Rafael amaya tijuana4/8/2023 ![]() Next to the track’s main building is what the groundskeepers call “ la capilla,” the chapel. On a Saturday afternoon last year, one of the bears was locked in a paralytic trance, his drooling mouth pressed up against the bars, his paws robotically lifting up and down in a series of repeating ticks that kept him dancing in place. The palatial entrance to Agua Caliente is framed by cages of groggy bears and lethargic tigers that reek of feces and stale urine. Once a year, Hank hosts a special race and lets his private stash of miniature monkeys ride the dogs like jockeys. Many of them are caged down in the track’s infield, where they go unnoticed by the Tijuana locals and Tecate-clutching gringos who shout numbers like desperate pleas at the sprinting greyhounds. Between the track and the residence lies Hank’s bucolic personal playground, which includes a bullring and a sprawling private zoo that houses an estimated 20,000 animals. Below lies the Agua Caliente racetrack, which Hank took over in the ’80s, long after its Prohibition-era heyday as a south-of-the-border Hollywood escape. The house is perched at the top of Hank’s private compound. Some have nicknamed him Genghis Hank, and her Hankita Péron. Hank lives in the house with his third wife, Maria Elvia Amaya de Hank, a fixture of Tijuana’s social elite. He is also one of Mexico’s leading traffickers in exotic and endangered animals. Besides owning Tijuana’s Pueblo Amigo hotel and shopping center, Hank (his paternal last name) heads up Grupo Caliente, a gambling and gaming empire encompassing the Agua Caliente racetrack in Tijuana and a string of off-track “sports book” betting parlors throughout Mexico. The house belongs to Jorge Hank Rhon, the 48-year-old presidente municipal, or mayor, of Tijuana, who also happens to be one of the richest and most scandal-laden men in Mexico. The dogs and the gate are there either to protect the house from the world outside, or to protect the world outside from what’s inside the house. They are pets on a gated, private driveway that leads to an imposing mansion on a tree-lined hillside above downtown Tijuana. Most are lying down, some are sleeping, some are playing, all flopping paws and biting snouts. In Tijuana, there are the backfires of cars, the moan of dying brakes, the whistles of taqueros, the songs of coin-craving troubadours armed with toy accordions, and there are the barks of the dogs. On busy stoplight corners next to kids juggling sticks orange with ragged fire, at the entrance to muffler shops chained to metal posts, beneath an oil-soaked Chevy chassis abandoned in a junkyard, along any road where they trot, in gangly packs of misshapen mongrels, until they’re crushed or abducted or shoved into a dark box in somebody’s frontyard garage. “I come to Tijuana to bark.”ĭogs bark everywhere in Tijuana. ![]() “Oh, that’s easy,” the La Jolla dog replies. “If you have it so good up there,” they ask the La Jolla dog, “then why do you always come down here to be with us in Tijuana?” He brags about running around in a big back yard full of beautiful flowers and freshly cut grass, about how his owners feed him scraps of filet mignon and grilled salmon, and about how at night, they let him jump up on the bed with them and cuddle into the morning on sheets of 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton. The La Jolla dog tells the Tijuana dogs how good he has it. All of them are locals, except for one, who comes south every day to visit from La Jolla, the precious coastal enclave north of San Diego where lawns are green even in the driest of droughts. There is an old Tijuana joke about a group of dogs hanging out below the border.
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