Finding the News

by Peter Copeland

  This was one of many times when I experienced “magical realism” not as fiction or art, but as just another day at the office.

  “Sorry about that,” Victor said later, back behind the wheel. “They got a little carried away.”

  “No,” I told him. “I appreciate their honesty. Americans want everyone to like us. We want to think we only do good in the world, and we forget that not everyone sees us that way.”

  Victor stopped for a six-pack of beer. The day was still hot. We drove around the edge of town watching the sky turn red and orange as the sun went down. “Salud,” I toasted him with a beer. “Driving around like this is what we call a champagne flight.”

  “I love it,” he said, laughing and popping open a beer can between his legs. “A champagne flight!”

  When I returned a few years later, Victor had taken a government job as a press spokesman. “On the other side of the envelope,” he said with a little laugh that did not hide his disgust. He told me a reporter friend had just published a series of stories on drug trafficking. Shortly after, two men walked into the reporter’s living room and shot him dead in front of his wife and children.

  The threat level to all of us increased when traffickers kidnapped, tortured, and murdered a DEA agent in 1985. If they would kill a US federal agent, an American reporter no longer was safe. The following year, my paper in El Paso got pulled into the violence while preparing a story about a trafficker named Gilberto Ontiveros, known as the “The Mophead.”

  The Mophead was building a luxury hotel in Juárez. When our photographer arrived to take pictures of the building for a story, he was jumped, beaten, and tied to a chair. The Mophead’s men put a pillowcase over his head, screamed at him for being a DEA agent, and beat him bloody. They boiled a pot of water and threatened to burn off his face. They made him lower his pants and said they would rape him. One man pointed a pistol at his head and pulled the trigger. Click. After hours of abuse, they loaded him into the back of a car and drove out to the desert, where the photographer was sure he would be killed. Instead, they released him, battered and frightened, but strong enough to walk back into town.

  My newspaper in El Paso went on a rampage against the Mophead. The Juárez papers—which knew the traffickers but rarely wrote about them—republished our stories in Spanish. The federal government in Mexico City was embarrassed enough to send a team of agents who arrested the Mophead. I was called back from Honduras, where I was covering the civil war in neighboring Nicaragua, and told to make arrangements to interview the Mophead in jail.

  Jail was too strong a word. More of a modest hotel where the Mophead was earning honored guest points. The Mophead wasn’t living in luxury, but he was not without power behind bars. I didn’t feel safe meeting him in prison. I could imagine an accident or a fight, then a riot, and there would be no witnesses.

  I drove out to the prison with Stephen Baker, a Spanish-speaking reporter from the paper. I was glad to have an ally for courage and a witness in case things went badly. Even if we survived the interview, it didn’t mean we were safe from the Mophead’s reach. Living in Mexico City, I was more vulnerable than when I had lived across the border in El Paso. This interview didn’t feel like just another story for the paper. One of our people had been attacked, and it could happen again. I felt no hatred for the Mophead, just wariness and fear.

  Steve and I were led through heavy gates and holding rooms. It was unusual to be allowed into the prison, but the government wanted everyone to know the Mophead really was behind bars. We were put into a small room and told to sit at a table to wait. After a bit I heard distant doors clanging. Then the door to our room opened, and there was no mistaking the Mophead. He was big, thickset, wearing tight black jeans and a bright yellow sport shirt, and he came toward us like a powerful dog straining on a leash. He really did have a mop of curly dark hair, which poked out from under a black cap emblazoned with a skull and crossbones.

  Most people are a little nervous before an interview with reporters. This guy did not look nervous. He looked confident, and angry. “What’s your name?” he snapped at me.

  I mumbled something.

  “What? Do you have a card?”

  “Gosh, you know, I just ran out.” I patted my pockets.

  The Mophead wasn’t interested in pleasantries. He started talking fast and picked up speed. He spat out the words in machine-gun bursts, punctuating every sentence with creative obscenities. He was used to owning the room and everyone’s attention. He told us his life story, cracked jokes, and bragged that he soon would be out of jail. He tilted back in his plastic chair, happy to have an audience writing down his every word.

  I found myself laughing with him, trying to remember he was not a normal person.

  “I’m not a saint,” he said, “but I’m not like they say, either.” He called himself a retired drug dealer and a victim of international politics.

  “They busted me because the government wants to look good with the gringos.” That business with the photographer, he said, was just a misunderstanding. Yes, his men had worked him over, but they let him go once they realized he wasn’t a DEA agent.

  Then he got serious, big arms on the table, and stared at me. “You know what really pisses me off about you and your fucking newspaper?”

  Oh God. Here it comes. I’m dead.

  “That fucking picture of me you keep running on the front page. It makes me look like shit.”

  We promised to get a more flattering photograph, and left the prison as quickly as we could. I didn’t hear from the Mophead again until after he had talked his way out of jail. Soon his business was bigger than ever. The DEA and FBI were searching for him, but he had gone underground. And just as I had feared, he was gunning for me.

  Back at home in Mexico City, I noticed strange clicking sounds on my telephone. All the reporters assumed our phones were tapped by the Mexican government, but now it felt more ominous. I also worried about Maru. Someone could get to me by hurting her, and she had none of the protections of being an American or a journalist. Had I put her in danger by loving her? Would I have to be more cautious in my reporting to protect us both?

  One night my phone rang and Maru answered. An angry man, obviously calling for me, spat in English: “You’re dead. You’re really dead.” He hung up. I hugged Maru, but we both were trembling. What were we going to do, call the Mexican police? I did report the call to the US embassy, but they could not protect us. We had to look out for ourselves.

  I begged Maru to be more alert on the street. I was nervous when she came home late after dance performances. I didn’t want to scare her, but acknowledging the risk of my position as a reporter could help protect her. She wasn’t at all surprised I had been threatened, maybe just that it had taken so long. “Don’t you dare stop doing your job,” she told me, ending the discussion about whether I should ease up on drug stories.

  Shortly after, on a quiet Sunday morning, I got another unexpected call, this one from the Mophead’s American girlfriend, whom I had gotten to know. We chatted a bit and I asked, not really wanting to know the answer, “Where is he these days? He’s on everybody’s most-wanted list.”

  “You mean Gilbert?” she asked innocently. She always called him Gilbert instead of Gilberto. “He’s right here sleeping. Do you want me to wake him up?”

  “No! No!” I whispered. “Let him sleep, please.”

  “You know he’s mad at you,” she said. “You keep writing about him.”

  “I have to keep writing about him,” I said. “He bought his way out of jail, and now they want to lock him up again. He’s selling drugs like nothing happened. And he beat up our photographer.”

  “Well, he’s still mad at you,” she said.

  We talked for a while, and she caught me up on the latest narco-gossip. I wanted to end the call quickly for fear of waking up the Mophead. I really didn’t want a cranky trafficker on my case.

  Finally she said good-bye. “Keep in t
ouch,” I said, silently hoping I never would hear from them again.

  6

  SHAKEN

  ——— ON WHEN THE STORY GETS PERSONAL ———

  Most of the time on assignment I did not worry about getting hurt. When I was scared, I often learned later that I had been afraid of the wrong thing.

  I was in El Salvador with Alejandro, my regular driver, cruising along a quiet stretch of country road just after sunrise. The date was September 19, 1985, my 28th birthday, and I treated myself to a day outside the city. Visiting rural areas, I was on guard for ambushes, crossfire, and landmines, but out here on the open road, I allowed myself to relax. I was pleasantly dozing in the sunny passenger seat, listening to music on the radio, when the announcer burst in with a bulletin: earthquake in Mexico City! Hundreds dead, buildings collapsed, bridges toppled, and roads cut in half.

  Maru.

  “We’ve got to get back to the hotel,” I told Alejandro. “I need to make a call.”

  When we pulled in front of the Hotel Camino Real, television crews were throwing equipment into vans. Running past them into the lobby, I picked up enough conversation to understand they were flying to Mexico to cover the earthquake.

  I ran up to my room and told the operator to put through a call. I gave her Maru’s number. I turned on the television to see the news and paced the floor. The operator rang and said the circuits to Mexico were busy. I should try later. I called the office in Washington, and the desk told me to stay in El Salvador. The daughter of the Salvadoran president had been kidnapped, and it was a big story in the US papers. It was too early, the editor said, to know what was happening with the earthquake.

  I didn’t argue. I just packed my stuff and checked out of the hotel. I didn’t care about the story, either the one in El Salvador or the one developing in Mexico. I needed to see Maru. Commercial flights were canceled, but one of the networks had found an old charter plane with a pilot willing to fly to Mexico. I put a few hundred dollars into the pot and got one of the seats. The aged prop plane was banged up on the outside, and inside the cabin was as cold as if the windows were open.

  It was dark by the time we approached the airport, and I could see the golden lights of Mexico City spilled onto the black earth beneath us, just as always. I hadn’t expected to see any lights, and certainly not all those cars on the road. I had imagined a city squashed by Godzilla, but things looked normal. I had a shortwave radio pressed to one ear, and I shouted the news bulletins to my colleagues above the noise of the engines.

  For many of us covering the region, Mexico City was not just a story, it was home. The newspeople on the plane had spouses and children living there. We willingly shared adventure and risk on the road, but now the danger had surprised us at home. I was glad we were together on the plane. I was part of the group now. People used the term pack journalism as though it were a bad thing, but a pack was comforting when we feared for the people we loved.

  I shouted the names of neighborhoods where the destruction was greatest and translated the frantic news reports into English. The street where I lived, Versalles, was mentioned again and again.

  Maru would have been asleep that morning when the quake hit, wearing her blue pajamas and tucked under a half dozen blankets in her dark, musty apartment. She lived in a stubby, four-story building made of thick stone. I imagined getting there and finding it in a heap. I would scratch and dig with my hands, desperate, but there was so much rubble. In my mind I saw her brothers and sisters discussing how to dress Maru’s body for burial. I shook my head and tried to concentrate on the radio news. My imagination was flying faster than the airplane.

  When we landed, we were told to wait for Mexican customs, but I slipped through a side door, walked into the first empty office, and dialed a phone on the desk. Maru answered—“¡Diga!”—and I felt the tension lift. Some part of me had known she was safe, but I had braced for the voice of her roommate saying Maru was dead. Instead, Maru answered with her usual crisp, “Diga.” It always sounded like she was telling a dog to “speak,” and my American friends jokingly had adopted her brusque manner of answering the phone.

  “I’m fine, Pito.”

  She always called me Pito, which sounded like PEE-toh, and was her Spanglish version of my name. Only later, when she yelled for me across a busy flea market and everyone laughed, did she mention that pito also was slang for penis.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Maru said. “I was knocked out of bed, but nothing happened.” She had been in touch with her family, and everyone was safe.

  When I tried to tell her how worried I had been, she told me to stop being silly.

  My shoulders relaxed. I took a breath. It was time to go to work.

  I arrived at her apartment by taxi, and Maru embraced me at the door. I looked her up and down and hugged her again. She playfully pushed me away, and we jumped into her car. We got within six blocks of my apartment before soldiers stopped us at a roadblock. I showed them my Mexican press identification, and we started walking, slipping under a rope stretched across the road. The streets were dark because the electricity was out, and the air was pungent with the rotten smell of natural gas from burst tanks and broken pipelines.

  Behind a line of soldiers, I could see the remains of the Hotel Versalles, which had left its foundation and slid into the street. Five stories had crashed into a heap of concrete and steel about thirty feet high, spitting out beds, tables, chairs, sheets and towels, pots and pans, and magazines. There was no space between the floors—the piles had been squished into a thick cement sandwich.

  I always got my hair cut by a woman named Clementina who worked in the barbershop across the street. From the barber’s chair I watched tour buses delivering camera-toting tourists to the hotel. I wondered how many guests had been buried under the rubble.

  People were camped in front of their buildings, afraid to go back inside. Before the earthquake, kids played soccer on this street using piles of stones to mark the goals. To drive by, cars had to wait for a break in the action, and the players would reluctantly make room. There were no kids playing soccer now. Parents held their children close.

  We found a dozen of my neighbors, some of them wrapped in blankets against the chill night air, sitting on the steps of our darkened apartment complex. The building had been evacuated, they said, and they were guarding against looters. “Thank God you weren’t here when it happened,” said the older woman who lived below me.

  Behind her, the underground garage was filled to the top with dirt and bricks, and the only car visible, a white Ford, was flattened. I couldn’t see my car at all. At first I thought our building had fallen straight down, but it was the building next door that had dissolved into brick and dirt and poured into our garage like lava. I was grateful for the solid construction of our building.

  “Is everyone all right?” I asked Modesto, the porter.

  He shook his head. “They say fourteen people next door were killed.”

  One of my neighbors cautioned, “Don’t light a match or a candle. There’s too much gas. Don’t even switch on a light. The light won’t work, but it might make a spark.”

  Modesto led the way with a flashlight up the yellow concrete steps. When Maru and I got to the door of my apartment, I paused, half expecting someone or something to be waiting inside. I turned the key and pushed open the door. It looked as if the place had been ransacked. The television had tottered off the table onto the floor. Plants had tipped, spilling dirt across the carpet. Pictures had shaken off their hooks and crashed, spewing broken glass. The building had shaken and swayed so much the bedroom doors had slammed shut.

  Modesto said there didn’t appear to be any structural damage, but we had to stay out for a few days until engineers could check the foundation. He said my car was not even scratched, but it was blocked in by a pile of rubble. He promised to dig it out soon. I grabbed clothes, a handful of fresh notebooks, and my printer, and we left.

  I interviewed
a few more people, trying to understand how it felt when the earth moved, before we returned to Maru’s apartment so I could write. I had been up since dawn, nearly twenty-four hours before, but I was wired awake. I had to slow down and put the story into perspective. I still didn’t know the scale of what had happened in the enormous city, just what I had seen with my own eyes. I was frustrated, feeling that I was looking at the world through a straw.

  Much of the city seemed undamaged, but certain areas, including my neighborhood, had been shaken to the ground. How was I going to make it seem real to people in the United States? How was I going to capture so much in five hundred words? I decided to write the story like a letter home, describing what I had seen on my block rather than follow the stiff formality of a straight news story.

  A more immediate problem was how to get my copy to the United States. The local phone lines worked fine (like normal anyway), but the international lines were down. I finished two stories before the sun came up, made copies on the printer, and took a taxi to the airport. I checked out the passengers waiting for a flight to Ciudad Juárez and found a young American couple. For thirty dollars they agreed to deliver the story to our paper in El Paso, just across the Rio Grande from Juárez. To be safe, I went to the counter for a Miami flight, and a man in line volunteered to phone in the story to Washington when he landed. Both couriers completed their missions.

  Since I didn’t have anywhere to stay, I took a room at the Maria Isabel Sheraton, a modern high-rise hotel on Reforma in front of the Angel of Independence monument, not far from where Maru and I had met. The monument had been damaged in the 1957 earthquake. I thought it strange that the last bad earthquake had happened the year I was born, and this one was on my birthday, but not once did I worry there might be another earthquake. I figured the earth moved, and then it had settled. So I was not at all concerned when the bellman showed me to my room way up on the top floor of the Sheraton.