Once I had been informed that there was a Document chronicling Adam's journey I had to insist upon contributing my own eye-witness chapter about his Great Mexican Adventure. I have listened to the recordings Adam has made about his encounter with our local mafia, so I can start my report on the right page, hopefully without too much pointless repetition. I'll try writing this in English; I should be fluent enough, but if not, my new best friend, guitar-hero Miguel deSanto (how cool!), has offered to check it over for mistakes. But first I would like to let you know some things about me, as teller of this story: I am Teniente Rafael Dominguez of las Fuerzas Armadas Mexicanas, meaning I am a lieutenant in the Mexican Army. My friends call me Raf. I was born in Morelos to an upper-class family, spent two years as an exchange student in San Antonio, Texas before I entered the military academy Heroico Colegio Militar in Mexico City to become an officer. In other words, I have lived a privileged life that has offered me access to Mexico's elite society. So I know exactly how corrupt it is. I was what they call a "junior", one of Mexico's rich kids living the swell life, expected to fall in line with the elite, take my share of the entitlement, satisfy my greed and protect the interests of the Fourteen Families against radical leftists and other rabble in the streets. After a few years of service in the military I could expect a future in politics. And when I was young, I fell for it, why not? Life was going to be good for me, I had no wish to rock the boat. But then I was stationed in Juarez. Ostensibly to control the drug cartels, who were killing too many civilians to be ignored any more. The cartels had been operating for generations without attracting too much attention, the police looked the other way, there were payoffs, business as usual. Then suddenly they all seemed to go crazy; instead of payoffs there were liquidations, groups of civilians were killed for no reason, it was war. The Sinaloa cartel against the Nogales mafia, and anyone in between got mowed down. The military was ordered to step in and stop the slaughter. But we also got conflicting orders to support one side or the other, depending on who had a deal with who, there was no logic to it. Or there was: money. But we could never know who had sold us out until we were in the middle of it. This was not simply corruption-- this was EVIL --and there was no authority you could trust: not the police, not the military, not your unit comrades and especially not your family. I became disillusioned and almost quit the Army. I was ready to quit Mexico too, immigrate to the USA, somewhere in the North, far from the border, the situation was so hopeless. I love my country, the sun shines on beautiful beaches, the food is good, the culture is admirable. Now imagine Mexico with an honest government, good police, no corruption, no evil: it could be a paradise. But it's absolutely impossible unless you kill all us Mexicans and start over. That's how I saw it. But then I discovered there were others like myself, young officers who felt it was our duty to clean up the mess our entire country was in. I reconnected with an old childhood friend, Leopoldo Guardiola (whom I call Leo) and who was a lieutenant, just like me. We both wanted to fix Mexico and tried to find others like ourselves. Call it an underground movement, secret rather than overt like the students in demonstrations --we could see that protest marches weren't getting anywhere. It was us who were sent in to squash their meetings, we could only do our best to avoid killing those students. We also did our best to wipe out the most ruthless mafia gangs when we got the chance, although our main problem was always orders from above to stand back and let the mafia do whatever it wanted. Very frustrating. But then came the Iguala scandals and international public opinion resulted in Presidential orders to form a unit that actually did go against the cartels, the 16th Battalion. I transferred in, as did many of my friends, including Leo, hoping there would be enough of us to do the job right. We began in Iguala, the Mayor and his wife were actually arrested, hundreds of police, some military upper-echelon officers. Our worst enemy was our own commandante, General Camilo Luiz Sanchez, but we could not find any proof to indict him. And as always, there are career soldiers with connections to corrupt officers and government officials, also within our own unit. They had their own agendas and worked against us, reporting our moves to the cartels, arranging murders. That's what was happening when I met Adam and his band on the side of the road by the bridge at Rio Mezcala, where the mafia had set up their road block. I was in a mini-van with Leo and Carlos and three other officers from our unit, on our way from a meeting in Chilpancingo to the 16th Battalion's temporary base in Cuernavaca. We'd been surprised by the road block because our driver didn't tell us, although he knew about it, talking on his cell phone and pretending it was a private conversation. It was a big operation; 40-50 mafia soldiers, almost a hundred civilian cars had already been stopped both directions on the Iguala-Chilpancingo Carraterra. When we got flagged in and told to step out of the car the driver said not to worry, he knew some of the mafia guys. And he did: they greeted him by name, "Hola, José Cuarón," and he and his two friends walked into a crowd of carteleros, while we were left to be questioned by unfriendly mafiosos with AK-47s pointed at our guts. I barely noticed Adam's bus being stopped not long after us, I was too worried what was happening to me. But when Adam stepped out of the bus I couldn't help noticing how much bigger he was than any man around him, especially since everyone else did too and commented on it. "It's that Bigfoot we've been waiting for," our guards were saying. At that distance I couldn't make out that he was all covered with hair, I'd just thought he was an extra-extra-large human guy wearing a weird shirt. Then noticed that most of the mafia soldiers were swarming around him and his bus, as if he was the primary target of this whole operation. When the others got off the bus-- especially those girls-- I finally recognized exactly who they were. I've got the Squatch and Friends album CD and I'd seen their concert on DVD several times. I was surprised, but suddenly had to focus in on our own situation as the mafia guys questioning us were done with Lieutenant Carlos Alvaro and murdered him right in front of Leo and me, shooting him in the head. Then they were asking us if we'd been involved with the Iguala arrests, although they knew exactly who we were. Someone had told them. Meanwhile three other guys from our unit were already released and sent on their way to Cuernavaca, drove off leaving us behind. Looked like we'd been set-up: it was obvious that the mafiosos were going to kill us. But then Adam, who was surrounded by all those mafiosos, tossed that now-famous padlock at the mafiosos about to shoot Pokey and Miguel, then went into spectacular action and started slapping his enemies down so that they stayed down, throwing them at each other, rolling cars over on them, moving fast before they had a chance to shoot him. Our own guards became distracted by all that, so Leo and I had a chance to jump them, we knew it was try or die. We are soldiers, been trained for this shit, so I clubbed my guy with his own rifle. Leo was wrestling his guy on the ground. But there was a third guy and he was about to shoot us when Miguel deSanto shot him instead and saved us. How often do you get rescued by a famous rock star? Pretty cool! Still being alive is cool too. When the fighting was over and all the mafiosos captured, it seemed natural that Leo and I become friends with Adam's group, comrades in arms against a common foe and all that. Actually, we were both star struck by the whole lot of them: famous media stars, real-live sasquatches, and of course, all those beautiful women! Meeting them moments after we had almost died was like finding ourselves in an alternative reality, like having gone to Heaven. Or suddenly inside some Hollywood Blockbuster superhero movie, considering how Adam and his Bigfoot girl friends had squashed all those mafia gangsters. Quite unreal. But it only took a moment to realize how real they were: neither Leo nor I had ever seen a Bigfoot before and here we were with three of them, so inhumanly big and hairy and powerful -- they were supposed to be scary monsters--and yet, once you got to talking with them, they were just people. Familiar people, actually; famous for being musicians, poets, cultured. Two of them, Adam and Masnia, even spoke Spanish! Both Leo and I had to make an effort to resist falling completely in love with all five of those women at once. Which was not easy, it really went against our sense of Latin Machismo. That may sound trivial under those conditions, but we were both hit hard by their beauty and personalities. Although it was quite obvious that everyone in their group was already involved in some sort of relationship, so it would have been very impolite of us to horn in. Although upon leaving the scene of battle at Rio Mezcala, we had served as a protective escort for their bus to our unit base in Cuernavaca, so we did horn in-- at least we invited ourselves to ride along with them. Actually, there were also practical reasons for that: some of the captive mafiosos were being questioned on their bus-- among them Salvador deVega himself, the cartel's biggest local boss, whom Adam and Magga had captured in a little side-action--so we were their liaison with the 16th Battalion's convoy. We were questioning prisoners-- or rather, the two Bigfoot women were, using some very special techniques to hypnotize the truth out of them. At 22:00 hours our unit Capitan called to inform us that we had a problem: he had received orders to meet with a convoy of the 11th Battalion on the roadside up ahead and deliver all of our prisoners to them-- AND the bus. So Adam and his band were to become prisoners instead of allies. Capitan Javier had already traced the origin of those orders back to General Camilo Luiz Sanchez. While questioning our captives we had learned that it was that very same general who had arranged for Leo and me--and our now-murdered friend Carlos-- to be eliminated by the mafia at the road block. So we had just been given orders to lie down and die. The convoy pulled over to the side of the carretera, about 2 km before the meet site. My cell phone rang; it was Capitan Javier up in the front of the convoy with a message to Adam. "I think you'd better take your bus and split to the north before we meet up with the 11th..." "No good, they'll just chase us down on the freeway," Adam said, "so I think I'll scout ahead to the meet-site, in case there's already a trap set up. " "No way, this is a military operation, you're a civilian," the Capitan insisted. "Right, a civilian target, seems I've been drafted. I'm not going to let them take me or my friends." "But you can't sneak up on them; they're probably watching us right now from traffic driving the opposite direction. Besides, they've got night-vision goggles, sonar scanners and lots of guns." "I can still see better in the dark than them, and I'm a bigfoot. You guys wait here, this won't take long." "No, I'm giving the orders here!" Officers can be so amusing. "Fine, but I'm still a civilian, remember?" Adam said and hung up. He gave me my phone back, I said maybe he should take it with him so that he could contact us, but he said, "No, cell phones can be traced and give away your location." He turned to his friends, who were all worried. "Addy, you'll get killed," Melly whimpered in a way that told me she was in love with that Bigfoot, which seemed like the most natural thing at the moment. "Promise I won't," he said. His friends actually laughed, although it was pretty feeble: something about Adam always having to keep his promises. Magga said something in the bigfoot language, it sounded like they had a short argument, obviously that she wanted to go with him but he wasn't about to risk her life. Then she jumped out the door and he had to run after her; she too was a civilian not about to follow military orders. Okay, none of us saw what happened out in the dark, but we could hear gunshots a few minutes after they left. Then some very loud and eerie shrieks that made my skin crawl. Then human cries. Sounded like Hell unleashed, quite disturbing. The girls, Melly and Lissandra, started crying, Pokey and Miguel almost went out the door to go help, but they knew that was just too foolish. The young bigfoot girl, Masnia, was the only one who seemed to be in control of her emotions, standing outside the door, listening. After half an hour she said, "One of them is coming back now." It was Magga who came running back to us, giggling like a kid, obviously unharmed. "We go to Adam now" she said in her pidgin-English, "everything okay!" Pokey started the motor and drove out of the convoy line and on ahead toward the meet-site. I signaled for the convoy to follow us, hoping it really was all right. The arranged meeting place was a kilometer ahead and to the right off the carretera, then another hundred meters into a clearing within a circle of trees. Excellent site for an ambush. There were several military vehicles in sight, half-hidden between the trees, but they were all stranded; having been flipped over, either on their sides or roofs. Adam stood in the middle of the clearing guarding a pile of rifles and pistols. A few 11th Battalion soldiers lay spread around, maybe hurt, although there was no blood to be seen. It looked like most of the soldiers had run away. He told us: "I tried to talk Magga out of going with me, but as it worked out, I couldn't have done it without her and she knew it. Some of those trucks are heavy, especially when they are full of men and equipment. But between us and a prodigious flow of haka we could just topple that armor-plated troop-carrier with the cannon mounted on top." I don't know what haka is, but it sounded like some kind of superhero juice. According to Adam, they had made it all the way into the trees without being seen, Bigfoots can do that I guess, and they discovered the ambush ready and waiting for our convoy to arrive, the entrance covered by the APC's cannon. They moved very fast, apparently, the soldiers were surprised that their jeeps and trucks were suddenly tipping over for no reason. Those that could get to their feet started firing blindly into the trees, since they couldn't see any enemies in the dark, which was the gunfire we'd heard. They were completely confused and never fired a shot at either of the two bigfoots. Then Adam and Magga screamed that weird howl in their faces and the soldiers panicked, superstitiously afraid of these big hairy monsters of the night, many just dropping their weapons and running away. Night-vision goggles were ripped away, rifles were grabbed out of soldier's hands and tossed into a pile, there was no resistance. Some of them ran off shouting, "Demonios!" or "Diablos!" as they ran. The ambush force waiting for us had been about fifteen men, which meant that twice as many soldiers would be coming when the rest of the 11th Battalion arrived. Theoretically they would be expecting us to be captured or dead, but most likely those soldiers who had run away would have reported the situation by now. But shots had been fired at us, so we were no longer obliged to sit and allow them to attack us. We reported that to General Artigone, who said he would write an arrest order for General Camilo Luiz Sanchez, which might confuse things enough so that the 11th Battalion would be leaderless for a day at least, until some corrupt higher ranking cartel supporter stepped in to negate those orders. So in the meantime, we gathered the few new prisoners we had and got our convoy back on the carretera heading for Cuernavaca. We'd see if the 11th Battalion would dare to wage open warfare while driving on the Carretera National in plain sight of eventual civilian witnesses. We never saw them. Adam's crew and their bus separated from our convoy at the intersection for D.F. and headed north, back towards the USA. They planned to get off the Carretera Nacional and take back-roads until they reached Guadalajara, where they could join an official tourist-safety convoy. We wished them luck. They wished us luck as well, since none of us were certain of what would happen when we got to base at Cuernavaca. Would we all be court-martialed for disobeying orders from General Sanchez? Or given medals for bravery in the war against the drug cartels? It could go either way in Mexico. Well, we didn't get court-martialed, but it took a few days to be sure. We had many prisoners to process, including the cartel's big boss Salvador deVega, but we knew the drug cartel would have pseudo-legal protection from higher up. And sure enough, we were ordered to release Señor deVega at once upon arrival and apologize for any inconvenience we might have caused him. Luckily, none of us had tortured or interrogated him: that had been the work of gringo civilians and bigfoot monsters. We had no choice but to release him, since we had no evidence of him committing any crime. The poor man had been illegally kidnapped from his own home. Señor deVega insisted that the Mexican Army locate that bus and arrest the Bigfoot Band, but General Artigone managed to put a hold on those warrants until the bus had time to cross over into the USA. Salvador deVega attempted to have Adam extradited back to Mexico, but the American authorities laughed that off, knowing who he was. It was different with most of the underlings; both Leo and I swore eyewitness reports of some of them committing murder right in front of us, including our friend Lieutenant Carlos Alvaro, with ourselves intended to be next. We got those assholes put in jail to stay. But most of the small-time underlings went to court and were released in a few weeks, against our loud protests. Viva Mexico, cabrónes!
|