An Inconsequential Murder

by Rodolfo Peña

  Lombardo wandered around, sketching in his notebook, and making small watercolors of the landscape and old farms that, like his friend’s, were being bought up mostly by the English and Parisians who renovated them into homes and summer cottages.

  Occasionally, Lombardo went into Morlaix, to visit the modest but interesting museum, buy things he needed, and sit in a café to read the papers.

  He usually tried to read Le Monde in an effort to improve his limited French, but he also bought The Times and El País, when available. Two weeks after he had arrived, he read the news in the Spanish newspaper: “Candidato a la Presidencia de México Asesinado”.

  In Ciudad Juarez, the candidate of the ruling party had been assassinated. In a related story, the conservative candidate pledged that if elected, he would ask the Army to get involved in containing the drug cartels and to bring back the rule of law and order.

  Lombardo closed the paper and drank the last of his coffee and cognac. “I told them so,” he said sadly.

  Lombardo tried to forget the woes of his country and enjoy the two additional months that he had planned to stay in France and Spain. He thought about Laura and savored the idea of staying with her for a couple of weeks while he looked for a place to live.

  Although the polls were very clear, he could not have anticipated then that the conservative candidate would win the presidential elections the following July and that President Echeverría would retire to Scotland after his mandate, alleging that he and his family were being unjustly persecuted by the conservatives. In that future, the President’s cousin would linger in jail for six more years before being pardoned on condition that he leave the country.

  The conservative candidate’s election would bring the Army into the fray of the drug wars and all hell would break loose. Now systematic Human Rights violations by the Army would be added to the dozens of murders a day that were being committed by one side or the other in the drug wars.

  Lombardo decided to order another coffee and cognac and thought again about Laura and her beautiful face, unaware that all of those terrible events of the future would eventually shape his own.