Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

“The war of the whores,” I replied.

  “I mean it, you bastard.” Rojano grabbed my wrist and hung onto it. He ran a hand through his hair and finished his glass of wine in two gulps. “Don’t be fooled by my tranquilizers, brother. Whores and good wine are facts of life. In Chicontepec it’s the law of the jungle. And the one has nothing to do with the other. Don’t be fooled.”

  “What’s new with Pizarro?”

  He took two photocopies each folded four ways from the back pocket of his pants and slapped them on the table. The first was a brief from the oil workers’ union to the Chicontepec town council demanding 2,000 hectares of municipal property for the union’s social services activities. The second was Rojano’s denial of this request. They bore the dates of September 19 and 24, 1977.

  “These are two months old. Why show them to me now?”

  “Because last week we got a personal notice from Pizarro. The tooled leather.”

  “Who got personal notice?”

  “We got a purchase offer for the lands Anabela inherited in Chicontepec.”

  “What has Anabela got to do with this fight? It’s the municipality’s fight.”

  “It’s a fight, brother. It’s more than a fight, it’s a war. It’s our war, and it’s started in Chicontepec. I came to tell you and anyone else who would listen. If I can, to tell the director of PEMEX this afternoon. But I’ve already learned from experience. The whole thing’s so crazy that nobody believes me. It’s so outlandish that sometimes I don’t believe it myself.”

  The bags had swollen more under his eyes. Their bloodshot whites were now a sign, not of confusion, but of desperation.

  His appointment with the director of PEMEX was canceled, and Rojano left town without seeing him. He didn’t see me either, though he was quite persistent in his efforts to reach me by phone. The columns about the International Monetary Fund that Arteaga traded for Bloody Marys triggered almost 50 editorials in the days that followed along with a call from the President of the Republic, who invited me to breakfast with three of the country’s leading columnists on January 16, 1978. By media standards, this meant I had ceased to be just a columnist and was now something else—“a national opinionmaker” as the director of my paper liked to say. Perhaps it was the autonomy that came with this change that made me write the column in which I tried to win the war in Chicontepec for Rojano and Anabela. Due to my bad timing and miscalculation, I succeeded only in casting them into a fray in which they were defenseless.

  The headiness and novelty of that breakfast had yet to dissipate when Anabela called from the Hotel Roma on January 25. We had dinner at the hotel and spent the evening in bed. She had become splendidly slender. Her legs had regained the harmony of bone and muscle they had when we first met. She was beautiful in the boyishly carefree way I remembered, a beauty that was only enhanced by the stretch marks from her pregnancies. Her thinness, however, had nothing to do with being young again. When she started to talk, almost five hours after we met, her iron self-control was on full display, and it was impossible not to see how completely she’d cast her lot with Rojano.

  Her version of events was a litany of bad news. They had received a second leather pouch from Pizarro with a plat including the lands that belonged to Anabela and Rojano. The union of municipal workers was demanding a total of more than two thousand hectares (all of which were predictably contiguous). The prior week, on the exact day when I was having breakfast with the President, a small disturbance had broken out in one of the town’s barrios. A child had died, and someone blamed it on the drinking water system that had come on line a few days before. Pizarro had posted a permanent detachment of his guards in one of the larger houses on one side of the plaza. In a bar fight Echeguren had injured a guard who was hurling insults at Rojano. The incident struck me as strange because, so far as I knew, Echeguren was unconditionally loyal to Roibal and Pizarro.

  “Echeguren is unconditionally loyal to me,” Anabela shot back. She looked me straight in the eye in yet another show of her self-assurance and power.

  “The point is, the time is quickly coming when we’re going to need your help. Things are starting to happen, Negro, and we’re not ready.”

  “What kind of help do you want?”

  “The kind you can give. Press coverage and public relations. Do you have any contacts in Internal Security?”

  “I’d have to check.”

  “It’s important for Internal Security to hear about this from an inside source because it’s beyond belief. It’s so outlandish and crazy that sometimes I don’t even believe it myself.”

  Her words were identical to Rojano’s at the Puerta del Sol. I wondered who was echoing whom and if I were now hearing them from their source.

  “And who’s your contact in PEMEX?”

  “I don’t have a contact in PEMEX.”

  “In the Defense Ministry?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s important that you memorize this, Negro.” Anabela was coldly analytical as she laid out the logistics of her situation. “The war has begun. Everything you can do for us helps. Every columnist you know, every newspaper that carries you, every political opening, every conversation, every step towards the fall of Pizarro is fundamental. Every printed line, every doubt planted in the minds of people with the power to take action counts. You know better than I how to do it, you know the ropes. Of course, if something were to reach the ears of the President, that’s excellent. Right now we have to get the children out of Chicontepec and down to my sister Alma’s in the port. All our friends in state government are on notice, and I do mean all of them. It actually comes to quite a crowd. They’re are only two of them that are trustworthy. And you, Negro. You more than anyone. You’re our bridge to the outside world, our lifeline.”

  She kissed me as if what she’d just finished saying had aroused her. We made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms. At dawn I woke up to go to the bathroom, and she wasn’t in the bed. She was sitting naked on the sofa, sleepless and deep in her own thoughts, looking down at the city spread out below the window of our fifth-floor room in the Hotel Reforma.

  She left two days later, and in the two days following her departure, I felt an unaccustomed urgency to see her again soon. I was anxious for her to come back. My column for January 29 was a projection of that anxiety in the form of a long think piece about Lázaro Pizarro, more an outgrowth of depression and longing than the tension that makes for good journalism. I wrote:

  “In the less visible outposts of his empire, disciples of La Quina—oil workers union boss Joaquín Hernández Galicia—have begun to hatch, and they show every indication of surpassing the exploits of their master. They surpass him in ambition, audacity, and initiative. And also, according to detailed reports that reached “Public Life” first, in cruelty and bloodshed. “So far the biggest egg the serpent has hatched is the emerging lord of lives and lands who rules the oil workers union in Poza Rica and is now extending his blood-stained grasp to the remote and fertile realm of Chicontepec in northeastern Veracruz.

  “There the up and coming leader of the heroic Oil Workers Union of the Republic of Mexico is taking to extremes La Quina’s recent infatuation with union farms as a means of reducing members’ living expenses. He has begun to purge allegedly ‘spurious’ property owners of some of the best land in the municipality of Chicontepec in the floodplain of the Calaboso River as it flows down from the Sierra.

  “The purge has been nothing less than radical. Land owners who decline to sell their holdings on the buyer’s terms have simply been wiped off the face of the earth. And the buyer leaves a calling card: a bullet to the temple of his true targets in the midst of shooting sprees or horrible accidents that claim the lives of many more persons than those the oil workers’ benefactor aims to get rid of. To date the following incidents have come to light…”

  The column summarized the cases contained in Rojano’s files. It cited dates, names, and circumstances while holding
back on some issues and documents that could be used as ammunition against detractors once the column had its effects.

  “The new benefactor in the oil workers’ world, the perpetrator of these radical expropriations, is, like La Quina, a revered and determined capo, an enthusiastic practitioner of what has come to be called petro-Maoism. This is a disciple who is certain to surpass—or who has already far surpassed, at least in shots fired—his mentor.

  “Engrave the name of this disciple and successor on your memory because you’ll hear it often in coming years. His name is Lázaro Pizarro, the terrible Lacho, the new family benefactor of the oil workers of Vera Cruz.”

  The Internal Security Ministry acknowledged my efforts. By this, I mean a colleague called and invited me to dinner at a restaurant he liked in Colonia Roma. We were to eat at La Lorraine and nowhere else. The owner, a widow from Marseille, had turned the place into a cooperative and bequeathed it to her workers, who all belonged to the Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Confederation. Everything remained as it always had been. The waiters wore black tuxedoes, the patés were made on the premises, and the cheeses were nearly worm-eaten with age. We had barely stepped between the planters in the entryway when we were confronted by my contact on Bucareli Street, who was dining with a friend. He sent us a bottle of Chateneuf-du Pape during our meal and had the waiter who served us dessert invite us to his table for cognac. Predictably, when we went for the cognac, his friend had left, and the issuer of the invitation was alone smoking an acrid Te Amo cigar from Tuxtla. As he smoked, he rolled the cigar between his lips, which were noticeably red and moist beneath his pencil moustache. The look in his partially open eyes was perfectly placid. On the pretext of needing to make an urgent phone call, my colleague left, and the appointment began.

  “You got it wrong,” my contact said. I glanced at his hands and shirt cuffs. He exuded a faint but perceptible aroma of lotion and tobacco that clung to him almost as if it were his sweat. There was a long silence.

  “I am speaking about your column today,” he went on. “What you say isn’t exactly accurate.”

  “I have proof for what I wrote,” I replied.

  “I know about your proof. That’s why I can tell you things are not the way you described them today.”

  “Then how are they?”

  “They’re more complicated,” my contact said with a smile. “As they always are.”

  He took an envelope out of his coat pocket and placed it on the table. Inside were the photos of the killings in Papantla of Antonio Malerva and his family. They had been retouched in several places with a very fine red marker.

  “The photos aren’t originals.” He puffed delicately on his cigar. “They’re photomontages. The red lines show where two photos were superimposed. The lines were drawn by the expert who did the analysis.”

  I picked up the afternoon paper he’d left on the table, the edition for February 2, 1978. With my pen I traced the frontpage image of Jimmy Carter greeting an astronaut.

  “This is also the work of an expert,” I told him.

  “No, sir, it isn’t,” my contact replied with a touch of irritation. “I mean what I say.”

  He reached his hand into the other side of his coat, brought out an envelope identical to the first one, and laid it on the table. I opened it and got my first look at its incredible contents. It was the most unexpected photo I could ever have imagined, a photo of my own cadaver laid out naked on the slab of a morgue, full frontal and taken from above the body. It showed major hemorrhaging from a bullet wound to the forehead plus several more wounds to the torso, and, what’s more, I appeared to have died young. The ruined countenance was my face as it was 20 years ago. I had the body of an adolescent, almost of a child. Underneath, in the inimitable and spidery lettering of a small town official with limited schooling, was a caption that read: Papantla, Ver., February 17, 1978 (two weeks later than our February 2 conversation).

  “Laboratory prophecy,” said my contact. “The photo’s from your military registration card. The body is real but obviously not yours. The blood, the bullet wounds, the shadings of gray, the montage are also ours. The magic of an expert I should say.”

  “What did Rojano’s expert add?”

  “You can tell by the red lines,” my contact explained. “He didn’t add much, just the shots to the temple, but it was done systematically. An execution-style shot to the temple was added to each photo. The rest—the photos and the corpses and the dates—that’s all real. But, as I understand it, that’s the crucial detail.”

  It was.

  “There are coroners’ statements documenting those shots,” I said.

  “There are, but they’re not decisive. They could also have been arranged. My point is, minus the shots to the temple, what’s left? What’s left is the piece of the truth that’s in your column. And what is that truth? What it amounts to is this. Several property owners around Chicontepec died violent and bloody deaths. Their holdings were contiguous, and they owned the best land in a region of good lands. It cannot be said that this is normal for the area, but it wouldn’t frighten anybody in the foothills of Veracruz.”

  “And who bought these lands?”

  “The oil workers’ union did. So did Lacho Pizarro. But what does that prove?”

  “It indicates that those deaths had a sole beneficiary.”

  “Sole, no,” said my contact. “There were two other buyers. Do you know who they are?”

  “That you’ll have to prove to me,” I said, anticipating the answer.

  “I have proof.” He removed a third envelope from his coat as if laying a final card on the table. “Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez and Anabela Guillaumín de Rojano are the other beneficiaries.”

  In the envelope were photocopies of records from the land registry in Tuxpan documenting up to three land purchases by Anabela and Rojano. Between the two of them they bought a total of nearly a 1,000 hectares.

  “These are in addition to the 800 I first told you about,” my contact said. “Pizarro and the union made similar purchases. But Pizarro didn’t doctor any photos to incriminate his friends. Do I make myself clear?”

  I understood all too well. My stomach churned uncontrollably. I’d been taken advantage of. It made me angry, but as usual it was too late to do anything about it.

  Some two weeks later, Anabela returned to Mexico City and sent word that once again she was at the Hotel Reforma. I stayed away. I didn’t go to her room, and I didn’t answer the phone that rang incessantly in my apartment for the next two days. Finally, she spent all of an afternoon and evening waiting for me in the newsroom of my paper, which is where we ran into each other at nine o’clock on February 20.

  “I spent two days going mad looking for you,” she said once we were in my car. “What’s the problem?”

  “What news are you bringing?”

  “I’ve been looking for you for two whole days. I came to Mexico City to see you. I’ve spent two days shut up in a furnished room waiting for you to call me, wanting to be with you. You make me feel like a character in some awful soap opera. What’s going on?”

  “Lots of work, that’s what’s going on. Didn’t you go the Museum of Modern Art?”

  “Listen, you bastard.” Anabela was livid. “I’m not your typewriter that you can bang whenever you damn well feel like it, and I’m not your bitch either. You don’t get to feel hurt and offended on my account. What the hell do I owe you, anyhow?”

  “You refer to the column?”

  “No.” Anabela’s eyes welled up with tears. “I mean your use of my ass, creep.”

  She got out of the car and slammed the door. For a moment I watched her in the rear view mirror. She walked as fast as she could down the sidewalk past a brightly lit shop window. She wiped her eyes. I watched the stride of her long firm legs moving precariously atop her high heels. I activated my door locks and pulled away.

  The next day a messenger brought a letter and package from Anabela.
The letter said:

  “It’s possible you know who I am, but you don’t know what I feel. I missed you those nights just as I’ve missed you other nights when you’re not around. In Chicontepec, that is. I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know what’s the matter with you. I know you hurt me. I hated you for it, then I again began needing you at night. I have fresh news for you. The situation is critical. Your column stirred up the hornet’s nest. The wasps are on the loose and ready to sting. This is all important as you’ll see. But, I repeat, I missed you, and you weren’t there.”

  The package documented a new case, the death of a Chicontepec notable in a bar fight in El Álamo. According to Rojano, “Negotiations with Lacho over the use of some community lands had broken down. The package included a crude map of the disputed lands, practically the whole east side of the municipality, a total of some five thousand hectares. In his impeccable block lettering in red ink, Rojano commented, “He told his loyal followers that he now has his Mesopotamia, and this is where he wants his Babylon.”

  Lázaro Pizarro, leader of the people, founder of civilizations. I picked up the new file together with the others that I had on my desk and threw them in a drawer in a closet I never used.

  Chapter 7

  DEATH BY WATER

  On March 18, 1978, I attended the festivities marking the anniversary of the expropriation of the oil industry in Ciudad Madero. Lázaro Pizarro sat on the reviewing stand next to La Quina, but in a clearly subordinate position. Roibal sought me out halfway through the proceedings. Characteristically, I didn’t notice as he slipped up behind me and poked me in the rib. His finger might as well have been a pistol.

  “The boss wants to know if you’d like to have a word with him.” There was an edge of sarcasm in his voice.

  “Wherever he’d like,” I answered before Roibal could say more.

  “Wherever you say.”

  “At the bar in the Hotel Inglaterra,” I said without hesitation. It was the most centrally located hotel in Tampico.