I found them on the Spanish version of Wikipedia, with the exception of the latter. That one was on the English version.
I don't know if they are in a museum. Stuff like this is most likely from some private collections.
Al Grito de Guerra: the Second Mexican Revolution
- Thread starter Roberto El Rey
- Start date
I found them on the Spanish version of Wikipedia, with the exception of the latter. That one was on the English version.
I don't know if they are in a museum. Stuff like this is most likely from some private collections.
Part 20: Hugo Chávez, Assassination of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo
In many ways, the offensive launched against the State of Zapata in mid-1993 was as much a PR campaign as it was a military campaign. Ever since its humiliating defeat at the Battle of San Cristóbal eight months earlier, the Mexican Army—and, by extension, President Bartlett—had been tainted with an image of weakness and incompetence. Determined to dispel this embarrassing image, Bartlett had ordered Defense Secretary Juan Arévalo Gardoquí to design a new assault on the Zapatistas that would leave the ELM broken, bloodied and reeling with no hope for a counterattack. Thus, on April 4, 42,000 well-armed and well-supplied soldiers under General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo marched into Zapatista territory once again to take on a grand total of 8,000 guerrillas, spread thin across the state and running low on weapons and ammunition.
The Army had learned from its defeat at San Cristóbal. Rather than attempting to defeat the ELM in a major, pitched battle, the attacking force split itself up into six columns and began retaking the rebellious municipalities one by one. Many Zapatista communities were too far up in the mountains for a direct assault, but those at a lower elevation were easy prey, and with these, the Army took no chances. In one such community, Plan de Ayala (formerly known as Juan Sabines Gutiérrez), the 327 inhabitants came under attack by an entire company of 140 soldiers, who, after evacuating the residents and stripping their homes of most items of value, arrested more than 40% of the adult population on suspicion of being ELM guerrillas. Village after village fell in this way; the ELM’s commanders desperately hoped that they could pull off a second San Cristóbal, but the armored cars which had failed so badly in the city’s narrow alleyways performed much better in the wide-open Selva, especially because the ELM had nearly depleted its stock of anti-armor rockets the previous summer.
By the end of June, more than thirty Zapatista communities had been reconquered by the Army. The ELM did its best to harass the occupying force and even managed to briefly retake a few municipalities, but there was little they could do without resupplying their weapons and equipment, and despite Governor Albores’s persistent requests, shipments from Havana were maddeningly slow to arrive. Finally, in July, Subcomandante Marcos decided to abandon the low-lying areas entirely, ordering his forces to retreat into the mountains and entrench themselves in communities where the terrain was rough enough that General Gutiérrez Rebollo would have a difficult time bringing his superior forces to bear. The Zapotecs in southwestern Zapata, meanwhile, hunkered down and prepared for a state of siege. At long last, the administration had achieved its strategic goal of slicing the rebel state in half, and although the remaining two halves would prove to be very tough nuts to crack, the Army had finally won back its swagger in the minds of the Mexican people. [1]
In one particular part of Latin America, though, this strategic victory was overshadowed by the news that one particular ELM casualty had been identified: Hugo Chávez—the Venezuelan Army officer and would-be revolutionary who had dropped off the map following a botched coup attempt in 1991—had turned up dead and in uniform in the State of Zapata, shot by Mexican troops in the defense of the Zapatista village of Tapalapa. There are a few competing theories as to how exactly he got there, but since 1995, Caracas has accepted the following explanation: after failing to take over Venezuela, Chávez fled to Cuba (whose intelligence services had secretly supported his coup), where he brooded for a year until, after hearing about the Zapatistas’ success at the Battle of San Cristóbal, his ambition got the better of him. On his own request, the Cuban Army sent Chávez to Zapata in 1992 as a military advisor, where he had apparently hoped to satisfy his hunger for power by taking on some kind of leadership role within the Zapatista movement. [2] News of Chávez’s death shocked and polarized the Venezuelan socialist movement: moderates who had not supported the attempted coup were relatively unmoved, while a smaller, more militant faction mourned the spiritual leader whom many had hoped would one day return to lead their country in revolution. The schism soon worsened into an ideological split, and as Venezuela prepared to elect its next president in December, it became clear that, even beyond the grave, Chávez would continue to exert a significant influence on his country’s politics.
Not two months after Chávez bit the dust, another death occurred on Mexican soil that would have subtler, but even more significant ramifications. On August 14, 1993, Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, the Archbishop of Guadalajara, was shot to death along with four others as he pulled into the parking lot of Guadalajara International Airport. [3] Cardinal Posadas Ocampo had been one of Mexico’s most respected clerics—known for his humble background as well as for his crusades against corruption—and the news of his death enraged and appalled the Mexican people more than any assassination since that of Celeste Batel more than five years earlier. His funeral in Guadalajara attracted over 110,000 mourners, and when Government Secretary Carlos Hank González (whom President Bartlett had sent to present an appearance of government sympathy) tried to give a speech at the memorial service, he was unable to finish his perfunctory drone of a eulogy because was interrupted so many times by furious cries for “¡Justicia!”[4]
That justice was predictably slow to arrive. Authorities quickly blamed the Tijuana Cartel for the execution, saying they had killed the Cardinal after mistaking him for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, head of the rival Sinaloa Cartel. But that explanation left the Mexican people wondering how professional killers could possibly have confused a vicious drug lord with an elderly gentleman in a flowing black habit. Soon, rumors began to emerge that Cardinal Posadas Ocampo had come across information that would have implicated dozens of PRI officials in a narcotics scandal, and that President Bartlett had ordered the Archbishop killed to keep him quiet. [5] The government, of course, rejected this notion outright, and after a ten-day-long “federal investigation” (which resulted in the arrest and conviction of Alfredo Hodoyán Palacios, a young member of one of Ramón Arellano Félix's death squads), President Bartlett declared the case closed, and pressured the country’s major news sources into dropping all mention of the assassination from its pages. El Informador, Guadalajara’s largest newspaper, complied with this directive so willingly that the 26-year Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, the paper’s youngest yet most diligent and industrious journalist, quit her job in disgust. Xanic's interest in the Cardinal’s death, however, persisted, and she immediately set about conducting her own investigation into the murder, hoping to dig up proof that there was more to the assassination than President Bartlett was willing to admit.
Though the initial public reaction fizzled out within a few weeks, the assassination of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo would have momentous consequences for Mexico. Ever since the 1930s, the PRI had had a decidedly unfriendly relationship with the Catholic Church, imposing laws which prohibited the Church from owning property or running schools, and which banned priests from wearing their robes in public or voting in elections. Some of the tension had been released in 1989, when Carlos Salinas had repealed some of the more extreme anti-clerical measures. But the Archbishop’s assassination (which a large majority of Mexicans still believed had been a government job) was a watershed moment. The clergy could tolerate restrictions on their rights to vote and own property, as well as President Bartlett’s general disregard for civil liberties. But murdering a man of the cloth for threatening to expose government corruption? That was a step too far. In the weeks after the Archbishop's assassination, the sermons heard by Mexican churchgoers began to change subtly in tone. Before Cardinal Posadas’s assassination, most preachers had been urging their flocks to turn the other cheek in the face of government repression and avoid stirring up trouble, but now they began to emphasize more “rebellious” sections of the scripture; according to historian Enrique Krauze, Isaiah 61:1 (…for the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the disheartened…to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them who are bound”) became a particularly popular verse following the Cardinal’s death.
This subtle change would have enormous historical impact. After so many years of tyranny and deprivation, a large majority of Mexicans—including millions of once-loyal priístas—had grown profoundly disillusioned with President Bartlett and the ruling the party. Up until now, most of these “ordinary” Mexicans had been keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, fearing that any signs of disloyalty would put themselves and their families in danger. But many millions of them were devout Catholics, and millions more had turned to religion for comfort in these times of strife. And when those millions of Mexicans heard their priests subtly connect acts of resistance with acts of godliness, they suddenly remembered the firmness with which their poet laureate, Octavio Paz, had urged them “to resist any encroachment on their freedoms with whatever means lay at their disposal”. By October, church basements everywhere from Cancún to Culiacán were holding hushed, late-night meetings in which hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of whom had scarcely entertained a political thought in their lives, gathered to discuss the manifold ways in which the government had trampled on their rights and liberties. And as these hushed discussions spread from church basements to restaurants, shops, garages and workplaces, the raucous, rebellious, revolutionary flair within the Mexican national spirit was beginning to awaken once more.
Anti-PRI graffiti became increasingly common on Mexican streets during the latter half of 1993. DFS agents arrested as many as two thousand street artists over the course of the year, but were ultimately powerless to stop the wave of vandalism, covering up anti-government slogans only to find a dozen more scrawled across the same wall the next day.
This spirit of sedition would find a home not only among ordinary Mexicans, but also among the highest ranks of the Army. After the April campaign against the Zapatistas succeeded, many officers had hoped that they would be transferred back to civilian peacekeeping duty, so that they could rebuild the massive, city-wide profit-making machines that had made so many of them rich after the Autumn of Terrors. A few optimistic officers even hoped that they would be sent to the border regions so that they could ingratiate themselves with the drug cartels and get in on the action. President Bartlett, however, had other ideas. Though he was pleased at the success of the spring offensive, Bartlett recognized that it had been a relatively easy victory, and he knew that it would be much harder to dislodge the Zapotecs and Zapatistas from their new hiding places. He also believed (correctly) that a root cause for the defeat at San Cristóbal was that urban peacekeeping had made the Army corrupt and inert, and he feared that if the soldiers were allowed to grow fat and lazy again, then the Zapatistas would be able to inflict another national humiliation. So Bartlett steadfastly refused to allow the Army to come anywhere near the cartels, and although he did permit a few brigades to return to their peacekeeping duties, he made them compete for territory and kickbacks with the much-despised DFS, whose agents he had given preferential powers and jurisdiction. Even as a dispute over meth distribution rights in September erupted into a bloody war between the Sonora Cartel and the Juárez Cartel, and the DFS began to fracture into opposing factions, Bartlett was hesitant to allow the Army to gluttonize itself upon the fruitful fount of drug money.
By late autumn, the Army’s leading generals—including Alfredo Navarro Lara, Vinicio Santoyo, and even Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, fresh from his victory over the Zapatistas—were beginning to ask themselves (and, increasingly, each other) whether it was really worth their while to have Bartlett in charge if it meant that they would be cut off from their most lucrative source of wealth. Meanwhile, hundreds of capitanos and tenientes throughout Mexico were stuck drowning their bitterness in the very same bars where, not two years earlier, they had been running profitable protection rackets. So when they overheard common citizens airing their grievances with the PRI regime in increasingly loud and emphatic tones, these disgruntled soldiers found themselves joining in on the discussions. And, as word crept up the military hierarchy that a long-simmering groundswell of anti-government anger was finally beginning to bubble up to the surface, the top generals began to formulate a plan: in the preceding months, the Army had detained three supposed American “tourists” who had, in fact, turned out to be CIA agents, sent to Mexico at George Bush’s behest to explore the possibility of effecting a regime change; in October 1993, a few high-ranking officers resolved to make contact with this CIA presence and inform the U.S. intelligence community that they would be willing to consider any plans which might result in the permanent retirement of President Bartlett and his political retinue from the public service. The generals were confident that Washington would take an interest in this proposal—particularly as the presidential election of 1994 hurtled ever closer and President Bartlett prepared for the ritual of destape, or unveiling, in which he would reveal to the world his preferred candidate for the PRI presidential nomination, heir apparent to the throne of the Mexican presidency.
[2] You may be thinking that it would make more sense for the Cubans to hold on to Chávez, in hopes of sending him back to Venezuela in the near future to lead the people's revolution. However, things are significantly better in Venezuela than they were in OTL 1993, thanks to much higher U.S. purchases of Venezuelan petroleum and the reversal of Carlos Andrés Pérez’s privatization program. As a result, only a small fraction of society (and a minority of socialists), view Chávez in a positive light, and by the time things start to get really bad again, Chávez will have been forgotten. Yet it’s a liability to have him just hanging around, so Castro sends him to Zapata under a false name hoping he’ll die without being identified. He gets exactly half of his wish.
[3] In OTL, Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was shot in the same location a few months earlier, on May 24, 1993.
[4] This happened in OTL to President Carlos Salinas, who happened to be visiting Guadalajara the day after Cardinal was shot.
[5] In OTL, the "Tijuana Cartel trying to bump off El Chapo" story was also tendered as the “official” explanation, but many believe to this day that the assassination was an inside job.
The Army had learned from its defeat at San Cristóbal. Rather than attempting to defeat the ELM in a major, pitched battle, the attacking force split itself up into six columns and began retaking the rebellious municipalities one by one. Many Zapatista communities were too far up in the mountains for a direct assault, but those at a lower elevation were easy prey, and with these, the Army took no chances. In one such community, Plan de Ayala (formerly known as Juan Sabines Gutiérrez), the 327 inhabitants came under attack by an entire company of 140 soldiers, who, after evacuating the residents and stripping their homes of most items of value, arrested more than 40% of the adult population on suspicion of being ELM guerrillas. Village after village fell in this way; the ELM’s commanders desperately hoped that they could pull off a second San Cristóbal, but the armored cars which had failed so badly in the city’s narrow alleyways performed much better in the wide-open Selva, especially because the ELM had nearly depleted its stock of anti-armor rockets the previous summer.
By the end of June, more than thirty Zapatista communities had been reconquered by the Army. The ELM did its best to harass the occupying force and even managed to briefly retake a few municipalities, but there was little they could do without resupplying their weapons and equipment, and despite Governor Albores’s persistent requests, shipments from Havana were maddeningly slow to arrive. Finally, in July, Subcomandante Marcos decided to abandon the low-lying areas entirely, ordering his forces to retreat into the mountains and entrench themselves in communities where the terrain was rough enough that General Gutiérrez Rebollo would have a difficult time bringing his superior forces to bear. The Zapotecs in southwestern Zapata, meanwhile, hunkered down and prepared for a state of siege. At long last, the administration had achieved its strategic goal of slicing the rebel state in half, and although the remaining two halves would prove to be very tough nuts to crack, the Army had finally won back its swagger in the minds of the Mexican people. [1]
In one particular part of Latin America, though, this strategic victory was overshadowed by the news that one particular ELM casualty had been identified: Hugo Chávez—the Venezuelan Army officer and would-be revolutionary who had dropped off the map following a botched coup attempt in 1991—had turned up dead and in uniform in the State of Zapata, shot by Mexican troops in the defense of the Zapatista village of Tapalapa. There are a few competing theories as to how exactly he got there, but since 1995, Caracas has accepted the following explanation: after failing to take over Venezuela, Chávez fled to Cuba (whose intelligence services had secretly supported his coup), where he brooded for a year until, after hearing about the Zapatistas’ success at the Battle of San Cristóbal, his ambition got the better of him. On his own request, the Cuban Army sent Chávez to Zapata in 1992 as a military advisor, where he had apparently hoped to satisfy his hunger for power by taking on some kind of leadership role within the Zapatista movement. [2] News of Chávez’s death shocked and polarized the Venezuelan socialist movement: moderates who had not supported the attempted coup were relatively unmoved, while a smaller, more militant faction mourned the spiritual leader whom many had hoped would one day return to lead their country in revolution. The schism soon worsened into an ideological split, and as Venezuela prepared to elect its next president in December, it became clear that, even beyond the grave, Chávez would continue to exert a significant influence on his country’s politics.
That justice was predictably slow to arrive. Authorities quickly blamed the Tijuana Cartel for the execution, saying they had killed the Cardinal after mistaking him for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, head of the rival Sinaloa Cartel. But that explanation left the Mexican people wondering how professional killers could possibly have confused a vicious drug lord with an elderly gentleman in a flowing black habit. Soon, rumors began to emerge that Cardinal Posadas Ocampo had come across information that would have implicated dozens of PRI officials in a narcotics scandal, and that President Bartlett had ordered the Archbishop killed to keep him quiet. [5] The government, of course, rejected this notion outright, and after a ten-day-long “federal investigation” (which resulted in the arrest and conviction of Alfredo Hodoyán Palacios, a young member of one of Ramón Arellano Félix's death squads), President Bartlett declared the case closed, and pressured the country’s major news sources into dropping all mention of the assassination from its pages. El Informador, Guadalajara’s largest newspaper, complied with this directive so willingly that the 26-year Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, the paper’s youngest yet most diligent and industrious journalist, quit her job in disgust. Xanic's interest in the Cardinal’s death, however, persisted, and she immediately set about conducting her own investigation into the murder, hoping to dig up proof that there was more to the assassination than President Bartlett was willing to admit.
Though the initial public reaction fizzled out within a few weeks, the assassination of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo would have momentous consequences for Mexico. Ever since the 1930s, the PRI had had a decidedly unfriendly relationship with the Catholic Church, imposing laws which prohibited the Church from owning property or running schools, and which banned priests from wearing their robes in public or voting in elections. Some of the tension had been released in 1989, when Carlos Salinas had repealed some of the more extreme anti-clerical measures. But the Archbishop’s assassination (which a large majority of Mexicans still believed had been a government job) was a watershed moment. The clergy could tolerate restrictions on their rights to vote and own property, as well as President Bartlett’s general disregard for civil liberties. But murdering a man of the cloth for threatening to expose government corruption? That was a step too far. In the weeks after the Archbishop's assassination, the sermons heard by Mexican churchgoers began to change subtly in tone. Before Cardinal Posadas’s assassination, most preachers had been urging their flocks to turn the other cheek in the face of government repression and avoid stirring up trouble, but now they began to emphasize more “rebellious” sections of the scripture; according to historian Enrique Krauze, Isaiah 61:1 (…for the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the disheartened…to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them who are bound”) became a particularly popular verse following the Cardinal’s death.
This subtle change would have enormous historical impact. After so many years of tyranny and deprivation, a large majority of Mexicans—including millions of once-loyal priístas—had grown profoundly disillusioned with President Bartlett and the ruling the party. Up until now, most of these “ordinary” Mexicans had been keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, fearing that any signs of disloyalty would put themselves and their families in danger. But many millions of them were devout Catholics, and millions more had turned to religion for comfort in these times of strife. And when those millions of Mexicans heard their priests subtly connect acts of resistance with acts of godliness, they suddenly remembered the firmness with which their poet laureate, Octavio Paz, had urged them “to resist any encroachment on their freedoms with whatever means lay at their disposal”. By October, church basements everywhere from Cancún to Culiacán were holding hushed, late-night meetings in which hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of whom had scarcely entertained a political thought in their lives, gathered to discuss the manifold ways in which the government had trampled on their rights and liberties. And as these hushed discussions spread from church basements to restaurants, shops, garages and workplaces, the raucous, rebellious, revolutionary flair within the Mexican national spirit was beginning to awaken once more.
Anti-PRI graffiti became increasingly common on Mexican streets during the latter half of 1993. DFS agents arrested as many as two thousand street artists over the course of the year, but were ultimately powerless to stop the wave of vandalism, covering up anti-government slogans only to find a dozen more scrawled across the same wall the next day.
This spirit of sedition would find a home not only among ordinary Mexicans, but also among the highest ranks of the Army. After the April campaign against the Zapatistas succeeded, many officers had hoped that they would be transferred back to civilian peacekeeping duty, so that they could rebuild the massive, city-wide profit-making machines that had made so many of them rich after the Autumn of Terrors. A few optimistic officers even hoped that they would be sent to the border regions so that they could ingratiate themselves with the drug cartels and get in on the action. President Bartlett, however, had other ideas. Though he was pleased at the success of the spring offensive, Bartlett recognized that it had been a relatively easy victory, and he knew that it would be much harder to dislodge the Zapotecs and Zapatistas from their new hiding places. He also believed (correctly) that a root cause for the defeat at San Cristóbal was that urban peacekeeping had made the Army corrupt and inert, and he feared that if the soldiers were allowed to grow fat and lazy again, then the Zapatistas would be able to inflict another national humiliation. So Bartlett steadfastly refused to allow the Army to come anywhere near the cartels, and although he did permit a few brigades to return to their peacekeeping duties, he made them compete for territory and kickbacks with the much-despised DFS, whose agents he had given preferential powers and jurisdiction. Even as a dispute over meth distribution rights in September erupted into a bloody war between the Sonora Cartel and the Juárez Cartel, and the DFS began to fracture into opposing factions, Bartlett was hesitant to allow the Army to gluttonize itself upon the fruitful fount of drug money.
By late autumn, the Army’s leading generals—including Alfredo Navarro Lara, Vinicio Santoyo, and even Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, fresh from his victory over the Zapatistas—were beginning to ask themselves (and, increasingly, each other) whether it was really worth their while to have Bartlett in charge if it meant that they would be cut off from their most lucrative source of wealth. Meanwhile, hundreds of capitanos and tenientes throughout Mexico were stuck drowning their bitterness in the very same bars where, not two years earlier, they had been running profitable protection rackets. So when they overheard common citizens airing their grievances with the PRI regime in increasingly loud and emphatic tones, these disgruntled soldiers found themselves joining in on the discussions. And, as word crept up the military hierarchy that a long-simmering groundswell of anti-government anger was finally beginning to bubble up to the surface, the top generals began to formulate a plan: in the preceding months, the Army had detained three supposed American “tourists” who had, in fact, turned out to be CIA agents, sent to Mexico at George Bush’s behest to explore the possibility of effecting a regime change; in October 1993, a few high-ranking officers resolved to make contact with this CIA presence and inform the U.S. intelligence community that they would be willing to consider any plans which might result in the permanent retirement of President Bartlett and his political retinue from the public service. The generals were confident that Washington would take an interest in this proposal—particularly as the presidential election of 1994 hurtled ever closer and President Bartlett prepared for the ritual of destape, or unveiling, in which he would reveal to the world his preferred candidate for the PRI presidential nomination, heir apparent to the throne of the Mexican presidency.
__________
[1] As in Part Sixteen, special thanks to @RamscoopRaider for supplying me with much-needed advice on how to make the military side of this part realistic. I couldn’t have written it without you, Ramscoop!
[2] You may be thinking that it would make more sense for the Cubans to hold on to Chávez, in hopes of sending him back to Venezuela in the near future to lead the people's revolution. However, things are significantly better in Venezuela than they were in OTL 1993, thanks to much higher U.S. purchases of Venezuelan petroleum and the reversal of Carlos Andrés Pérez’s privatization program. As a result, only a small fraction of society (and a minority of socialists), view Chávez in a positive light, and by the time things start to get really bad again, Chávez will have been forgotten. Yet it’s a liability to have him just hanging around, so Castro sends him to Zapata under a false name hoping he’ll die without being identified. He gets exactly half of his wish.
[3] In OTL, Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was shot in the same location a few months earlier, on May 24, 1993.
[4] This happened in OTL to President Carlos Salinas, who happened to be visiting Guadalajara the day after Cardinal was shot.
[5] In OTL, the "Tijuana Cartel trying to bump off El Chapo" story was also tendered as the “official” explanation, but many believe to this day that the assassination was an inside job.
Last edited:
Fantastic. A perfect storm of popular discontent, gross tyranny and incompetence, rampant crime and corruption, foreign opposition, and a catastrophic loss of military support.
The PRI regime seems to have lost all support in Mexico. Bartlett isn't long for this world.
The PRI regime seems to have lost all support in Mexico. Bartlett isn't long for this world.
Oh, this is getting good!
On a sidenote, I assume John Paul II never visits Mexico in 1990 and 1993, correct?
If so, what were the main reasons in this timeline?
On a sidenote, I assume John Paul II never visits Mexico in 1990 and 1993, correct?
If so, what were the main reasons in this timeline?
Last edited:
"The forces of Church and Revolution have once again come into conflict in Mexico. With the government renewing its attacks on the Church, the embattled Catholic parties and social movements are launching an armed rebellion to seize control of Mexico. Cristero militias are reforming after a decade of inactivity, supplemented by defectors from the federal military. They have taken over several rural states and are using these as a base from which to operate.\n\nThe first Cristiada ended with a settlement negotiated between senior Revolutionary and Church officials thanks to intermediation by the American government, but it looks likely that this violence will end only with the complete destruction of one of the belligerents."
I don't think it'll end in this matter...right?
I am thinking the people reject Bartlett's 'heir' at the election and begin to demonstrate in the streets. Bartlett overreacts and calls in the Army and the Army says no. Then its up to the DFS who may start fighting each other for power. Then of course our intrepid girl report drops her story in the US and all hell breaks loose.
Bookmark1995
Banned
I am very concerned about the military, because they seem to be wild cards.
They seem less concerned with a prosperous Mexico and more concerned about their ill-gotten gains.
They seem less concerned with a prosperous Mexico and more concerned about their ill-gotten gains.
Hey! Thought I’d give a quick update here. The next update is about 85% finished. The reason it’s taken so long is because it’s a narrative piece which always takes longer for me to write, it’s longer than most of the other ones with a few different parts, and I’ve been busy with coursework. However, since my university has closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic and I am adhering closely to the mantra of social distancing (as we all should be doing as much as we can), I will have a lot more time to work on it than I otherwise would have. The next update should be out by Tuesday! Good luck weathering this storm, it’ll pass eventually if we’re smart about it!
Stay healthy, and have fun writing! We eagerly await the next entry!
Narrative Interlude #8
Guadalajara, Jalisco
October 8, 1993
3:43 PM
October 8, 1993
3:43 PM
“I don’t have it,” said the banker.
Lydia Cacho leaned forward. “You mean you won’t give it to me.”
“No,” the banker replied angrily, “I mean I don’t have it.”
Cacho fretted beneath her icy exterior. The Bartlett administration was horrible at hiding its secrets—she marveled at just how much sensitive information she’d already uncovered just by asking (or bribing) lowly officials who didn’t know any better. But when polite requests and bribery both failed, she had few other tools at her disposal but blunt intimidation. And when none of those things work, she found herself at a dead end. She’d already left Sonora empty-handed after a two-month long hunt for evidence had been thwarted by the stubbornness of a single, stubborn functionary. If the trail went cold again here, she didn’t know where she could turn next.
“Where is it?” she snarled at the banker with enough frost in her voice to freeze the tip of the man’s nose.
“I already gave it away to another woman,” he said gloatingly, folding his arms to conceal his slight. “A journalist.”
Cacho refused to move. “Which journalist?” she spat.
“And why should I tell you, you pushy puta?” He spat with the caustic tone of a man who’d already allowed himself to be intimidated by a woman this week, and wasn’t about to let it happen again.
Maintaining her cold stare, Cacho reached into her pocket and pulled out a sheaf of bills. She hoped she wouldn’t have to give away more than two days’ worth of motel fare to this cockroach.
11:12 PM
Thump thump thump.
Xanic von Bertrab froze. [1] Her hands began to tremble as she stared back down at the paper they held. Instinctively she reread the title: “BALANCE STATEMENT AND SUMMARY FOR THE ACCOUNT OF JUAN GUTIÉRREZ GOMEZ”.
Juan Gutiérrez Gomez, of course, was the alias of Rubén Zuno Arce, a local heroin trafficker who had recently been named as a PRI candidate for the federal Congress. The government, therefore, would have liked very much to keep the details of his financial transactions far, far away from prying eyes like Xanic’s. Anyone with a prying interest in Zuno’s bank statements could expect a midnight visit from men in dark uniforms; anyone who had gone so far as to procure hard copies of said statements could only hope those men would leave her in as many pieces as they found her.
Xanic was suddenly flooded with terror as she remembered the sequence of rash decisions that had brought her to this moment. When Cardinal Posadas had been assassinated in August, she had instantly sensed a massive story lingering just below the surface, but her editor at El Informador was too cautious—too cowardly, she had thought at the time—to print it. So she quit her job and embarked on a freelance spree, unearthing mountains of sordid facts and evidence. The manic thrill of chasing a story of her own had pushed Xanic to search for clues in every bank and cut-rate construction firm in Jalisco, heedless of the sinister eyes she must have drawn at every step. Only now, as the incriminating pages rustled between her fingers and an unknown menace stood outside the door, waiting to dismember her, did the high vanish like the golden sheen from a shattered lightbulb and leave her cruelly in thrall to cold, blue terror.
Thump thump thump.
Her whole body convulsed in fright. Shivering with fear, Xanic momentarily considered stashing the documents in a drawer, or tearing them up into pieces, or compressing them into a compact ball and swallowing them whole. But she knew that any attempt to hide the damning papers would not only be futile, but would incriminate her further in the eyes of whoever stood behind the door. With tears welling up her eyes and her heartbeat climbing up to her ears, she rose from the chair and forced herself, step by robotic step, toward the door. Finally she reached it and twisted the doorknob; the hinges creaked and whined as Xanic pulled it open, motionless as a deer in pair of headlights.
She couldn’t bring herself to be relieved, but she was at least a little surprised. The figure standing before her was not an angry-eyed man in a menacing black uniform but a woman, barely older than Xanic herself, in normal, almost shabby, clothes. She’d heard that DFS casualties were growing by the month because of the drug war, but were they really that desperate for new recruits?
“Are you Alejandra?” The woman asked. Xanic registered the question, but found herself transfixed by the woman’s gaze. It was intense, but not quite cold—the eyes of a person accustomed to turning rivals to stone with her glare. “Xanic,” she responded simply.
The woman continued her line of inquiry. “I was told you have some information I’ve been looking for,” she said in an even voice, “concerning a certain Juan Gutiérrez Gomez.”
Xanic felt her neck tighten up again. Surely this was some sort of trap; this time next week, she would be rotting in a jail cell awaiting trial before a DFS tribunal. And yet, despite every obvious, logical impulse, something about this woman—she couldn’t exactly say what—put Xanic at ease, whether it was the seemingly sincere gravity behind her gaze or her surprising bluntness. Xanic still wasn’t quite certain, though, and so she asked the first question she thought of:
“Are you DFS?”
“No,” the woman replied. “I’m a journalist.”
Suddenly Xanic discerned a new dimension in those eyes: a certain inquisitiveness, a desire to pierce the minds of her adversaries not merely to unnerve them, but to understand them better. She pictured the papers still lying on the table just a few feet behind her. The woman simply stared, as if reading her thoughts.
“Please come in,” said Xanic, stepping to the side.
11:17 PM
Five kilometers to the east
Five kilometers to the east
“I bet he's already bought himself five houses—one for every minute he’ll live after he walks out of Los Pinos for the last time!”
The burly Mexican slammed his glass down on the table, sending the rest of his tequila sloshing out onto the table. He had clearly imbibed too much for his own political good, but his equally-inebriated comrades didn’t seem to mind, responding to his joke with peals of loud, drunken laughter. The barkeep didn’t care either, it seemed, as he was already filling up another glass for his loose-walleted patron. The only person who particularly cared what this stained-overall-clad Mexican had to say about Manuel Bartlett was the American “tourist” hunched over the bar.
The “tourist" stared down at his glass, which he’d barely touched in twenty-five minutes. As far as he was concerned, tequila was one of the vilest liquids God had ever cursed upon the human race, but it was the only thing any watering hole in Mexico seemed to have in stock these days. Still, he had to keep up an image. Bracing himself, he picked up the glass and took a third sip, wincing as he forced it down his throat.
It was the sixth bar he’d visited that week, and each night, the pattern was the same: weary, ragged Mexicans would start filtering in late in the day; those with jobs would start arriving at about nine or nine-thirty, those without them around six or seven. At first, quiet would reign as the disaffected patrons slowly drank away their senses. But as the mezcal flowed and inhibitions joined sorrows in a wet, alcoholic death, the discussion became much louder and much more political. In every city he’d visited during his four-state trek across central Mexico, the topic of conversation was the same: abajo Bartlett, abajo el PRI, complaints about how miserable things were and how miserable they would continue to be if el partido oficial maintained its stranglehold on power. He already had mounrains of material for his report—the manuscript of his first draft was approaching 120 pages—but the gist would be simple: a political maelstrom was brewing in Mexico. If he was planning to have his pet candidate elected President in August, Manuel Bartlett would have to deal with a massive, growing wave of popular discontentment, whether he knew it yet or not.
The man was so focused on appearing indifferent that, at first, he barely noticed when a woman took a seat on the stool next to him. As he tried to listen, however, he found it harder and harder to concentrate on what the drunken patron was saying. Suddenly he realized that the woman sitting beside him, despite her silence, was screaming to be noticed. He knew it was probably just a prostitute preying on drunk gringos—he’d already encountered four of those so far on this excursion. But something felt...different this time. If she was a hooker, she would have gotten impatient by now and made an advance. This woman, whoever or whatever she was, seemed more than happy to wait for him to make the first move. His instincts seized up and his stomach tightened. Was this a trap? Had his cover been blown? As far as he knew, he hadn’t ever come close to revealing his true purposes, aside from one unpleasantly close encounter with one unpleasantly drunk man. Had the government or the DFS somehow found out anyway?
For a moment, he considered simply getting up and strolling out of the bar without looking at the woman. But he quickly realized he had no choice. If he ran away from this woman tonight, they’d send someone a lot bigger and a lot uglier to chase him down tomorrow. Slowly, mechanically, tremblingly, he turned his head and looked at the woman beside him.
Her beauty was paralyzing. The gleaming, opal eyes would have been entrancing enough on their own, but they were matched by twin tapestries of flowing, jet-black hair and supported by a statuesque pair of cheekbones that bent down into a bold chin, projecting elegance and confidence in equal measure. It was obvious her most youthful years were behind her—she was probably in her mid-thirties, at least—but time had left her beauty so undiminished that she clearly felt no pressure to hide that fact. The man just stared. Almost never in his life had he seen a woman quite like this one.
“Good evening,” she said, smiling, in accented English. “I am Irma.” [2]
After momentarily deserting him, the man’s instincts came flooding back in. He was being set up for something. Had the door already been blocked off? If he looked behind him, would he see the loud drunk from earlier walking towards him and pulling a pistol out of his overalls? He felt his blood racing. How in the hell was he going to get out of this?
“I have been sent to speak on behalf of a very powerful interest,” the goddess continued, “and we have an important message which we would like you to pass on to your superiors.”
Shit shit shit shit shit.
“I’m, uh, I’m sorry, señorita, but I don’t have any idea what the h-hell you’re talking about,” he managed, barely keeping himself from whimpering.
She didn’t respond. Instead, her eyes darted behind him and her hand sent a near-imperceptible signal to someone at the back of the room.
This was it. He saw it vividly: in a moment, a bag would be thrust over his head, he’d be dragged away from the bar and shoved into the bag of an unmarked van, and would spend the last few hours of his life in a concrete cell being beaten, tortured, and cut into progressively smaller pieces before being mailed back home in a series of bloodstained suitcases. He was so wrapped up in his vision that he jumped when he felt a heavy hand slap him on the back, and almost jumped again when the voice that followed it was friendly rather than threatening.
“Good evening, friend!” He turned to see a very large man, with a bald, rocklike mass of a head and an enormous pair of eyeglasses resting upon a great, hulking, sausage-like mass of a nose, take the seat beside him. “I buy you drink?” He asked in convivial, if broken, English, already signaling the bartender with a wave of his hand.
The gringo simply stared. The man’s mug was fascinating enough in and of itself, but he knew it from somewhere, and he quickly remembered where: its image had been in the briefing binder he’d memorized. Unless he was very, very badly mistaken, the plainclothed man sitting beside him was General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, champion of the Army’s summer campaign against the Zapatistas and winner of the government’s only major victory over the rebels since the start of the rebellion.
His introduction over with and his English skills exhausted, the General switched back to Spanish. “Listen, my friend,” he said with in a surprisingly unthreatening tone, “I know your boss Mr. Bush wants to see a few things change down here in Mexico.”
The gringo had just enough presence of mind to mumble that he was about thirty levels removed from Presidential Bush in the governmental pecking order.
“Well, whoever your boss is,” the General allowed, “tell him—and I speak for the Army when I say this—that we want Bartlett, Hank and the rest of those cocksuckers out just as much as you do. And we’re ready to make good on that promise. You find someone to run for President against the PRI next year—you’ll have to be the ones to do it, the opposition here is a bunch of dickless monkeys and they won’t come within ten meters of us—and we’ll make sure he wins.”
The gringo blinked. He could barely believe what he was hearing.
“Any questions?” Asked the General as a fresh glass of tequila was set down upon the bar. The gringo couldn’t even stammer.
“Good,” said the General. “Enjoy your tequila,” he said as he rose from his seat, strode up and ducked out the door. Still slumped on his stool, the gringo looked to his right; Irma, or whatever her name was, had vanished without a trace.
He looked around him. The bar had just as many people in it as it had before (minus two), but now it was completely and totally empty to him.
He looked back down at the liquid reposing within his glass. He grabbed the glass, raised it to his lips and swallowed it all in a single gulp.
God, he loved tequila.
Mexico City, Federal District
November 3, 1993
9:34 PM
November 3, 1993
9:34 PM
Porfirio Muñoz Ledo had been tailed many times before. Five years as an opposition senator in Manuel Bartlett’s Mexico had taught him the secrets to avoid being followed too closely: don’t look back, duck a corner here, dip out of the light there. These days, though, the DFS didn’t seem all that interested in stopping or harassing him—they just wanted to make sure he went home every night after performing his senatorial duties, instead of leading an underground meeting of anti-government satanists. In fact, he’d racked up such a strong record of good behavior that, most nights, they didn’t even bother sending anyone to follow him anymore. Only once or twice a week was he tailed on his walk home, and it was always the same guy doing the tailing. They’d never spoken, but Porfirio had taken to calling the man Pedro in his head, and he liked to think they were friends now.
Something was different today, though. He’d caught a glimpse of the man out of the corner of his eye, and it sure as hell wasn’t Pedro. Pedro kept his distance. This guy was so close behind, Porfirio could hear his footsteps. With each step, the back of Porfirio’s neck grew tighter and tighter, and by the time he approached his front door, he had already accepted that he was about to spend the foreseeable part of his future rotting away in Lecumberri as an enemy of the state. Reaching the doorstep, he spun around to face his fate.
“Just arrest me,” he said without mirth or merriment, hoping they’d at least let him see his children one last time before they locked him up.
“I couldn’t arrest you even if I wanted to, senador,” the man responded. As taken aback as he was by the response, Porfirio found himself even more surprised to find that the man’s Spanish, while grammatically impeccable, had a slight American accent.
“I’m not going to bother with pleasantries,” not-Pedro went on. “I represent the U.S. foreign intelligence service and we want you to run for President of Mexico.”
Porfirio stiffened up even further. He’d been thinking about running for President since 1991. As the most prominent opposition politician in country (other than Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, of course), he would certainly be well-placed to run in 1994, but he had decided it would be a pointless risk. Bartlett had already barred the PAN and the Frente—what was left of it, anyway—from fielding a presidential candidate, so he clearly was not in the mood for even the pretext of a fair fight. And even if Porfirio did manage to win over the people’s hearts, Bartlett and his cronies would cheat him out of victory just as they’d done to Cárdenas, and in the meantime he would be putting himself, and, more importantly, his wife and children, in potentially mortal danger.
“I have no intention whatsoever of contesting the presidential elections next summer,” Porfirio announced, entirely unconvinced that not-Pedro wasn’t a DFS double-agent trying to bait him into saying something treasonous.
The man was unfazed. “You can win. You will win,” he continued, disregarding Porfirio’s uninterested response. “We’ve had our ears to the ground for months. The people are furious with the PRI. They’re poorer and more frightened than they’ve ever been, and they don’t trust anything that Bartlett or any other príista says. They want change. If you run, they will elect you.”
Porfirio was unmoved. “If you think that the people pick the President in this country, you haven’t been looking very closely,” he scoffed.
“Oh, yes we have,” said not-Pedro. “The PRI is ceasing to function as an organization. It’s falling apart. Bartlett doesn’t know it yet, but he’s already squandered the labor vote—he lost half the unions after Cananea, and the other half can’t scrape together enough muscle for an amateur arm-wrestling match,” he claimed. “We’ve seen the PRI’s membership rolls, too. Every day, two hundred priístas decide not to renew their membership because they don’t want to risk getting hauled in front of an OIP kangaroo court,” he continued. “Oh, and they’re almost completely broke. In Coahuila, their candidate for governor invited ten thousand people to a rally but they only had enough money for four hundred free sandwiches. The place was almost empty after twenty minutes.” Porfirio knew this was probably all horseshit, but as a former President of the PRI, he couldn’t help but feel a bit distressed at the thought of sixty years’ worth of accumulated political wisdom and time-honored electioneering tactics being completely squandered over the course of a single sexenio. Still, even if it all was true, why in the hell would anyone in Washington care? If Bush was expecting cheap oil in exchange for his support, he’d be better off finding himself another stooge.
“So what’s in it for you?” Porfirio asked as a cool breeze wafted through the night air.
Not-Pedro allowed himself a slight smirk. “Well, you know, there’s nothing we Americans love more than democracy—especially in Latin America.” Porfirio chuckled. If nothing else, Not-Pedro had a sense of humor.
“That, and the drug trade has spiraled completely out of control, and we couldn’t get Bartlett to do anything about it if we gave him the keys to the foreign aid safe,” Not-Pedro continued. “We want a President who’ll strangle the DFS and put its capitanos into concrete cells.” Porfirio demurred. He wanted that too, actually, but he doubted the DFS would want to see anyone with those kinds of priorities get within a hundred kilometers of Los Pinos.
“And what if the DFS decides it doesn’t like that idea and has me killed?” He asked with a scowl.
“If you run,” not-Pedro replied evenly, “you will have the full support and protection of the Army.”
Porfirio blinked. “The U.S. Army?” he asked, not quite incredulously.
“No,” said not-Pedro. “The Mexican Army.”
Now this guy was really pushing it. So the Army cared about politics now? Since when did anyone in the Army care about anything other than his paycheck? And even if they did have a stake in the election, what reason could they possibly have not to support the status quo?
Not-Pedro could sense Porfirio’s bewilderment. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “but Bartlett hasn’t trusted the Army since San Cristóbal. Even after they finally won a few battles in June, he still hasn’t given them back a sliver of the power they had before he took office, and they want it back.They’ll make sure you win because they know that anyone of Bartlett’s puppets would keep them en la cucha for the next six years.”
Porfirio's brow furrowed. ‘En la cucha’? ‘In the doghouse’? Was that some sort of Americanism? If this guy was a DFS double agent pretending to be American, he was doing a damned fine job of it—a finer job than he imagined anyone in the DFS could ever do. He was starting to believe this guy really had been sent by the CIA and that they really did want him to run. And yet, he still had one burning question.
“But why me?” He asked not-Pedro. “Why don’t you ask Cárdenas to run instead? Everyone in the country knows his name, and he’s probably the one opposition politician in this country that Bartlett wouldn’t kill if he had the chance.”
Not-Pedro frowned wistfully. “We already asked him. He doesn’t want to run. He’s afraid if he enters politics again, he or someone he loves will get hurt, or worse.”
Porfirio nodded gravely. He certainly didn’t blame Cuauhtémoc. The PRI had already murdered the love of his life, and when he’d finally stuck his head out again a few years later with the noblest of aims—to help broker peace between the government and the Zapatistas—he’d come within an inch or two of getting killed himself. Perhaps he was right to fear for his life. But no other opposition man, aside from Porfirio himself, had any sort of nationwide recognition. If anyone was going to challenge the PRI in the election, Porfirio realized, it would have to be him. But, he began to ask himself, was it worth the sacrifice? Even with the support of the Army, even with the support of the people, the PRI had a thousand ways of wrenching the election away from him, just like they’d done to God knew how many opposition candidates for the past six decades. He knew that better than just about anyone—he’d been in charge of the party once before, and he’d presided over more than his share of fraud and vote-rigging. If he ran, he’d be putting himself, his family, his friends, everyone he loved at mortal risk, all for the sake of an election he probably wouldn’t win.
And yet, he began to wonder, perhaps it was worth it anyway. When he’d first entered politics thirty years before, the Institutional Revolutionary Party had been a flawed, yet dynamic coalition of workers, farmers and intellectuals that was spearheading Mexico’s transition from an agrarian backwater to an industrialized middle power. But, over the course of his career, he’d watched with dismay as his party decayed into a brutal, power-hoarding ogre whose leaders no longer cared about anything but lining their pockets. Porfirio had already sensed that the people were turning against the PRI, and what not-Pedro had said only bolstered his conviction. But he’d read too much history not to know that, sometimes, the fate of a nation hinges on the decisions of a single individual. If no one stepped up now, Porfirio thought, if another PRI hack was permitted to waltz his way to the presidency without even a pretense of opposition, then all the anti-government energy built up by Bartlett’s rule might just dissipate. The opposition was fractured and leaderless, and it could very easily run out of steam over the next six years. If no one ran against the PRI (if he didn’t run against the PRI), then the nation’s best-ever shot at overthrowing the established order would be squandered.
And then Porfirio struck upon a realization that scared him more than anything else he’d thought so far: if he ran, and everything this man had said was true, then he might just win. Did he actually want to be President? Eighteen years ago, when he was the Secretary of Labor and a leading contender for the PRI nomination in 1976, when the job was all about jet-setting around the country in Armani suits and Rolex watches, attending banquets and giving speeches, Porfirio would have probably blown up an orphanage if it’d meant President Echeverría would have handpicked him as his successor. But if he became President now, he’d be faced with a stagnant economy, an angry population, a treasury drowning in foreign debt, and a security apparatus utterly in thrall to the drug cartels. What truly sane man could possibly wish that on himself?
Not-Pedro checked his watch. Porfirio almost jumped at the motion; he’d all but forgotten there was another person in front of him.
“I’ll have to give it some thought,” Porfirio announced.
Not-Pedro nodded. “I’ll be back in a week. Make up your mind by then.” With that, he spun on his heel and set back off down the street.
Porfirio watched him for a moment, then set off toward the front door. But as he pulled out his key, he was suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity. He turned back to face the man, now almost around the corner.
“Hey!” He shouted at Not-Pedro. “What’s your name?”
“Malcolm!” he shouted as he continued on down the street.
Dammit, Porfirio muttered, and walked inside.
__________
[1] Xanic von Bertrab is one of Mexico's most famous investigative journalists. In the mid-90s, having recently graduated from university, she held jobs with various publications in Guadalajara, including for the city's first big independent newspaper, Siglo 21. In 1992, when negligent handling of flammable liquids at a local Pemex facility caused Guadalajara's sewers to explode, taking out several of the city's streets and killing over 200 people, she was the one who uncovered the evidence of negligence. In 2012, she worked with American journalist David Barstow to expose the evil practices of Mexican Walmart stores, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. She's about to have a late-entry role in TTL's drama of Mexican political history.
[2] Irma Lizette Ibarra Naveja was one of the most beautiful and charming women of her time and place. She was crowned Miss Jalisco in 1970, and by the mid-1980s she was the première dame of Guadalajara high society. In what was then the capital of the Mexican drug trade, she danced-and-romanced everyone from drug lords to generals, and within a few years she would become a self-appointed intermediary between the cartels and the Army. Whenever a new regional Army commander arrived in town, she would organize an elegant dinner for him and his staff, and would make a point of inviting the city’s most influential traffickers so that the two sides could get acquainted with each other. On July 28, 1997, after announcing that she would be holding a press conference to reveal her connections with the recently-deceased trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes and the disgraced General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, Irma Ibarra was shot eight times in her car. A newspaper article detailing her assassination is available (in Spanish) here.
Last edited:
On the plus side, it's not like anybody will miss the worst of the bastards.
The drug lords and revolutionaries probably will leave mourning relatives, though. Hopefully the conflict doesn't last long.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Wow. This was really interesting.
It appears the wheels are falling off Bartlett's little corruption ring. I dread the forces of moderate order losing out to revolutionary chaos.
It appears the wheels are falling off Bartlett's little corruption ring. I dread the forces of moderate order losing out to revolutionary chaos.