Robert Rivard
The 53-year-old editor of the San Antonio Express-News on not losing readers, not jumping stories, the murder of one of his reporters, and what passes for Mexican justice.
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Did they ever want to read that?
I don’t know that they ever wanted to read that, but we used to give it to them. Now we tell them, “Here’s what happened.” It might have been a six-hour meeting, but for five hours nothing happened. We’re not going to bore them if nothing happened.
Back on the subject of your corporate bosses: What’s it like to work for one of those big, bad media conglomerates?
People speak nostalgically about family newspapers. When I broke into this business, there were family newspapers all over. For every decent one, there were literally hundreds of embarrassingly bad family newspapers with every member of the family on the payroll. The profile of family newspapers is somewhat mythical and blurred in hindsight. Frankly, the newspaper in this town was family-owned before, and it was never remotely distinguished or served anyone’s interest, in my opinion, in the way it should have. I work for an incredibly diversified international media company that owns more than one hundred businesses. People think that the newspapers are the company, but the newspapers are a division. Hearst is bottom-line oriented. They set financial goals and expect us to make them, and there are consequences when we don’t. But they’re also visionary; they understand that they need to invest in their properties and their markets if they are going to remain viable. They have bestowed resources on me in San Antonio that are historic in nature. I have more journalists working for me now, at probably double the pay, than both the Express-News and the [now defunct] Light ever had combined.
What makes them think, resourcewise, that this market is a good investment?
The outlook for San Antonio is so positive. The Census Bureau just came out with some very interesting data; I think we’re the eighth-largest city in the U.S. right now, but we’ll pass San Diego and become the seventh largest by 2010. So we are a growing market. There’s no reason why a good paper can’t leverage that growth and remain profitable.
It’s going to be fueled, isn’t it, by the boom in the Hispanic population?
That’s the number one reason, but the number two reason is the amount of people coming into the market to satisfy the needs of employers like Toyota and the National Security Agency. We are basically going to add more than nine thousand people to the city, and [in many cases] these are qualified white-collar professionals who are coming.
If you think about it, you yourself were a white-collar professional who moved to San Antonio.
Yeah. I grew up in the North, at the top of the mitten in Michigan. My father was French Canadian, and his parents, I like to say, crossed the river without papers, only it was the St. Lawrence River. My mother is an Irish Catholic from the Bronx; her dad was a cop whose beat included Yankee Stadium. So I come from a very different world.
Not exactly the guy you would expect to be editing the San Antonio newspaper.
No. But I spent my formative years, my twenties, in Brownsville; the person I am today is who I became then. And I spent my later years working as a reporter in Latin America.
How did you get interested in the business?
I remember a man coming to my house and telling my mother that he had a great opportunity for her boys. What he wanted us to do was knock on all these doors and sell Sunday newspaper subscriptions. So we did it. We had fifty customers who got eighty fat Sunday papers from St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit. Real early in the morning, in the pitch-black dark, my dad would drop my older brother and me off at the general store with our bicycles. We were supposed to be writing the last names on the papers and loading them in our baskets, but we would sit there and read them. My brother would read the comics to me and explain them because I didn’t understand them, and I would read the sports pages. I was always amazed that wherever news was being created, there seemed to be a reporter to write about it. So I thought, “When I grow up, I’m going to go to exotic places in Latin America, where there are always news stories.”
From that to this, and to your book, Trail of Feathers, which is about the murder of one of your reporters, Philip True, seven years ago and your attempt to find his killers. Why did his death become such a crusade for you?
Because when he disappeared in the backcountry of Mexico, I knew probably better than all but a few in our newsroom what the implications were.
Having spent so much time yourself south of the border.
Right. I was taken by surprise. I didn’t know he had gone. The editors below me had turned down his repeated attempts to get the paper to approve his trip as a journalistic assignment, so he went on his own. I think he didn’t tell me because he knew I was the one guy who would have stopped him. I would have said, “You aren’t going there alone, pal. It is a hell of a lot harder to kill two people than it is one.” In the immediate hours after he was reported missing, it was clear that this was not a case in which he would just turn up lost.
How long did it take between the time he went missing and the time you found his grave?
Well, he told [his then-pregnant wife] Martha, “If I’m not back in ten days, come looking for me.” He left the day after Thanksgiving in 1998, and I don’t think she contacted us until about December 10. Three days later I went down to Mexico to beg President Zedillo, who I knew, for a major ground and air search by the military, and that happened. The next morning I was on an army helicopter with one of the ranking Mexican army generals, and we flew Philip’s route; we triangulated places where he had been seen and hadn’t been seen. Just as we landed in a village, it turned out, a Huichol hunter approached to say that he had found the body of a foreigner, a backpacker who had apparently fallen off a cliff.
After hiking through a remote area to get to the spot, the body was gone. By then, we later learned, Philip had been out in the wilds for eight days with vultures feeding on him, but as the search party started to close in, his killers realized there were army troops and helicopters involved. So they panicked and went back in the middle of the night to move his decomposing body. They wrapped it up in a ground cloth, stuffed it in his sleeping bag, and spent the whole night dragging it down the depths into this canyon. But when they started out, they tore the corner of his sleeping bag, and the goose down followed them all the way, a little old trail of feathers.
Down we went on the most hair-raising hike I’ve ever taken in my life. We followed the trail of feathers and came upon a sandbar with what looked like fresh green reeds strewn around. A Huichol dog started barking and pawing, and when I got down on my hands and knees, I could smell death. I started digging him out with my hands.
What happened once you found the body?
They did an autopsy in Guadalajara and determined unequivocally that he had been murdered. He’d taken a blow to the skull and then had been strangled. It didn’t take long, ten days, to catch the Huichol Indians who killed him; by Christmas Day they were under arrest. But what should have taken us a year under the Mexican system to find them guilty took six years. We finally won at the supreme court level, but unfortunately a judge set them free without ever telling the state, the family, or the newspaper and they fled, Mexican-style. The authorities have made only halfhearted efforts to go after them.
What did you learn from all this?
That there’s no justice in Mexico unless you buy it.
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