Guest Column
Murder in Monterrey
- Murder in Monterrey
- By Kelly Arthur Garrett
- The Herald Mexico-El Universal
November 13, 2006
Shortly after 9 a.m. on a September morning in 1973, a chauffeur named Bernardo Chapa Pérez neared the intersection of Villagrán and Luis Quintanar in the city of Monterrey, Nuevo León, as he drove his boss to work, just like on any other Monday.
His passenger was no ordinary executive. He was Eugenio Garza Sada, "without doubt the most important businessman of his generation," as journalist Jorge Fernández Menéndez puts it in the early pages of his latest book-length exposé, whose title translates as "Nobody Knew Anything: The True Story of the Assassination of Eugenio Garza Sada."
Garza Sada owned, among other things, the nation´s two major breweries, Cervecería Cuauhtémoc (where he was heading that morning 33 years ago) and Cervecería Moctezuma. It´s only a slight exaggeration to say that with each sip in Mexico, Garza Sada made money. He was the Carlos Slim of his times.
But in a matter of minutes, Garza Sada was dead, along with Chapa Pérez, another passenger, and two of five attackers who poured out of a blue pickup truck to storm the vehicle. It was a botched kidnap attempt that quickly became a shootout. Garza Sada was killed by a bullet fired at point blank range into his ribs.
The murder, needless to say, caught the nation´s attention and to this day remains, in Fernández Menéndez´s words, "one of the darkest chapters in our recent history."
It also permanently stained the presidency of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976), taking its place alongside the existing stains from his involvement in the Tlatelolco army massacre of protesting students in 1968 (when he was interior secretary) and the "Jueves de Corpus" encore killing of demonstrators by hired thugs known as the halcones, or falcons.
What we learn from "Nadie Supo Nada" is that this particular stain is uglier than we thought. Mining recently released archives from the now defunct Federal Security Directorate (DSF), Fernández Menéndez presents rather convincing evidence that Echeverría knew about the plans to kidnap Garza Sada a full year and a half in advance. But he did nothing to thwart it, and he did nothing to warn the industrialist about it.
The reason Echeverría knew about the kidnap plot was simple - the government had a mole inside the group planning the kidnapping. The group belonged to an armed revolutionary movement loosely (and very confusingly) held together around the "September 23rd League," a well-known subversive force at the time.
The reason he let the plot play out is a more complicated matter. It has to do with the unsubtle nature of one-party politics at the time, when ideology was a malleable concept in the service of power. It also has to do with betrayal, ambition, inexperience and ignorance.
"(Garza Sada´s) was an absurd and unjust death," Fernández Menéndez writes. "But it also (revealed) a way of doing and understanding politics that has not died."
The author shows us why that is true by knitting the pieces together in much detail, perhaps too much (the book´s seven-page index consists almost entirely of names, enough to humble Tolstoy). But we can summarize the thesis in two paragraphs as follows:
The Monterrey Group of industrialists, of which Garza Sada was the recognized leader, hated Echeverría. The feeling was mutual. In our day, Monterrey´s conservative business leaders have had their horse in the presidency for six years and probably will for six more. But back then these folks were mostly frozen out of the halls of power. They bluntly considered Echeverría a communist, despite his penchant for having leftists murdered. Their extremism was emphasized in a display ad after the incident, which as much celebrated the death of Chile´s elected president Salvador Allende in a military coup the week before as it lamented Garza Sada´s murder.
At the time of his death, Garza Sada was making arrangements to purchase, from an ex-colonel named Jose García Valseca, a chain of newspapers whose flagship was El Sol. The García Valseca enterprise was suffocating in debt, so much so that the government had to, with much pleasure, take over its operation. Echeverría was a control freak when it came to the media; a few years later he would engineer the death of the venerable Excelsior as an increasingly independent journalistic voice (and in the process unwittingly creating the circumstances for the birth of the critical weekly Proceso and eventually the opposition daily La Jornada). He liked controlling the El Sol chain and he didn´t want Garza Sada to take it over.
Fernández Menéndez stops short of implicating Echeverría in the death of Eugenio Garza Sada for two reasons. One is that the plot had to do with kidnapping, not murder. The other is that the author is a stickler for using nothing but documented evidence. Speculation must remain speculation until some piece of paper proves or disproves it.
But Fernández Menéndez makes it clear in the book as well as in interviews that he believes the former president should answer for at least a crime of omission. He also knows that the chances are close to nil that anyone in the administration of either Echeverría or his successor José López Portillo would ever have to answer for anything that happened during that especially nasty 15-year period (1967-1982). He advocates instead a Mexican version of the South African-style "truth commission," in which immunity is exchanged for an honest accounting.
Unlike Fernández Menéndez´s previous "From the Maras to the Zetas" - a survey of Mexican drug gangs co-authored with Víctor Ronquillo and reviewed recently in this space - "Nadie supo nada" shuns interviews and testimonials, relying instead almost entirely on official documents, many of which are quoted at length. The strategy helps credibility at the cost of readability. The book is a tough plod, for which the author would probably give no apologies if asked. "If there´s no investigation, it´s not journalism," he recently told a gathering of reporters.
The only break from the tedious procession of names and facts and archive numbers comes with the epilogues, where we learn a bit about how some of the major players´ lives turned out. One sequel stands out:
Elías Orozco Salazar was one of the shooters in the murders, the man who, according to the record, actually killed Garza Sada. He was caught three weeks later and stayed in prison until 1984, when a general amnesty for "political prisoners" combined with good behavior got him out. On September 17, 1988, 15 years to the day after the Garza Sada murder, Orozco Salazar and his wife were in a car with a friend and Interpol agent named Florentino Ventura. Somewhere near the Perisur shopping center in the southern part of Mexico City, according to Orozco Salazar, Ventura lost it and shot everybody in the car, including himself, save one. Orozco Salazar´s survival of the deadly incident can only be attributed to uncanny good luck, if not (as at least one insider claims) to a creative reconstruction of what actually went down.
And where is he today, our man who survives shootouts when almost everybody around him doesn´t? Surviving, still. Orozco Salazar joined the Labor Party (PT) in 1994 and currently serves as its state president in Tamaulipas.
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