Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  “Are you spending the night in Tampico?” Roibal asked.

  “I’m flying out at seven this evening, on the President’s plane,” I stressed.

  “Then in the bar at the Inglaterra. At four?”

  “At five,” I said. “After the dinner.”

  “At five then,” Roibal agreed.

  The meal for 300 people was served at union headquarters. I drank giant Cuba libres over ice from glasses made from the bottom half of Bacardi rum bottles, and acquired through a friend in the presidential entourage. They held nearly half a liter of liquid. We drank three of these as pre-meal refreshment and three more while dining on a profusion of crustaceans, fish, ribs, shrimp and tripe on taco shells, corn and flour tortillas, and a variety of sauces and marinades. Shortly after 5:00 I requested a car from the chief of the press office and a driver from the presidential entourage.

  I told the driver whom I was going to see and asked him to leave me at the back of the hotel, then go around to the front and enter the bar like a normal customer. That way he could keep an eye on our meeting. When I entered the bar at exactly 5:30, or half an hour late, the driver was already there nursing a beer. Pizarro was alone at a corner of the bar. He was seated with his back to the wall and a bottle of iced mineral water on the table. Roibal was waiting for me by the street entrance, and two guards stood in the doorway to the hotel. Pizarro remained absolutely motionless as he watched me approach as if I weren’t there, or as if he just hadn’t noticed me. I’d brought my glass from the dinner with me and was just beginning to feel an alcoholic buzz, “euphoric and ecumenical” as René Arteaga would say. I asked the waiter to refresh my drink over a large dose of ice. On my way to Pizarro’s table, I changed my mind and went straight to the bar to have my glass refilled with rum, ice and Coca Cola. Only then did I go to the table where Pizarro had been waiting for half an hour.

  “How’ve you been, chief?” As I spoke, I spun a chair around and sat down spread-eagled on the seat in front of him.

  “Waiting for you, my journalist friend,” Pizarro said in a nasal monotone that resonated with anger.

  “We were delayed by the President,” I said after a swallow of my drink. “How are you?”

  “I’ve been slandered, offended, and plotted against, my journalist friend.” He spoke in a low voice, nearly a whisper. “The national press says I covet the job of Joaquín Hernández Galicia. They even say I’ve overshadowed him, that the disciple surpassed the master. Have you read anything like that in the national press, my journalist friend?”

  It was hard not to admire his style and his irony. He was indirect and at the same time precise in the way he got to the heart of our dispute without so much as alluding to it. His tone of voice, because it was so flat and impersonal, made any criticism seem doubly hurtful and unfair.

  “I’ve read things like that, chief.”

  “And what do you think of these accounts?”

  “They’ve been proven false for the most part, chief.”

  “But there hasn’t been any retraction, any effort to repair the damage in the court of public opinion, my journalist friend.”

  “There has been where it counts. The President was informed as soon as he inquired.”

  “It’s a relief to hear you say that, my journalist friend,” Pizarro said. “I worry about your failure to understand, your impudence. Did I mistreat you in Poza Rica? Didn’t you like what you saw? Did your brief visit displease you? So why haven’t you come back? The door was open for you. Or were you just distracted by visions of doe flesh?”

  “That was probably it,” I said, then took a long drink.

  “If that’s the case, it’s understood. All you have to do is look at her,” Pizarro said. “But you worry me, friend, because I don’t think you listened to what I told you. Either that, or the most important part didn’t get through to you. You listened to the tales told by your friends instead, the ones they’re still telling you. And to what’s passed on to you between the sheets. But here’s the truth. None of you know what you’re getting into, you least of all. You don’t know the size of the battle or the size of the force needed to fight it and not lose. Your friends are trying to start a fight they have no business getting into. I told you this before, but you didn’t listen. Where these things are concerned, they’re amateurs. They think they know what they’re doing, but they don’t. They think they see what they’re looking at, but they don’t. They think they can, but they can’t. They hear the sound of the river, but they have no idea how much water it carries, and they know nothing of the streams that form the river. I do know, friend, because I dug the trench that made the river. I know exactly why I did it and what I want the river to irrigate. You people come along with a thimble and think you can change the course of the river by the thimbleful. Just because it’s in front of your nose, you want to own it. But you don’t know what it took to get the water to where it is and to irrigate what it irrigates. You don’t know how much work it took to build that river drop by drop, providing help as needed and getting obstacles out of the way. It takes years of work, my friend. Every month of every year, every day of every month, every hour of every day. And then you people come along and want to take over. You become one of the obstacles that get in the way. And you know why? Simply because you’re a bunch of amateurs. You think it’s there for the taking by whoever sees it first and decides to grab it. That’s not how it is, my friend. There’s no such thing as an asset nobody owns or has any claim to. Whoever wants it has to push the prior owner aside and usurp that claim. And that’s what I’ve spent my life doing. It’s what I’ve lived for, it’s my profession. What I’ve learned is simply this. What makes the difference in this game isn’t who wins or who gets to keep the assets. The issue, my friend, is who survives because this game is about survival. First, you take care of your enemies, then you look out for yourself. This second form of survival is what really matters, and you can only achieve it by what you build, by what you leave behind for others. Now do you understand?”

  “I was bewitched by my diet of doe meat,” I said.

  “Stings like these last longer than the pain,” he said. Once again Pizarro withdrew into himself as if anger had drawn him out of his cave and now, having returned fire, he was staging a cautious return. “Don’t declare victory.”

  He got to his feet, and Roibal was immediately at his side. “I told you what I needed to tell you,” Pizarro said. He took leave of me without shaking hands. “I just don’t know how long it will take for it to sink in.”

  He stared at me long enough to make me feel ridiculous, a drunk holding a huge, half empty glass of Cuba libre. “You owe me one, paisano.” He touched the palm of one hand with the index finger of the other. “I’m making a note of it right here.”

  He left, and I stayed behind, fixated by his river metaphor. As a snapshot of the way Lázaro Pizarro viewed his earthly mission, it was unequaled. The certainty that buttressed his will had reached the extreme of making him see himself as a kind of god who brought streams together and turned them into a river of his own creation. He was right about that, but what did it have to do with his aspirations as a puppeteer? How many of the strings that moved the plot really were in his hands? He controlled the region with an iron fist. He had Rojano elected mayor, had prior knowledge of what PEMEX was up to, and was in a position to exploit the company’s plans for his own ends. In Chicontepec, where he was born, his word was the unwritten law. He’d found jobs for half the youths who left the town, and in it he’d stationed machine-gun-toting guards to watch every move Rojano made. Was he wrong to consider himself a sort of supreme architect, the man in charge of the world around him?

  In mid May 1978, on Tuesday the sixteenth, President López Portillo began his trip to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. His ample entourage included a press plane for reporters from all the media plus a handful of “leading columnists” as The New York Times correspondent, an unbearable flatterer, put it in hi
s dispatch for the day. We flew to Gander, a military stopover in Newfoundland, and then to Hamburg where we spent nine hours on the ground before flying on to Moscow. I wrote, “Riding the coattails of President López Portillo were the four airplanes for his entourage of some seven hundred people. These included the presidential family, ministers and directors of decentralized state-owned enterprises, journalists, technical support crews for radio and television, organizational staff, singers and actors, the corps of the Mexican folk ballet, museum directors, and the anthropologists charged with setting up their exhibits. We watched the sun rise over Glasgow and saw the moist and renovated city of Hamburg come into view below us, precisely spread out amidst an astonishing number of trees and green zones. A red-eyed press corps succeeded in finding a place to eat pozole in the Rothembaumhaus. In the lobby of the Hamburg Plaza Hotel, Fidel Velázquez, the ageless head of the Mexican Workers Confederation, chatted with his relatives in monosyllables. He was not part of the official entourage, but when Mexico travels, so do its traditions.”

  The night of Wednesday, May 17, we landed at Vnukovo 2, the airport on the southwest outskirts of Moscow. Two kilometers of parked commercial aircraft flanked the taxiways. The tour of the Soviet Union lasted a week. We visited the Kremlin, bought nesting dolls and amber necklaces, and spent a white night in Leningrad. We saw where Lenin printed Iskra in Bakú on the Caspian Sea, and at night we heard the eerie sound of the wind crying through the narrow trenches miners dug into coal seams around the city. We went to Novosibirsk and the city of science, Academgorodok, the campus home of 30,000 scientists.

  Then we went to Bulgaria. We spent hours walking the tree-flooded streets of Sofia and won 5,000 dollars at the casino in Varna where the trip ended. Reyes Razo and I broke away from the entourage to celebrate our luck at the casino with a side trip to Athens. We imposed on the hospitality of Ambassador Cabrera Maciá and spent two days with a pair of Cypriot sisters who taught us the Greek words lestá (money) and thalasa (sea). From Athens we flew to Paris where we strolled our way through museums and cafes. We had sumptuous meals at La Coupole and Fouquet’s where Reyes Razo turned down two already opened bottles of a world famous vintage because he considered the wine slightly thin. We visited Cortázar and the dives of Montmartre. We drank champagne, chatted up chorus girls, and hired our own company for four days of partying after which we still had 3,000 dollars left over. We spent half of that in London and the other half in New York. On June 12, I wired my newspaper for two plane tickets back to Mexico City. Reyes Razo put the 300 dollars we owed the hotel on his credit card.

  On June 15, 1978, we landed at the international airport in Mexico City. A reporter from my paper was waiting for us. The look on his face was not good, and he didn’t hesitate to say why. A week earlier, in the early hours of June 9, the town of Chicontepec had gone up in flames. There had been an attack on the city government building, and Mayor Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez had been lynched.

  Doña Lila had taken a tidal wave of phone calls and messages. A good many of them were from Anabela, long distance calls from Veracruz and Tuxpan and two from Chicontepec the day after it burned. “The woman’s gone crazy. She’s called you two and even three times a day every day,” Doña Lila said. “Like a lost soul in Purgatory.”

  I called Veracruz to check in with Anabela’s sister, but Anabela wasn’t there. I got my first account of what happened from her sister. The town hall was surrounded on the night of June 8 in mourning for two children who died of dysentery. The demonstrators accused the municipal authorities of poisoning them with drinking water from the pipes laid the month before. The attack came around midnight after someone fired at the grieving relatives. The crowd charged the government building, and more shots were fired, wounding two of the protesters, one of whom subsequently died. Then the building was torched. They got Rojano out and dragged him around the plaza. A town leader entered the Guillaumín house with his sons. They held Anabela captive all night and refused to let her leave, thus saving her life.

  I hung up and went to look for my contact in the Ministry of Internal Security. I was trembling, bitten by the irrational conviction that there was a causal link between my absence from Mexico and Rojano’s death. I went over and over my own activities during the crucial day. Eighth of June, lunch at El Plaza, Deep Throat at a porno movie theater, the evening performance of Oh Calcutta on Broadway followed by martinis at Dino’s on Sixth Avenue and listening to Brenda McGuire sing “killing me softly with your fingers” while Rojano was being surrounded in the government headquarters of a non-existent town in western Veracruz.

  No one answered at Internal Security. I checked the newsroom file at the paper. All I found was a terse account filed two days after the fact from our correspondent in Veracruz. “Chicontepec Mayor Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez was killed yesterday during a popular uprising that claimed the lives of at least two others. At last reports, the incident also left five injured, two of them seriously. The disturbance on the night of June 8 was sparked by townspeople protesting the deaths of two children. Rioters blamed the deaths on contamination of the water system installed in the town a month ago.

  “Eyewitnesses interviewed by phone said the mayor and his staff were dragged from their offices and lynched, and the town hall was burned down. The mob apparently became violent when shots were fired from the building where the mayor and his aides were holed up.”

  I reached our correspondent in the newsroom at El Dictamen in Veracruz. By phone he added more details. To begin, he gave me the name of the source who spoke to him directly from Chicontepec: Genaro Roibal. The information for the one published report of the affair had come from Roibal. In later inquiries the reporter had pieced together a more complete approximation of what happened.

  On June 8, 1978, the bells of Chicontepec rang in mourning. The whole town knew they rang for Miguel Yacomán, leader of the Barrio San Antonio. He had been gravely ill and his condition had deteriorated in the past week due to the water. This marked the third death attributable to water problems, specifically to the pipelines laid early that year to supply two thirds of the town (which had previously depended on wells, ditches and rainfall runoff) with drinking water. The two prior deaths, also the result of serious stomach infection, were in the barrio of San Felipe, also served by the new system. Residents began to blame these deaths—preceded by the bouts of vomiting and bloody diarrhea quite common in the area—on water from the pipelines. Yacomán’s funeral procession followed the traditional route from one side of town to the other, but as it passed the town hall, the marchers pointed to the coffin and shouted in Totonaca, Here’s your water, honorable authority. That same day there was another unrelated death, and the townspeople, who were already in a dark mood, took it as proof that the evil eye was at work. It happened in Yucuman’s own barrio when a young Indian boy attempted to mount a yoked ox. The animal threw the youngster against a fence and broke his neck. His small coffin was added to the procession, compounding the community’s grief. By 6:00 in the evening the funeral had become a demonstration. The coffins were placed before the town hall, and the ensuing wake quickly became an orgy of protest and blame.

  It was about 6:00 when prayers began, minus the priest, who refused to officiate outdoors. Torches were lit, and the mescal started to flow. The mayor made an appearance and, standing before the crowd, spoke at length with its leaders. Some of the demonstrators even went inside the town hall and stayed there for over an hour. Around 11:00 the town council ordered the serving of two barrels of atole at public expense. At midnight the women began a long lamentation in Totonaca. In the midst of this commotion the first two shots rang out. One came from a corner of the plaza, the next two from its opposite side. Then machine-gun fire pelted the plaza from all sides like a thunder and lightning storm. The panicked crowd clustered about the dead. After one of the leaders spoke, old carbines, pistols and scythes appeared. More rounds of machine-gun fire raked the plaza from all sides, and the angr
y crowd shouted threats at the town hall. There was one shot and then another. Two of the mourners were downed. Others broke through the door of the town hall and set it on fire. Burning torches were hurled through the windows. Shortly afterwards, the crowd surged into the inner patio where there was more shooting and more casualties as protesters dragged out the mayor and his aides, some seven or eight persons in all. When they got to Rojano, an aide stepped forward and tried to intervene. He had a pistol and threatened to shoot whoever came near. No one was deterred by the threat of young Echeguren. The youth got off a single shot before being bludgeoned and hacked to death by machetes. Protesters hauled the captives into the plaza, bleeding, beaten, and with their hands tied. Another round of machine-gun fire further infuriated the crowd, and they vented their wrath on Rojano. The morning sun rose over his body on the paving stones in front of the town hall. He was half naked, and his hands were tied behind his back. He lay in the middle of a pile of stones, rigid and bloated beyond recognition.

  “Who fired the machine guns?”

  “Rojano’s people,” the correspondent said.

  “What people?”

  “The people Roibal was leading.”

  “But those weren’t Rojano’s people?”

  “They weren’t townspeople either. They were there to look out for the interests of the mayor and Lacho Pizarro.”

  “Then why didn’t they intervene?”

  “Intervene? If you don’t mind me saying so, intervening would have been idiotic,” the correspondent said. “Who would dare get a crowd like that even more riled up?”

  “The people barricaded in the town hall might dare.”

  “You mean you agree with me that it would have been idiotic?”

  “I agree it’s something they might have considered.”

  “Are you going to write about this? I can get you more information. The widow’s here in the port, and it’s under investigation by the state government.”