The Demands of the Dead (14 page)

Until I got to the church, where there was at least a plastic mug of black coffee poured out of a thermos for me. Most of the community was in the church by the look of it. Women and children on the right, men on the left, leaders (called “responsables”) of various kinds at the front. Two of the seven were women, and one had her hands on the shoulders of the same 9-year old girl that was with Susana when I had arrived at the observer camp. My little witness. I looked at the kid and she held my eyes for a long beat, before I looked away.

I'll keep your secret, kid,
I thought.

They spoke in Tzeltal, and I had to wait my turn, even though I thought what I had to say was urgent. These people even handled emergencies democratically.

They invited me to the front, and me and my translator followed. I stepped up and faced a congregation lit by candlelight. The electricity, erratic all night, had cut out for good.

It was my first time in this church. In the candlelit church, children – except for the girl in the front - sat with their mothers at low benches, which substituted for pews. Some kids walked back and forth in the aisles. In this limbo between a church and a town hall meeting, each member of the congregation stood to speak.

I suddenly wished I had come to a normal service, on a Sunday, during the day, to see all these people unhurried, not terrified, not looking they had been awoken in the middle of the night and spent the last four hours discussing an emergency and waiting for who-knew-what to happen to them.

I suddenly realized that the massacre at Acteal in 1997 had gone just this way. The community had been threatened. They had run to the church. There, in the church, they were slaughtered. If I remembered Acteal, so did they.

I found myself watching the door. These frightened people were waiting for me to say something.

The people who had been massacred at Acteal were not Zapatistas. They were supporters of the Zapatistas, but they were strict pacifists who refused to take up arms. Las Abejas. Being unarmed wasn't always a protection.

I needed to focus. The Abejas were killed at Acteal. Were the Zapatistas going to fight back? Was this the whole community? Were there people I didn’t see keeping an eye out? Soldiers? The famous guerrillas? I wasn’t focusing. This was all so irrelevant. Yes someone could come through that church door and kill everyone here. How was that any different from a million other situations.
Do something, Mark. Say something.

“I am Mark Brown and I am here to investigate the murders of those Public Security Officers.”

I waited for the translation. No one reacted. They were stoic. Especially in front of me. They weren’t going to react to anything I said. No watching the mood or playing to the crowd here.

“I am here with the endorsement of the Chiapas Human Rights Defense Network and the investigation I am conducting is independent of the police here in Mexico.”

I waited for the translation.

“I have been here two days, studying the situation. I interviewed Antonio and Rodolfo today. I believe it is possible they were arrested because of those interviews.”

I waited.

“Before I came to this community, I was at the army base here at Hatuey, interviewing officers in Public Security, including the commander of the operation at the base, Beltran.”

I listened for the translator to repeat Beltran’s name. I liked to do that when I heard translations, listen for words I knew. I didn’t hear it. They called him something else, probably.

Bastard, maybe. I would have to take care not to call him that myself, before the night was through. Lying, sneaky bastard. 120 cops to make 2 arrests. Who was that for? Who was supposed to learn a lesson from it? Me? Them? Hoffman? The whole community? Somebody was sending a message.

“The commander ensured that he would cooperate fully with my investigation and provide me with all the information relevant to the case.

“It is possible that these arrests are a change in the commander’s policy. If that’s true, I will file my report stating that the Public Security refused to comply with an independent investigation. I’ll appeal to the prosecutor-general and then the governor, and publicize the lack of co-operation.”

My words sounded hollow to myself. They had
arrested
,
kidnapped
,
raided
, and I was promising to
file
,
appeal
, and
publicize
. Still no reaction. Unless you counted the 3-year old who was running up and down the aisle, and the 5-year old running in circles at the back of the church.

“Public Security had its own investigator working on this case. He and I worked closely earlier this week. He would have been the one who ordered any arrests.

“They might claim that these arrests were made in light of new information. If that is the case, I will demand they give me the information so I can continue my work.”

I didn’t know how to say what came next. I wasn’t feeling very neutral right now. But the only way to help right now was to act neutral. It was still my only chip.

“If Antonio and Rodolfo are innocent, and I have no evidence suggesting they are not—“

They didn’t react.

“—then my investigation will clear them. In any case,” I stopped to breathe and wished I had my water bottle, “I would like to go to the base here, to confront commander Beltran, and ask him whether he has new information to share or whether he has withdrawn the cooperation of the government from my investigation.

“I realize you are in the process of preparing a response to these arrests and my actions could have an effect on your situation. I will not act without your permission.”

That was it. My translator, whose name I still didn’t know, stayed put. I wanted to sit down. I didn’t sit down.

The old woman with her hands on the shoulders of the 9-year old girl in the front row stood up and asked a question. She looked and pointed at me. My translator answered without explaining to me. This was repeated a few times. Then one of the women responsables stepped forward and said something to the community, looked at me, and said, in very formal Spanish:

“You may go.”

I wasn’t sure whether she meant I could go to the base, or whether I had to leave the church right away, or both. I left.

I waited outside the church. My translator came out after 20 minutes. He said I could go. At sunrise. Alone.

That had been the last topic of debate. But it turned out they understood the importance of my neutrality as well as I did. Showing up at the army base with a Zapatista escort would have done no one any good.

I packed my stuff up. All of it. There wasn’t much sense in coming back here. There were two possibilities. Either Beltran was no longer cooperating, in which case I needed to be in San Cristobal to appeal to higher powers, or Beltran had new information on Antonio and Rodolfo, in which case I would want to talk to them. And to Chavez. This was a military base. It wasn’t even a police station, despite Public Security’s presence there. There would not be a prison or even a holding cell. I was almost certain that Antonio and Rodolfo were on their way to a prison somewhere, if not already there. There were a lot of things that went slowly here. But these things happened unusually fast. No matter what, I’d be going somewhere straight from the base, and not coming back here.

Was this arrest Chavez's work? It was if he knew I was here. It could be he didn’t know, that the cops on patrol who’d seen me at the encampment hadn’t reported this, that it hadn’t trickled all the way along to Beltran and Chavez.

The only way Chavez wasn’t behind this was if Public Security had no idea where I was, they had unearthed significant evidence implicating Antonio and Rodolfo in the killings, and they were eager to share it with me but couldn’t reach me.

Unlikely, but they might have contacted Hoffman by now. I had no way of knowing. There were no phones out here and definitely no email.

But what evidence could they possibly have? I had seen all the forensics, the scene of the crime, the schedules, all of it. Had someone confessed to committing the crime with them? Or seeing it? Or hearing them talk about it? Had they been betrayed? New ballistics? Had they found the weapon that killed Gonzalez and Diaz? Maybe they had it all along and didn’t give it to me. But they couldn’t link such a weapon to the rebels without fingerprints. And why would they have the suspects’ fingerprints? Most people lived and died in the communities without even a birth certificate. Unless Antonio and Rodolfo had already been arrested, they wouldn’t have prints on file. Maybe they had already been arrested. They hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with me about criminal records, prior arrests, or anything else. I didn’t even know their full names. In fact it was only by accident that I knew their faces.

I put the pack on my back and said a tired and hungry goodbye to Hatuey. The coffee was kicking in but I was still scattered and drowsy.

I got back on the trail on which Gonzalez and Diaz were killed in the mountains, in the jungle, as the sun was starting to rise, with a big backpack, some tortillas, a bottle of water, a dim sense of what was going on, and a dimmer sense of what I was going to do about it. I heard the crunch of rubber bootprints behind me.

Emi, looking fresh and tireless, tossing a machete up, spinning it in mid-air, and catching it by the handle as he walked.

“I will walk with you for a bit,” he said.

“Not all the way to the base, of course,” I said.

“Of course not,” he replied.

It was not a time for idle chatter and Emi was not a talkative man. We walked in silence, save for our boots crunching the forest floor, some beetles, the mist, and the disappearing stars. The trail was worn down from 120 armed men and their 2 prisoners. In the tracks I read that the whole operation had gone very quickly and smoothly, that the prisoners were walked briskly from the camp.

So many tracks, so many different services involved. The Federal Preventive Police and the Army had been involved in the arrest. Federal Preventive Police didn’t usually hang around the bases the way Public Security did. They were brought in from somewhere, just for the arrest. Maybe this went higher up the food chain than Chavez, or even Beltran. Maybe up to Saltillo or even higher.

When I got as far as the scene of Gonzalez and Diaz's murder, I stopped to reshuffle my bags, take a swig of water. Emi whispered to me: “Wait here.”

He walked off the trail into the woods, and though he was good in the woods, anyone traveling at any speed creates what Mr. Manley, and those who taught him, called concentric rings. Insects and birds reacted to a passing human. Other insects and birds reacted to their reaction. Slight disturbances could create ripples, like throwing a stone into a pond. Sometimes a tracker in the woods would mask his presence by impersonating another animal. Birds, like robins, would be a good call. I heard Emi make a sharp, loud robin call. Seconds later, I heard a response – from a winter wren.

What was most interesting about this birdcall was that the winter wren was from New York State, and not, as far as I knew, characteristic of southern Mexico.

Walter was in these woods.

As serious as the situation was, I smiled as I squatted to munch a dry tortilla and wait for Emi to come back. He did come back, just to say goodbye.

The Zapatista encampment outside the military base, where I had interviewed Rodolfo, had been torched, now a steaming pile of coal and burned canvas. The Army had poured water on what was left of it. They didn’t want to burn the woods.
Well
, I thought, surveying the destruction
. It would be easy enough for the rebels to pitch a few more tents, and bring the cameras back.

The cameras. They would be getting here soon. The sun had risen. This was a good place to see the mountains stretching off in both directions. And just across the way there was the base.

And the base, like the community, was on red alert. A line of soldiers ringed the fence, the same tension, and perhaps shame, written on their faces and bodies.
Well good
, I thought.
I won’t have to knock
. I got some papers ready and walked to the fence.

Chapter 6

A full squad of highly diligent red-alerted Public Security officers and another squad of Army soldiers greeted me at the fence with heavy weapons and a lot of yelling.

We cleared that up. I waited at the pillbox for a familiar face to escort me to Beltran's office: Officer Escalante, looking as sour as ever. His hand wasn't wrapped, though I could swear I saw it twitch when he looked at me.

“Looks like the arm is fully recovered?” I asked.

He didn't reply. Just sidled up to me and walked alongside towards the main building.

Beltran kept me waiting, Escalante standing over me. A show of dominance, familiar enough in bureaucracies. But maybe something useful to me. Beltran was showing me what he valued by denying it to me, and anything I knew about him I could use.

The Apache Scouts whose descendants taught Mr. Manley's teachers believed that knowledge was power. Their task was to find the enemy without being seen, to find out what the enemy's plans were without giving anything away. The Zapatista leader, Subcomandante Marcos, said the Zapatista's words were weapons. He was a talented commander from what I could tell, keeping his army alive and growing for six years in these conditions, and a poet. I was no poet, but on this base, words – information and disinformation – were my only weapons. My mission depended on what I could convince Beltran of. He wanted respect? I would drown him in it.