Protective Poet Finds Himself in Need of Bodyguards in Mexican Mystery

Homero Aridjis had just been elected president of International PEN--the star-studded writers group--and the prominent Mexican writer was bursting with ideas.

The group would visit oppressed writers in Iran. Defend government critics in Cuba. Vigorously campaign for persecuted artists in Nigeria and China.

But a year later, Aridjis has a more urgent case on his hands.

His own.

In recent months, Aridjis has been haunted by menacing callers who wake him up at night and scar his holidays. The distinguished poet and novelist doesn’t know who is behind the threats, although he suspects a political motive. He knows only that they want him dead.

Suddenly, Aridjis can identify with the hundreds of jailed or threatened writers defended by the London-based PEN. He knows he isn’t as badly off as some. But, shadowed by two government-supplied bodyguards, the soft-spoken poet has entered the same “culture of fear.”

“You begin to limit your world,” Aridjis, 58, said in an interview in his living room, a cozy clutter of books and soft chairs.

“I used to have the freedom to go out alone, to take public transport, the subway. I loved to walk. . . . It’s part of my life as a writer,” he said. “But now I can’t do it. My mind isn’t free. If I go into the street, it’s in a car with two armed men, turning every which way.”

Aridjis has written 26 books of poetry, fiction and essays, including “The Lord of the Last Days,” his most recent to appear in English. But it is his other passion--nature--that has made him controversial.

In 1985, Aridjis founded the Group of 100, a sort of Who’s Who of Mexican artists and intellectuals joined together to defend the country’s imperiled environment. His activism has earned him the enmity of loggers and many business owners and politicians.

But the recent threats are different. They are short and direct, he said, not the barrages of phone insults he occasionally received before. And they hint at knowledge of his family and activities.

The threats began in November, when Aridjis and his U.S.-born wife, Betty, were in New York. A man told their Mexico City answering machine:

“Dog. I am looking for you, dog. You are going to die soon like a dog. I have you in my sight. You are the next ones who are going to have their ears cut off.”

Aridjis recalls: “The voice sounded very sinister and professional. People who have suffered harassment--and I played the tape even for people in the government--said it was very serious.”

What was particularly unnerving was that the caller echoed Aridjis’ comments over the phone two days earlier to a Washington Post reporter in Mexico regarding a notorious kidnapper who cut off his victims’ ears, he said.

Many assume the Mexican government taps foreign journalists’ phones. But Aridjis wondered how “criminals could have access to those tapes.”

The threats continued.

Just before midnight on Aug. 16, the phone rang in the Aridjis’ home in the posh Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood in Mexico City. His wife answered; the caller hung up. Half an hour later, a woman with a breathy voice left a message insulting the Aridjis’ two daughters, who were about to return from universities abroad.

“And you?” the caller said. “You’re going to die very soon. See you soon.”

Aridjis tortures himself with questions about what the callers want. Are they upset that he denounced attacks on Mexican crime reporters last fall? Are they angry at PEN’s support for Brig. Gen. Jose Francisco Gallardo, a jailed critic of the Mexican military?

The only common thread, he said, is that the threats seem to come after interviews with the foreign media or speeches in which he defends freedom of expression.

International groups are mobilizing to support Aridjis. Members of PEN, including the writers Edward Albee, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller and Susan Sontag, appealed to Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo late last month to protect Aridjis.

A Zedillo spokesman, David Najera, emphasized that the government has provided Aridjis with the bodyguards. “The practice of making threats is against government policy,” he said. The director of the Mexican intelligence agency investigating the case declined an interview.

Other prominent government critics said it is unlikely that the Zedillo administration would be harassing Aridjis.

“He’s not the principal critic of the system,” said political scientist Lorenzo Meyer, noting that Aridjis mainly speaks out on environmental themes, while others denounce the government on more sensitive issues without problems.

Still, Meyer noted, political retaliation can’t be ruled out. Some government critics have occasionally been threatened in recent years, he said, even as Mexico has moved toward a full democracy. And the threats might be coming from somewhere other than the presidency. The days when Mexican politics were tightly controlled by the president are over, Meyer noted.

“Every piece of the system is acting in a more independent way,” Meyer said. “Zedillo doesn’t control anything anymore.”

Aridjis once enjoyed the favor of the authoritarian system. As a young artist, he received government stipends to write. Like other prominent intellectuals, he was rewarded with diplomatic posts. But when he returned to Mexico in 1980 after 14 years abroad as a diplomat and university professor, Aridjis found a changed country.

“I had many friends who had been very idealistic. Once they started working for the government, they became extremely corrupt,” he said. “I understood the system corrupts people. It’s the way our government works. There’s no accountability, no prosecution.”

These days, Aridjis is taking advantage of what he calls his “house arrest.” He is writing a book about his childhood. And he continues his activities for PEN, which has a list of 945 writers worldwide who have been killed, imprisoned or threatened with death. This week, Aridjis is attending a PEN conference in Helsinki, Finland, on “Freedom and Indifference.”

“It’s ironic,” he said. “I’m going to preside over this conference of writers . . . while in my own country I can’t practice freedom of expression.”