Editor’s Note: With the Mexican still sleeping off New Year’s Eve, we thought it’d be a good time to refry his April 5, 2007, column about our soon-to-be-former president’s abuelito. Enjoy!
Dear Mexican: What do Mexicans think about President George W. Bush’s grandfather having a hand in getting out of jail the guy who stole Pancho Villa’s head?
Kruising Klassily in Kennebunkport
Dear KKK: Ah, Villa’s stolen skull. No macabre Mexican legend is more mired in intrigue, distortions and looniness. Here are the accepted facts about Pancho’s purloined pate: On Feb. 6, 1926, someone raided Villa’s tomb in Parral, Chihuahua, and scurried away with the famed general’s three-years’-dead head. Mexican authorities quickly arrested Emil Holmdahl, a gabacho mercenary who fought for various factions during the Mexican Revolution and had been seen around Villa’s tomb. Holmdahl denied any responsibility, and the authorities released him for lack of evidence. Nevertheless, stories of Holmdahl boasting about his crime (read Haldeen Braddy’s “The Head of Pancho Villa” in the January 1960 edition of Western Folklore for more details) soon spread on both sides of la frontera.
Flash forward to 1984. In his memoir, Let the Tail Go With the Hide, Arizona rancher Ben F. Williams declared that Holmdahl not only admitted to stealing Villa’s skull, but that he also received $25,000 for the deed. Williams shared this information with a friend who belonged to the Order of Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society that counts three generations of the Bush dynasty as members; the friend told Williams that Holmdahl sold them Villa’s skull. Two years after Williams published his book, Skull and Bones members (among them Jonathan Bush, Dubya’s uncle) met with some Apaches and offered them a skull. Tribal leaders had recently discovered an official Skull and Bones log claiming that Dubya’s granddaddy Prescott Bush and other Bonesmen stole the skull of Geronimo from his burial grounds in 1918.
Still with me? Gracias. Now, refry this: Around the time George H.W. Bush ran for the presidency in 1988, someone merged the details of the Villa and Geronimo grave robberies, noted the Skull and Bones connection, and concocted a fable in which Prescott Bush helps Holmdahl dodge the federales, buys Villa’s skull and displays it alongside Geronimo’s noggin at the Bonesmen’s headquarters. Coupled with Prescott’s Nazi ties and George the elder’s CIA past, the Bush-Villa conspiracy served as further proof to critics that the Bushes are the First Family of the New World Order.
Problem is, the Bush-Villa conspiracy is as flimsy as a swap-meet T-shirt. For one, Williams’ memoir was the first time anyone had publicly tried to connect Skull and Bones with Villa’s remains, and the book never mentioned Prescott Bush. Braddy’s essay mentioned that Holmdahl himself reportedly told friends that scientists in Chicago paid him $5,000 for the cabeza. Not only that, but all serious scholarship on the matter is skeptical. Friedrich Katz, author of the definitive English-language Villa biography, The Life and Time of Pancho Villa, called the Skull and Bones claim “the latest story to surface” among dozens of similar yarns. And while Alexandra Robbins wrote in her 2002 Skull and Bones exposé, Secrets of the Tomb: The Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power, that the organization possessed Villa’s skull, she retracted the claim in a 2004 interview with the Yale Herald.
So why does this legend persist? Simple: It’s a myth in which everyone wins. Mexicans get to cry about Yankees desecrating their heroes; gabachos can crow about pulling a fast one on the Mexicans; and everyone gets to fret anew about the creepy Bush family. A shared belief in the Villa-Bush conspiracy is one of the few things that unite Mexicans and gabachos—and if believing in a stupid conspiracy is what it takes to get the two groups together, then count me a Bonesman.
Ask the Mexican at th********@as*********.net or myspace.com/ocwab. Or write to him via snail mail at: Gustavo Arellano, P.O. Box 1433, Anaheim, CA 92815-1433.
