Death in Veracruz (20 page)

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 his 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 angry 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.”

“Never mind the widow,” I said. “Help me with the official investigation.”

“Whatever you say.”

“That's what I say.”

“All right. How do I get back to you?”

I gave him my phone numbers and re-dialed Veracruz looking for Anabela. I found her this time, or I almost did. She'd returned home, but it sounded as if she were somewhere else. Her voice was cold and her reflexes slow and subdued as if they'd been buried under a landslide of obstacles and barriers.

“I want to go to Mexico City with my children,” she said at last. “I'm thinking of taking a plane tomorrow. Can you pick me up?”

Naturally, I said yes. I hung up and again tried to reach Internal Security. One of my contact's aides answered. He wanted to know exactly where I was, how long would I be there, and if I could stay put for an hour. The hour was nearly up when Doña Lila answered the door. The aide was outside with my contact standing behind him.

“I'm about to receive another set of doctored photos from Chicontepec,” I told him before he could sit down.

“A terrible occurrence,” he said expressionlessly. He unbuttoned his jacket and made himself comfortable on the sofa. “There's one fact about all this that makes us extremely uneasy.”

“I warned you about this more than a year ago, sir. I warned you when it had just begun.”

“With skewered information,
paisano.”

“
It was true.”

“No, it wasn't.” my contact said. He took out the gold cigarette case where he kept his aromatic, dazzlingly white Dunhills.
“It came to be true,
but it wasn't at the time.”

“How many deaths do you need to make something true?”

“None,
paisano.
What I'm saying is that your case turned out to be true in light of the fact we find deeply troubling.”

As was his custom, he reached for an envelope in his coat pocket and handed it to me. In it were photos of Rojano's body lying in the cobblestone streets of Chicontepec before the town government building. His nose was broken, his forehead looked out of line, and there was blood on his exposed teeth. One eye was open. The other was swollen into a welt resembling a pear sitting on a chopping block formed by his eyelid. The skin had peeled off on parts of his head,
his collarbone had been broken on one side, and the arm connected to it was sectioned into three pieces.

“This could have been avoided if your people had acted in time,” I said, dizzied by the sight of the ruined remains on the stone street.

My contact observed a brief silence.

“Do you see the detail? I'm referring to the hole in the mayor's left temple from the final bullet.”

I looked again, and there it was. Part of the impression created by the smashed face in the photos was attributable to an impact that deformed the forehead and left side of the skull.

“That must be a photo doctored by his wife to trick you into blaming Pizarro.” A knot formed in my throat. I was nauseous from looking at the mutilated corpse.

“It's a shot from a .357 Magnum, a collector's item. Nobody in Mexico has one. It's hard to see how anybody could own one in Chicontepec.”

“Then you already have a report with the facts?”