Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  On July 29, 1978, I got another call from my contact on Bucareli. We ate from a stand that sold tamales and pozole on Alvaro Obregon. He asked me to interview Pizarro. Pizarro himself wanted me to, he said, and from that night on he served as an unofficial intermediary. The public backlash from the Chicontepec case was on its way to becoming an affair of state, he said. Provided there was no interference with the ongoing investigation, it was in the government’s interest for the opposing parties to negotiate.

  “I have nothing to negotiate with Pizarro,” I said.

  “There’s always something to negotiate, paisano,” my contact answered characteristically. “And in this case more than ever. I’ve investigated Pizarro, and I can tell you he stops at nothing. He’ll go after you as readily as he’ll go after the widow. Or the widow’s children.”

  “Threatening me is part of being an intermediary?” I said.

  “Part of my friendship is to tell you the truth and to protect you as best I can,” my contact said. “I understand you’re providing Mrs. Rojano and her children with a place to stay.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t be upset. Those kids have been touched by tragedy, but their parents have enormous holdings in Chicontepec, holdings that don’t do the children a bit of good where they are. They might as well be heirs to buried treasure. With all due respect, let me suggest that’s something else that could be negotiated with Pizarro.”

  I got to my feet and marched off from the food stand without another word. I’d agreed to meet the director of my paper at the grill in the Hotel del Prado where our after-dinner conversation lasted past midnight. I got back to the apartment around one. Everyone was asleep in the penumbra. I got out the paperwork on a proposed nuclear energy bill and reviewed it with a nightcap of whiskey in my hand. I read the bill, underlined it, and began to review its history and implications as outlined in the support materials. At one point I looked up to see Anabela standing in the doorway, deigning to visit my room for the first time since Rojano’s death.

  It was nearly dawn when I told her of the encounter with my contact the night before. She waited in silence for my indignation to subside.

  “Your friend’s right,” she said at last. “We have to negotiate with Pizarro.”

  “What is it you want to negotiate?” I asked, or shouted rather.

  “My life and the life of my children.”

  “Are you afraid he’ll kill the three of you?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything, Negro. After what happened to Rojano, I’m less afraid than ever. But I need time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To get back at him, Negro. To get back at him, that’s all.”

  I made it known that we would negotiate provided the talks took place in Mexico City under the aegis of Internal Security. The conditions were accepted provided that I—and not Anabela—attend the meeting. We gathered on the morning of August 9, 1978, in a small conference room at the Hotel Reforma. My contact came for me at eight thirty, and shortly after 9:00 Roibal escorted us to the table where Pizarro was already waiting. He was alone with only a glass of mineral water in the no-man’s-land he always created between himself and the food and eating utensils elsewhere on the table.

  “I’ll witness the negotiation,” my contact announced. “Let me just remind those present that to negotiate means to yield on some points in order to gain on others. The President will be briefed on the outcome of this conversation.”

  “My thanks to you, sir, and to the President,” Pizarro said, slowly rotating his glass of mineral water. “Tell me what I can do for you, my journalist friend.”

  Without further ceremony, I laid out Anabela’s conditions: indemnification for Rojano’s death, payment at market value for all family properties in the municipality of Chicontepec (some three thousand hectares with grazing herds and four houses), clearing Rojano’s name on the public record, and an end to harassment of the family, Anabela, and her children.

  “The things it’s in my power to give are granted forthwith,” Pizarro said. “Let Internal Security and the state government determine the market value of family properties within the municipality, and the union will promise to purchase them at the best prices. The indemnification you request for the mayor’s death is not in my power to grant because I’m not an insurance company. Nor am I in a position to clear anybody’s public record. Concerning harassment of the family, I haven’t harassed them. I have no reason to harass them. What I can offer, with help from Internal Security, is to look into who’s responsible for this harassment and to let you know so you can negotiate with the responsible party.”

  In reply I spoke directly to my contact. “I want an explicit commitment from the leader of the oil workers not to make any attempt on the lives of the Rojano Guillaumín family.”

  “There’s no need to ask for that,” Pizarro hastened to add. “It’s a given.”

  I’d touched a nerve, and I pressed the demand. Pizarro refused to give in. “He’s claiming the oil workers resort to such tactics, and that’s a charge we cannot accept.”

  “Absent an explicit commitment from the leader of the oil workers,” I responded, “I request that the President be advised that I hold the oil workers’ leader responsible for everything that has happened or may happen in the future affecting the physical wellbeing of the Rojano Guillaumín family, and that includes the murder of the mayor of Chicontepec.”

  “What you’re saying is unfair, my journalist friend.” Pizarro sounded deflated, and there was no mistaking the anger in his voice. “And so is what you’ve written. I had my differences with your friend, political and historic differences that I described to you with the example of a river. Fundamental differences. But you need to accept reality. I didn’t kill your friend. Your friend was killed by the people of Chicontepec, the people who lived with him, the people he governed. Those are the facts, friend. The rest is anecdote, circumstantial. You’re asking me to take responsibility for a death brought on by the anger of the people. All right, I’ll accept that responsibility. I accept responsibility for that death along with each and every one of the inhabitants of Chicontepec who lynched your friend. I’ll even go so far as to agree in the name of the people of Chicontepec and the union of oil workers to indemnify the widow for her terrible misfortune in marrying a man who was executed at the hands of his own people. But as an oil worker I cannot acknowledge any responsibility for the harassment you say the family has suffered or the catastrophe that was your friend’s own doing. I have no interest in other people’s wives.” Pizarro’s allusion to my situation with Anabela was crystal clear. “For better or for worse.”

  My contact hastened to intervene. “We now have agreement on two of the issues under negotiation. The purchase of family property within the municipality at a fair market price and indemnification for the death of the mayor. Correct?”

  Pizarro agreed.

  “All right, then,” my contact continued, “I now ask that the family take off the table its demand to have the name of Rojano Gutiérrez cleared on the public record. There’s nothing the oil workers’ can do about that, anyway. The state government has to take care of that, not the union.”

  His words amounted to an unspoken promise that the question of Rojano’s record would be pursued in other channels. I accepted.

  “And I also ask,” my contact went on, “that the family rephrase its references to the harassment it’s suffered in a less confrontational way. If you agree, Lacho, the compromise could be that you and your group will be vigilant in seeing that no further harm comes to the relatives of the tragically deceased mayor of Chicontepec.”

  “Especially the children,” Pizarro said.

  “I consider the distinction inappropriate,” my contact said, sensing Pizarro’s reticence with regard to Anabela.

  “It’s appropriate,” Pizarro said, “because children are the country’s future, and we must give them priority since the rest of us bel
ong to the past.”

  “That’s not the case,” my contact said.

  “Sir, it is precisely the case,” Pizarro said.

  “If Anabela’s not part of the deal, then there is no deal,” I said.

  “I already told you, my journalist friend, I have no interest in other people’s wives. For better or for worse.”

  “Does she remain part of our agreement?” my contact inquired.

  “As far as I’m concerned, she’s always been part of it,” Pizarro stated ambiguously. He fixed his eyes on the glass of mineral water from which he’d yet to drink. “So, Mr. Undersecretary,” he told my contact, “if you would be so kind, I’d ask you to inform the President that we have buried our differences since I only agreed to this negotiation in order to serve him.”

  “So be it, Lacho.”

  “And, my journalist friend, the door to my humble house in Poza Rica remains open, and you’re welcome to visit whenever you like.”

  We shook hands. Roibal stepped up to escort him. Attentive and withdrawn, Roibal ignored me as if we’d never so much as crossed glances in the past. “Give my regards to your man Echeguren,” I said as they filed through the hotel lobby, but they gave no sign whatsoever of recognition.

  “Are we going to sign the minutes?” I asked my contact.

  “As soon as there’s an assessment and the contracts are drawn up.”

  “When?”

  “Three months at most. Are you worried?”

  “On two counts. The first is that the sale price be adjusted upwards in light of PEMEX’s planned investments in the Chicontepec paleocanal.”

  “And the second?”

  “That there be no distinction between Anabela and the children in the clause that binds the union to be vigilant in seeing to it that no further harm comes to the family.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And if anything does happen to the family, your people will again be responsible.”

  “Calm down, paisano. Pizarro put his standing with the President on the line here. If he violates this agreement, he loses everything. It would be suicidal.”

  “All Lázaro Pizarro cares about is his standing with Lázaro Pizarro.”

  Three months later, on November 6, 1978, we traveled to Xalapa to sign off on the sale of Rojano’s and Anabela’s holdings in Chicontepec for 30 million pesos, or slightly less than 1.5 million dollars according to the exchange rate at the time.

  The attorney for Local 35 of the oil workers union made the lump sum payment under an agreement that also required the union to cover all transfer fees and taxes. By this time I had rented an office on Hamburg Street where I wrote, kept my files, and handled all other aspects of my job at the newspaper. An accumulation of furniture, planters, hangings, and porcelain statuary had converted my apartment on Artes into a rough approximation of Anabela’s and Rojano’s house in Veracruz. Tonchis and Mercedes called me uncle. With every passing week, Anabela slept more nights with me, though we made a point of waking up in our respective beds every morning. Doña Lila was surprisingly maternal in the way she looked after the children, especially Mercedes. Anabela went to the gym mornings after dropping her children at school and ran the household with the condescending yet cordial support of Doña Lila. She signed up for classes to improve her French, and in September she unexpectedly returned to the Faculty of Political Sciences to complete the semester and a half she’d needed to graduate upon dropping out in the 60s.

  We ate out frequently, going one by one through the restaurants along Insurgentes and Reforma and in the small world of the Zona Rosa. Then, we’d lock ourselves up in a motel, almost always the Palo Alto (first encounter), though there were other times when we took an upscale suite in a stylish hotel just because we could afford it.

  We did and we didn’t live together. I often traveled to cover political events outside the capital, and then, after six months of staying put, in late 1978, Anabela made her first trip to Veracruz. A month later, she went back to arrange the transfer of Rojano’s body to a crypt she bought especially for him in the French Cemetery. In mid January 1979, we collected the coffin at the airport and took it by hearse to its destination in a bower of tall eucalyptus trees. Anabela, the children, Doña Lila, and I attended the burial by ourselves. We threw a dozen red flowers and two modest wreaths in the grave. “He’s better off close by,” Anabela said as gravediggers finished their task. Her deep-set eyes filled with tears.

  Life went on-or appeared to go on-undisturbed. Anabela began organizing dinner parties and get-togethers on Artes. The guests were friends and acquaintances: politicians, columnists, reporters, press officers, and staff from my paper. Once or twice a week part of the crowd would show up on Artes, and, unfailingly, Anabela would make some sinister reference to Pizarro or tell some dark tale touching on her experiences with him. This seemed only natural given what she’d recently been through and the recurring impact it was bound to have on her state of mind. I quickly understood, however, that neither sentimental weakness nor any psychological difficulty accounted for her refusal to stop thinking about the hell Pizarro put her through. Anabela was conducting a disciplined assessment of the means at her disposal for vengeance. For the time being, that meant filling the heads of those who sat down at her table with information about the world of Pizarro, especially the heads of those in a position to disseminate—or take action on—what she told them.

  She had, in fact, built a thick dossier on the man, a meticulous accumulation of news stories, photos and official reports on Pizarro and his workers’ revolution (manifestos, flyers etc.). Our correspondent in Veracruz contributed a substantial collection of interviews, state government documents, family history, union history, and crimes and abuses he was found or alleged to have committed. Between Anabela’s arrival in Mexico City with her children in June 1978 and the day the land sale was completed in Xalapa, her file on Pizarro grew from two to twelve organized boxes. It included a small bibliography of books and articles about the region of Chicontepec, the oil industry, the union, agrarian issues, violence, indigenous groups, area bosses, and life in the municipality.

  During those months, the city was undergoing a frenzy of street widening, and Artes was among the thoroughfares targeted for modernization. On the morning of November 18, 1978, the entrance to the building was blocked when a rear-end loader dumped a mound of dirt and gravel in the doorway. I wrote a column about the horrors of the urban renewal to which the city was imperiously subjected by its tycoon mayor, Carlos Hank González, but it was well after noon before I could get out. I used the downtime to review Anabela’s files, including one I paid particular attention to. It contained detailed information about the union’s social service activities around Poza Rica over the past ten years, the years of Pizarro’s leadership. Nothing was left out. There were clinics and child care centers, schools, discount stores, scholarship programs, interest-free lending agencies. Plus the famous union gardens.

  Aside from “La Mesopotamia,” the union had fostered within Pizarro’s sphere of influence two more agricultural operations. “Egypt” was located near the Tuxtlas and grew tobacco and coffee. “Tenochtitlán” was near Rinconada on the road to Veracruz. A variety of crops grew on other farms whose state-of-the-art practices and equipment dramatized the potential productivity of rural Veracruz. A strange and incredible economic system was emerging, a closed circuit unaffected by any market and governed solely by its own rules of cost, price, and supply. Prices stayed unchanged within this circuit of self-sufficiency even as they skyrocketed in the rest of the country. The cost of credit remained zero at a time when bank interest rates were prohibitive. The economic rules of the outside world had simply been abolished in an odd system that walled itself off from the forces controlling trade and productivity everywhere else. It struck me that its self-sustaining character perfectly matched Pizarro’s determination to depend on no one other than himself, and to make his own rules. It also seemed clear to me that his iron
will was not his alone. It was a force that came from the world he ruled and from which he arose. It was as if Pizarro, disturbed psychology and all, was the personification of a collective will—just as the agricultural complexes were a precise expression of his will, his inner rigidity, and his delusions of autonomy. Nothing in that fertile and abundant world evoked the dark side of Pizarro, the deaths in Chicontepec, the mutilation and the death that his rage burnt into Anabela and her children and into her relationship with me. This world of order and harmony harbored a community rescued from the abuse, speculation, and collapse that afflicted consumers and producers throughout the rest of the country. The file on these farms documented the creation of something like a utopia. It explained and justified the loyalty of its beneficiaries as well as their fervent support and even veneration of Pizarro as their leader.

  Prior to that morning, I’d passed through Pizarro’s idyllic domain but I hadn’t seen the whole picture. I hadn’t understood how the civilizing impulse and the dealings of its founder and leader might seem justified by the threats confronting his people. They lived in a reality that was being hacked out of the jungle little by little in defiance of the corruption and brutality of the world surrounding them. A modest, fiercely defended City of God had grown up in the marshes of northern Veracruz, in its rain forests and in the chaos of its awful cities, despite segregation, cutthroat competition, red light districts, and the law of the gun. What could Rojano offer instead? What good could he and Anabela have done for Chicontepec, once the sinister influence of Pizarro had been eliminated? A new dynasty of obscenely rich Veracruzan land barons with an endless parade of heirs educated in New York?

  At 5:00 in the afternoon the dirt pile was removed from the doorway (Anabela didn’t come home to eat), but I didn’t go out. My review of the boxes and reports that made up the Pizarro file continued through the evening and into the night. It ended at dawn the following day when, for the first time, I was able to see Pizarro whole. I saw him as he was: in the miserable barracks of Poza Rica’s first oilfield, a nine-year-old orphan in a red light district rampant with venereal disease, malaria, pityriasis, chiggers, and explosions in abandoned oil pipelines; I saw him climbing on a crate to reach the bar in the saloon where he hawked newspapers as a youngster afflicted with a host of allergies—to powders, chocolate, mangos, seafood, pollen, leather—that isolated him from normality and explained his aversion to physical contact and the circle of fear within which he lived his life; I saw him join the oil workers union as an adolescent peon and lose two fingers, a wife, the two children she bore him, and his best friend in one of the many union meetings that ended in gunfire; and, on March 27, 1952, as a first-time delegate from Local 35, I saw him rise in protest at yet another bloody union gathering after a deranged gunman in a nearby saloon opened fire on the rival candidate.