Death in Veracruz

by Hector Camín

  The final story of the month took up three full columns. It reported the enormous sums PEMEX was transferring to the union on the incredible pretext of granting it exclusive subcontracting rights for the company’s exploration and construction projects as part of a collective bargaining agreement. The union could then outsource the work and charge finders’ fees amounting—by my calculations—to between 1 and 1.5 billion dollars annually (between 25 and 35 billion pesos). The columns also described in detail the company’s parallel transfers to the union of some 800 million pesos for commissions and paid leave. Most of those funds went to paying oil workers who, instead of doing their PEMEX jobs, worked for companies and businesses belonging to the union, especially the so-called “union gardens” of which “La Mesopotamia” and Pizarro’s other agricultural complexes were prime examples. These net transfers of resources went a long way towards explaining the low costs and very low prices that enabled the union to boast about its efficiency to the rest of the country. It paid nothing for either skilled or unskilled labor. Its payroll was met by others.

  Never did I feel so immersed in the simple task of investigating and communicating as I did in those days. Never so neutral, so remote from the political and personal implications of my column. I had no ulterior motives. I was objective and dispassionate, at absolute peace with myself.

  In early March my contact sought me out. All the news I’d had from him in the intervening months was a card slipped under my door a few days after Anabela’s departure. It said, “Negotiated as agreed, but vacation should continue until further notice.” Was this further notice? We met on March 8, 1980, at a small restaurant in the Condesa District, the Tio Luis, which in times past had been the hangout of the bullfight crowd, on Montes de Oca and Cuautla.

  “Working hard?” he said once we’d greeted each other in the protective aura of a display case where the embroidered vest of Manuel Benitez, el Cordobés, was enshrined.

  “Hard and well,” I said. My contact asked the waiter for mineral water only to drink, and I followed suit.

  I thought back three years to Rojano and his abstemious domestic facade, his self-conscious parsimony.

  “It shows day after day in your column,” my contact said. “It’s the best one around these days.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve got some items for you to consider if you’ll allow me.”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “But I’d like to discuss something else with you right now.”

  I nodded, and he explained. “Pizarro’s been declared terminally ill. He’s sinking fast. At the rate he’s going, the doctors say he won’t last two months.”

  “Is that how much longer the vacation’s going to last?” I said, thinking this was the news he had for me.

  “The vacation doesn’t have an end date yet,” my contact said.

  “Then why are you telling me about Pizarro?”

  “I want you to go see him,” my contact said.

  “I’m not interested in seeing him.”

  “You will be,” my contact said. “It’s part of the negotiation about the vacationer and her future safety. Pizarro himself had me ask you.”

  “How crazy can you get?”

  “Are you referring to me or Pizarro?”

  “You and Pizarro. Why stir up that hornets’ nest?”

  “It’s still an open file, paisano. I don’t want to see more toads jumping out of it. Help me close it because you’ll also be helping yourself. The vacationer isn’t exactly the most placid woman who ever lived, paisano.”

  “That’s strictly a private matter. Don’t pry in my private life.”

  “That’s all I’m trying to do,” my contact said, “to keep your private life from becoming public.”

  “Are you handing me a bill, paisano?”

  “I’m asking for your help in closing a file that just happens to concern you. I’ve asked you before, and you’ve helped me through your column. For me the only difference is that this case involves you, and I admire and respect you. What’s more, the interview will be of interest to the vacationer.”

  “Leave the vacationer out of this.”

  “A remarkable woman, paisano,” my contact said. “I don’t ever want to be her enemy.”

  “You never will be.”

  “There’s another thing. Your recent disclosures about contracts and transfers has the union very worried,” my contact said. “It’s also in on this negotiation. That’s why Pizarro wants to see you. It’s a political matter if you know what I mean.”

  “I do, which is why it’s not negotiable.”

  “Everything is negotiable, paisano,” my contact said with a knowing smile.

  I went to the restroom and returned.

  “When do you want us to see Pizarro?”

  He smiled once again.

  Chapter 11

  A TRUMPET FOR LACHO

  The annual celebration of the expropriation of the oil industry took place on March 18, 1980, in Salamanca, Guanajuato. The President and his entire cabinet attended, along with an ample contingent of travel companions, speeches, and confetti. It was a time of heated debate about Mexico’s possible entry into GATT—the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. Signatories to the pact promised to open their borders to world trade, a step which would bring an end to the long decades of industrial protectionism on which the Mexican economic “miracle” was based. The war raging among bureaucrats and the general public over the unbridled growth of PEMEX and the need to rein in its burgeoning exports had also entered a new phase.

  In his keynote address that day, President López Portillo announced that Mexico would not be joining GATT and that a Mexican Nutrition System—to be known by its acronym of SAM—would be set up to mount an all-out attack on social stagnation and low productivity in the rural economy. These measures would be accompanied by a cap of 2.5 million barrels per day on crude oil production, officially laying to rest the notion that abundant oil would pay for absolutely everything including foodstuffs for the foreseeable future and whatever other imports might prove necessary.

  These announcements were greeted by cheers, outpourings of emotion, and (more) confetti.

  Years later we would learn that, as a practical matter, the progressive loosening of import restrictions then under way would make the question of joining or not joining GATT seem beside the point. Mexico had already opened its borders as much as it would have had to under the treaty but without the advantages to be gained by negotiating the terms for signing. With the change in presidential administrations, SAM got lost in a labyrinth of criticism and bureaucratic infighting. The token effort to put the brakes on excessive oil earnings for fear of hobbling the rest of the Mexican economy proved just as futile. Between 1978 and 1981, crude exports brought in 55 billion dollars, and by the end of 1982 the country was faced with foreign debts amounting to 80 billion dollars.

  But the speech in Salamanca was the first public acknowledgment of the need to get PEMEX’s runaway expansion under control. Intellectuals and journalists declared the day a turning point in the López Portillo administration. It marked the beginning of the end for PEMEX’s wild growth spurt at a time when its impact on the economy as a whole and on Mexico’s relations with the outside world was of increasing concern to public opinion and to the government itself.

  For other observers of the president’s speech, the measures announced that day had a more personal and tangible impact. First, they stifled the presidential ambitions of PEMEX director Jorge Díaz Serrano and the secretaries of the economic cabinet who had voted in favor of GATT. In other quarters the decisions of March 18 hit even harder. They curtailed PEMEX’s giant investment projects, the grandest of which was the Chicontepec paleocanal and the golden city to be that drove both the ambitions of Rojano and the aspirations of Pizarro.

  It was the day of my meeting with Pizarro, but I didn’t see him at the ceremony. We met on the city’s outskirts in a bungalow at
the Club Campestre—the country club next to the Panamerican Highway where I was driven by my contact. We passed through a phalanx of guards and entered a small, dimly lit room with drawn curtains. A single lamp cast a weak yellow light from the back of the room. Pizarro was seated in a wheelchair next to the lamp, wearing glasses with pitch black lenses like a blind man’s. There was a coverlet over his legs. Roibal stood behind him. He’d put on weight and was rapidly going bald. He wore a black patch over his left eye. The cord holding it in place made a line across his forehead and tied behind his neck. His face looked extraordinarily old. Little Darling sat next to Pizarro, mechanically stroking his arm.

  We approached the pathetic trio, and I noticed that Pizarro’s hair had gone totally gray except for a few streaks of white tinged with yellow like dirty ashes. The skin of his face sagged visibly into a wattle while the bones of his skull had grown more prominent. His nose, jaw and cheekbones seemed larger than before and his forehead wider. Something similar had happened to his sternum which thrust forward and upward under his shirt. What was most striking, though, was that Pizarro had shrunk. He was much smaller than he had been and sat in his wheelchair like a ventriloquist’s dummy, unstrung, fragile, and guided solely by Little Darling’s automated stroking of his arm. I watched closely as we sat down in front of him as my contact laid out the reasons for our meeting.

  Pizarro listened while running his tongue back and forth over his lips as if unable to control his saliva. Now I was seeing him up close: the glasses, the yellowed streaks of white hair, the barrel chest, the doll-like arms resting on the chair, the incontinent salivation, the skull protruding towards us from beneath the skin of his face. This is what had survived the fury unleashed by Anabela, the remains of the stupid and murderous adventure that ended in the dark of night with the death of Edilberto Chanes. It was the perfect outcome for a vendetta. Pizarro wasn’t dead, just inert. He’d yet to be swallowed up by the earth, eaten by worms, and forgotten. His shrunken body remained alive and aware of the satisfaction others would take in watching it turn slowly into a cadaver. He still had a ways to go before reaching the grave. This was vengeance incarnate, a gradual and irreversible death reflected day after day in the mirror of a consciousness that could feel the abysmal triviality of the oncoming silence. Each second, each hour, each day brought another measure of torture for Pizarro, forcing him to confront the unbearable certainty that his historic mission had come to a premature standstill. Imagine Napoleon before Austerlitz, or Hernán Cortés before the conquest of Mexico, or Lázaro Cárdenas before expropriating the oil industry.

  “I’m out of time, my journalist friend,” Pizarro said once my contact made it clear he’d be talking to me only. “My time is running down and so is my body. A day in my life is like a year in yours.”

  He hadn’t lost his voice. It had grown deeper and richer and, in stark contrast to the body it inhabited, sounded more vigorous and powerful than ever.

  “There’s something I want to tell you. What’s important to me is that you hear it whether you believe it or not. I’m not going after your lady. I know you had your doubts about that, and you got her out of the country. But you don’t need to worry about her. That I can guarantee.”

  “That’s not the message we got from you in December,” I replied.

  “I know, my journalist friend. But the message wasn’t from me. The story the leather pouches tell is different. It wasn’t the one you and your friends attributed to them. Not the one you published. Those were fantasies, my journalist friend, fantasies that did a lot of harm.”

  “Love can do terrible things,” Little Darling said sadly.

  “The mayor of Chicontepec is dead,” I said.

  “That doesn’t matter any more,” Pizarro said.

  His lips trembled, and saliva drooled down his chin, but his voice was firm, his diction perfect.

  “As I once told you, people are always dying, but our people don’t die in vain. They never will. Our deaths are caused by need, by history, not revenge, my journalist friend. So you don’t have to worry about reprisals from us. We’re not spiteful people, we’re workers. As I told you, we built a river. We remove what gets in the way and put what helps in its place. That’s all. Whether your lady lives or dies at this time is of no importance to our work.”

  He sounded like an oracle, as if someone else were speaking through him. A true, solemn, and guttural ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “I am asking you not to attack the union in return,” Pizarro continued. “Don’t meddle. The little you learned about its machinery ought to have sunk in. Don’t stick your hands in the gears. Leave us to our work, don’t judge us without first getting to know us. And don’t try to get to know us by provoking us.”

  He lay his head against the back of the wheelchair. He seemed utterly overcome with fatigue. In my mind’s eye I could see the immaculate corrals of “La Mesopotamia” in El Álamo, the mangroves and the stables, the parts shop and the complex at the center of it all. Once again I found myself admiring Lázaro Pizarro, the boss of Poza Rica, leader of his people, and founder of civilizations. His lips were trembling. It took enormous physical effort for the voice to maintain for even a few minutes the power and resonance required to match its owner’s opinion of his role in history.

  “If you’d like to ask him something, you may,” Little Darling said in her dulcet voice. “We know what it’s like to be hopelessly in love.”

  “Do today’s presidential decisions mean the whole Chicontepec project is on hold?” I asked.

  “It was shut down by total lack of foresight,” Pizarro said, regaining his strength.

  “God gave it to us, and God is taking it away,” said Little Darling.

  “Then it was all in vain,” I said.

  “Nothing’s in vain, my journalist friend,” Pizarro said with renewed vigor. I felt the full force of the anger driving his indomitable will, the passion smoldering in that ruined body. “Everything comes from the same source: the showers that water the land and the flood that washes away towns, lives and animals. History makes mistakes too. It gets off on the wrong track as the saying goes. Our job is to keep it on the right track, to make the corrections. And it’s a high-risk undertaking, my friend, just like the oil business. You have to greet the losses with open arms. Losses, as you can easily see, are part of the game.”

  He thrust his head back and stared up at the ceiling, clearly exhausted. His jaw tensed. His lips had gone dry, and his hands trembled ever so slightly.

  “God is taking him away from us,” Little Darling said, kissing Pizarro’s arm as she stroked it.

  When he leaned back to rest on that same arm, the light from the lamp struck the left side of his face, exposing the moisture that came with his grief.

  We started back to the hotel without speaking, but my contact made a surprise stop on the way at a small plaza with red benches and privet trees saturated with birds. He had me get out, and we stood next to a dry fountain. All around us were teenage couples, old men basking in the sun, ice cream vendors, and street sellers hawking local delicacies in the holy Mexican peace, marking the anniversary of the day the oil was nationalized.

  “Now you’ve seen him,” my contact said. He brushed the dust out of the orifice from which one of the fountain’s four frogs ought to have been spouting water. “I hope you realized his days are numbered.”

  “I did,” I replied.

  He rested his impeccable ox-blood shoe on the edge of the fountain and in his customarily deliberate fashion took the time necessary to extract and light a cigarette.

  “Now it’s my turn to apologize to you for what I’m about to say.” He released the smoke from the first drag on his cigarette.

  I began picking at a frog of my own.

  “The Pizarro you were looking at in the wheelchair wasn’t the work of Edilberto Chanes.” My contact looked up at the sky. He furrowed his brow, trying to hold the brilliance of the open sky in his gaze. “What you sa
w in that motel was a man consumed by cancer, not wounds inflicted by someone else. Much less Edilberto Chanes.”

  “Are you telling me that Chanes never got to Pizarro?”

  “I’m telling you Chanes didn’t so much as launch an attack.” Once again he inhaled and tried to look up into the cloudless sky. “The attack never happened.”

  “I got direct confirmation of Pizarro’s wounds from Houston,” I said drily.

  “I don’t know what you confirmed in Houston,” my contact said. “It’s true Pizarro was in Houston at the time of Chanes’s death. He went to get treatment for the cancer that was eating him away and for no other reason.”

  I tried hard to think back. I got no information from Miller concerning the exact reason for Pizarro’s admission to Methodist Hospital. She did mention they put him in the trauma unit.

  “Roibal was also admitted with injuries,” I pointed out.