Questions about Saga of Castaway Fishermen
 Monica Campbell - SFGate.com
| | Jesus Vidana leaves the airport upon arriving in his home state of Sinaloa, in northern Mexico. (AP/Dario Lopez-Mills) |
Cannibalism. Drug trafficking. Animals' blood. Forget the latest telenovela, this is the drama that has Mexicans transfixed.
The details of the story of three fishermen who say they spent nine months and nine days floating in the Pacific Ocean, eating dead birds and collecting rainwater to survive, have gotten more vivid with each day that has passed since their rescue was first reported around the middle of August. As does the controversy.
At first, the men were hailed as folk heroes. But then questions surfaced over what happened to the other men who died during the adventure and whether the survivors resorted to cannibalism. Skeptics also wondered if the men were delivering cocaine instead of hunting shark, as they claimed.
On Friday, at last, the men returned to Mexico. But before they headed back to their respective homes, they were mobbed by the media. The battery of questions mostly centered on the details of their amazing feat, but others addressed unfounded allegations of cannibalism.
During a news conference, the fishermen flatly denied eating the flesh of their two dead boat mates. "We fished, and we ate the fish raw," said Jesus Vidana, 27, thin and sunburned.
"It made us appreciate our friends and food," added another survivor, Lucio Rendon, with a wide smile. The men, who said they lost their fishing nets before running out of gas, then fashioned fishing line from dismantled engine cables and created hooks from the boat's motor parts, according to transcripts from the news conference.
"There were times when we caught four, five fish, and at times nothing," Rendon, 27, told Mexico's Televisa network.
Apart from swollen feet, the men seemed in remarkably good shape. Asked about their healthy appearance after such an ordeal, Salvador Ordonez, 37, the third survivor, said the crew from the Taiwanese tuna trawler that rescued them fed them plenty of food and put them in air-conditioned quarters.
The fishermen, according to several media reports, said their saga began on Oct. 28, when they set sail from San Blas, a fishing town in the state of Nayarit, a short drive north of Puerto Vallarta. They soon ran out of fuel, which turned a routine deep-sea shark-fishing trip into a harrowing ordeal. For 285 days -- one of the longest lost-at-sea cases on record -- the men floated in their 27-foot, cabin-less skiff along the North Equatorial Current, they said. They fished, captured seabirds and drank rainwater.
Ordonez was nicknamed "El Gato," or "The Cat," for his ability to pounce on birds that perched on the boat at night. To protect themselves from the sun, they huddled under blankets.
To keep their wits, they sang corridos, traditional Mexican ballads, they said, read the Bible and prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Sometimes, they kept still in order to ward off circling sharks that, they said, thumped their tails against the boat.
"We never lost hope because we were always seeing boats," said Vidana. "They passed us by, but we kept on seeing them, every week or so. Sometimes we'd go a month without seeing one."
On Aug. 9, the Taiwanese tuna vessel discovered the men near the Marshall Islands, some 5,500 miles from Mexico's Pacific Coast. The tuna boat crew said the three men, who were sleeping when they were spotted, were "skin and bones."
Once rescued, the fishermen wrote their names on a piece of paper, which was faxed to the tuna boat's port base in the Marshall Islands, according to news reports and statements by Mexican government officials. Word of their survival quickly reached Mexico, where the story has remained on the front page.
"It's a remarkable feat," said Tomas Francisco Ramirez, 63, a longtime national merchant marine captain in Mexico. "But they had the good luck of being in fairly calm waters, free of hurricanes and with a good amount of cloud cover and rain. It's a wild story but, in theory, entirely possible."
Ramirez said during an interview that he trained Ordonez in a two-day, government-sponsored survival course in September 2004. Apparently, Ordonez followed one of Ramirez's tips: drink animals' blood, whether it comes from fish or birds.
"It's a well-known method of survival," said Ramirez. "Blood is a safe liquid, filled with nutrients."
Ramirez, who said he "couldn't wait" to talk to Ordonez about his journey, dismissed the cannibalism rumors. "There's plenty of fish out there. I'd say that water was their main problem, not food."
By Friday afternoon, the fishermen had left Mexico City for home, according to news reports. Rendon flew to the airport near San Blas, where a musical band met him on the tarmac. So did leaders from the Roman Catholic Church and weepy relatives.
"I'm crying from both nerves and joy," Noemi Becerra, Rendon's mother, told reporters. "It's like I'm going to see him for the first time. It's as if he's being born all over again."
Meanwhile, the media reported that Vidana returned to his home state of Sinaloa, in northern Mexico. For the first time, he would meet his daughter, Juliana, who was born four months ago.
Initially, Mexican officials were expected to question the men over the possibility that they were smuggling drugs. San Blas, like other parts of Mexico's Pacific Coast, is known as an embarkation point for shipping cocaine and marijuana to the United States.
The survivors have denied the rumors that they carried drugs.
"They are wrong because we went out to catch sharks," Vidana said in a television interview.
Fellow anglers in San Blas have also vouched for the survivors' integrity, saying their lifestyles are not those of drug smugglers.
For now, the fishermen are off the hook. Last week, government officials said there was no evidence that linked the men to illicit drugs.
Meanwhile, it is unclear whether law enforcement officials will investigate the death of the two other boatmen.
It wasn't until five days after their rescue that the survivors revealed that the boat originally carried five men. They said one man, a deckhand nicknamed "El Farsero," died in January, while another man known only as "Mr. Juan" died in February.
The fisherman told officials and reporters that they threw both bodies overboard. Little is known about the two dead men, who now are being called "ghosts" by the local media.
Juan never wanted to eat raw food, Ordonez said at Friday's news conference before he headed to his home in the southern state of Oaxaca. As time passed, he said in a separate interview, Juan began to vomit blood.
Vidana added that their two companions who died would turn away while the others ate raw animal meat.
Still, all three fishermen said they would undergo a polygraph in order to disprove any doubts about their impressive story. "Yes, sure, we'll do it," said Ordonez. "This way there is no doubt left in any one's mind." |
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News from Around Banderas Bay | August 2006 
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