Mexico’s Acquittals in American’s Death Stir Anger

The widow and the editor of a U.S. journalist who was found buried in a shallow grave in the remote mountains of central Mexico in 1998 expressed anger Friday at a judge’s acquittal of two men accused of killing him.

But a U.S. philanthropist who helped finance the defense for the men--who at one point confessed to the killing--said prosecutors never even proved that Philip True was murdered rather than killed in a hiking accident, as one forensic witness claimed.

The chief prosecutor in Jalisco state this week appealed the acquittals of Juan Chivarra de la Cruz and Miguel Hernandez de la Cruz. A three-judge panel is expected to rule on that appeal, which is allowed under Mexican law, within a few months.

The developments left the death of True, a correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News, as frustratingly unresolved as it was the day his badly decomposed body was discovered in the remote and sacred mountains of the Huichol Indians in December 1998.

The case has been riven by contradictory autopsy reports, disputed allegations of torture to extract confessions and a dizzying cast of players. The 2 1/2-year trial has gone through three judges and four prosecutors in the town of Colotlan in Jalisco state, leading to the acquittals last week.

Robert Rivard, the newspaper’s editor and a friend of True who has doggedly pursued the case since the reporter’s body was found, told a news conference Friday: “There is a mountain of physical and circumstantial proof that it was not a hiking accident, that it was murder.”

Rivard also sought to blunt suggestions by some human rights activists that the prosecution of the Indians was a heavy-handed attempt by the Mexican government to satisfy U.S. demands for justice in the case.

“This is not a football game,” he said. “The release of the suspects is not a victory for Mexico or against the United States. To the contrary, we have a victim of homicide, and we have guilty parties, and we want justice.”

The head of the Jalisco human rights commission, Maria Guadalupe Morfin, wrote in a newspaper column Wednesday that the evidence suggested that True fell to his death in a state of extreme drunkenness and that the suspects were tortured. “It is a scandal that [the state] persists in its intention to appeal,” she wrote. “The hypothesis of murder is not sustainable.”

In Guadalajara, Miguel Gatins, an American who became involved in the defense of the two men last December, said he spent nearly $30,000 in helping develop the defense over recent months.

“The main thought I had was the sense of inequality of the scales of justice, of the gigantic powers on one side: the U.S. government, the state of Texas, Mexican authorities, the army. And on the other side, two little Indians. It started bothering me,” Gatins said.

He joined Patricia Rosales, a Guadalajara lawyer who runs an institute for the needy, in assisting the public defender to prepare affidavits from family members of the suspects who said the two men and at least one parent were tortured and in challenging the autopsy results.

Rivard described the defense as the beneficiary of Gatins’ comparatively huge contribution, arrayed against the efforts of the inexperienced and frequently changing local prosecutors.

Rivard argued that the defendants confessed to the killing in several official statements and interviews but that only later did their accusations of torture emerge. He said journalists had been with the defendants much of the time after their arrest and never saw signs of torture.

The dispute also turned largely on the two autopsies conducted on True. The first, in Guadalajara just after the body was discovered, found that True was strangled. As controversy grew, the federal government ordered a second autopsy about 10 days later, which found that True died of pulmonary edema, possibly the result of a severe head injury.

Both autopsies found high alcohol levels, but forensic experts have noted that decomposed bodies often contain high natural alcohol levels. Colleagues who knew True as a health nut found it hard to believe that he would get drunk while undertaking a strenuous 60-mile hike.

Gatins said the autopsies may not have been conclusive, “but you can’t have two people convicted of murder, or strangling, when there was no such strangling. . . . I think it’s a sad tragedy all the way around. We’re not saying we really know what happened to Philip. But we do suggest it’s quite possible it was an accident.”

True’s widow, Martha, said that when she heard of the acquittals, “I felt as if he had died all over again.

“I want to share with you that my husband loved Mexican culture, that he understood the Huichol culture perfectly. He had spent 20 years studying it, and he knew what he was doing,” she said Friday, holding her 2-year-old son, Philip Jr., who was born three months after his father died.

“This is not a case against the Mexican society, but a case involving human beings, and there was a murder.”