A 'True' Impunity Test for Mexico

By: This editorial ran in the Dec. 8 issue of E&P.

When Philip True pitched his editors at the San Antonio (Texas) Express-News in 1998 on a feature about Huichol Indian culture in the remote and rugged Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range, he concluded his memo by writing: "There is a beautiful story within all of this. Interested?"

They weren't particularly interested, as it happens -- and neither was there a beautiful story awaiting the 50-year-old Mexico City bureau chief as he took vacation time to hike alone into Huichol territory. True disappeared, and after an anguished search by Express-News Editor Robert Rivard, colleagues, Mexican authorities and Huichols, the reporter's decomposing body was found in a shallow grave Dec. 16, 1998.

In the nearly five years since True's murder, the story only grew uglier as his killers first confessed, then denied, their guilt. As their case moved excruciatingly slowly through the judicial system, the two accused Huichol Indians, Juan Chivarra and Miguel Hernandez, were adopted as a cause by a wealthy American expatriate, Miguel Gatins. Thanks to that well-financed defense, Chivarra and Hernandez -- brothers-in-law known as troublemakers in their Huichol community, who had in their possession True's backpack, notebook and other personal effects -- have remained free despite their convictions in 2002.

But now we know that during all this time that Chivarra and Hernandez have been free, the lead investigator for the defense team knew that they had killed True -- because they told her. Their thin and always implausible defense has collapsed completely. Gatins has declared that the evidence against the two is overwhelming, and he has withdrawn all his support. With the money gone, the politically influential lawyer who had such success keeping Chivarra and Hernandez from punishment is out of the picture, too.

Now it is time for the Mexican judicial system to do what it has failed to do not only in the True case, but so many times before: Uphold justice by punishing the murderers of a journalist. Philip True's killers must not be allowed the impunity still enjoyed, for example, by those who plotted the 1988 murder of Hector Felix Miranda, co-publisher of the Tijuana weekly Zeta, or the 1991 assassination of Diario de Juarez columnist Victor Manuel Oropeza Contreras.

Under President Vicente Fox's administration, Mexico has come farther than ever before in adopting transparency and the rule of law as operating principals of government. There's now a national freedom of information law, and the government is opening the files on long-buried official transgressions, such as the 1968 massacre of students at Tlatelolco Square.

The True case is a test of whether Mexico intends to continue on this path towards liberty and accountability -- or to slide backwards to intimidation of journalists and impunity for their killers.