Death In The Mountains

It was the deadliest U.S. jetliner crash since terrorists blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Initially, experts thought Colombian controllers speaking broken English caused the accident. But a senior U.S. air-safety official told NEWSWEEK that pilot error – or errors – led to the crash. The Federal Aviation Administration is studying American Airlines’ prior training to see if the blunders that apparently doomed Flight 965 are isolated or systemic. Meanwhile, American Airlines–which hadn’t suffered a fatal crash since 1979 -took the unusual step of acknowledging some guilt. “We are saddened that human error on the part of our people may have contributed to the accident,” said C.D. Ew-ell, American’s chief pilot. “The accident reminds us that aviation, while not inherently dangerous, is terribly unforgiving of any inattention to detail.”

“Inattention to detail” may turn out to be an understatement. Aviation experts say that misunderstandings between ground controllers and air crews are common and correctable. But unless it’s recorded on a part of the cockpit-voice tape not examined by air-safety officials, there seems to be little explanation for the pilots’ failure to conduct an “approach briefing”-a series of legally mandated procedures in which the crew reviews the plane’s speed, landing path and tower communications, as well as plans in the event of an emergency.

Colombia is a dangerous place to ignore safety procedures. In 1992 terrorists blew up Cali’s approach radar. Although the Colombians purchased a new $8 million system, it’s sitting in the airport’s cargo area because officials fear guerrillas will blow it up again. As a result, controllers sometimes lose track of planes – which happened for three minutes last week to another American Airlines plane en route from Miami to Bogota. Colombian officials insist the missing radar is not designed to guide landings and would not have saved Flight 965. In any event, Tafuri and Williams, experienced pilots with thousands of hours of flight time, had flown to Call before. Only then, they also flew home.

1 63 miles north of Cali, the pilots contract ground control. Instructions are to “report” when they reach the Tulua radio beacon.

2 The pilots radio back that they are heading direct to Cali," taking them off the recommended flight path in the narrow corridor between mountains. “Affirmative,” says ground control.

3 Controllers repeat their instructions to “report Tulua.” But by this time Flight 965 has already bypassed the town. When pilots finally reprogram the plane’s navigational system for Tulua, the plane makes a radical left-hand turn.

4 Realizing they are suddenly heading the wrong way, the pilots turn the plane back toward Cali. An automated warning system tells the pilots: “Terrain. Pull up.”

5 The pilots attempt to pull the plane up, but it is too late. The jet crashes, killing all but 4 of the 167 passengers.

title: “Death In The Mountains” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-16” author: “William Hampton”

By late December, Mexican officials had made a collar. The suspects were a pair of Huichol farmers, 28-year-old Juan Chivarra de la Cruz and his 24-year-old brother-in-law, Miguel Hernandez de la Cruz. Prosecutors say the men confessed to murdering True after a conflict over taking a picture–and that they hid his backpack and planned to retrieve its contents. But amid conflicting autopsy reports and allegations that soldiers–under pressure from Mexico City to make an arrest–tortured the suspects into confessing, doubts about their guilt have lingered. “What do you believe in this case?” says Emma Lew, a Florida medical examiner hired by the FBI to observe a second autopsy. “You don’t have good physical evidence, you have changing stories.”

True himself seemed to leave few clues behind. Some answers, friends and investigators thought, might be in the reporter’s notebook he always carried. Mexican authorities said if he had had one with him when he died, it was never recovered. But last week NEWSWEEK found Philip True’s last notebook. In a warehouse just outside Guadalajara used by the courts to store evidence, True’s backpack sits on a shelf. The contents include his size-9i hiking boots, his passport and camera, a copy of “In Cold Blood”–and a three-by-five-inch, yellow REI “Weatherproof Journal.”

“Greetings… I’m a journalist.”

“Did you get authority from San Sebastian?”

“No, from Tuxpan.”

“We are in San Sebastian and you must get the governor’s permission. I am going to my ranch and I will send some guys to get your pack. [They] will take you back to San Sebastian and maybe put you in jail. You can’t come on the Huichol land without permission.” True writes: “It looks bad for a bit.” Finally, he asks, “If I take no pictures, can I pass on?” “Yes, follow me to my ranch.”

That might have been True’s fatal mistake. In another journal entry, a letter in Spanish to his wife, Martha, it is clear that True has made the one-day hike and reached the valley just past Juan’s village, Yoata. “This place is very savage. It is hard, difficult, beautiful and terrible. It is good to know it,” he writes. He tells her that he will rest there that day, Saturday, Dec. 5, before a 1,200-meter climb out of the valley and that he will try to send her a radio message from the next town, San Miguel Huastita, on Monday. He never made it.

In typical Mexican style, there are many theories about why True died. They range from the possible to the absurd: True was a victim of mestizo ranchers who have been stealing land from the Huichols and view foreigners as “pro-Indian provocateurs”; True stumbled upon a poppy field or marijuana plot and was murdered by drug traffickers; True was a CIA agent killed in some sort of undercover operation. But more than a murder mystery, the case of Philip True is the story of how a gringo living in cosmopolitan Mexico City wandered alone into one of the country’s poorest and most isolated areas, a place in which the distrust of outsiders runs higher than he ever imagined.

The sierra madre is so rugged that the Spaniards decided not to bother conquering it, and Pancho Villa hid out there during the Mexican Revolution. The Huichols, who number about 16,000, have lived there for centuries, their homes scattered over the brown and yellow mountainsides. The trails are rocky mule paths carved into cliffs, often thousands of feet high; water is scarce, and poisonous snakes and plants abound. In his journal, True wrote that the “gorges [are] so deep and the cost of access so high that you just might call them evil and forget about going down there.”

True first got the idea to cross the Sierra Madre last March. In a story proposal to his editor at the San Antonio Express-News, he described the people and countryside as “breathtaking and accessible,” and said he wanted to write about the onset of modernity. “A day near a Huichol community is marked by the nearly constant sound of children laughing and playing. This kind of joy gives them a certain integrity in their being that allows them to welcome in strangers.” He ended his memo: “There is a beautiful story within all of this. Interested?” In fact, the editors never got around to approving the assignment. So True eventually decided to burn vacation time to do it. His bosses say they did not know he was going alone.

His diary entries generally bear out his ideas about the Huichols, whom he had spent some time with before. He describes them as “proud, positive and tenacious” and writes that “although their numbers are diminishing, those who carry on here seem happy… Although many leave to work or sell beaded masks… in Guadalajara or Mexico City, it is here that they are at home and here that they will stay for as long as they can.” He notes that people are generally friendly and generous with advice and directions, though he mentions a tense reception of long silences at one village early in the trip.

Experts on the Huichols say that True’s view of the Indians was so idealistic that it blinded him to the dangers of his trip. While Chiapas has become the metaphor for the gap between rich and poor in Mexico, the Sierra Madre has also had its share of conflict. In the 1930s it was a destination for foreign prospectors and miners, and anthropologists wrote about the Indians’ disdain for outsiders. Then came Roman Catholic missionaries and, later, in the 1960s, a wave of hippies wanting to try peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus that is central to Huichol culture. In the 1970s, the government built airstrips and a few roads. Under the strain of poverty, many Huichols were forced to take seasonal jobs picking tobacco near the Pacific coast.

Most recently, a new set of conquistadors has arrived: cattle ranchers and loggers trying to take over hundreds of thousands of acres of Huichol territory. Murders are rare–and usually tied to alcohol–but there have been outbreaks of violence. Journalists are no more welcome. “There is a strong undercurrent of mistrust for strangers and their motivations for filming and asking questions,” says Susana Valadez, an American anthropologist who has lived among the Huichols for the last 24 years. Roberto Lopez Lopez, a 23-year-old official in the town of San Sebastian, says: “It is disrespectful to enter an area that is not yours. The fields look big, but they belong to somebody. He didn’t deserve this fate, but the lack of permission hurt him.”

True had prepared for the trip for months. He had a one-person tent custom-made. He tracked down rare maps. And he spent hours perfecting his use of a compass. And every morning for a week before he left, he loaded up his pack with more than 40 pounds of gear and hiked 10 miles through the hills of Lomas, the posh Mexico City neighborhood where he lived. By the next week, he was as far from Lomas as you can get in Mexico. From the depths of the Sierra Madre, six days into his trip, he writes: “It is a great thing to have accomplished the relatively easy task of getting in here. Now to get out.”

But what kind of man even goes in? For all his love of foreign cultures and indigenous people, True came to shun his own family. He grew up on his grandparents’ chicken ranch in the San Bernardino Valley in southern California. Philip didn’t know it at the time, but his father, who owned a gas station on the ranch, was sexually abusing Philip’s sister, Bonnie, she said. When Philip was 11, his parents divorced and he turned against his mother. Only many years later, in 1977, at his father’s funeral, did he learn about the abuse. “There was a lot of bitterness in our house,” says Bonnie Biggs, now 48 and married.

True escaped into the 1960s. He worked odd jobs to pay his way through the University of California, Irvine, where he majored in comparative cultures. He grew his hair past the shoulders. He wrote a school newspaper account of being arrested in an antiwar protest. He lived frugally, reused his coffee grounds and preached the virtues of self-reliance, hard work and conquering fear of the unknown. “He thought you could find the whole universe in any particular task if you approached it with dedication and care,” recalls Peter Harris, a college roommate and hiking buddy. In 1974, True hitchhiked to New York. He settled in Hempstead, on Long Island, got a union job in a warehouse and worked as a labor activist. In 1977, he organized a 10-month strike by bookstore workers. After that he started a one-man wallpapering business that allowed him to save money. He also started taking photographs, learning Spanish and translating articles for local Spanish newspapers.

His other escape was travel. He hitchhiked to Alaska. He rode his bicycle across the United States and then down into Mexico. Later he visited rebels in Nicaragua and El Salvador. To his friends, he became a sort of Kerouac figure. “He took his life into his own hands and decided to take care of himself,” says Bronwen Heuer, a former girlfriend. “He was obsessed with giving life meaning. It was selfish in a way.” In 1985, Philip’s sister, whom he rarely saw, called him to ask if he had any arrangements for burial if he should get killed on one of his adventures. “He said he never thought about it,” she remembers.

In 1990, he closed down his profitable wall-papering business to take a $7-an-hour job at the local newspaper in Brownsville, Texas. At 42, he was nearly twice the age of most of the reporters there, but, says Lavice Laney, then managing editor, “he just seemed to really want to write.” True covered Matamoros, the Mexican city across the border. He wrote vivid stories–including a memorable account of a jailed drug dealer who shipped in goats, crates of beer, clowns and a band for a party in prison–but often clashed with his editor when his stories were shortened. He befriended the janitors, lived with two young reporters and became known around town for his parrot, named Fidel. Kimberly Garcia, one of his housemates, says: “He eked out his own way of living and didn’t go by the rules.”

In Matamoros, True met Martha Perez, a Mexican who ran a family-planning organization, and in 1992 they married at her family’s house there. He scheduled the wedding on the anniversary of his father’s death and told his mother and sister not to come. “I guess he found in Martha’s family what we never had,” his sister says.

Three months after the wedding, True took a job covering the border for the San Antonio Express-News and the newlyweds moved to Laredo. The paper sent him to Mexico City in 1995. He felt invincible. Even the known dangers of the world’s largest city seemed overrated. “He was so confident in himself, the way he could get out of situations just by talking,” says Martha True, 39. “He felt like just another working man.” He was passionate about Mexico and Mexicans, and he spoke perfect Spanish. His best stories were about the ordinary people he met. His mother, who died last year, never read them, and his sister saw them only after True was dead. “I didn’t know or understand how good his writing was–is,” she says.

Even with his new life in Mexico, True “was happiest when he was carrying in his bag all that he needed to survive,” explains his widow. Last week she gave birth, two months premature, to a 3-pound, 4-ounce baby boy she named Philip. Someday he may read about his father’s love of the wilderness from his final notebook: “A trail is the way. It is a companion… Lose it, you have lost your way, your purpose, your goal … Oh black moment. Find it again. The sun rests on a valley … the world is all right again.”

For Juan Chivarra de la Cruz, the world was never right. In an interview in jail with NEWSWEEK, he said he grew up as an orphan, bouncing back and forth between different relatives. He finally settled with an uncle whom he came to call Dad. His only contact with mestizos was in San Sebastian, where he sporadically attended school. At 17, Chivarra married his aunt, Yolanda, who was 14 at the time. “My grandparents saw I was a good person and offered me their daughter,” he says. A few years later, his sister married Miguel Hernandez de la Cruz, whom Chivarra counts as one of his only friends. Huichol leaders say that Chivarra often stole animals and fences and threatened his neighbors. Chivarra acknowledges that he has made many enemies–he says because he refuses to spend his money on alcohol and has chased people off his land to protect deer.

A powerfully built man who favors jeans and T shirts to the traditional embroidered Huichol garb, Chivarra says he was framed. As he tells it, he saw Philip True only once. The American passed while he was at his ranch vaccinating cattle. Chivarra said he ran when True tried to take a picture. Then True went on his way.

Several days later, Mexican soldiers were scouring the countryside and airplanes were distributing fliers bearing True’s photo and offering a $1,000 reward–provided by True’s paper–for finding him, dead or alive. On Dec. 15, searchers found the wrong man: a 25-year-old Swiss anthropology student who had been studying the Huichol. Amazingly, his name was Philip Truempler. The next day they received word that an Indian hunter had found True’s body in a canyon, at the bottom of a 100-foot cliff. But when they went to retrieve it, they found only bloodstained rocks. A trail of down feathers led them to the body. Somebody had dragged True several hundred meters and buried him in his tarp and down sleeping bag on a bank of the Chapalanga River.

Eight days later, according to Chivarra, he returned from a hunting trip to find soldiers at his house. They loaded him into a helicopter and tortured him into making a confession, he recalls: “The commander said, ‘We know you killed the gringo. We have a witness who saw you kill him. You tried to sell him the gringo’s camera. We want a confession… We can hang you later or throw you from the helicopter.’”

Hernandez’s story deepens the mystery. He says that, indeed, he strangled True with his bandanna after True wandered into his house, drunk, and tried to attack him. Samuel Salvador, a Huichol lawyer in Guadalajara, believes that Chivarra is “psychologically in charge” of his brother-in-law and has persuaded him to shoulder the blame. Hernandez’s story appears to be invented: none of True’s friends can imagine his being drunk–especially not in the middle of his trip–and Hernandez said that True could not speak Spanish.

High up in the Huichol country, most Indian villagers–including some of the suspects’ relatives–say they believe that Chivarra and Hernandez killed True. “I don’t know why these guys killed him,” says Pascual Hernandez Gonzales, the governor of Almoltita, the village True passed through one or two days before his death. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” Lola Hernandez, a cousin of Miguel’s, recounts the local gossip of how Chivarra threatened True on the trail just past Almotita. It is nearly identical to the story True writes in his journal.

The morning after True passed through, according to Juan’s 19-year-old brother, Martin, Hernandez, Chivarra and his wife, Yolanda, set off on a several-day trek to make a religious offering in the city of Jesus Maria. On the trail, they soon caught up to True. “He insisted on taking their pictures. He was drunk,” says Martin. “When you’re drunk, you think you can do anything. Miguel and Juan pushed him off the rocks and left him there. They saw the body on the way back and took it to the river to bury.” Yolanda, several months pregnant, burst into tears when asked about the incident. “They just told me to walk ahead. I didn’t see what happened.” On the way back, she says, when they came to the same spot, they told her to continue home and that they would arrive later.

Such testimonies are likely damning. But the justice system in Mexico has been so undermined by corruption that even when the authorities are right, doubts remain. And there is no shortage of doubt in case No. 28912/98. For one thing, the Jalisco State Human Rights Commission is investigating the torture allegation. Officials there say that the suspects’ families and one local governor were roughed up and threatened during the search for the men, who were illegally arrested by soldiers on Dec. 24 and not turned over to the court system until two days later. Torturing crime suspects is common in Mexico, and Amnesty International has taken up the case.

The physical evidence doesn’t help, either. True’s body arrived at the office of Mario Rivas Souza, the Jalisco state coroner, just after midnight on Dec. 17. Rivas, who has performed tens of thousands of autopsies in a 46-year career and keeps a collection of fatal bullets on his shelf, says that True was strangled to death and raped with an object after he was dead. He also says that the alcohol content in True’s body, .26 percent, was too high to have been caused by decomposition, so that either True had been drinking or somebody had poured alcohol into him. “This was a murder,” he says. But at one point, even that was being challenged. True’s badly decomposed body was shipped to Mexico City for a second autopsy, ordered by the Mexican president’s office. The report concluded that True was neither raped nor strangled, but died of pulmonary edema caused by a blow to the back–an injury consistent with a fall. Hardly anybody espouses that view anymore, but Lew, the Florida coroner, says the death cannot be called a murder with absolute certainty.

Is it possible that under intense U.S. pressure to solve the crime, Mexican authorities set up two poor Indians who happened to have had a run-in with the victim–and scared their families into lying? The journal–whose last entry describes a dark bird that “squawks and talks like a parrot” and “flies lightly, gracefully, landing in slender branches”–doesn’t answer that question. Philip True, the journalist and the man, would have liked to.

title: “Death In The Mountains” ShowToc: true date: “2023-02-01” author: “Sara Andre”

By late December Mexican officials had made a collar. The suspects: a pair of Huichol farmers, 28-year-old Juan Chivarra de la Cruz and his 24-year-old brother-in-law, Miguel Hernandez de la Cruz. Prosecutors say the men confessed to murdering True after they argued with him about taking a photograph. But amid conflicting autopsy reports and allegations that soldiers–under pressure from Mexico City to make an arrest–tortured the suspects into confessing, there are, in some quarters, doubts about their guilt. “What do you believe in this case?” says Emma Lew, a Florida medical examiner hired by the FBI to observe a second autopsy. “You don’t have good physical evidence; you have changing stories.”

True, a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, left few clues behind. Some answers, friends and investigators thought, might be in the notebook he always carried. Mexican authorities said if he had one with him when he died, it was lost. But last week NEWSWEEK found Philip True’s last notebook. In a warehouse just outside Guadalajara used by the courts to store evidence, True’s backpack sits on a shelf. The contents include his size-91/2 leather hiking boots, his passport and camera, a copy of “In Cold Blood”–and a three-by-five-inch, yellow REI “Weatherproof Journal.”

Filled with True’s observations from the final days of his life, the book doesn’t solve the case, but it provides some of the most important–and untainted–evidence so far. It indicates that True had a confrontation with a man named Juan and suggests that Juan may have viewed the American as an easy target because True lacked the necessary paperwork to trek through Indian land. On the 20th page, True writes: “Juan, sitting on hillside, about 7:30… whistling to somebody barely visible in the ranch below.” In capital letters, he writes: “THIS IS THE PICTURE OF THE TRIP.” Then he describes the following exchange: “Greetings… I’m a journalist.” “Did you get authority from San Sebastian?” “No, from Tuxpan.” “We are in San Sebastian and you must get the governor’s permission. I am going to my ranch and I will send some guys to get your pack. [They] will take you back to San Sebastian and maybe put you in jail. You can’t come on the Huichol land without permission.” True writes: “It looks bad for a bit.” Finally, the journalist asks, “If I take no pictures, can I pass on?” “Yes, follow me to my ranch.” That might have been True’s fatal mistake.

“Some people test their mettle by climbing high peaks. In the Sierra Madre, it’s the depths of the holes that you climb up out of that is the mark of your mettle.”

In a journal entry, a letter in Spanish to his wife, Martha, it’s clear True eventually reached the valley just past Juan’s village, Yoata. “This place is very savage. It is hard, difficult, beautiful and terrible,” he writes. The Sierra Madre is so rugged, in fact, that the Spanish decided not to bother conquering it. The Huichols, who number about 16,000, have lived there for centuries. In a proposal for an article he planned, True said he wanted to write about the onset of modernity. “A day near a Huichol community is marked by the nearly constant sound of children laughing and playing. This kind of joy gives them a certain integrity in their being that allows them to welcome in strangers.” His diary depicts the local folk as “proud, positive and tenacious.”

Experts on Huichol culture say that True’s idealistic view of the Indians blinded him to the dangers of his trip. In the 1930s the Sierra Madre attracted mineral prospectors; anthropologists reported that Indians greeted outsiders with bitterness. Later came Catholic missionaries, and then hippies drawn by peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus central to Huichol culture. More recently, a new set of conquistadors–cattle ranchers and loggers–have tried to take over hundreds of thousands of acres of Huichol territory. “It is disrespectful to enter an area that is not yours,” says Roberto Lopez Lopez, a 23-year-old Huichol official. “The fields look big, but they belong to somebody. [True] didn’t deserve this fate, but the lack of permission hurt him.”

From the depths of the Sierra Madre, six days into his trip, True wrote: “It is a great thing to have accomplished the relatively easy task of getting in here. Now to get out.” But what kind of man even goes in? For all his love for foreign cultures, True shunned the people closest to him–his own family. He escaped from a bitter childhood in California into the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam War and preaching the earnest virtues of self-reliance. “He thought you could find the whole universe in any particular task if you approached it with dedication and care,” recalls Peter Harris, a college roommate and hiking buddy. In 1974 True settled in Hempstead, Long Island, N.Y., got a union job in a warehouse, worked as a labor activist and eventually started a one-man wallpapering business. He also learned fluent Spanish–and began to travel. He hitchhiked to Alaska. He bicycled across the United States and then to Mexico. Later he visited leftist rebels in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Bronwen Heuer, a former girlfriend, says: “He was obsessed with giving life meaning.”

In 1990 he moved again, this time to take a $7-an-hour job at the local newspaper in Brownsville, Texas, covering Matamoros, the Mexican city across the border. There he met Martha, and in 1992 they married. By 1995 True was the Mexico City correspondent for the San Antonio Express-News. Even with the domestic comforts of his new life in Mexico, True “was happiest when he was carrying in his bag all that he needed to survive,” says his wife. Last week she gave birth, two months premature, to a 3-pound, 4-ounce baby boy. She named him Philip.

“A trail is a companion… Lose it, you have lost your way, your purpose, your goal… Find it again. The sun rests on a valley… the world is all right again.”

For Juan Chivarra de la Cruz, the world was never right. In an interview from jail, he says he’s an orphan who bounced back and forth between different relatives. At 17, Chivarra married his aunt, Yolanda, who was 14 at the time. A few years later, his sister married Miguel Hernandez de la Cruz, whom Juan counts as one of his only friends. Huichol leaders say that Juan often stole animals and threatened his neighbors. Chivarra acknowledges he’s made many enemies–he says because he refuses to spend his money on alcohol and has chased people off his land to protect deer. In 1996, after a land dispute in his village, he and part of his family were forced to move to Yoata, a tiny hamlet on the edge of a deserted canyon.

Chivarra says he saw Philip True only once, when he passed Chivarra’s ranch. When True tried to take his picture, Chivarra says, he ran away. Eight days after True’s body was discovered on Dec. 16, Chivarra says, he returned from a hunting trip to find soldiers at his house. They loaded him into a helicopter and frightened him into confessing. “The commander said, ‘We know you killed the gringo. We have a witness who saw you kill him. You tried to sell him the gringo’s camera. We want a confession…We can hang you later or throw you from the helicopter’.” Human-rights groups say that the suspects’ families, as well as a local official, were also tortured during the hunt for True’s killers.

Hernandez’s story deepens the mystery. He admits he strangled True with his bandanna–after the American wandered into his house, drunk, and tried to attack him. The story appears to be invented: none of True’s friends can imagine him drunk, and Hernandez says that True didn’t speak Spanish.

High up in the Huichol country, most Indian villagers–including some members of the suspects’ families–say they believe that Chivarra and Hernandez killed True. The morning after True passed through Yoata, Miguel, Juan and his wife, Yolanda, set off on a several-day trek to make a religious offering in the city of Jesus Maria. On the trail, they soon caught up to True, according to Chivarra’s 19-year-old brother, Martin. “He insisted on taking their pictures,” he says. “He was drunk… Miguel and Juan pushed him off the rocks and left him there. They saw the body on the way back and took it to the river to bury.” Yolanda, several months pregnant, burst into tears when asked about the incident. “They just told me to walk ahead. I didn’t see what happened.”

Still, the case had been engulfed in doubt from the start. Is it possible that the Mexican authorities, eager to settle a troubling murder of a foreigner, set up two poor Indians who happened to have had a run-in with the victim–and scared their families into lying? The journal–whose last entry is a description of a dark bird that “squawks and talks like a parrot” and “flies lightly, gracefully, landing in slender branches”–doesn’t answer that question. Philip True, the journalist and the man, would have liked to.