Breathe
By Claudia Pérez Atamoros
"My life is in danger. If something happens to me, investigate", said the worrying telegram received the night of June 5, 1949 in the Excélsior newsroom, sent by the reporter and writer Concha de Villarreal from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, where she had arrived a couple of days earlier to follow the trail of corruption that the Pedrero brothers, in collusion with the state authorities, carried out to become lords and masters of the exploitation and commercialization of Pox. (Between 1948 and 1954, they created the company Aguardientes de Chiapas and Plantaciones Agrícolas Intensivas, the first with headquarters in Comitán and the second in Pujiltic . the second in Pujiltic.
And these were the headlines at the time...
JOURNALIST CONCHA DE VILLARREAL IN SERIOUS CONDITION
EL UNIVERSAL, JUNE 6, 1949
"THERE IS A GROUNDSWELL, YOU CAN'T GET MIXED UP IN POLITICAL MATTERS": CONCHA DE VILLARREAL, IN THE MIDST OF HER GRAVITY.
EXCÉLSIOR, JUNE 7, 1949
WHENEVER A JOURNALIST COMES TO TUXTLA, HE COMES TO VISIT ME. MRS. VILLARREAL DID NOT DO IT, GENERAL FRANCISCO J. GRAJALES.
(GOVERNOR)
EXCÉLSIOR, JUNE 8, 1949
The event that kept her on the brink of death for a week in Chiapas and hospitalized for more than a month in Mexico City did not end her life, but it did forever disrupt her safety, her environment, her marital relationship -which would end 5 years later- and her peace of mind....
That report never saw the light of day, but the event marked Concha de Villarreal as the first Mexican journalist to suffer an assassination attempt in the 20th century, a conclusion I reached after finding no previous allusion to a similar event and giving Concha the credibility of the attack she suffered.
They, those journalists of the 30's and 40's walked on cobblestones, because others had already opened the breach and removed the weeds, but they still had to be able to walk evenly... Even today it is barely a road and it is full of potholes... and there is still a long way to go to turn it into a highway. And to achieve this we have to exercise our memory and keep them in mind. To know their stories and to be in solidarity with them.
For many, the attack was not an attempt on her life, but a suicide attempt and, therefore, they stigmatized her and destroyed her professional prestige. She was accused of having jumped from the second floor of the hotel, of having planned the whole thing and was labeled as a madwoman, which caused the hierarchs of the media companies to ignore her and stop buying her reports, pushing her into a precarious economic situation. She always maintained that she was pushed and that all her notes disappeared after the incident.
The night before, the journalist not only sent the telegram to Excélsior, she sent another to the President of the Republic and to several friends and colleagues, and also requested refuge and protection from the local parish priest, who did not take her in and sent her to the Jardín Hotel, whose owner was "absolutely trustworthy". She said she felt threatened and followed by two individuals.
The next day the father sent a message to the editor of the newspaper and among other things informed him that "the journalist went into the hotel and climbed to the roof to throw herself off...In fulfilling the painful task of informing you of what happened, please accept my condolencesThe little father gave her up for dead, as well as his esteemed colleagues of Excélsior, for such a regrettable tragedy: Rufino Torres Gómez, parish priest. Templo Parroquial.
At the hospital she confessed to her husband Anastasio de Villarreal that "someone" she had met the day before had given her a glass of comiteco, the regional drink. The husband would later state that he feared that his wife had been "the victim of a maddening concoction".
The circulating versions said that she had suffered a nervous breakdown, that she had delirium of persecution... but no medical report stated such condition. The final report from the ABC Hospital in the capital did not contain any information on the matter and only informed that Dr. Guillermo Velasco had her under treatment to help her sleep.
Until that fateful event, Concha de Villarreal never manifested any trait of psychiatric illness. Never. On the contrary, according to her colleagues, she always conducted herself with courage and honesty and carried out her journalistic work with exceptional good sense and impeccable integrity in favor of the truth; qualities and talents "incompatible with the most elementary fear" and with her well-known temperance.
Finally, on March 27, 1956, six years and nine months after that event, Concepción de la Luz Noriega González, Concha de Villarreal, lost her life at the age of 50. She died far from her homeland, from the country that, standing up, applauded her reports and awarded her novels. The land that saw her born, love, almost die and lose her prestige as a reporter...
She died in Caracas, capital of Venezuela, in the Psychiatric Hospital, victim of bronchopneumonia. Her body was exhumed and brought to Mexico thanks to the sorority of her journalist friends Helia D'Acosta, Chelina Galindo, Isabel Farfán and Edelmira Zúñiga.
How she ended up in the psychiatric hospital in Caracas remains a mystery; she had emigrated to that country a few months earlier. Some say that she followed the trail of a report, others that she went to take refuge there, where, finally, she was killed. The truth is that Concha de Villarreal was never the same after overcoming the seriousness of what happened in Chiapas. She told her journalist friends that she did not feel safe anywhere and one day she left her apartment in the Anáhuac neighborhood and disappeared, only to turn up dead in another country.
Concha de Villarreal dedicated her pen to social journalism and when she left it after the attack, she continued to be concerned about the peasants and indigenous people of our country. She compiled in Las encantadas her "feminist" reports in Las encantadas, in Mexico is looking for a man she portrayed the country during the six years of Carden's presidency wrapped in a nonsense between Ávila Camacho and Almazán... she devoted herself almost entirely to writing novels, and wrote her column De interés para las damas (Of interest to ladies).
In 1953 -4 years after his attack-, he won the Lanz Duret prize, sponsored by El Universal, with the novel Tierra de Dios and he would win it again three years after his death with the work Desierto Mágico (1959)*, a work he sent to his publisher -eight days before his death became known in Mexico- with the following note. "My dear friend: I am sending you the original of my novel about the Ixtleros. Publish it when you can, and the money that corresponds to me, if I am alive by then, I will let you know where to send it to.
She was never formally part of any media, she always liked to work on her own. At Excélsior she lived her best years rubbing shoulders with that so-called black editorial staff made up of Carlos Denegri, Luis Spota... which is why the media covered all her hospital expenses after the suicide attempt.
Her remains were exhumed and brought to Mexico City and buried in the Panteón Jardín, note the irony in Jardín, name of the hotel that marked her life and the cemetery that welcomed her.
Concepción de la Luz Noriega Gonzáles was born April 25, 1906 (certificate in my possession) in Gómez Palacio, Durango. Daughter of Manuel Noriega and Leonor González. She married Anastasio Villarreal in 1923 in Coahuila. Her elementary and high school studies were in religious schools and she studied at the Normal for teachers in Coahuila.
She worked as a rural teacher in her native state. She started in journalism in 1930 in El Siglo de Torreón. She worked at the publishing house Alrededor de América. She headed the magazine El Niño in the capital of the country. She founded the peasant newspaper El Correo de la Revolución. She was a reporter for the magazines Orbe, Todo, Sucesos para todos, El Economista, Revista de Revistas and the newspaper Excélsior. She actively participated in social campaigns for the benefit of the country's peasants, women and abandoned children.
In his reports, his reactionary position and his denunciation of the injustices and inefficiency of the authorities always prevailed. She did so with a singular use of irony that also revealed her clear intention to permeate and influence public opinion. While other journalists of her generation "fought" the eight columns with interviews to fashionable politicians, she navigated in the national daily life and reflected each and every one of the problems that afflicted the country.
In the middle of 1938, for example, he wrote: "In this city there are so many lazy people, irreconcilable enemies of work, of those who look for it praying to God not to find it, that, if they resolved to unionize, they would form the most numerous central of all those existing in the Republic. The CTM would be too loose for them, the CROM too loose, the CGT too loose, and the FROC too broad."
He denounced the existence of two organizations called the Alianza de Menesteros Mexicanos and the Liga Socialista de Mendigos. Insisting that "the profession of beggar was the most lucrative in Mexico". El "Chojo", one of the leaders, told me: "with this high cost of living, those who do not want to join our union are threatening to leave us "without work"..."
All the noises are mute; the silence is immense; the voices that sing... Deaf, Concha de Villarreal!
*The post mortem award (four thousand pesos in cash) for this novel was claimed in 1961 by his sister Leonor Noriega, "sole and legal heir".
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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