Hitchhiking in Mexico by Jonathan Hall

I recommend sitting down with an old friend and comparing memories of long-ago shared experiences. I guarantee they’ll be different.

“I didn’t say that; you said that!”

“No, no, no… we didn’t start drinking until much later!”

I did it recently with my oldest friend Mark, and we reminisced about hitchhiking in Mexico forty years ago. And one ride in particular…

It started with us standing at the exit to a gas station on the outskirts of San Blas, Mexico. Back then, in 1981, San Blas was an out-of-the-way fishing village with a permanent population in the hundreds, seasonally swollen by surfers and adventurous gringos; a few, cobbled main streets (where the night spots were) that branched onto tracks that were half dirt, half sand, leading off to palm-fronded beach bars. Traffic was sparse and slow. San Blas was a long, contented sigh of a place.

Mark and I were students traveling around Mexico for six months: a month’s Easter vacation from University College London before a term at Guadalajara University, followed by two months’ summer vacation exploring a country that we came to learn was the size of Western Europe.

We’d spent a long weekend in San Blas, staying up late and misbehaving, dealing with our hangovers and the sultry afternoons by swimming in the Pacific, but now we had to return to the big smoke of Guadalajara, three and a half hours away. That day, we were red-eyed and tousle-haired, with canvas rucksacks on our backs, and moving as stiffly as old men from having slept in hammocks. We didn’t much fancy our chances of catching a ride.

This wasn’t the first time we’d hitched. We’d also traveled by train, bus, *colectivo* (a kind of informal, local bus, usually a people-carrier), taxi… Each had its place, but we’d also tried hitching, and it had worked pretty well. Me being skinny—and therefore non-threatening—probably helped, as did looking American (tall and blond); Mexicans often fancied practicing their English. All in all, I was a novelty. My friend Mark looked more Hispanic, but as a pair we were a decent proposition. As for the danger of hitching in Mexico in the eighties, we were nineteen and fearless. To put it another way, we had little understanding of real-life consequences.

The first memorable ride we had was with a father and son, on their way to a cockfight in Campeche. They were owners—galleros—in an air-conditioned bullet of a limousine, with a sound system that somehow made the interior seem even more cavernous than it actually was. They bred, trained, and gambled on the birds that traveled ahead of them, though presumably in similar (albeit avian) luxury. They both wore suits and were festooned with diamond-encrusted jewelry: watches, pins, bracelets. When we climbed into the back, we had to move their fancy cowboy hats (with hat bands featuring feathers, fire opals, and turquoise) from the seats and place them lovingly on the rear shelf. Clearly, there was money in cockfighting. The pair had the air of oil prospectors who’d struck it lucky.

Funnily enough, this was Mark’s and my first point of divergence: he remembers them as a husband and wife, and the car as having a spread of longhorns on the bonnet. That just can’t be true, can it?

At the other end of the spectrum was a ride we had in the back of a farmer’s pickup that inexplicably detoured off-road and into a different century. After an hour bucking along the dirt tracks of outback Jalisco state, we arrived at a remote hamlet of low, mud-and-brick buildings. Our driver told us we’d just be stopping for five minutes and nipped into one of the houses without explaining why. We were immediately surrounded by what seemed like the entire population, along with their chickens, cows, pigs… We offered cheery greetings but received only awkward, mumbled replies and sidelong glances. We tried to engage the mute kids, but they’d look down as soon as you caught their eye. Although no one talked to us, they were definitely talking about us. But what about us? Were they sharing recipes for cooking gringos? Then, just before we left, we were brought earthenware mugs of the sweetest, coolest well water we could have ever imagined. Except… Mark swears (misremembers, surely!) that the most refreshing water that I ever drank was, in fact, an icy beer.

Driving off, we kicked up a dust cloud, and when we looked back through it, all we could make out were broad smiles and wild waving of arms; there were even whoops! Maybe they’d been as unnerved as we had, but now we were gone. And they had a story to tell. As did we. The gurning, village mascot clung to the side of the pickup for an improbably long time until our driver finally pulled over for him to jump off and trip back to the village, before we drove on and rejoined the main road to Puerto Vallarta. At the time, I had no idea what the detour had all been about and speculated now, to Mark, that it had been entirely to show us off: two gringos.

“What do you mean?” said Mark. “He told us. It was to bring some medicine, or some cigarettes or something, to his old mum.”

Then there was that day, standing in the San Blas gas station. We were starting to think our luck had run out when a Transam pulled in to refuel. I know nothing about cars, now or then, but you didn’t have to in order to know that there was something special about that big, growling rocket. We were desperate enough to be proactive, so Mark dispatched me to make contact with the driver.

I approached gingerly, smiling as guilelessly as I could. The first thing I noticed was the size of the driver: a big man, with a meaty arm hanging out of the open window—relaxed, confident. A Transam is what’s known in the US as a muscle car, a souped-up sports car, and he filled it, not with muscles, but with… bigness. I greeted him, and he nodded back neutrally. I told him that my friend and I were headed for Guadalajara and asked if there was any chance of a lift. It was only then that I realized the Transam only had two doors, and the rear seats looked cramped. It was going to be a tight squeeze for two of us. But it was while I was assessing the space inside that I noticed something else: a submachine gun lying on the passenger seat. An actual submachine gun: an Uzi, or a MAC-10; one of those that were starting to appear in films in the early eighties, usually in the hands of villains and henchmen.

Unfazed, the driver tracked my glance.

“Are you a good guy or a bad guy?” I asked idiotically. Although what do you ask a man with a submachine gun on his passenger seat?

He grinned wolfishly, showing a gold incisor, and answered me with the single word “Federale.”

The Federales were the big dogs of Mexican policing and, to a certain extent, a law unto themselves. And this was the early eighties, the era of the Guadalajara Cartel, which had just cultivated a new strain of marijuana (sinsemilla) that was to revolutionize the drug trade and also lead to city-wide, then nationwide, corruption, murder, and chaos. We were blissfully unaware of any of that until, thirty years later, we watched Narcos: Mexico on Netflix.

Meanwhile, the driver, Rafael, our new best mate, stowed one rucksack and the machine gun into the cubbyhole boot space, then Mark folded himself into the rear seats with the other rucksack, and I hunkered down in the passenger seat. Although weirdly, Mark remembers sitting in the front, with me in the back. I mean, I can actually see the scene, and it was definitely from the passenger seat!

Anyway, for the next couple of hours, Rafael regaled us with war stories, clearly delighting in our awe, wonder, and naivety. For a start, he told us that he and his brother had just come from a shootout with some drug traffickers and had confiscated two Transams, this one and the one his brother was driving half an hour behind us. We gulped; a shootout?! He told us that during his career he’d been shot seven times and even showed us some of the scars: one on his forearm, one near his collarbone…

At one point, zig-zagging up a hill that the Transam’s turbo-charged, V8 engine could have eaten for breakfast, we found ourselves held up by a slow-moving VW Beetle that eventually came to a complete stop, blocking the road. Rafael put on his hazards, stopped behind the stricken car, and sauntered up to the female driver’s open window. It turned out that the Beetle’s engine simply couldn’t handle the gradient. Rafael got back behind the Transam’s wheel and shunted the weedy Beetle the remaining couple of kilometers to the summit, where the woman finally peeled off onto a sideroad and went on her way with a grateful wave. By that time, Rafael’s brother Gabriel had caught us up in his confiscated Transam, and Rafael led us a few kilometers further on to a roadside cantina for a break.

Mark remembered nothing of the Beetle interlude but did now jump on my memory of it.

“God, yes, that’s right!”

We parked the Transams in front of the cantina and all climbed out. Both Rafael and Gabriel were big men, and both were as tall as me—in a country where I was usually a foot taller than anyone around me and where once, standing on a crowded metro platform in Mexico City, I’d felt like my head was a beach ball bobbing on a sea of black hair. Before locking, Rafael reached back into the car and pulled a chrome automatic from the glove compartment that he then tucked into his belt, in the front of his trousers, where everyone could see it. The brothers both wore check shirts, jeans, and cowboy boots. Where Rafael had his pistol, Gabriel had an ornate silver belt buckle. They led the way, striding like a couple of John Waynes (although Gabriel favored his left leg because of an old bullet wound in his right), with Mark and me scampering to keep up, exchanging glances as we tried to figure out if these guys really were who they said they were.

Before entering the cantina, Rafael greeted a man in rags who was hitching his mule to a post. The mule was laden with four-gallon cans.

“Pretty pony,” said Rafael, patting its neck.

The muleteer was instantly deferential to the giant with the pistol in his belt and explained that the cans contained honey from his hives in the hills. He insisted on pouring some onto torn quarters of a fat, flour tortilla for the four of us to sample.

“Nah! I’d remember that,” said Mark. “I hate honey. Can’t eat it.”

The interior of the cantina was full of similarly modest farmers, most with machetes slung over the back of their chairs or dangling from a shoulder. But when Rafael and Gabriel walked in, it was clear who the alphas were. We were brought pork-cheek tacos without asking, and beers, and coffees, and no payment was ever asked.

We reorganized for the final leg, Mark traveling with Gabriel, which meant that, on the final approach to Guadalajara, when Rafael held up a vial of white powder and asked me if I wanted some cocaine, my compadre was no longer there for support. I spluttered and fudged. It had been a test, but until Rafael laughed, I didn’t know if I’d passed or not. I still don’t.

“Do you think he wanted you to say yes or no?” asked Mark.

I shrugged. “I mean, that’s the thing, isn’t it? We never figured them out.”

As the traffic started to snarl up, announcing the outskirts of the city, Rafael’s driving became more aggressive. He and Gabriel worked as a team, swapping the lead, blocking lanes for each other, muttering imprecations at other drivers. I was surprised when Rafael honked what sounded like a playful, seven-note rhythm—sometimes known as “Shave and a haircut, two bits!”—at a car he felt had cut us up.

“What was that?” I asked.

To the same rhythm, he said: “Chinga tu madre, cabrón!” – go fuck your mother, asshole. Another glint of his gold incisor.

We pulled in near our guesthouse and climbed from the two cars, retrieving my rucksack from the boot—there was the submachine gun again. As we said goodbye, Rafael invited Mark and me to spend a weekend on his yacht, which he said was moored in the swanky marina of Barra de Navidad. We said “sure,” and took his business card that simply bore his name, an embossed shield, and the words “Dirección Federal de Seguridad.”

I meant to keep the card, but when we moved out a few weeks later to set off on our travels, I mislaid it. We never saw Rafael or his brother again.

“So, big question,” said Mark. “Were they good guys or bad guys? I always assumed good guys. I mean, he had a card.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But that’s the first thing I’d do, if I were going to pass myself off as a Federale: print a card. Well, maybe get a badge made…”

“Then again, they didn’t need any of that,” said Mark, adding, in his best ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ bandido voice: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”

He was right: they were gunslingers in the Wild West, and it didn’t matter if they had badges or not. And, anyway, we’d never know.