Torn from the World

by John Gibler

  “So you do know them,” the police officer said.

  “I mean, I saw them at the school, the technological institute, and I thought they were students.”

  “You know,” the officer said, “tell the truth, because you do know them.”

  “If I knew them I’d take you to where they live, their house. But I don’t know who they are.”

  “And this datebook is yours?”

  “No.”

  “Yes it is. Admit it.”

  “How can I admit it?”

  “You guys are fucked.”

  “Why,” Gerardo asked him. “How much do I owe for the . . . give me a ticket. I mean, if I was a bit . . . I wasn’t intentionally blocking the road. The car overheated. That’s why we pulled over to the shoulder. We didn’t block traffic or anything like that, anything wrong.”

  By this time the two young men had walked a hundred or so meters and had crossed a railway bridge. The police raised their rifles and shouted: “Get back here! Come back!” Gerardo told me that the two young men stopped while the police aimed their rifles at them and shouted for them to return. “So those guys took off running,” he told me, “One of the police chased after them for about fifty meters, but couldn’t catch them; they left.”

  The police kept interrogating the three men, asking repeatedly who they were, where they were going, what their jobs were, and how they knew the two young men. Gerardo Tzompaxtle told the officer interrogating him that he ran a small store. Both he and his brother are the owners of a small corner store in Astacinga, where they both live. Gerardo also grows corn, two different kinds of beans, and peas. The police did not believe him. (Gerardo told me that later the police searched their store as well as both his and his brother’s houses.) The police—and later many of the reporters and columnists who commented on the case—said that it was impossible for an indigenous man such as Gerardo to have a 2001 Volkswagen Jetta. So they said: The brothers aren’t small farmers and businessmen; they are criminals. “So that’s where discrimination comes into play, don’t you think?” Gerardo asked.

  I asked Gerardo if at any point the police showed him anything written in the datebook that they said they found in the trunk. “There were some documents in there,” he told me. “They said they were . . . like an analysis about whether or not that guy Obrador could win the elections.” I asked him about the “propaganda documents alluding to the EPR” that the PGR claimed to have found in his car. “They got that off the internet and put it in the case file,” he told me.

  The police held the three men there on the highway shoulder for about two hours. The police then took them to a police station in Rio Blanco, a bit outside of Orizaba. There the police stripped the men of their wallets, belts, and watches and documented the belongings. The police tried to document the two cellular phones found in the young men’s backpacks as belonging to Gerardo. At the station in Río Blanco the police once again separated the three men and interrogated them.

  “That’s where they started interrogating us again,” Gerardo said, “asking who we were, whom were we going to kidnap, whom were we going to murder. Then a bunch of luxury cars arrived. A lot of people. I would guess that they were feds, the ones who interrogated me. They didn’t really give us a chance to rest. One would come in, then another, and all of them asking us who we were, what we were doing, if we were kidnappers or guerrillas. That’s when they started throwing that term at us. After a while, it would have been about seven at night, they brought us out of the police station and took us to the offices of the PGR in Orizaba. They put us in a little jail, a room. Around eight at night they started interrogating us again, whether we were guerrillas and all that. The local police were freaked out. They asked us what we were up to, because outside the Army had shut off all the streets. Then the police asked us where we had been planning to hide the stash of weapons they found. It was just a lie they made up. We didn’t have any guns. I’ve never even shot a gun. They said that they had found a whole bunch of guns on us, but that was pure lies.”

  Their families found a lawyer who went to the PGR offices in Orizaba, but the police would not let the lawyer speak with the three men. That Friday, January 13, the men spent the entire day closed up in the room. A tall, civilian-dressed man made them take off their shirts and pants and face the wall stretching out their arms. He examined the soles of their feet, their calf muscles and their shoulders. Then he said: “You can walk a good while with that backpack, no? Yep, these are guerrillas.”

  Around dawn on Saturday, January 14, the police took the men out of the cell where they had been held since Thursday evening, with their wrists and ankles cuffed, and led them to a vehicle with ten armed agents. They sped through all the tollbooths. “We didn’t even know where they were taking us,” Gerardo told me. They arrived at a SIEDO office building in Mexico City around seven in the morning. They were made to walk down “a gauntlet of armed and masked agents. They told us that now they were going to make us talk, that they were going to beat the shit out of us. They mocked us.”

  The police again separated the three men and again interrogated them. Around noon each of the three men was made to give a statement to the federal prosecutor with four armed agents from the Federal Investigative Agency (AFI) guarding them: two in front and two behind.

  “So you’re the famous Rafael?” the federal prosecutor asked Gerardo.

  “No.”

  “Rafael,” he repeated, “Andrés’s pseudonym.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Where is he?” the prosecutor asked in a mocking tone.

  “I haven’t seen my brother Andrés in years. I would lie if I told you where he was. I haven’t seen him in years. I might not even recognize him if I were to see him.”

  “Well, today you guys are fucked and it’s Rafael’s fault. Your brother, we had him. We had him and he slipped out of our hands.”

  “Um, I don’t know. . . . ”

  “You guys are going to do some years inside. You’re going to spend some years in prison.”

  “And that asshole laughed, that federal prosecutor,” Gerardo Tzompaxtle told me.

  On October 16, 2008, two years and nine months after their arrest, Gerardo and Jorge Tzompaxtle Tecpile and Gustavo Robles López were acquitted of all counts of organized crime and kidnapping due to lack of evidence. They were found guilty of attempted bribery, a crime that carries a three-month sentence. At ten that night the three men walked free.2

  * Quotations from the police document Parte Informativo de Servicios No. 043/2006 appear here mostly as they do in the original, including some grammar errors. I corrected a number of the police report’s spelling and punctuation errors in the process of translation, as it seemed too forced to try to reproduce those Spanish language errors in the English translation. A few words are illegible in the scanned copy I have on file and are represented with ellipses here.

  TZOMPAXTLE AND NUBE

  IN HIS WRITTEN TESTIMONY ANDRÉS Tzompaxtle refers to his wife and children as “Nube” (cloud): “When I had been pinned down my closest loved ones came into my mind and memories of testimonies of various compañeros and other social activists about what falling into enemy hands entails. I [said to myself], today it is my turn, my loved ones may never see me again, I will do everything to resist, and if I must die I hope not to betray anyone, and you, Nube, take care of the treasure you hold in your hands.”

  Tzompaxtle spoke about them several times during our interviews, especially in relation to the house in Acapulco that he never revealed to his torturers. “I would never have given up that house. It became the symbol, or I converted it into the symbol, of my life. I traded that house for my life,” he told me. The house fell into enemy hands due to the carelessness of his compañeros and it was there, in that house, that military intelligence agents found the photograph.

  After some time I asked Tzompaxtle if I could speak with Nube, interview her about her experien
ces, about what she lived through during those months when he was disappeared. He told me that he did not know if that would be possible, but that he would think about it and consult with Nube. When we saw each other a few months later, he told me that I would not be able to talk directly with Nube, but that I could give him some written questions and he would bring me her answers. I made another proposal: What if I lent Tzompaxtle my digital voice recorder, wrote down a few questions that he could ask her, and he could record their conversation and bring me back the recorder with their interview? He said yes.

  I tore a sheet out of my notebook and quickly wrote down some questions. I asked if Nube would mind telling me a bit about her childhood, her adolescence, her decision to join the armed struggle, how she met and fell in love with Tzompaxtle, how she found out about his disappearance, and what she lived through during those months, how she found out that her husband had escaped, and what she felt upon being reunited with him. I told Tzompaxtle that my questions were only guides to begin a conversation, and that he should ask any questions he wanted to, and that she should feel free to speak about anything she might want to share. I told him that I hoped to listen to her speak about her life, her thoughts, and her experiences having her compañero—husband and father of her children—disappeared and then reappeared. I took out my voice recorder and gave it to him.

  I was aware of the theoretical and practical risks of my proposal. Would Nube modify her answers speaking to her husband and in the presence of a voice recorder? Yes, the person who listens always impacts the person who speaks and their manner of speaking. By the same logic, she would modify her responses speaking directly to me. Could Tzompaxtle manipulate her responses or even find some other woman to say whatever he wanted her to say? Theoretically, yes. But, on the one hand, if I so mistrusted Tzompaxtle I wouldn’t be doing this. On the other hand, the core, bare-bones, essential truth of a story can be heard in the voice just as it can be seen in the face of the one who speaks. There may be distortions, evasions, silences, missing information, but the emotional truth of having lived through the disappearance of one’s husband would be present. Evidence of this could be found in any of the numerous meetings or protests organized by family members of the disappeared. I would not be able to see Nube’s face, but I trusted that I would hear a bit of her truth in the recording of her voice. And after listening to the recording, that trust only deepened. When Nube doesn’t want to speak about something she tells Tzompaxtle so directly, just as he did with me. Such honesty inspires trust, as do the emotions in the voice. I felt that I could hear Nube smiling when she spoke of being a small child in the country and seeing newborn birds in their nest. I could hear her anger when she spoke of growing up hungry, working for poverty wages, suffering from racism. I heard the certainty and anger in her voice when Tzompaxtle asked her if she ever thought that he could betray her during torture and she fired the word “¡Jamás!” (Never!) like a bullet. I heard her voice break, repeatedly, when she tried to describe the pain she felt when her compañero was disappeared.

  What follows is, with minimal editing, the interview between Tzompaxtle and his wife Nube.

  Nube: My childhood . . . my childhood was two things: the negative and the positive, that is the beautiful. Hunger, for example, is not beautiful because you suffer humiliations. My childhood. What I remember is that it was really fun for me, happy: running, free, always free, always running. Or when my mom—more than anyone, her—taught me to work in the house, I was happy then. But on the other hand, when I didn’t have my mom then there wasn’t any happiness. And being hungry, and barefoot. But more than clothing, things to wear, it was food that worried us. It wasn’t that I was well-dressed. Hunger, it isn’t very . . . what more can I say about that? Hunger is hunger. It doesn’t matter if you are barefoot, it doesn’t matter if you only have one dress, if your stomach has something . . . if you have something to eat.

  Happiness was running, being with my mom, with my brothers. Living, among other things, it was the happiness that I had. Beyond that, my happiness was the necessity of helping someone. Perhaps carrying water, because they’d give you a piece of bread or something to eat.

  Tzompaxtle: When you speak of playing, what did you play? What was play for you? Besides running and jumping.

  Nube: What other kinds of playing? I didn’t have dolls, but something that the indigenous people teach is that you don’t necessarily have to have a doll. Do you know what we played with, what they taught me to play with? For example, when we had corn cobs, my mom taught me that a cob could be a baby. They gave you the corn cob half-wrapped in a piece of a rag and they told you: “See, this is your doll.” But in the end, it wasn’t a doll; it was a corn cob. We played with those. My cousins and I. We played a lot together.

  We also played “mealtime.” We cut some big leaves and those were our plates. We grabbed some rocks and those were our pieces of bread. We pretended that it was food. During the fruit seasons we played with the fruit, with whatever there was. When you don’t have anything, then what are you going to play with? We had some animals, though not many. That was also fun: when the little lambs are born it is really cool. It excites you because they are being born, you see it differently. It filled me with joy. Even today when I see something tiny that has just been born, it is a little creature that is alive and it makes me . . . I don’t know. Those are the things I played with.

  Tzompaxtle: Did you see it as a pet?

  Nube: Well, to be honest, I didn’t know what a pet was.

  Tzompaxtle: How did you see it?

  Nube: Well, it was more like part of the family. A little animal that we also need for protection, because it would watch over us at night. I just knew that it was a little animal, that we had a puppy there, in the house, like a part of the family.

  Tzompaxtle: What feelings, or sensibilities, did it create in you?

  Nube: Sensibility . . . joy. So much, a lot . . . It isn’t the same as having a doll. You are playing with something that is alive. It isn’t the same as a stuffed animal that they buy for some rich kid, for a child that has the possibility to have things, as something that is alive, no? And that is . . . for me it was always exciting. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

  Tzompaxtle: What other things were a part of your childhood?

  Nube: Clouds, stars. Things that I don’t . . .

  Tzompaxtle: Were those your only favorite animals?

  Nube: There were a lot of things. In the country, even though you live in squalor, there is something more. For example, I was fascinated by, you know what? Little birds. I’d go look for their nests to see how they are born. There are little eggs there, and if you go back in fifteen or twenty days they’ll have hatched. That is really neat. You know what else? I’d look for tiny worms and I’d take them to the nests. The baby birds open their little beaks like this and then I’d give them something to eat. That was fun to me.

  The tree . . . to grow amidst trees. It’s not the same seeing cars and buildings without trees. Like they are lifeless things. That’s how the big cities are these days, more buildings than trees. I’d stick with what I experienced as a girl. All of it. Except the hunger.

  Tzompaxtle: What else did you learn as a child? What work did you learn how to do?

  Nube: In the country, well, to work the milpa,* cut weeds, split wood, gather wood, to grind using the metate.** I’m not saying that I do it well, but more or less I know how to prepare the corn for making tortillas the following day.

  Tzompaxtle: Okay. Anything else?

  Nube: Well, when I went to school, more than anything I liked the opportunity that I had. My brothers went, but they only learned a bit to read and write. My little brother went up to first grade. My brother who died didn’t really go to school. They taught me games. They taught me to defend myself during that part of my childhood.

  Tzompaxtle: What did you feel at school? What did school mean to you?

  Nube: To learn. To kn
ow more things. You know what? What intrigued me were big cities. I always said, “I want to go there, see how people live, maybe they live better.” I was always curious, since I was a girl. I’d say: “I don’t want to stay here. I want . . . ” It’s absurd. As a girl, when I was eleven years old, I learned to give injections. What made me so sad was that there were no doctors. But people came to know that I could give injections and they all brought me their babies. Sometimes they woke me up at night, or when it was raining. Even today it makes me so sad. I don’t know. Perhaps because my mom was always sick, but that, that feeling . . . I don’t want to go there because it hurts. It hurts just remembering it. No. I don’t want to.

  Tzompaxtle: What did learning to read, or learning to speak another language mean to you?

  Nube: At school they forced things on you that . . . Well, learning is good. To read and write, no? But the things that they started forcing us to do . . . Your language. They told you not to speak your language, that you had to speak Spanish. It was confusing. I mean, now I say “confusing” but then I didn’t even know what “confusing” meant. The first teacher I had didn’t speak Náhuatl, I don’t think. So it was hard for us, well it was hard work for me personally, to know what the teacher was saying.

  Later, when you start learning to read and the book is not in your language, you don’t even know what the book is saying. You don’t understand. It is hard for an indigenous person, for someone who doesn’t speak that language. And the questions . . . you have to answer them in Spanish. That part was really hard for me. I know that as I learned it was like a kind of awakening. And moreover, in the books we saw how people lived in the cities. That’s why I had the curiosity to see how they are, how people live there. Later I realized that the things the books said isn’t what it’s like to live there. You see it differently. There is a big difference. For example, when you read a book and then see how the people in your town live, how others live, and you see the inequality. In the book you see kids playing, going to school, and they have shoes and you see that you’re barefoot.