Trail of Feathers
by Robert Rivard
Public Affairs. 417 pp., $27.50
By Sam Quinones
Several years ago near Mexico City, a woman shot and killed a male companion who was about to rape her. Though a witness confirmed her testimony, the woman was arrested for murder. Women’s groups rallied to her cause. I covered the story, and during the protests one leader explained to me why the groups had mobilized. “In Mexico,” she said, “you aren’t given justice. You have to take it.”
In December 1998, another case would prove the truth of that statement. Philip True, the Mexico City correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News, walked into the Sierra Madre mountain range in search of a story about Huichol Indians and never came back. He was murdered — apparently beaten, then strangled with his own bandanna — by two Huichols, for reasons that still aren’t all clear. True was the first accredited American journalist to be murdered in modern Mexico. He was fifty years old, married, and about to be a father for the first time. His trip to Huichol territory was to be a farewell to the bohemian life he’d led, soon to be replaced by something more stable. His son, Philip Theodore True — Teo — was born three months after his father’s murder.
In Trail of Feathers, True’s editor, Robert Rivard, chronicles his reporter’s life and murder as well as Rivard’s own arduous campaign to take justice in Mexico. The title of the book refers to the down feathers that spilled from True’s sleeping bag as his killers used it to carry his corpse down into a canyon to bury him. The feather trail led Rivard and a police investigator to True’s body within days of his murder, and to his murderers, Juan Chivarra and his brother-in-law, Miguel Hernandez. The trail also led Rivard into the swamp of Mexico’s criminal justice system. Over the next few years, crucial evidence about True’s murder is lost. The case has four prosecutors, three attorneys general, and two autopsies. A second autopsy is done without the presence of the doctor who performed the first. There are two verdicts in six years, one issued without the prosecution’s knowledge. In fact, though finally found guilty, Chivarra and Hernandez, at this writing, are not behind bars.
Rivard’s book reverberates with the question of what is true, and how a society unaccustomed to truth from its justice system can be brought to recognize that truth. The case is drenched in Mexican attitudes toward the United States, American and middle-class Mexican guilt, and Indian historical grievances and underdevelopment. Indeed, the history of U.S.-Mexico relations is so pervasive that, after a while, Philip True appears to have symbolized, to some Mexicans, American arrogance.
That’s very sad, for Philip True loved Mexico a lot more than many of the Mexican politicians and news-media stars who unctuously profess their amor patria. He was the kind of American correspondent who often shows up in Mexico. A journalistic free spirit, he was fleeing the newsroom’s claustrophobia, eager for a place where he could follow his reporter’s nose without an editor’s interference. Mexico beautifully provides all of that for the journalist who will venture into it.
True had survived a harrowing childhood and spent his early adult years in working-class jobs before entering journalism at forty-one. He didn’t much appreciate the press conference and the pack. “The good stories, True believed, were always found ‘out there somewhere,’ in places that required perseverance to reach,” Rivard writes.
Mexico is a wonderful country to cover because it will always defy your best preconceived notions. But in True’s case, those notions may have been fatal. True went to the Huichol Sierra expecting “the constant sound of children laughing and playing” and Indians using “a small handgrinder for cornmeal,” according to the query he sent his editors. Instead, he found two inbred losers — outcasts in their own community — who most likely killed him, from my reading, for being an outsider, perhaps for having seen their marijuana crop, and maybe for conjuring in their minds historic wrongs done to the Huichols.
I recently returned to California after working as a freelance journalist in Mexico for ten years. During my time in Mexico, I found that many Americans romanticized the country in a way that, the better I got to know the place, seemed terribly superficial. The grinding poverty and unfairness of the country are unseen, overlooked, or misdiagnosed as quaint or picturesque. I knew True as a colleague and, I have to say, he didn’t seem to suffer from such myopia. He’d lived on the U.S.-Mexico border and in Mexico City — two places that will cure any American romantic. Nevertheless, from the case Rivard makes, when it came to the Sierra Madre he was to hike, and its Huichol Indian inhabitants, True may have been fooling himself. He may have overestimated his own roughing-it abilities, and perhaps was too enamored with his image as a guy who charted his own course.
He hiked for miles through Mexico City to prepare for his trip. But he went into Huichol territory without a guide or permission from the correct Huichol authorities — both of which are deemed necessary by everyone who knows Huichol culture. True’s journal entries show that his trip was going poorly. He was behind schedule and had received no welcome at all. “True was five days out of Mexico City,” Rivard writes, “without a single sustained conversation with a Huichol.”
Still, it’s a shame True never wrote his story, for it might well have been full of great fact-inspired observations. The trail, he noted in his journal, “is a companion. It tells you that you are getting somewhere, even if it’s not where you were going, or wanted to, you are not alone . . . . Trail is security . . . . Lose it, you have lost your way, your purpose, your goal. Oh black moment. Find it again, the sun rises on a valley of waving flowers, the world is all right again — such is the drama of trail walking.”
The True case is about how two American journalists — True and Rivard — grapple with Mexico. But it is also about Mexican attitudes toward the United States. Rivard is at his best on this topic. The case, for example, seemed to get bogged down in reports of Mexican immigrants’ being mistreated in the United States. Members of the Mexican press corps seemed willing to view True’s murder as some kind of revenge for what is seen in Mexico as widespread abuse of those immigrants.
Mexican reporting on the United States is of absurdly poor quality. That is due to years of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government propaganda, which held that Mexicans lost their soul when they went north. It was all part of the fiction that Mexico needed the PRI as protection from Yankee predation. The poor quality of Mexican reporting about the U.S. derives also from the fact that most news reporters are from the middle class — Mexico’s most cloistered class. The rich travel at their whim; the poor go to the United States out of necessity. Only the middle class has neither reason nor funds to go north.
All this creates a constant beat out of the Mexican media regarding how their paisanos are treated in El Norte. The truth, of course, is that most poor Mexicans are treated better, and with far more justice, in the United States than they are in Mexico. But these subtleties the Mexican press corps conveniently ignores — and ignored certainly in the True case.
Rivard portrays a similar kind of ignorance in his profiles of two do-gooders — the disparaging term is apt here — Miguel Gatins and Patricia Morales, who believe Chivarra and Hernandez are innocent because the Mexican system is corrupt and the two men are Indians and thus symbolic victims of history. Gatins is an expatriate American, a recovering alcoholic with an inheritance, who funds the Huichols’ defense. Morales is a flighty human-rights activist who argues their case before the judge. Gatins and Morales put on a surreal public tragicomedy that lasts several years, in which they take up Chivarra’s and Hernandez’s cause with little examination of the facts. Finally, Morales can live with herself no longer and admits that the two men had, in fact, confessed to her years before that they’d killed True. Learning this, Gatins stops funding the defense, after having spent tens of thousands of dollars of his money. By then, though, the two Huichols — who were out of jail while their first verdict was being reconsidered — are nowhere to be found.
The irony, of course, is that the two men Gatins and Morales held up as sympathetic victims of history and Mexican corruption actually turn out to be guilty. That’s Mexico for you. The absurdity, however, continues as Morales rationalizes that the Huichols killed True for supposedly stealing and selling semi-precious stones from Huichol territory. True could have made more money, as Rivard notes, lying about his expense account than he’d have made selling Huichol stones.
But Morales’s rationalization is fascinating for what it says about how history is alive in the present. Their government has told Mexicans for years that gringos will steal what’s theirs. Some of that is true, some of it isn’t. Mexican Indians live doubly aware of what outsiders have taken from them. The Huichols, in fact, have had their minerals and natural resources stolen — semi-precious stones among them. In so much of human affairs, all that matters is what people believe is the truth. But to me, the stolen-stones motive sounds like hogwash that Morales created to rationalize her disgraceful behavior.
Trail of Feathers isn’t the best-written book I’ve ever read. Rivard’s prose is wordy, his quotes sometimes clunky. As his adjectives and adverbs mount, they give his writing an effusive feel I could do without; there are too many offers “eagerly accepted” and too many proposals “readily agreed” to. His observations on everything from his golf game to Mexican immigration occasionally stand like speed bumps in his narrative’s path. There’s a solid 330-page book hiding in the 374 pages of Rivard’s text.
Still, Trail of Feathers is tremendous for the way it digs into enormous issues of history, poverty, and bilateral misperceptions. Moreover, when it comes to editorial perseverance, Rivard is the gold standard, as is, I suppose, the Hearst Corporation (which owns the Express-News) for funding it all — many of Rivard’s repeated visits to Mexico, all the frequent trips the paper’s reporters took to the Sierra Madre and Guadalajara while covering the case, the work of lawyers and publishers who have pressured the Mexican government since 1998. Long after True’s case faded from the news, Rivard remained relentless. The case consumed his life when he could have dismissed the whole thing as further proof of Mexican corruption and inscrutability. It’s enough to make reporters wonder whether their own editors, in these days of ceaseless budget cuts, could equal Rivard’s effort in pursuing justice for True and his widow.
The death of Philip True jolted the foreign press corps in Mexico City. We were forced to examine how we worked in the country. We were reminded of Mexico’s basic unfairness. We knew that many Mexican journalists were killed without the kind of attention True’s murder received. It’s nauseating how many of their cases remain unsolved.
True was among the foreign correspondents who would meet each Friday for drinks at a bar called Nuevo Leon in the Colonia Condesa of Mexico City. It was a vibrant group, one, I felt, that was becoming aware that a historic story of Mexico’s change was slowly unfolding before it. Bar Nuevo Leon was a place to be comforted in numbers, to talk about Mexico and the stories one was writing, and for new correspondents to hear what older ones knew. It was one of several reasons, I think, why U.S. newspaper coverage of Mexico’s slow trudge out of the PRI’s one-party rule during those years was first rate.
But the group never consistently recovered its numbers after True died. His death was not the only reason. Other journalists were leaving then. Those who arrived weren’t as interested in socializing. The bar group gained energy and numbers around the time Vicente Fox won the presidency in 2000, but September 11 finished it off as the world’s focus turned elsewhere. The group still meets and is helpful for new reporters, but it doesn’t have the vitality it had before True’s murder.
Philip True was killed seven years ago this December. Like the truth in this case, the two Huichols have vanished. I hope that, like that truth, they’ll be found again someday. In the meantime, Trail of Feathers stands as testimony that despite all that has changed in Mexico, it remains a country where justice isn’t given, it must be taken.
Sam Quinones (www.samquinones. com) is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and the author of True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.
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