Will literature help soften officers’ rough image?

Most of those being tutored haven’t completed high school.

WASHINGTON POST

NEZAHUALCOYOTL, Mexico — In the luminous opening scene of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Aureliano Buendia confronts a memory.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” Garcia Marquez wrote.

But here in Nezahualcoyotl, Garcia Marquez’s opening line reads, “Many alfas later, in front of a 44 squad, Col. Aureliano Buendia had a 60 about that distant afternoon when his father 26 him to 62 ice.”

Confused?

The police here aren’t. The Nezahualcoyotl version speaks their language: cop-speak.

Police supervisors here are translating some of the greatest works of the Spanish language using police radio codes.

So Macondo, Garcia Marquez’s mystical Colombian village, is a “22.” And Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’ windmill-tilting hero, is a “skinny 67.”

Nezahualcoyotl’s stab at remaking the Spanish-language literary canon in terms that can be easily understood by poorly educated police officers strikes at a fundamental problem in Mexico.

The country’s educational system is woeful. And the police, most of whom come from poor neighborhoods where the schools are the worst of the worst, reflect it.

In a survey of 15-year-olds in 30 developed nations, Mexico ranked last in reading comprehension, according to a study released last month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Most of the 1,300 police officers, firefighters and rescue workers now being tutored in Nezahualcoyotl have not completed high school, and barely any have gone to college.

Mayor Victor Bautista Lopez says he believes that teaching them to read will improve their communication skills and help them overcome the image of police as uncouth, uneducated brutes.

“Like politicians,” Bautista Lopez said, “they’re almost at the bottom when it comes to prestige.”

Nezahualcoyotl sprawls over 60 square miles east of Mexico City.

With more than 1.1 million residents, it is the country’s seventh-largest city, a poverty-gripped place with a long, sordid history of police corruption scandals.

Outside city hall and the police station, there is a statue of Nezahualcoyotl, the Aztec-era “poet king” who gave the city its name. He holds a writing quill and a scroll.

Police here can’t help but think he would approve of their new literary enthusiasm.