“Conflictive. Serious. Sad.”
“I saw you in the movie,” I told her. “You seemed nervous, bouncing your leg. I thought you were waiting for someone.”
“No, I pulled a muscle,” she said, opening her trench coat and turning out her leg to show me the inside of a lovely muscular thigh packed into a pair of jeans. I was unable to speak, fortunately.
“I saw you too,” she said. “You looked so serious eating your popcorn.”
We walked down Reforma, once in a while lightly bumping into each other just enough to express interest if not desire. Tall palms rose up in front of the sleek steel and glass buildings that towered over the street. Every few blocks, amid the modern offices and banks, there stood a heavy, stone building from a distant era. The night was clear, and everyone seemed to be out strolling. We talked and laughed and she took my arm. I could not understand everything she said, but I nodded and smiled a lot.
“Do you have any friends in the city?” she asked.
“A few but not many.”
“Amigos or amigas?” she asked, men or women?
I knew we were playing a game here, and I was glad to play. “Mostly amigos,” I said. “How about you? Do you have many friends?”
“No, I am very demanding.”
I asked, “Will you be my amiga?”
“Encantada,” she said, “delighted,” and my heart fluttered.
Suddenly we were at the corner of Insurgentes Avenue, and it was time to part ways. I was leaving the next day, back to El Salvador, but I promised to call her in a week. My trip turned into two weeks, but I called Maru the day I arrived back in Mexico.
“Hi, this is Peter,” I said in Spanish.
“Who?”
“Peter, the guy from the movie.” Silence. “You remember, the journalist.”
“Oh, yes. How was your trip?” The way she pronounced trip was like I had not really gone anywhere.
The trip was fine, I told her, but longer than expected. I was disappointed she didn’t remember me, but after a little gentle prodding, she agreed to meet me for another movie, this time sitting together. We fell back into easy conversation and started seeing each other. She didn’t speak English, but wanted to learn. She helped me with Spanish and taught me about Mexico, about dance and the arts, and about herself.
She had music on all the time, and one day she played a catchy tune called “Corazón de Melón.” She said the title didn’t refer to cantaloupe, as I had understood, but was a term of endearment like “sweetie.” Just then I realized why Cuca in El Paso had called me that, and I smiled at the memory.
After a few months, Maru agreed to take me to visit her family, who lived an hour away on an unpaved street in a rough and struggling part of the city called Iztapalapa. Maru had told me she was one of twelve children of an itinerant father and a mother who had raised them while running a small grocery store in the front room of their cinderblock house.
When Maru was about thirteen, she was discovered by a dance company. She was trained rigorously and soon was traveling the world with the famed Ballet Folklórico de México. Someone had opened a door for her, and she rushed in, exhilarated to find herself and a career she loved.
Coincidentally, I had found my journalism career the same accidental way, and it was one of the few things we had in common. Now that same randomness, or luck, or maybe guardian angels, had led me to her.
I was nervous meeting Maru’s mother, but I thought we had a nice conversation. Maru complained I didn’t talk with her mother, or anyone for that matter: I interviewed them. I thought talking politics was a good icebreaker.
“Señora,” I said, “Do you vote in the elections?”
“I always vote,” she said.
“If you don’t mind my asking, do you vote for the PRI or the PAN?” I said, mentioning the official party and the largest opposition party.
“They’re the same, aren’t they?”
Either this was a shrewd political analysis, recognizing how the two parties served as counterweights to support the larger system, or Maru’s mom was not too interested in politics. “What do you mean?”
“The PRI, the PAN. Who knows? On the day of the election they come and pick me up in a bus. We go and mark little pieces of paper and put them in a box. Then they give us a sandwich or something and they take us home.”
I nodded. The only vote allowed on those government-run outings was for the ruling party. Here I was writing all of these detailed analyses of Mexican politics, and I was missing the story. The politicians and experts I interviewed were participants in the system, both for and against the ruling party, and knew well how Mexico worked at their level. But what about the majority of people? Was this how one party had survived so long, through the powerlessness of citizens and the coercion of the state?
“Why do you bother to vote?” I asked her.
“It’s my patriotic duty, isn’t it?”
Maru’s mother spoke differently than Maru did, and I had trouble understanding her. It was not only her accent, but the way she saw the world. She was from old and rural Oaxaca, wrapped in a dark shawl of centuries of tradition and beliefs. She had cut her braids and given up her long skirts when she moved the family to Mexico City, but she still had country attitudes. Life was hard because it was meant to be hard. If things were too good, she would have worried. I was different from Maru, but I could communicate with her, even when we had to pass a Spanish-English dictionary between us. With Maru’s mother, I feared the distance was too great.
Because of Maru, and then her family, my professional interest in Mexico became personal. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I started to write about films and books, sports, music, soap operas, and travel destinations. One trick I learned from New York Times reporter Larry Rohter was to write for every section of the paper, thereby making myself valuable to the entire news organization and less dependent on the international desk (and less easy to fire). I even wrote for the food section, interviewing the great chefs of Veracruz about preparing their famous red snapper.
My editors, however, were less interested in fish recipes than in hard news. I was drinking up Mexico because I found it fascinating; getting my editors excited would require a US angle, and the big story was the crashing Mexican economy and its potential impact on the United States.
During the early 1980s, Mexico was in a full economic crisis, unable to pay its debts, forced to devalue the currency and cut public services, and facing a devastating decrease in revenue because of the world market’s low price for oil, its main export. Unemployment was high, people were protesting in the streets, and some US analysts warned about a revolution on our border.
I walked over to the US embassy for a 4 p.m. appointment to talk about the economy. There was a large fence around the building to keep out the occasional protests, which were loud but not violent. While demonstrators shouted anti-American slogans in front of the embassy, in the back of the building many other Mexicans lined up to apply for visas to visit or live in the United States.
I joked to Maru: “Their slogan should be ‘Yanqui go home, but take me with you.’” She didn’t laugh. In fact, she didn’t get most of my best jokes. I usually had to point at my knee to signal a joke, or “knee slapper.”
A serious man named John Walsh came into the embassy press office and directed me to sit on the couch. He sat in a chair across from me. He looked at his watch theatrically. In response I checked my watch; I was fifteen minutes late. “We may be in Mexico,” he intoned, chiding me for my tardiness, “but we are not of Mexico.”
His description summed up my situation precisely. I was living in Mexico, working in Mexico, and I even had a Mexican girlfriend, but I was not part of Mexico. I immersed myself in Mexican affairs, wrote stories, and sent them off to Washington, where they were distributed to hundreds of newspapers around the world. But I might as well have sent my stories into outer space: after I pressed that final key on my computer, I ne
ver heard a thing about what I had written.
It was not the same as being a reporter in El Paso, where I wrote a story in the morning, and it appeared that afternoon on the rack at the gas station. In El Paso, people called to complain about or praise my stories, and I felt I played some role in the community. The name recognition also was a welcome form of compensation: a byline was a daily bonus in lieu of cash.
Another difference was that in the United States, getting a story was as easy as picking up the telephone. In Mexico, nobody in government would even take my call, let alone give me information over the phone. The telephone book itself was worthless; it had so many wrong numbers that people referred to it as the “Mexican Book of the Dead.” I had been spoiled by the rules back home. There, I needed information, and government officials gave it to me, either because it was required either by law or by custom. In Mexico, my reporting techniques weren’t working.
When I set out to write about the economy, for example, I called repeatedly to the spokesman for the Mexican Treasury Department, whose job was to respond to questions from reporters. A secretary answered, and I explained, for the third time, what I wanted. The spokesman’s not in right now, she said, but I’m happy to take your message.
The next day I called again. A different secretary cheerfully took a new message. Another day went by without a word. My office was pressing me for a story on the economy, so I met with local businesspeople, Mexican economists, and “Western diplomats”—what we were allowed to call experts who worked at embassies representing many different countries, not just the United States.
It was after 9 p.m. when I tried the Treasury spokesman one last time. Officials often went back to work after a late lunch. On the first ring, the guy himself answered. The conversation in Spanish went something like this:
“Hello, Peter,” he said, warmly, pleasantly surprised to hear my voice. He either had not seen my earlier messages or he was a terrific actor. “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you. We’ve got to get together for lunch.”
“That would be fantastic,” I said. “I was hoping for an interview with someone at Treasury about the economy.”
“Sure, of course,” he said. “Do you have someone in mind?”
“Not really,” I said. “I was hoping you could recommend someone.”
“With pleasure,” he said. “Let me get your number, I’ll check around and I’ll call you back with something. Deal? And let’s do get lunch. I’ll have my secretary call you to set up something. Great to hear from you.”
I flushed with pleasure. Okay, I thought, now we’re rolling. I had met the spokesman a couple times, and that was paying off now. I might even do a longer story—what we called a “takeout” or a “thumbsucker”—on the Treasury interview, if he got me someone big enough. Finally, I had gone from outside the door to inside the room.
By the end of the week, I ran out of time and filed what I had on the economy. I worked on a few other projects and waited for the promised call from Treasury. I didn’t make any lunch plans because the spokesman had said we would get together, although he didn’t say when. Nor was I sure if we were going to do American lunch, around noon, or Mexican lunch at 3 p.m. I snacked a little and checked the phone to be sure it was working. By 4 p.m., I was starving and made myself something to eat.
I waited until the magic hour—9 p.m.—and called again. He answered cheerfully: “Peter, how the heck are you? What’s going on? What’s new?”
“I’m wondering if you had any luck getting me that interview,” I said.
He didn’t hesitate. “You know what? I did ask around, and listen, I was just going to call you. It’s good that you called first. The truth is, and I talked to the minister and various people on his staff, the truth is that for you to really understand the economy, this is probably not the right place for you to start. I think, especially because you asked about the peso and its relative strength vis-à-vis the dollar, well, as you know, that’s really not in our purview. So what we are thinking is that the best place for you would be the Bank of Mexico . . .”
I started to stay something, but he kept going.
“. . . So the Bank of Mexico . . . let me see . . . I’ve got a friend over there . . . let me just find his number. I’m going to give you to my secretary and she will give you the number. He’s a friend of mine so just use my name. Great talking to you. Ciao.”
I never did get the Treasury interview. Even when I was granted an audience with government officials, they rarely told me anything, and the more authority they had, the less likely they were to reveal something valuable. I prepared well for interviews, rehearsed my questions, dressed in my best suit, and stopped for a shoeshine on the way. Many times all I received in return was a cup of coffee and cookies on the good china and a lecture about the five historic principles of Mexico’s foreign policy.
I should have realized I needed to develop deeper sources. On one of my early reporting trips into Mexico, while I was working in El Paso, I had seen just how helpful the right person could be.
I had traveled to La Paz, south of California, to cover the 1983 summit between President Ronald Reagan and Mexico’s president Miguel de la Madrid. The night before the meeting, I was invited to dinner by Ricardo Chavira, a reporter friend from the paper in San Diego, and the top Mexican journalists covering the summit.
Bottles were lined up on the outdoor table along with heaping plates of fresh seafood. The food was delicious, and it was a breezy warm night, but the conversation was annoyingly dominated by one of the Mexicans. He was young and bearded and talked constantly. He tore into a huge lobster, obviously on an expense account. After dinner he sipped a French cognac and smoked a Cuban cigar he carefully removed from a leather case. The guy lived pretty well for a reporter.
He did say one interesting thing. He predicted that Reagan would greet de la Madrid with a Mexican-style embrace, called an abrazo. The Mexicans did not want to appear rude but also did not want such a lovey-dovey image to dominate Mexican television, so de la Madrid was going to counter the bear hug with a vigorous, American-style handshake.
I walked back to the hotel with Ricardo, ready to sleep for a few hours before the presidential meeting the next morning. I asked him, “So who was that Mexican reporter who kept flapping his gums?”
Ricardo laughed. He’s not a reporter, he said, he’s one of the top analysts in the Mexican government, their expert on the United States. Then I understood the deference everyone had showed him, and it made me reconsider what he had said.
The next day, Reagan stepped off the plane, his usual smiling, ambling self, and put out his big arms to hug the smaller de la Madrid, who deftly parried the attempted abrazo with a gracious handshake. Reagan smiled, and everybody was happy. I would not have noticed the momentary awkwardness if I hadn’t been looking for it.
I asked Ricardo for the phone number of my new friend from the Mexican government, and he became one of my deep, protected sources. Since there is no statute of limitations on “off the record,” I can’t name him, but years later he rose to a cabinet-level job and was considered for president of Mexico.
I realized, again, that the best way to learn was to cultivate people who knew things. And the only way to get them to talk was to earn their trust. In that sense, Mexico wasn’t different from Chicago or El Paso, where my best tips had come from people who confided in me. Trust and loyalty were especially powerful in Mexico, and even in business transactions people gravitated to friends and relatives, willing to pay a little more to someone familiar rather than to risk being taken by a stranger. This made the country less efficient, but it was a cultural trait I could use.
Working for Scripps Howard, which most Mexicans could not pronounce let alone identify as a newspaper company, just made the personal connections more important. If people in Mexico (or any country) wanted to leak something internationally, they went first to the big US newspapers. No one was going to seek out less powerful news o
utlets, but they might leak something to me, if they trusted me.
I never promised anyone a bogus story (or money) in exchange for cooperation, and I tried to be frank and honest about my job. Mexicans got a kick out of American directness because their political culture was dizzying with polite platitudes and empty promises, like the runaround I got when asking for the interview at the Treasury Department.
I began a series of courtships, usually over lunch or coffee, to develop new sources. I learned to go slowly and be patient. A good Mexican lunch could last three hours, and sometimes the best information emerged in the final minutes. I tried not to ask questions that would make someone feel like he was breaking a confidence, or worse, betraying his country.
As a reporter from the United States, I often was suspected of having a secret agenda to help my country or damage Mexico. Even Maru wondered if I was a spy, since, according to her, I was too nice to be a real reporter. (This was not meant as a compliment.) On the other hand, Mexican officials regarded US reporters as less likely to harm their careers because the stories would not be published in Mexico.
Pepe was a senior official who was close to power, because of both his job and his family. He knew people in the government, and the people behind them in the shadows, and he felt important talking about them. I was deeply curious about how things worked, and my desire to understand Mexico was passionate and genuine. Perhaps Pepe thought he could influence how Mexico appeared in the US media, but really, I think he just enjoyed my company; I was an appreciative audience for his opinions.
During one memorable lunch at our regular spot, Los Guajolotes (“The Turkeys,” but it sounded better in Spanish), he was colder than normal. The waiter brought him the first of many rum and Cokes. “I told you I wanted a lot of ice,” Pepe snapped at the waiter. “I thought the service here was supposed to be good.” After a few more drinks, the normally charming and gracious Pepe was more unpleasant. He was complaining about something—I gathered it was something I had done—but he was talking in circles and beginning to slur his words.
Finding the News Page 10