by Hector Camín
He pushed the photo aside and lay the package, a bulky manila envelope marked remittances, on the desk.
“I’ve been working on this for two years,” he said.
He undid the red string between the seals on the flap and the body of the envelope, then took out what looked like a leather saddlebag. It was, to be more exact, a square leather letter file with a rigid center panel and four flexible dividers that closed like an accordion over the documents between them. On each divider there was an engraving: a pasture; a factory smokestack; an oil well; and the head of an Olmec statue next to an Indian woman with long braids. Each divider bore the caption Destroy to create in large rustic lettering with the motto Whoever can add can divide in smaller letters below. Each image was framed by a border composed of intertwined pseudo-Aztec figures.
Rojano opened the leather dividers exposing three file folders, each wrapped in different-colored onion paper. Nervously and with painstaking care—he’d begun to sweat—he opened the first packet.
It contained a set of photos of semi-nude cadavers still fresh and bleeding from wounds to their skulls and bodies as they lay on stone slabs in what had to have been a smalltown morgue. Eight photos of eight bodies, among them a child of about ten, his lips pulled back by rigor mortis to expose his teeth, his small eyelids half shut. The caption in crude white lettering beneath the photos read: Municipality of Papantla, Veracruz, July 14, 1974. Also in the packet was a photocopy of the death certificate issued by the office of the public prosecutor, a file of some twenty pages, and the plat of a parcel of rural property with the surveyor’s seals and notations in the margins.
Rojano pushed the letter file and crepe paper to one side of the desk and slapped the photos down one by one in two rows of four as if dealing a deck of cards.
“There they are,” he said without looking up. His demeanor spoke volumes about hours wasted poring over this macabre game of solitaire. “What do you think?”
“What do you want me to think?”
“Don’t you see something strange about them?”
“That you’re collecting them so meticulously.”
“I’m serious, brother. Does the date mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“It’s the carnival of Corpus Cristi in Papantla.”
“Did they get killed at the carnival?”
“In part. They all died in the same incident.”
He waited for me to ask about the incident. I asked, “What incident?”
“At the market in Papantla,” he explained. “The police report said a group of armed men burst into the market screaming insults against Antonio Malerva. This guy.”
He pointed to a naked man with a big belly on the top row with two punctures in his ribs. He had a large mustache and a thinning curl of pompadour.
“He was eating lunch at a food stall when they caught up with him,” Rojano went on. “Witnesses said shooting broke out, and the death toll is what you’re looking at. But there’s a problem.”
He paused, waiting for me to ask what problem.
“What problem?” I asked.
“Antonio Malerva was unarmed,” Rojano said and again fell silent as if certain of the effect this revelation would have.
Granting the effect of the revelation and with due curiosity, I asked the required question. “Then who did the shooting?”
“No one knows. The fact is that none of the attackers were killed. The other fatalities were the woman who owned the food stall and her daughter.”
He pointed to the photos on the right in the lower row: a woman with Indian features who had been shot in the neck; and a girl with full lips and two bullet holes in her adolescent breasts.
“The two customers eating next to Malerva were also killed,” Rojano continued. “Prospero Tlamatl, a local Indian who helped at the church during carnival. He was identified by the priest.” He pointed to the left end of lower row: two shots to the neck, a blood soaked dress shirt, and a jaundiced complexion that contrasted with a scruffy whitish beard.
“And this last guy’s nameless. He was never identified.” He now pointed to the emaciated effigy of a peasant with leathery skin and no teeth whose blazing, half-open eyes recalled the photo of the dead Che Guevara.
“What makes this guy last?” I asked. “You’ve got three photos to go.”
From left to right next to the shot of Malerva were the photos of a man, a woman, and the child who caught my eye first.
“That’s precisely what I’m getting to.” Rojano said. He placed them in the middle of the desk. “What strikes you about them?”
First of all, they were bloodier than the others. The only blood-free part of the woman’s face was the tip of her nose. It was a classical face, the kind an artist might draw with a straight nose descending from a rounded forehead to flaring nostrils. Her widely spaced eyes lay deep in their sockets, and her high cheekbones all but disappeared in their final ascent to her temples from which a liquid seemed to flow, covering her lifeless features with a patina of wax.
“They belong to the same family,” Rojano said. He pointed to the adults. “Raul Garabito, who was a farmer, and his wife. The child is theirs. Now look closely. There are bullet wounds in the Garabitos’ bodies just like the others. The women and the child have wounds to the chest, the man’s are in his abdomen and ribs.” He pointed with his pen to the wounds in the photos. “But look carefully at their heads.”
There followed the requisite pause.
“Do you see the problem with their heads?”
I nodded mechanically.
“I’m talking about the source of the bleeding.” Rojano sounded vaguely impatient.
“From the wounds,” I said.
“From the wounds to the forehead,” Rojano asserted. “That’s exactly the problem.”
I drained what remained of my drink and once again put myself on the line. “What exactly is the problem?”
“They were all killed, but the only ones they made sure of were the ones they were after,” Rojano stated with conviction.
“They weren’t after Malerva?”
“They claimed they were, but the ones they made sure were dead were the Garabitos, not Malerva.”
“You’re saying that because of the shots to the head?” I asked.
“I say it because they were executed,” Rojano replied.
Acts of bloodshed have a peculiar kind of loquacity. I’d seen it often as a police reporter. People get run over minus their socks but with their shoes still on, shots penetrate a lung but cause only minor hemorrhaging, suicides who fire a .45 at their forehead wake up at home the next morning with a new part in their hair. There was no reason for the Garabitos’ head wounds not to follow the coarse logic of bullets.
“That’s what happens when people get caught in a crossfire,” I started to say.
“What crossfire?” Rojano insisted heatedly.
“You said there was a shootout, and these people got caught in the crossfire.”
“That’s what the witnesses said,” Rojano noted. “What I said was that Malerva was unarmed. What’s more, the Garabitos were also unarmed. So the question then becomes which of the victims fired? The Garabito kid? His mother? The woman with the food stall? Her daughter? Prospero Tlamatl? The unidentified guy? Tlamatl and the unidentified guy don’t have twenty pesos in their pockets between them. Can you imagine them with pistols in their waistbands?”
What I needed to do was not to imagine them but to follow Rojano’s logic. “So according to you, what happened?” I asked.
“The same thing that happened the following month in Altotonga,” Rojano said as he reached for the second file.
He unwrapped the (purple) crepe paper and spread the file’s contents over the desktop. It was a collection of newspaper clippings that explained how a drunk had fired into the crowd in Altotonga during the festival in honor of the town’s patron saint on July 22, 1974. He wounded five and killed two before fleeing, Roja
no explained, growing increasingly agitated. “He’d fired at least a dozen times because he hit twelve targets,” Rojano declared. “Unheard of marksmanship for a drunk.”
“He fled almost four blocks, and the mounted police who supposedly gave chase couldn’t catch up with him. At the very least he was a surprisingly fast drunk,” Rojano surmised, “and they didn’t catch him later either.”
He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and dried the sweat from his lips and cheeks.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“What didn’t happen. Read on.”
He handed me the autopsy reports on the cadavers. Certain passages were carefully underlined in red. In stilted coroner’s prose, the documents described the deaths of: Manuel Llaca, age 29, by shots from a .38 caliber pistol that struck him in the right groin area, the rib cage, and the left shoulder; and of the widow Mercedes Gonzalez de Martín , age sixty-four, from wounds to the abdomen, left arm, right gluteus and left temple (the latter enclosed in a double red circle). The report went on to detail the wounds inflicted on the other five casualties.
“Count the shots,” Rojano said. “Twelve shots counted one by one.”
I asked about the shots.
“They show the same pattern as in Papantla,” Rojano said, drying his hands with the kerchief. “Shooting breaks out, several people get killed, but only one gets the finishing shot to the head.”
“The woman shot in the head?”
“The woman they made sure was dead, yes.”
“What makes you think they’re the same?”
“Look at the circumstances,” Rojano started to say. The facade of domestic tranquility was cracking, and his habitual vehemence began to show through. “A drunk fires twelve shots from a .38 revolver, kills two, and injures five. But the .38 with a twelve-round magazine hasn’t been invented. The biggest ones have eight. Sot…, the drunk changes magazines in the midst of the shootout or someone other than the drunk is shooting.”
“Maybe he had two pistols.”
“He didn’t have two pistols. According to all the witnesses, he had one. But even if he had two pistols, how was he going to finish off the widow Martín? He never got that close to her.”
“You’re saying they were all shot in the head to make sure they were dead. So what? If you’re killed by gunfire, bullets are what kill you.”
“No, no, listen to what I’m saying!” Rojano leaped from his chair. “The Martín woman was already down when she was shot in the head. The shots came from in front of her. First she was shot in the abdomen, then in the left arm, and the impact flipped her over. That’s why the next shot got her in the butt. But she was shot in the temple in cold blood when she was already on the ground. They took advantage of the confusion to finish her off.”
His version was admirably descriptive and precise. It also betrayed many imaginative hours reconstructing what happened from a blur of forensic data.
“She could still have been hit in the shootout,” I insisted.
“What shootout, brother?” Rojano began pacing about the office, wiping his collar with his kerchief. “You’re looking at an execution, damn it! Don’t you see?”
“I see, but I’m out of whiskey. Is the bar closed?”
“Of course not. Whatever you like.”
He left the room, and I took a closer look at the files. The surveyors’ plats identified properties belonging to Raul Garabito and Severiano Martín. The former consisted of 300 hectares in the municipality of Chicontepec; the latter nearly 500 wedged between the eastern spur of the Sierra Madre and the Calaboso River in the municipalities of Chicontepec, Veracruz, and Huejutla, Hidalgo.
I opened the third file and saw more photos from provincial morgues. These were from Huejutla, five bodies cut down during the town carnival (November 1974) a few months after Papantla and Altotonga.
The accompanying newspaper clip from El Dictamen said that gunmen (i.e. the henchmen of local political bosses) mowed down the Arrieta brothers whom it described with characteristic editorial impartiality as “leaders of smalltime communist pseudo-peasant organizations.” The gunmen “achieved their objective at no risk to themselves by firing into the crowd at a cockfight killing five and wounding four. Except for the Arrietas, who were notorious communist agitators in rural Hidalgo, the remaining victims of the shooting were innocent bystanders.”
A typed list of the dead summarized Rojano’s very different version of events. Rather than the Arrieta brothers, he put check marks next to the names of Severiano Ruíz and Matías Puriel. I looked them up in the coroner’s report. Rojano had underlined the same sentence where it was repeated in two different paragraphs: “Projectile penetration is also visible in the left parietal area with severe disruption of the encephalic mass and superficial external burns characteristic of a projectile fired from a distance no greater than thirty centimeters.”
I was beginning to study the surveyors’ plats when Rojano returned with ice and mineral water which he placed on the stack of orange and mango crates next to the desk.
“The pattern is identical,” he said with a nod towards the third file while opening the bottles. “The Arrietas died in the shooting, but they weren’t the ones executed.”
He was already into his story so I served myself and asked about the executions.
“They were half brothers,” Rojano said, beginning to drink from one of the water bottles. Then, surprisingly, he added, “They were both sons of Severiano Martín, the man whose widow was executed in Altotonga.”
“All from the same family?”
“Sons of Severiano Martín, a dirty old stud who knocked up every woman around and sowed the whole area with sons. He didn’t give them his surname, but he gave his land to the two who got killed in Huejutla.”
“In Chicontepec?”
“Exactly. You looked at the plats already?”
I nodded.
Rojano continued: “Old man Martín had 1,500 hectares of the best land in the area, and he died without a will like all the other old-time bosses. But between them Severiano Ruiz and Matías Puriel owned some 350 hectares. They killed the widow who had 500 and executed the half brothers. That makes 850 hectares in all.”
“And who wound up with the land?”
“That’s the thing, nobody did. The lands went unclaimed.” Once again Rojano grew excited by his own words. “It turns out there are no heirs or relatives left to file valid claims to these lands. In a nutshell they can be easily acquired with a combination of money and the right political connections.”
“What do you mean in a nutshell?”
“In a nutshell I mean that two whole families have been executed in cold blood with alibis built in to divert attention at a cost of nine dead and nine more wounded.”
“That’s absurd. How did you manufacture this information?”
“How did I manufacture it?” Rojano bellowed as he leaped out of his chair. “Don’t fuck around with me, brother. I didn’t manufacture it. Ask me how I found out, not how I manufactured it. There’s nothing slanted in what you’re looking at, nothing inconsistent or made up.”
“Then how did you find it all out?”
“Anabela was the godchild and niece of the widow Martín whose maiden name was Mercedes González Guillaumín.” Rojano pulled out his kerchief as he spoke. “Aside from that, there are the letter files, the leather saddlebags the folders came in.”
I picked up the folder on the desk. Rojano kept talking.
“Everyone who was executed received one of these letter files months before receiving a bullet in the head. The one you have in your hands reached the widow three weeks before the bullets in Altotongo. Here are the others.”
He groped behind the orange crates and retrieved two tooled leather letter files covered with dust and pseudo-Mexican artwork. He ran his fingertips over the one he had in his hands. The quality of the leather was extraordinary, thick but smooth and malleable to the touch like cloth. Whoever can add c
an divide.
“In the leather letter files there were offers to buy the lands described in the documentation,” Rojano said. “I found them in their houses afterwards. Garabito’s widow had hers sewed up the sides to make a handbag. She had it with her at the market in Papantla when she was executed. Here it is.”
It made a horrible handbag. There was a strap attached to the letter file with gold staples so it could be worn over the shoulder.
Rojano continued: “A servant of the widow Martín had it, a servant who was sort of a nursemaid to Anabela. There are close ties among the families with French blood. They don’t say Martín, they say Martán, and not Guillaumín, but Guillomé. The nursemaid said the stepsons had received the same kind of folders. According to her, the evil eye came with them.”
“But you said that what came in them were purchase offers.”
“Each one was actually an ultimatum, a final offer that was the last in a series.”
“How do you know that?”
“From the best possible source.” Rojano rubbed his kerchief between his hands. “I was told by the buyer himself.”
The whiskey had had its effect. I didn’t react, but the tale with all its scaffolding struck me as quintessential Rojano: overblown and labyrinthine with an agenda shrouded in shadows. I was glad to see him return with more liquor. I set my suspicions aside and relaxed for the first time all night.
“You mean to say you know the buyer?” I asked. “You know the would-be benefactor of these ex-landowners?”
“That’s not all I know, brother.”
“A schoolmate?” I went on. “A childhood friend?”
“Not quite, brother. For the last two years we’ve been having coffee whenever he’s in the city. That’s where the story begins as far as you’re concerned.”
“You mean the man behind this massacre?”
“Yes, the brains. We have long conversations whenever he comes to town.”
“To plan the future of the children of Veracruz?”
“Don’t fuck around with me, brother. It’s no laughing matter.”