Into the Maze at-14

by Dick Stivers

  Legends tell of Quetzalcoatl inventing the calendar and astronomy and mathematics. Other legends describe the beauty of the god’s own city, Tula, where the feather-pennants of his palace floated like shimmering flames. Though archaeology disproves the enrapturing myths of Quetzalcoatl, the reign of the god-king represented the ultimate achievement of Mexican culture.

  But Quetzalcoatl fell.

  The violent devotees of death, demanding war, demanding human blood and hearts to gorge Tezcatlipoca, overwhelmed Quetzalcoatl.

  In time, myth transformed the god-king from a gold-skinned Nahuatl to a being with white skin and a beard, clothed in shimmering metal, who marked his path with crosses. The Toltecs believed Quetzalcoatl would someday return from his exile to retake his throne.

  This myth doomed Mexico to conquest by European invaders.

  In the centuries following the expulsion of Quetzalcoatl, the Toltecs, who had invaded Mexico, suffered the invasion of the Chichimecs. These tribes of merciless barbarians worshipped a god who spoke only to priests and warriors, Huitzilopochtli. Led by their god, they wandered the valley, attacking the weak cities, making alliances with the strong. Later, one tribe of the Chichimecs established their city on a marshy island in the center of Lake Texcoco. They were the Aztecs.

  The Aztecs dedicated their city of Tenochtitlan to war. As their first act, they erected a temple to their god Huitzilopochtli and gave him a sacrifice of the “sacred eagle cactus fruit,” human hearts.

  Huitzilopochtli demanded unending blood. The Aztec lords believed that if they failed to appease their god’s hunger for victims, the sun would fail to rise. They sacrificed their own young men and the warriors of other nations. The Aztecs fought their wars not to expand their empire, but to take captives for the altar of their god. Ceremonies demanded hearts. At the dedication of a new pyramid to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztecs sacrificed eighty thousand captured warriors in four days.

  Sacrifice decimated the young men of the defeated nations. Taxes impoverished the citizens. But invincible armies of Aztec warriors threatened any rebellious nation of their empire with annihilation.

  Then couriers brought word of the return of Quetzalcoatl. The couriers told of floating mountains coming from the east, bringing a man with white skin and a beard, clothed in metal. The white man brought an army of superhuman white warriors who walked on four legs, preceded by priests with crosses.

  And so the Spanish marched into Mexico. Every enemy of the Aztecs believed that alliance with the Spanish offered release from centuries of domination by the Aztec warrior-priests. With the gunpowder weapons and the horses of the European invaders, they hoped to smash the armies of the Aztec empire and win freedom for their people.

  Together, the Spanish and their Mexican allies destroyed the Aztecs.

  But instead of granting their allies freedom, the Europeans ravaged the Mexican nations and cultures in a holocaust unequaled in Mexican history for savagery and murder. The Spanish conquerors of Mexico claimed the wealth of the conquered land as theirs by the divine right of victory. The looting of the gold of Tenochtitlan, the enslavement of the defeated warriors, the mass rapes of the starving widows and daughters of the defeated, the destruction of the temples for building stone…Spanish greed and lust had no limit: not law, not conscience, not human pity. What the Spanish saw, they took.

  Spanish knives pried out precious stones. Spanish wrecking bars tore the gold and jade and turquoise from the holy places. What had been sacred, beyond price, became only loot.

  Cortez took his share and distributed a share to his white warriors. Shares went to the imperial court of Castille to buy perfumes to scent the stinking, never-washed bodies of the nobility, to buy spices for the palace dinners, to buy silks and velvets for the splendor of the royal audience. But the greatest share of the loot went to the king and queen of Spain themselves.

  Though the Mexicans continued to fight the Europeans, they suffered defeat after defeat at the steel blades and muskets and cannons of the invaders. If the Mexican warriors avoided the swords and the bullets of the Castillians, smallpox — the most lethal of the Spanish weapons, the weapon that decimated entire cities — eliminated the last organized resistance in central Mexico.

  From La Ciudad de Mexico, the Spanish overlords dispatched hundreds of expeditions, numbering from a few soldiers to thousands, to search for other cities with wealth to loot.

  To the south and west, they found more lands and peoples to conquer and rape and enslave.

  But to the north, the Spanish found desert lands and peoples they could not conquer: the Yaquis, the Comanches, the Apaches.

  The Spanish turned to the slavery and exploitation of Mexicans to sustain their wealth. In the mountains where the Spanish found gold or silver, Mexicans broke the stone and carried the ore from the mines. Mexicans slaved day after day, endlessly, without any hope of release but death. The Spanish overlords watched the carrion birds feeding on the emaciated bodies of Mexicans who had been Knights of the Eagle and Jaguar before the destruction of Tenochtitlan, and they called it’ ‘God’s justice.”

  Where the Spanish found no precious metals, only fertile land, the conquerors created haciendas. Mexican slaves worked the vast estates. They had no rights, no future but slavery, no hope. They suffered through a life lower than animals, because the animals knew only pain and death, while the Mexicans remembered Mexico before the Spanish and despaired.

  Finally, after years of debate between the Spanish and the Catholic Pope, the Church ruled that los indlgenashad human souls and could receive the Mercy of Christ. The Mexicans received the religion of the Spanish, but the suffering continued.

  Spanish colonists flooded Mexico. Year after year, the Spanish overlords exacted wealth without measure from Mexico. The king and queen of Spain appointed viceroys to rule “New Spain.” Generations passed as kings and queens of Spain ruled through their viceroys.

  By the terms of the First Audiencia, no Spaniard born in Mexico could hold imperial office. The Spanish born in Mexico, called the Creoles, resented this dictatorial ban. Pure Castillian blood flowed through their veins, they spoke the language of the court, they attended universities in Europe, and yet they did not enjoy the opportunity for prestige and enrichment offered by the Imperial Office of Viceroy.

  Centuries passed without change. Then, in Spain, King Ferdinand VII lost his throne to Joseph Bonaparte of France. The Creoles, who had tolerated the rule and taxation of a Spanish emperor for generations, refused to share the wealth of Mexico with a French emperor. The Creoles demanded independence for New Spain.

  Mexicans also demanded independence. In a decade of civil turmoil, an alliance of the Creole elite — the Church, the army, and the landowning “families” — defeated armies oundigenasand mestizos — Mexicans of mixed European and Indian blood — who wanted national independence, freedom from slavery and the distribution of land to the people. Mexico gained independence from Spain, but now the Spanish Creoles ruled the Mexicans.

  One hundred years of violence and dictatorship passed before the Revolution. But the traditions of slavery and feudal domination did not end. The Creole elite never forgot their Spanish birthright of wealth and privilege.

  Though the blond hair and fair skin of the Spanish had been darkened through the generations, the Creole elite continued to rule from Mexico City. They spoke Castillian. They honored the European conceits of racial superiority. They sent their children to European universities. They never surrendered their control of the government.

  This aristocracy of modern Mexicans who traced their ancestry to Castille continued the tradition of the exploitation of Mexico. Their Spanish forefathers stole the gold of Tenochtitlan. The Creoles stole the land and enslaved the Mexicans. The modern elite exploited the “liberated” campesinos and workers. The elite found foreign co-conspirators — North Americans and Europeans — to rob Mexico of natural resources. The elite made illegal contracts for the delivery of minerals, wood a
nd oil, then invested their foreign earnings in Swiss banks and political bribes.

  Indigenasand mestizos sometimes held the presidency of Mexico, but the elite always held the government. Campesinos received plots of land, but the elite held vast, fertile valleys, watered by rivers, financed by its own banks. Indigenasfound work in industry, but the elite owned the factories. Some villages received water and electricity, but the elite enjoyed Cancun and Paris. Mexicans voted, but the elite selected the candidates.

  Then, in 1970, the intensely nationalist administration of President Luis Escheverria threatened the control exerted by the wealthy. Land reforms cut into the vast holdings of the leading Creole “families.” Taxes took a share of their profits to provide schools and hospitals for the people of Mexico. The emergence of a distinctly Mexican culture, proud and strident, hateful of the Spanish rape of their ancient nation and the invasions of other foreign forces, challenged Castillian domination.

  In this resurgence of Mexican culture, artists glorified the mysteries of pre-Conquest America. Film directors made movies with actresses who had dark hair and indigenafeatures. Federal attorneys found the prosecution of corrupt millionaires to be a stepping stone to political recognition by the Mexican people.

  The Castillians struck back at the people of Mexico with the traditional weapons of Latin oligarchies: corruption and deceit.

  The elite, in their demand for power to ensure wealth and privilege, had through the centuries developed corruption to an art. They instinctively knew the formulas for determining, at what price and in what circumstances, gold or dollars would break an oath of office.

  They knew the techniques of the invisible manipulation of local officials.

  They knew when to apply dollars and when to apply violence.

  As the term of President Escheverria ended, hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes ensured the nomination and election of a new leader faithful to Castillian traditions.

  Though the administration of President Lopez Portillo appeared to continue Escheverria’s policy of promoting Mexican nationalism, the new leaders only mouthed meaningless slogans. These new leaders — who bragged of their pure geneology dating back to the Conquest, born into privilege, with Castillian names — blatantly exploited the nationalistic prejudices and misconceptions of the Mexican people by condemning the United States for its wealth and history of dominating the nations of Central and South America.

  Simultaneous with their campaigns of denunciation of the United States, and of NATO and world capitalism, the Lopez Portillo Administration received a gift from deep beneath the rich soil of Mexico.

  Oil.

  President Portillo launched an ambitious national development program. But the president declared that petrodollars could not fund the creation of a socialist state as quickly as he wished.

  With the oil beneath Mexico as collateral, the Lopez Portillo regime borrowed billions of dollars from American and European banks to finance the development of Mexico.

  But these billions of dollars never reached the people of Mexico.

  The wealthy elite became even more fabulously wealthy. Banks in the United States and Europe reported year after year of record deposits as Mexican leaders looted their nation.

  But when the price of oil fell, when Mexico no longer had the flow of petrodollars to meet the interest payments, the orgy of greed ended.

  Inflation attacked the value of the peso. The price of corn and beans, the staple foods of the common people, doubled then doubled again. Campesinos by the millions went north to work in the fields and factories of the United States.

  In the cities of Mexico, mobs demanded an accounting of the stolen billions.

  Leaving the crisis to his newly elected successor, President Lopez Portillo retired to his fifty-million-dollar mansion outside Mexico City. In a final ceremony, the departing president stood before the Mexican senate and accepted the praise and applause of the elite of Mexico. For he had already set in motion something that would buttress the fortunes of the Castillians through the years of his successors. He had begun the resurrection of the heroin syndicates of the sixties and early seventies.

  Castillian wealth and privilege had been secured again.

  And as had happened many times in Mexican history, foreign invaders once more came to the ancient land.

  But these new invaders did not journey from Europe or North America. The elite of Mexico had found their allies among the criminals of El Salvador, Argentina and Chile.

  Unlike the other invaders of Mexico, the fascists of the International came by invitation.

  And Able Team came, the last invaders, because they damn well gave themselves no other choice.

  10

  In a storeroom of the abandoned garage, Vato prepared a drug. Gunther lay lashed to the springs of an iron bed, ropes securing his arms and legs and torso. He and the men of Able Team watched as Vato took the ingredients from a leather pouch, black with age and handling.

  Vato put the knot of a cactus button on a board and chopped it with a knife.

  “You think peyote will make me talk?” Gunther asked.

  “This is not peyote.”

  “I am not unfamiliar with Mexico. I know what that is. I know I will not talk. You will only make me sick.”

  “It is like peyote, but it is not.” Vato smiled to the prisoner. “You will soon know the difference.”

  An old porcelain cup and a rusty auto valve served as a mortar and pestle. After cutting the cactus button to hundreds of fine bits, he dropped it into the cup and crumbled in another substance. He ground the mixture to a powder. He added pinches of other powders. Then he took a folded square of paper from the pouch. The paper contained dried beetles the size of dimes.

  “What do you call those?” Lyons asked.

  Vato smiled and shook his head. He would not reveal the secrets. He dropped two of the beetles into the cup. Their shells crackled under the pestle as Vato ground them into the mixture.

  Gadgets turned to their prisoner. “Last chance, colonel. Talk now and you won’t have to eat that crazy shit.”

  “It will do nothing!” Gunther declared. He glanced around the circle of onlookers.

  His eyes met Coral’s for a long moment.

  Then Gunther laid his head back on the squeaking bed. He closed his eyes against the searing light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  A couple of tar-colored lumps went into the cup next. Vato pressed down hard, grinding and blending. He worked patiently, stopping from time to time to stir the mixture with his knife blade, then grinding again. When the mixture became a homogenous green-black dust, he tasted it and nodded.

  “Hold his head,” he told the others. “Open his mouth and pinch his nose shut. Kino, you pour the water.”

  Lyons and Blancanales immobilized Gunther’s head while Gadgets tried to pull his jaw open. Gunther locked his jaw shut.

  “Relax,” Gadgets told him. “Some people pay money to take drugs.”

  Gunther struggled against Gadgets’s hands. Glancing to his partners, Gadgets asked, “Was it because I didn’t say please? Come on, open up. We gave you the chance to talk. Please, open up…You’re not cooperating…”

  Gadgets slammed his fist into the side of Gunther’s head, using the full force of his arm to drive the knob of his center knuckle precisely into muscles and nerves over the sphenoid bone of Gunther’s temple. A second blow struck the ropes of muscle over the condyloid process of the jaw.

  Stunned, his jaw numb, Gunther could not resist as Gadgets pulled his mouth open.

  Vato dropped in the powder. Gunther strained to twist his head. Kino carefully poured a stream of water down Gunther’s throat. Gunther had to swallow or drown.

  “Now we wait.”

  The effects came slowly. After thirty minutes, Gunther began to blink his eyes and shake his head from side to side. He breathed deeply. Lyons leaned over Gunther and saw that his eyes no longer focused.

  Gunther
’s breathing came in rasps. Then his eyes closed. Vato grasped his wrist and counted his pulse rate. Vato nodded.

  “Question him now.”

  “Who are you?” Blancanales asked in English.

  Violence seized Gunther. Arching his back, all the tendons of his neck standing out like cables, he strained to break the rope that bound him to the iron bed. His body trembled, sweat streamed from his face. He gulped air in panting gasps.

  Vato studied the reactions, then took a plastic kit from his drug bag. The kit contained a vial and a disposable syringe still in the plastic envelope. Vato assembled the syringe and put the needle into the vial.

  “This will calm him.”

  “What is it?” Blancanales asked.

  “Morphine.”

  “Don’t put him to sleep!”

  “He will not sleep for days.” Vato injected a few milliliters of the narcotic.

  The spasms stopped but Gunther continued struggling. Blancanales leaned over him and asked him in Spanish, “Quitnes?”

  Gunther raved through the night.

  *

  Lyons and two of the Yaqui teenagers, Kino and Jacom, stood guard on the rooftop. They alternated shifts, sleeping and watching the dark street. Cars and trucks sped by, bouncing over the broken pavement. People walked past without a glance at the abandoned garage. The street noises, the jets roaring overhead, the radios and televisions covered the screams and shouts of Gunther’s delirium in the storeroom.

  After midnight, the neighborhood fell quiet as the thousands of families in the tenements finally slept. But the sounds of the city never stopped, the traffic noise of the avenues and expressways still going on, planes and trucks and unmuffled motorcycles hurtling unseen through the gray, polluted night.