Parachute Journalism Cont'd

If you saw the last two posts and are still interested in the puzzling local news practices on display in the skydive tragedy in Puerto Vallarta last week, here's the latest dubious hearsay.

Vallarta Daily reports this morning that the British family of one of the two missing and presumed dead jumpers, Varsha Maisuria pictured above, have taken it on themselves to search for equipment capable of reaching the underwater wreckage and the bodies.

They're in water anywhere from from 500 to 1,000 meters deep. Local search and rescue teams can dive no deeper than 100 meters.

But buried in the story are two interesting new assertions about the chain of events leading to the crash. One says it actually began when the plane showed signs of mechanical trouble and started losing altitude. The passengers were all prepared to skydive and decided to get out while they could.

The other new purported "fact" was that the pilot "abandoned" the plane himself before it hit the water, apparently with the two women still attached to it. 

The story wonders aloud why the pilot would have violated "normal protocol" calling for a pilot to stay aboard until all passengers are out. It's a curious time for reportorial curiosity to make a sudden appearance. Apparently only questions that have obvious answers are worth asking.

The highly significant new tidbits were offered as usual without any attribution or any admission that the story has gaping holes that need filling.

There's no reference at all to the previously mentioned investigative report, which supposedly said the two surviving skydivers made a normal exit from the plane and parachuted safely before the two victims tried to jump and got caught on the landing gear.

The latest story repeats the assertion of all other previous accounts, which said the pilot and the two surviving passengers were rescued from the water after the crash.

If the plane was really losing altitude fast because of engine failure, you could speculate that  it hadn't yet climbed high enough for actual skydiving and the three survivors all jumped out quite close to the water. But at this point who knows except those three?

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. But Vasha Maisuria's family certainly does. 

This Just In!

Well, wouldn't you know it. No sooner do I hit the "publish" button on my blog post earlier today about the scanty news coverage of our skydiver crash than along comes more coverage.

No worries for me, however, because it doesn't make the reporting look any better. In fact it raises more questions than it answers.

The fresh story was posted by Vallarta Opina, a local paper and website that's supposed to be as good as it gets around here.

The new development was a summary issued by the state prosecutor's office on its previously unreported investigation of the incident.

The summary included a brief paraphrase of the pilot's statement to investigators. He's supposed to have told them that he took off with two pairs of jumpers aboard and that the first pair -- two men -- cleared the airplane with no problem.

The second pair -- the two women -- got caught on the plane as we know. The pilot tried but failed to reach them from the cockpit, so he began to descend. But the women's parachute suddenly deployed, and its drag pulled the plane into a spin that the pilot couldn't control.

If we accept this as an accurate summary of what the pilot said, he had to be the only person left inside the plane when it crashed. The Cessna 80 has a maximum of six seats, and it's been reported only five were aboard at the start of the trip. Two parachuted safely, which left the pilot and the two missing women.

Yet the rescue teams said they rescued three. Did the two men who jumped safely not make it to their planned landing site and need rescuing themselves? Or was the plane overloaded and there were actually two more passengers?

Vallarta Opina makes no effort to reconcile the pilot's statement with any of the previously reported facts. In fact it seems unaware of them, reporting incorrectly today that the dead women remain unidentified, which they aren't. The paper follows local custom and confines itself to reporting what came in over the transom.

And to make things even weirder, searchers located the plane in water either 500 meters deep or 1,000, depending on which story you believe. The wreckage is too deep to retrieve with any equipment available here. But they say they can see it, and there's no sign of the women's bodies.

Maybe this sort of slow dribble of factoids is the right way to tell a story after all. I'm certainly hooked.

Inquiring Minds

A week ago Thursday a single engine Cessna was spotted a mile north of where we live, flying just a few hundred feet above the water about half a mile off shore. Somebody was hanging underneath it.

As sunbathers and hotel guests watched in horror from the beach, the aircraft went into a brief spin, plunged into the bay and sank.

News accounts quickly appeared online in both English and Spanish. The Cessna 180 was owned by a skydive operation. There were five people aboard when the plane took off. Three were pulled from the water. Search and rescue  teams weren't able to reach the deep-sunk wreckage or locate the other two passengers, now presumed dead.

One story on the day after the accident mentioned in passing that the events leading to the crash appeared to have begun when a pair of skydivers jumped from the plane and their equipment got tangled in the landing gear.

After that and to this day, nothing.

Obviously there's a story of mortal terror to be told about whatever happened starting with the violent lurch and tilt thousands of feet above the bay that must have been the first sign that the jump had gone wrong, and ending with the crash witnessed by hundreds.

The pilot and two passengers survived without serious injuries, but I've found no sign in public media of anything they might have to say about the chaotic survival struggles inside and outside the tiny cabin of that Cessna as it descended toward the water.

Yesterday Pam spotted a brief item in the UK Daily Mail identifying one of the dead as a British woman who was making her first tandem jump with an instructor. Her family pleaded in the piece for continuation of the search for her body.

The other victim was also identified as the jump instructor, a California woman described by friends in another brief from Lompoc CA as an adventure seeker. Both of them may have been swept from the plane high above and well away from the crash site. If so, the person seen clinging to the undercarriage may have been one of the survivors trying to jump to the water at low altitude before the crash.

I hope somebody bothers to tell us some day.

What amazes me isn't so much that the information hasn't been reported. There are only three living witnesses, and at least two of them seem to have been foreigners who may have gone home. The third, the pilot, may not want to talk or may have been told not to.

But it's remarkable that the local stories in both English and Spanish are straight police blotter renditions that don't even acknowledge the absence of nearly all the details that would be crucial to understanding what took place, or hint at any attempt to dig them out.

All this is sadly typical of what passes for news in Puerto Vallarta, a city of a quarter million that you'd expect to be better served by its news media. In fact there are at least a half dozen tabloids in addition to the four or five online sites I follow.

They offer a steady diet of luridly illustrated murders and assaults, car wrecks, and arrests of parents or neighbors accused of sexual abuse of children in their care. Sourcing is almost entirely limited to official statements and handouts. There's virtually no sign of reportorial enterprise of any kind.

I'm not suggesting that there's no real journalism south of the border. On the contrary, Mexico is now in the front rank of countries where reporters are threatened, beaten or even killed for poking too aggressively into narco-cartel business and other dark corners.

But the instincts and talents that drive that kind of journalism are curiously absent in our town, and I'm not sure why.

Just Politics

I've always been puzzled by the reflexive scorn heaped by many of my fellow expats on the least suggestion that there might be cause for concern over public safety here in Mexico. These days I'm more puzzled than ever.

Last Friday, members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel fanned out across Puerto Vallarta, where I live, and set several gas stations ablaze, firebombed two banks, burned a couple of buses and drove a pickup truck through the window of a shopping mall department store before setting it alight. Fortunately nobody was hurt.

The attacks were timed to coincide with similar incidents in Guadalajara and a dozen or more other towns across Jalisco, a Pacific coast state long known as the birthplace of tequila and mariachi music but now achieving notoriety as the home of one of the country's most vicious and powerful criminal enterprises.

Friday's mayhem was the latest in a series of increasingly bold demonstrations of the cartel's growing power to evade and retaliate against the government's attempts to suppress it.

Last month near San Sebastian del Oeste in the mountains about an hour east of here, cartel thugs with assault rifles ambushed an armed state police convoy, killing 15 officers before melting away into the surrounding hills.

On Friday, a truckload of gunmen taking part in the firebombing and blockading of roads around Guadalajara paused to shoot down a military helicopter that had caught sight of them on the road. Six soldiers died in the crash and more were hurt. They say it's the first time narcoterrorists have downed a Mexican government aircraft.

I'd have thought these events would give some pause to those who like to insist that it's silly to think of Mexico as any more dangerous for visitors than Omaha. But it hasn't. Here is a sample of the self-soothing affirmations of faith that still pepper expat blogs and conversation:

- U.S. State Department travel warnings about Mexico deliberately exaggerate the risks in hopes travelers will spend their vacations and their money at home.

- Media coverage of the killing and burning here is fear mongering, driven by ratings mania or even by racial and ethnic prejudice.

- The cartels are as eager as the government to avoid harm to Puerto Vallarta's reputation as a haven for well-heeled tourists and retirees, which is why the firebombers took care Friday to attack property and not people.

- You're as safe in Mexico as you are in Peoria. (As long as you only drive in the daytime. On the toll roads. And don't go places or do things that might cause you to be mistaken for anybody in the drug business. Oh, and last Friday, don't go outside until the firebombing stops.)

- And my personal favorite from last weekend, the violence is "just politics."

As proof that all is well, proponents offer the fact that they have lived and traveled in Mexico for years without ever having been mugged, meeting only the friendliest of people and partaking joyfully of the country's rich cuisine, culture and scenic wonders.

I'm happy to report that I can say the same thing. And I'll admit I don't feel any less safe than I did a week ago.

But this country is grappling with something that is starting to look less like a law enforcement problem than an armed insurgency. Cartel hoodlums may have tiptoed around the tourists in Puerto Vallarta last weekend. But they exploit, terrorize and oppress entire communities in rural areas off the beaten path that they control. If it suits them one day to kill or kidnap urban expats, I'm quite sure they will.

Yes, Mexico is still a great place for snowbirds to spend the winter, and no, the chances of getting caught in a cartel crossfire outside your condo still don't seem more than nominal at this time. I hope I still feel that way when it's time for us to come back in the fall.

But only a knucklehead with no genuine respect for his host country would go around bragging that smart gringos need have no worries, since the chaos, suffering and danger that confront many everyday Mexicans and their inadequate government don't have anything to do with us.

Pickleball?

It's too bad about the name, because the game is a pretty good one.

I was just introduced to it a few weeks ago when our neighbors Dave and Cory invited me to come along with them to a free lesson. Now I seem to be hooked.

You play it with short-handled paddles. The ball is very much like those plastic Whiffle balls, about three inches in diameter. It makes a satisfying THWOCK when you hit it right.

The Ruidoso Pickleball Association, of which I'm now a member, plays on a pair of municipal tennis courts adjacent to the village-owned golf links. You can get four pickleball courts on each of the tennis courts, which the village has obligingly allowed to be overpainted with pickleball boundaries.

The nets assemble in a couple of minutes, and just like that you can have as many as 32 players in doubles action, though it's seldom much more than half that many.

I couldn't help noticing them as I rode my bike around the paved three-mile path that surrounds the golf course. From a distance it looked like slow-paced ping pong, and I pegged it for the new shuffleboard because most of the players seemed to be geezers. (Like me.)

But I had to admit it looked and sounded like they were having a lot of fun, so when Dave and Cory said they were going to learn how to play I thought what the heck.

I got in their car and came home later with my own $75 paddle and my new association membership. Players show up on a daily schedule, so the next morning I went back to try my luck in competition. It turns out to be far more strenuous than it looks like from the sidelines. I was winded and aching after just a couple of short games.

Yet the court and the rules are cleverly designed to allow almost anybody to compete. You can hit the ball hard, but its anti-aerodynamic properties keep it from traveling too fast, and the short court boundaries mean you can't whack it too hard for fear of hitting it out.

Also, you're not allowed to return a ball in the air while either of your feet is inside a no-volley zone in front of the net, which for some reason they call "the kitchen." That keeps the game from becoming a slam-fest, which it would otherwise because it turns out some of the geezers have as much killer instinct as ever.

But although there's ample scope for the very athletic and super-competitive to express their inner champions, the limitations imposed by the rules leave plenty of room for the slow, the uncoordinated, the overweight and the arthritic to score points on stealth and shot placement.

Former tennis stars sometimes find themselves fighting for victory against roundies who are more agile than they look and people just back from knee replacement surgery.

So it's a fine game. Why did they have to call it "pickleball?" I've heard a couple of stories about that, but why tell either of them since they both end badly?

Do-gooding

When celebrities like Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall die, you have to brace yourself for a pious blitz of tributes to their unsung contributions of time and money to worthy causes.

It’s a little hard to take, partly because of the large helpings of treacle you have to choke down as you read the praise, but mainly because by and large the praise is deserved and prompts you to consider why you haven’t been doing more yourself.

Back in the early 90s I did a little volunteer work at an organization called Friends In Deed. It was a support group co-founded by film director Mike Nichols in response to the AIDS crisis.

By the time I was helping out at their SOHO center, deaths from the virus had swelled from a trickle in 1980 to a tidal wave. AIDS had claimed more than 30,000 lives in New York City alone, a figure that has more than tripled in the years since.

That eclipses the toll of the 911 attacks, which created an instant city-wide spasm of unity and empathy. The response to AIDS, by contrast, was a massive and willful attempt not to notice. 

People were literally dropping like flies. Family members, friends, colleagues were suddenly sick, then house-bound, then gone. Every day it seemed the Times obituary page was dominated by talented people who were only in their 30s or 40s.

Friends In Deed provided counseling and other services to traumatized survivors -- grieving and exhausted partners, caregivers and other gay men who were sure they were going to be next.

I thought some straight people ought to show up and let them know the rest of the city was horrified at what was happening to them.

Some of their stories were pretty awful. One devastated man described the last grisly, intimate months of his partner of more than a decade during which he fed him by hand, emptied his bedpans, changed his dressings, gave him his injections, witnessed his pain, endured his abuse, held his hand through the final hours and watched him die. 

Only then did the victim’s parents show up. They were furious to learn that their son had been gay, blamed the grieving caregiver for his death, kicked him out of the apartment, threatened harm if he tried to attend the funeral and ignored the express wishes of the deceased that his partner receive a share of his estate.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that a few in this embattled community began wondering aloud what I was doing there if I wasn’t gay and didn’t have any direct connection to one or more of the afflicted. I began to feel like a voyeur, so I peeled off.

But I was around long enough to attend a holiday fund-raising gala. During a Christmas champagne toast with one of the handful of friends I’d made at the center, I stepped backward and bumped into somebody behind me.

Turning to apologize, I found myself face to face with Lauren Bacall. She raised her glass and nodded. I did the same. I guess she was one of the organization’s angels. She certainly looked like one.

Yearning To Breathe Free

Mayela is visiting us from Mexico. In Puerto Vallarta, we hired her last fall through an agency to play and speak Spanish with Elizabeth a couple of times a week after school. Pam took a special liking to her and invited her to join us in the mountains for a few weeks.

So now she's here, bunking in the trailer like all our guests. It's her first time in the U.S. To get here, she had to fly from Vallarta to Dallas, then catch a connecting flight to El Paso, where Pam drove to meet her for the two-hour drive to Ruidoso.

I was worried about how things might go at the Border Patrol checkpoint about a half hour north of El Paso. They always ask us if we're U.S. citizens and then wave us through. Now, I fretted, Pam's going to say no and point to Mayela, and then they'll also notice our Jalisco license plates and then the sniffer dogs will snap to defcon 3.

But it turned out the heartburn was actually in Dallas. When Mayela handed over her passport and the visa she'd had to travel six hours to Guadalajara to apply for, a 30-minute interrogation ensued regarding who bought her ticket, how much money she was carrying, how she planned to pay the expenses of her visit, where she was going, etc.

The agent wasn't satisfied with her answers and escorted her to a room, where she sat for the best part of an hour with other bewildered and anxious detainees. Finally another agent called her out for a few more surly questions and then abruptly told her she could go. By that time she was in danger of missing her El Paso connection but ran all the way to the gate and just made it.

So, welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave, except that's not really the face we're turning toward our southern neighbors these days.

Mayela's story didn't really surprise us very much. But since she arrived we've all been a little stunned by the escalating fear and fury now being directed at the Honduran and Guatemalan children crossing the border and throwing themselves on the mercy of U.S. immigration authorities.

It isn't the opposition to admitting these kids that's deplorable. Reasonable people can differ over exactly what should be done with them now that they're here. It's the nasty and irrational tone of the vigilantes who gather, some with guns, to deny temporary sanctuary in their towns to these refugees.

Most of the protestors are probably nice enough people who may have the grace to be embarrassed some day by what they're saying and doing on cable news. But for now, they seem to have convinced themselves that their government is giving up the country to an army of conniving little Artful Dodgers intent on stealing a golden ticket to the good life.

I wish they'd spare a moment to reflect on what it would take to make them send their own children off alone to run a thousand-mile gauntlet of drug dealers, sex traffickers and other predators for the off chance of gaining access to the homelessness, unemployment and the ever-more-niggardly public assistance that await them in an unfriendly distant land.

I'm sure they'd realize that it would take more desperation than they've ever seen in one place themselves, that their own homeland would have to be a hellhole of dead-end misery to make them do it.

And I'd like to think that if they achieved this degree of insight, the hand they extended toward these vulnerable and innocent fugitives on their doorstep would be gentle, even if for most of them the hand may turn out to be empty.

Mayela goes home next week to get ready for her next year of college. She has a good home, a stable family and hopes for a career in psychology. Her country is no hellhole, although judging from a couple of hair raising stories she's told us from personal experience, she has no illusions about it.

Thanks to her border crossing and her glimpses of recent headlines, she now has fewer illusions about our country too.