Journalist's Journal
By Robert Rivard Posted Jan 1 2006
Photo Courtesy of Robert Rivard
True's enshrouded corpse is carried to a waiting military helicopter after a search party located his hidden grave at the bottom of the Chapalagana Canyon. His editor, Robert Rivard, helped search for the body.
The question I am most asked at readings of Trail of Feathers is this: Why did you go down to Mexico to join the search when your reporter disappeared?
Fellow newspapermen and women ask the question, and so do readers. It's a question that always surprises me, no matter how many times I hear it, and a question that I often stumble through when trying to give a satisfactory answer.
I thought I'd try to do better here.
Philip True, the Mexico City bureau chief for the San Antonio Express-News, was reported missing in December 1998 by Martha, his Mexican-born wife, when he failed to return from a long-planned 100-mile trek through the Sierra Madre of western Mexico, home to the reclusive Huichol Indians.
The Huichols are one of Mexico's most preserved indigenous cultures. They speak their own language, abide by their own legal code and cultural mores, and enjoy considerable autonomy from the central government. They live a simple, agrarian lifestyle, wear colorfully embroidered, hand-woven cotton garments and produce distinctive folk art. Their finely beaded masks and animalistic figures are especially admired.
The tens of thousands of square miles of land the Huichol have occupied for more than a thousand years are beset on all sides by encroaching outside forces, which has led the Huichol to be wary of uninvited outsiders, whether they are Mexican mestizos or foreigners. All visitors are expected to seek written permission from the Huichol governors who oversee the sparsely populated municipalidades, or counties. Those allowed into Huichol territory are expected to travel in the company of a native guide who speaks both Huichol and Spanish. Those who arrive without permission are regarded as trespassers and often are detained and evicted.
It was into this country that True sought to travel. For reasons we will never know, he failed to register or seek a guide.
The trek was part backcountry sojourn and part journalistic inquiry, combining two of True's great passions in life: walking in the wilderness and roaming far off the beaten path in pursuit of a good story.
His third passion was Martha, who was pregnant with their first child when True left on his journey. It was Martha's pregnancy that lent an air of urgency to True's plans. At age 50, he was a fit, experienced hiker who had trained hard, carrying his backpack filled with 60 pounds of rocks on brisk 10-mile walks though Mexico City in the weeks before his planned late-November departure. Martha, at age 40, was about to undergo an amniocentesis to confirm the health of the fetus. She wanted her husband at home to be with her during her nine-month term.
Months earlier, starting in March, True had unsuccessfully lobbied his editors in San Antonio to authorize his proposed trek through Huichol territory, a proposal editors turned down repeatedly until a frustrated True finally decided to use vacation time to make the trip.
I wish True had advised me of his plans. As a former foreign correspondent who had worked in Mexico and covered civil wars in Central America, I knew what trouble could befall a reporter traveling solo through the backcountry. I would have insisted that True take a photographer and abide by the buddy system, or I would have vetoed the trip. Perhaps that is exactly why True did not share his plans with me.
I will never forget that Friday morning in December 1998 when a small group of editors walked into my office to deliver the bad news that True was missing. Susana Hayward, a staff reporter who had recently worked for The Associated Press in Mexico, was immediately dispatched to join True's brother-in-law and his best friend, who had hired a bush pilot and were searching the vast canyon country of the Huichol Sierra along True's intended route.
Fortunately, we had a map tracing True's planned 100-mile walk, 10 miles a day for 10 days, through plunging canyons and steep-faced mesas that would take our reporter through a series of Huichol villages before he emerged at the end of his trail not far from the Pacific Ocean. In the days before her husband's departure, Martha has asked several times for a copy of the map, and when Philip failed to provide one, she insisted and prevailed the day before he left. Without it, we would not have known where to start.
By Sunday, two days later, it was evident that True was not going to be found along the trail, nursing a twisted ankle in a village, unable to communicate with us. I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable in San Antonio, worried about True's fate after such a long absence and guilty that I was not down in Mexico helping broaden the search.
We needed more resources devoted to the search than any newspaper can muster. We were doing all we could, but it wasn't enough. Our small search party was distributing leaflets throughout the Huichol Sierra that included True's photo, details of his route and a reward for information. Regional radio broadcasts in Huichol and Spanish were advising listeners of the missing reporter and the reward.
We needed more than all that. After two sleepless nights I decided to head south of the border.
I took the first flight Monday morning from San Antonio to Mexico City. A suit bag held everything I would need for a planned visit to see President Ernesto Zedillo at Los Pinos, the pine-shrouded grounds where he lived and worked on the edge of Chapultepec Park. A diver's duffel was packed with gear for the canyon country: hiking boots, warm clothes, canteen, and a handheld GPS device.
It never occurred to me not to go searching for True. Staying home was not my style, and my considerable experience living and working south of the border made me the most ideally suited person in our newsroom to join the search.
I also knew that President Zedillo and his staff would be more impressed by my presence than if we sent another reporter to request his help. We needed helicopters to access much of the remote country, ground troops to augment the Huichols we were paying to help search on foot, and we needed radio communications where none existed.
I had known Zedillo since he first took office, and while he was out of the city, his senior aides quickly agreed to provide the help we sought. The next morning I found myself on a helicopter with one of the country's ranking generals and his contingent of soldiers headed northwest from Guadalajara to establish a base camp deep in Huichol territory.
True and I were not close friends, as many have assumed. He had worked for the Express-News first in one of its border bureaus and then in Mexico City. His only time in the San Antonio newsroom came during home visits. Before becoming a reporter, True had been a labor organizer and did not warm to management. Our shared passion for all things south of the border was not enough to bridge that gap or lead to a deeper bond.
That didn't matter at all now. True was my reporter. I was his editor. A newsroom is like an extended family, and now, one of our own was missing. True's disappearance hit hard in every corner of the newsroom. If the newspaper's top editor would not go looking for True, who would?
Fate put me in the small search party that tracked a trail of feathers that had spilled from True's torn sleeping bag into one of Mexico's most forbidding canyons. It was there we found his hidden grave. I remember giving thanks that we did find him and that Martha and the newspaper were not condemned to a lifetime of never knowing what happened.
Days later, after I had returned home, the notes and letters began to arrive from reporters who I had never met, people who didn't know True, either. Reporters wrote to thank me for going down to search for and help bring home True. Some expressed doubts that their own editors would act in the same fashion faced with the same circumstances. I wasn't so sure about that, but I was grateful for letters from strangers that gave me a sense of how people perceived my decision to head south.
Ordinary people sometimes are thrust into extraordinary circumstances. How one responds is something an individual has to live with forever. I am at peace with myself for my decision to go searching for True, for the six years we spent pursuing a just verdict in the case, and now, for having written the story of his life and death.