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 News from Around the Americas | April 2007 
Gunned Down in Mexico
 Cory Wolfe - The Saskatoon StarPhoenix
| | Gerry Gagen holds one of the three bullets that pierced his body after he was shot in Mexico. (Vance Lester/StarPhoenix) |
A spent bullet sits on the windowsill of Gerry Hagen's kitchen.
The copper slug greets him every morning as he surveys the thick aspen stands that sprawl across his acreage southwest of Saskatoon.
"I'd rather see it there than still in my back," Hagen says of the bullet, which resides in a pill bottle with a pink cap.
Hagen has another souvenir that he can't see. A second bullet remains embedded in the muscles near his shoulder. Hagen presumes that a third round - the one that tore through his abdomen and exited through his hip - is somewhere inside a house in Mascala, Mexico.
That's where Hagen was on Dec. 10, 2006, when he opened his front door and got a pistol shoved in his face.
A 20-year veteran of the drilling industry, Hagen had worked in places such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru.
He was deployed to the Mexican village of Mascala last November. A 90-minute drive from the coastal resort of Acapulco, Mascala boasts rich deposits of gold and silver in its mountains, and Hagen was appointed supervisor of the mining project.
The 48-year-old Canadian was not naive about the perils of working on foreign soil. He knew of kidnappings and holdups. In fact, just six months before Hagen arrived, a company supervisor was stabbed. Three years earlier, Hagen was sent to the very same village to replace two Australian workers who had been robbed at gunpoint.
"Of all the Latin American countries, Mexico was the most corrupt," says Hagen. "And I'm almost ashamed to say that because to a point, I was involved in some of that corruption. I paid off cops for speeding tickets."
Hagen's company hired local residents for support roles. Many of the Mexican workers didn't have bank accounts, so they were paid in cash on the 10th and 25th of each month. At 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 10, an armoured truck arrived at Hagen's residence and two armed guards delivered the payroll cash - approximately $28,000 - in a clear plastic bag.
A couple of night shift workers arrived mid-morning and Hagen paid them. About 15 minutes later, he heard another knock and opened the door to see two strangers. One of the men carried a manila envelope.
Hagen spoke to them in Spanish.
"The one kept saying, 'This is for the water trucks . . . this is for the water trucks.' I just assumed he was looking for pay for the water trucks. I told him, 'I don't pay you guys. The mine pays you. I just supervise you up at the drills.' "
"But he kept repeating himself: 'This is for the water trucks . . . this is for the water trucks.' "
Hagen opened the manila envelope and was slightly bewildered to see only blank pages. But then, he says, the light came on.
"I looked at the other guy, but he had already pulled the pistol out of his belt and had it pointed at my face."
Hagen would stare down death and survive a harrowing surgery in Third-World conditions before he hypothesized a motive for the two strangers at his door.
About two weeks before their visit, Hagen had fired a water truck company "because their drivers were drunk all of the time and they were missing shifts."
Two trucks were hired to deliver a steady supply of water to the work site, but the delinquent deliveries forced operations to stall on several occasions. Water is necessary to cool the high-speed drill bits.
Hagen now believes his decision to find a new water supplier is directly related to the two strangers who arrived at his door. He attempted to slam the door when one man pulled the pistol. However, the metal door bounced off its latch and swung wide open, leaving Hagen exposed to the 9-mm pistol.
Two bullets ripped through his left abdomen and another pierced his right leg.
"I remember crawling in a pool of my own blood and I'll always remember the warmth of that blood. I knew I was in bad trouble."
Denise Hagen was baking cookies on the morning of Dec. 10, a Sunday.
She had spoken to her husband, Gerry, the previous evening by telephone. He was planning to be back in Saskatoon within six days.
Denise had joked to a friend that Gerry would divorce her if he returned to find no Christmas baking. A batch of cookies, speckled with Smarties, was in the oven when the phone rang. She recognized the number as Gerry's and enthusiastically fielded the call, but it was one of her husband's co-workers.
"He said, 'I've got something to tell you,' " recalls Denise. "I was joking back and I said, 'Oh, what did I win?' Then he asked, 'Are you sitting down?' and I said, 'Oh, is it that good?' "
It wasn't good at all. Denise's eyes swell with tears as she remembers what she heard next: "Gerry got shot this morning."
Hagen pulled through surgery at a hospital in Iguala. Two days after the shooting, his company arranged for him to be airlifted out of Mexico. A five-hour odyssey by helicopter and private jet delivered him to Saskatoon.
"There was no way, in my head, that I was gonna live if I had stayed (in Mexico)," says Hagen. "When I went into surgery, I remember lying on this table. I looked up and there was a cobweb on the light above the table. Conditions are filthy."
Staff at St. Paul's Hospital stabilized Hagen and he believed he'd be home for Christmas. However, complications kept him in hospital for almost four months. He endured three more surgeries - and several scares - before finally going home three weeks ago.
"I used to be one of those whiners about the health-care system, but I tell you, I take it all back," says Hagen. "The nurses and doctors were unbelievable."
Hagen faces more surgery this summer, but doctors expect him to make a full recovery. As far as he knows, Mexican authorities have not laid charges against anyone in connection with the December shooting.
When Hagen moved home last month, his dog Grover was waiting for him.
The affable mutt was just an orphan puppy three years ago when Hagen rescued him from the streets of Mascala. Fast forward to last December and Hagen was the one being rescued from the very same village.
Hagen grins at the irony.
"I find him as a starved-out rat and bring him home. Then he's here at home, eating T-bone steaks in my frontyard and I'm in his hometown getting shot."
cwolfe@sp.canwest.com |
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