Snakes in the Garden

Mexico's famed resort city of Cuernavaca, balmy and scented with jasmine and heliotrope, has just the atmosphere for languorous relaxation. As the 45,000 Mexican inhabitants pad about the streets, busily putting things off until manana, many of the 5,000 U.S. residents take their ease in elegant villas with lush gardens, shady patios, gemlike swimming pools and high pastel walls.

What goes on behind those walls, naturally, is no outsider's business, and the great majority of the foreign colonists--retired businessmen, artists and writers, well-heeled or well-married expatriates--are thoroughly respectable, thoroughly discreet, or sometimes both. But gossip is rampant, and everyone knows that Cuernavaca has a yeasty leavening of the oddities and eccentrics who also find their way to Capri, the COte d'Azur and other lotus-eaters' resorts of the world. If tales are sometimes .whispered of gay fiestas involving such narcotics as alcohol, opium and intellectual Communism, of ambisextrous wingdings and nudist bridge-and-bathing parties, who could be surprised? Cuernavaca, in fact, has been called "a sunny place for shady people." Propertied residents, concerned over real-estate values, try to keep the gossip down by following the tolerant rule of see no evil, hear no evil. But recently, they have begun to hear rumors of an ugly thing new to Cuernavaca--blackmail. Stories of rich foreigners being framed on phony charges of misconduct and blackmailed for large sums soon spread to the capital. 40 miles away. Last week federal agents were in town, eagerly hunting victims of the racket.

From a wealthy gringo named Everett Sholes. who owns one of Cuernavaca's most sumptuous homes, they took a deposition that told of his illegal detention by state police on charges never specified. He had been threatened with deportation, confiscation of his property, and a ruthless investigation of his closest friends. At that point two other local Yanquis turned up at police headquarters--by coincidence, they claimed--and offered to square things without unpleasant notoriety. They did. at a cost of $20,000. "I asked my family in the U.S. to send me the money." said Sholes.

Even though Sholes hesitated to bring charges in the case, the state police chief was summarily fired, and the two helpful gringos departed from Mexico in hot haste. Authorities continued their search for other victims, and vowed to pursue the investigation to the bitter end. Said a state official: "We want to assure Americans that they will have full guarantees of protection here."

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