A Touch of Evil

A Touch of Evil C. M. Mayo You see how this country is. Tomorrow who knows what will happen? Luis Donaldo Colosio Why aren't you back in Mexico City? —U.S. detective to MiguelVargas (played by Charleton Heston) in Orson WeUes's A Touch of Evil On Wednesday, March 23, 1994, Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was in La Paz, Baja CaUfornia, about to fly home to Mexico City when he got the phone caU ordering him to go to Tijuana. Tijuana, the Lost City. TJ, as the Border People caU it, Tia Juana say the gringos. Sin city, poor city city of dog races and discos, gray skies and trash, Tijuana crowds against a twelve-foot-high iron waU that runs along the no man's land north of the border up and down canyons, across fields and marshlands, more canyons, more fields, until finaUy, at the smaU park that faces Tijuana's Bullring by the Sea, a public toilet, and the La Michoacana ice cream shack, it slopes down a hfll of sand and into the water where it sUces right through the waves. People jump the waU, people burrow beneath the waU, they bash big holes in it. Every night, hundreds ofpeople bolt through the no man's land, darting from the searchUghts of die heUcopters, the headUghts of the Border Patrols' Ford Broncos, the infrared nightscopes, and the shouting, biUy-club-wielding agents. Interstate 5 to San Diego posts warning signs showing not catde, but running people, a Uttle girl with pigtails flying. Sometimes they make it, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they get robbed or raped. Ifthey make it into the United States, they wfll wash dishes, pick lettuce, sew blue jeans, cut grass, lay bricks. Theirs is quite a story, weU told in many books. Among the best ofthem 130 C. M. Mayo131 are Ted Conover's Coyotes and WiUiam Langewiesche's Cuttingfor Sign. I'm going to teU you a different story, which begins four years and a month later, when I drove my big red OldsmobUe into downtownTijuana and right up the ramp ofthe fruity-pink Camino Real Hotel. I tossed the keys to the doorman, I rode the escalator up to the lobby, and I strode across the gleaming, marble floor. "She's rich," is what the last person I'd interviewed had said about me. I didn't think ofmyself as rich, though I was comfortable enough to be able to travel from one end of the thousand-mile-long peninsula to this other. But, for the moment, consider this true. In the bar I met a Tijuana-born, San Diego-educated multidisciplinary artist named Ana María Herrera, a young woman with glossy raven-black hair and a movie star smile. We sat on a squashy black sofa. We ordered drinks. Flamenco strummed on the stereo, the notes weaving through our conversation like threads of silver. Overhead, the skylight poured down the golden light of a softly waning afternoon. Three p.m. on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 23, 1994: Luis Donaldo Colosio wasflying up the Baja California peninsula. By this time, he would have been over the waist of the Central Desert. Brown; the sea on either side blue. He probably didn't bother to look. He'd beenflying all over the countryfor the lastfour months, ever since his destape, or "uncovering"—President Salinas's announcement that he would be the presidential candidate of the party that had ruled Mexico since 1929, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or the PRI. Colosio was a man with a lot ofenergy, however: he was young, onlyforty-four years old. Trim andphotogenic , he'd earned a masters degreefrom the University ofPennsylvania; since then, he'd held his own with the technocrats ofthe Salinas administration, the Ph.D.sfrom Stanford, Chicago, MIT, Yale, and Harvard. But unlike his Hermès-tied Mexico City colleagues, Colosio, a middle-class provincial, had the afición ofa born politician . He thrilled to wade into the crowds, to clasp the hands that reachedfor him, touched his back, his arms, his hair. At rallies, he would breakfree ofhis bodyguards and allow himself to be carried along, as...