The last hero of the Gentle homeland

The last Mexican emperor The one who never gave up and kept the secret of the treasure of his kingdom until the sacrifice with fire, was not executed in his city, but on the periphery, or better, on the edge of his kingdom, in the region of the great swamps. In the jungle between Campeche and Tabasco he was hanged.

Arduo was the path of the condemned man and his executioners in the expedition to Las Hibueras. A large group of swamps and swamps was so dense that the horses with their bodies submerged walked with difficulty. They built bridges to cross rivers that broke as they passed; They used rafts. Several servants and soldiers abandoned the company, others died along the way, but the captain, for whom they brought a stool where he could sit, continued forward. His firm character contrasted with his body deformed by syphilis.

Some say that to avoid an uprising he decided to kill him on the way to Las Hibueras. Others, that it was his plan since he started the trip. Anyway, the day came when he ordered him to be hanged along with his cousin the Lord of Tacuba. According to the chronicle of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, moments before dying, Cuauhtémoc said to La Malinche, who was called La Lengua: Why do you kill me without justice? God demand it of you. And so, without justice, Hernan Cortés ordered him to be hanged from a tree.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo explains in his chronicle of the Conquest that the execution seemed unfair to him. and it seemed bad to all of us who came that day.

Some say that he was executed far from Tenochtitlan to avoid an uprising, and perhaps that was the case, but the location of his bones has continued to raise a cloud of suspicion over the years. It should not surprise us: the bones, in addition to being the obvious support of the body, are its least perishable part, a container for the marrow, the permanence of what has been experienced, the last evidence of someone after death.

That is why Catholic tradition venerates them among its relics and makes them travel through many places. In 2010, following this religious custom, Felipe Calderón, as president, exhumed the bones of the heroes who gave us homeland and drew up a route to take them through Mexico City. The historian who devised the project also proposed bringing the remains of the dictator Porfirio Díaz from Paris, but this did not prosper. The bones that walked the streets of the city, with all the honors, were not those indicated by official history: in the urn of Mariano Matamoros a group of specialists found those of a woman; in that of Francisco Javier Mina, evidence of seven individuals, and in those of Hidalgo, Allende and Morelos, bones of children, women and deer. The truth about the civic lesson with which Calderón sought to legitimize his government was only known at the end of his mandate.

Of Cuauhtémoc we know the place and an approximate date of its execution, February 25 or 28, 1525, although officially it is commemorated on the 28th. The alleged bones of Cuauhtémoc in Ixcateopan, Guerrero, gave rise in 1949 to a commission headed by Eulalia Guzmán in order to verify its authenticity. He reviewed documents, excavated inside the local church, where he found a set of bones and a copper plate with the name of the last Mexica emperor. After contrasting what was found with what the oral tradition of the elders of Ixcateopan said, the archaeologist authenticated the remains. Not everyone shared their conclusions within the National Institute of Anthropology and History itself. Three more commissions were formed that advised against paying attention to Guzmán’s conclusions.

The controversy over the authenticity of the remains gave rise to new essays on the subject. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma joined the groups known as deniersand the researcher at the Metropolitan Autonomous University Jorge Veraza Urtuzuátegui recently published the book Cuauhtémoc denied, in which he validates Guzmán’s thesis.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the execution of Cuauhtémoc; The controversy over the remains of the legendary tlatoani, whom López Velarde called in his soft homeland young grandfather, only hero at the height of art. In any case, the pilgrimages to Ixcateopan will continue, and in these days political, social and academic leaders will speak out on the matter to clarify the truth with new evidence or to bring, each person, water to their mill, in order to make the past their best present. .