"Surveillance?" Lyons asked. "Maybe they spotted us coming into the city?"
"In all those thousands of cars?" Gadgets asked, incredulous. "Anyway, don't we have almost identical vans? With Anglos in both vans? You notice they didn't lock on to you... Man, that means something."
"Yeah. It means they know we're in the city."
"And," Blancanales added, "that we have lost the element of surprise. We may be hunting them, but now they're hunting us, too."
In a van, Coral listened to the dash radio. An announcer raved nonstop. Coral turned to the North Americans.
"It is on the news. On all the stations. They tell of North Americans killing Mexicans and Europeans. This one..." he motioned to the voice blaring from the radio "...a politician says it is CIA. He will demand the withdrawal of United States forces. He is screaming 'Foreign invaders, foreign invaders. 'Invasidn de extranjeros!'"
9
History chronicles many invasions of Mexico. The armies of the United States, the French empire, the Catholic empire, all played their role in creating the passionate nationalism of the Mexican people.
Yet the armies of the North American and European nations appear late in the history of the region that would become the republic of Mexico.
In the ancient Valley of Mexico, the black, alluvial soil of the shores of Lake Texcoco provided the foundation of life for the emerging civilization of the Mexicans. The people farmed crops of corn and beans and squash, and the gentle climate and seasons allowed for two crops a year. They lived in union with the seasons of their crops, fearing drought and disease, hoping for ample harvests and many children.
Religion rose from the mystical bonds between these people and their world. Before the Romans built their public monuments on the Mediterranean, pyramids and temples overlooked the mists swirling about Lake Texcoco.
But an accident of geology had formed the valley with its temperate climate, its fertile land and year-round streams in the center of regions ravaged by tropical extremes. To the north, barren deserts offered only cactus and small animals to sustain the tribes of nomads living in wastelands. To the south, despite the torrential rains and lush tropical growth, the red clay soil would not support agriculture.
When strangers came to the valley, they saw the paradise of Mexico and wanted it. The mountains circling the valley did not protect the people from the invasions. The ancient people of Mexico knew only unending war.
Cycles of invasion created endless defeat and chaos. A barbarian tribe called the Toltecs entered the Valley of Mexico and attacked the city-states lining the shores of Lake Texcoco. The Toltecs crushed some cities and became allies with others. The religions and traditions merged, the decadent and barbarian cultures fusing. This new culture spoke Nahuatl, the language still spoken in Central Mexico a thousand years later.
The god of war became a vital part of the Nahuatl culture. When Nahuatl-speaking cities built temples, their two supreme gods received the highest and most splendorous pyramids. The first, Quetzalcoatl, the god of the Teotihuacanis, represented enlightenment and beauty. The other, Tezcatlipoca, became the god of war and magic. The gentle priests of Quetzalcoatl the Plumed Serpent asked the people only for offerings of jewels and feathers and sacred butterflies. The warrior-priests of Tezcatlipoca The Smoking Mirror, the Lord of Night demanded the hearts of captives taken in battle.
Legends tell of Quetzalcoatl inventing the calendar and astronomy and mathematics. Other legends describe the beauty of the god's own city, Tula, where the feather-pennants of his palace floated like shimmering flames. Though archaeology disproves the enrapturing myths of Quetzalcoatl, the reign of the god-king represented the ultimate achievement of Mexican culture.
But Quetzalcoatl fell.
The violent devotees of death, demanding war, demanding human blood and hearts to gorge Tezcatlipoca, overwhelmed Quetzalcoatl.
In time, myth transformed the god-king from a gold-skinned Nahuatl to a being with white skin and a beard, clothed in shimmering metal, who marked his path with crosses. The Toltecs believed Quetzalcoatl would someday return from his exile to retake his throne.
This myth doomed Mexico to conquest by European invaders.
In the centuries following the expulsion of Quetzalcoatl, the Toltecs, who had invaded Mexico, suffered the invasion of the Chichimecs. These tribes of merciless barbarians worshipped a god who spoke only to priests and warriors, Huitzilopochtli. Led by their god, they wandered the valley, attacking the weak cities, making alliances with the strong. Later, one tribe of the Chichimecs established their city on a marshy island in the center of Lake Texcoco. They were the Aztecs.
The Aztecs dedicated their city of Tenochtitlan to war. As their first act, they erected a temple to their god Huitzilopochtli and gave him a sacrifice of the "sacred eagle cactus fruit," human hearts.
Huitzilopochtli demanded unending blood. The Aztec lords believed that if they failed to appease their god's hunger for victims, the sun would fail to rise. They sacrificed their own young men and the warriors of other nations. The Aztecs fought their wars not to expand their empire, but to take captives for the altar of their god. Ceremonies demanded hearts. At the dedication of a new pyramid to Huitzilopochtli, the Aztecs sacrificed eighty thousand captured warriors in four days.
Sacrifice decimated the young men of the defeated nations. Taxes impoverished the citizens. But invincible armies of Aztec warriors threatened any rebellious nation of their empire with annihilation.
Then couriers brought word of the return of Quetzalcoatl. The couriers told of floating mountains coming from the east, bringing a man with white skin and a beard, clothed in metal. The white man brought an army of superhuman white warriors who walked on four legs, preceded by priests with crosses.
And so the Spanish marched into Mexico. Every enemy of the Aztecs believed that alliance with the Spanish offered release from centuries of domination by the Aztec warrior-priests. With the gunpowder weapons and the horses of the European invaders, they hoped to smash the armies of the Aztec empire and win freedom for their people.
Together, the Spanish and their Mexican allies destroyed the Aztecs.
But instead of granting their allies freedom, the Europeans ravaged the Mexican nations and cultures in a holocaust unequaled in Mexican history for savagery and murder. The Spanish conquerors of Mexico claimed the wealth of the conquered land as theirs by the divine right of victory. The looting of the gold of Tenochtitlan, the enslavement of the defeated warriors, the mass rapes of the starving widows and daughters of the defeated, the destruction of the temples for building stone...Spanish greed and lust had no limit: not law, not conscience, not human pity. What the Spanish saw, they took.
Spanish knives pried out precious stones. Spanish wrecking bars tore the gold and jade and turquoise from the holy places. What had been sacred, beyond price, became only loot.
Cortez took his share and distributed a share to his white warriors. Shares went to the imperial court of Castille to buy perfumes to scent the stinking, never-washed bodies of the nobility, to buy spices for the palace dinners, to buy silks and velvets for the splendor of the royal audience. But the greatest share of the loot went to the king and queen of Spain themselves.
Though the Mexicans continued to fight the Europeans, they suffered defeat after defeat at the steel blades and muskets and cannons of the invaders. If the Mexican warriors avoided the swords and the bullets of the Castillians, smallpox the most lethal of the Spanish weapons, the weapon that decimated entire cities eliminated the last organized resistance in central Mexico.