicans, Alejandro Marti knew his son was a target. He took great precaution to keep him safe. Each day Fernando went to school in a chauffeur-driven armored car. Sitting next to the driver was an armed bodyguard. They varied the route traveled each day to avoid the predictability that would have made an ambush easy.

The strategy worked well until the one time it didn’t. On June 4th, 2008, the car carrying Fernando Marti was stopped by the police. As the occupants waited anxiously to be moving again, the cops approached their vehicle to explain the problem. As it turned out, the police were the problem. They attacked the vehicle, strangling the bodyguard and kidnapping, both the driver, who was later tortured and killed, and young Fernando Marti.

Considering the fortune of Alejandro Marti, the ransom demand was high. With reason to suspect the police, Marti hired a private consultant, and the money was paid according to instruction. Having said nothing publicly for fear of corrupt police involvement, and after waiting almost two months for a response, in August of 2008, Marti went to the media. He pleaded for the return of his son and offered to pay more for his release. Like any loving parent, he would have given anything to have his boy back. Sadly, it was a plea in vain. Fernando’s bullet ridden body was discovered in the trunk of a car in the same Mexican City neighborhood where Leon Trotsky met his violent end in 1940. Unlike Trotsky, Fernando Marti had no blood on his hands.

The bodyguard, believed to be dead, somehow survived, and was later able to identify the killers. Two of the three arrested were police officers, one of them, the leader, a woman.

It’s unclear why the boy was killed. Perhaps the money didn’t arrive in the right hands; perhaps there was fear that he could describe his abductors. Most likely is that these are remorseless murderers, who, having lost their decency while pursuing personal gain, think nothing of targeting and slaughtering innocents, including children.

In the early evening of most days, near a park in the center of Mexico City, a middle-aged lady pushes a bulky, heavy cart laden with a water-filled cauldron, cobs of corn, and various supplies. By the time she arrives at her patch of business space, she has pushed the cart more than a mile over pavement heaved by earthquakes, always with a watchful eye on the city’s notoriously impatient and aggressive drivers. Having repeated this task over many years, like a commercial Sisyphus, her arms are the size of cannons, not as sleek perhaps, but equally powerful. The guys at Petaluma wouldn’t have a chance.

For the next four hours, she stands behind her cart, which can be turned into a three-sided tent when it rains, and sells corn on the cob and esquites, boiled or barbequed kernels of corn sold in a cup. Either can be served with any of mayonnaise, cheese, chili pepper or lime juice. On a good day, she might make seventy-five dollars, more often much less, from which she must pay the corn, the cart, the supplies, and the storage. When she finishes for the night, she makes the return trek with the cart, sometimes in rain and cold – at least lighter now without the water and the corn. Tucking the wagon into the storage shed for the night, she begins the hour and a half journey home by metro and bus. In the morning, the preparation and the routine start all over.

On rare occasions her daughter shows up and helps for awhile. A pretty girl of university age, she bubbles with the enthusiasm, happy and full of life. Maybe she won’t make it to the Louvre, or St. Paul’s, or Times Square. If she’s lucky, she won’t make it to Ciudad Juarez. But it’s not likely she’ll end up pushing corn for a living either. Her mother, through force of will and body, has given her a chance at a less onerous life.

Amidst its majesty and pollution, its wealth and its poverty, its great mass of humanity, most poor Mexicans sweat out a hard, honest living, anyway they can. Much more than New York, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Thousands of people walk around with portable shoeshine shops. If you’re in Mexico City and you don’t have a military polish, it’s not for lack of opportunity. Five-and six-year-old kids, put on clown suits with big balloons in the back making their asses enormous, seemingly funny. When the light turns red, either performing alone, or at the top of a pyramid of people, so that drivers can better catch their act, they put on a brief show before walking among the cars seeking whatever change people might spare them. As the traffic moves again, they wait stoically on the boulevard until the next stoppage signals the start of a new shift. With Shakespeare, “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.”

Mexico City is a grand and glorious destination. It is one of those places that should be seen at least once in a life, not as some sort of stupefied religious mandate, rather as an experience of the possible and the unlikely, the magical and the obscene.

It is a hard city, one where you can be alone among millions, where you see countless acts of empathy and generosity, where many people who don’t have much, try to look after those who have even less. It is at once noble and heart-rending.

It is a world where youngsters put on Pagliacci suits and perform for money, where exhausted women push unwieldy carts over long distances to keep their families alive another day, and where some, the country’s cowards, shoot 14-year-old boys for sport.

Paul Heno 2009