schizophrenia. Valero's old gym acquaintances can't accept such things. He'd been too focused. He could hit a heavy bag so hard that the foundation of the city seemed to quake. How could such a good fighter be schizophrenic? Old-time head doctors had a term for it: funneling. A person like Valero could focus on something with a sniper's precision even as his mind frayed at the edges. It's that ability to focus that kept the bad thoughts at bay. Of course, this kind of focus only works for a while. The mind falls in on itself.
Jennifer was no match for him. Valero once told a reporter he wished he could keep his wife and children in a crystal box so no harm could come to them. When she was found dead, the blood from her slit throat had clotted on the hotel carpet. It looked like a small pig had been slaughtered. Still, her body was placed on the floor very much like a little doll in a box.
Some reports said he had taken her to the hotel against her will. Others said they were both on the way to a rehab center in Cuba. She was a drug user. She needed help too. The story has two sides. And with each side, there are those who deny and debate and disbelieve.
You could tell it as a straight psycho tale. You could simply focus on her injuries. The bite marks. The gunshot wound. The perforated lung. The time she overdosed and nearly fell off the roof of their apartment. The sad look on her face as she sat ringside. He's winning championships. She's fearing for her life.
You could tell it that way. You could get away with it. There's a thirst for madness. You could draw from a big pool of nasty details and rumors.
He had secrets. We learned enough of them to think we knew him. We'll never know him.
The Venezuelan media treated the Valero case as a tragedy. The American coverage made it a horror story. It's possible that it was both. You take what you need and project it to your audience. Americans like to judge; Venezuelans wanted a hero.
He's dead now. Mental illness and drug addiction took him down. He was found in a jail cell, a picture of his family stuffed into his mouth.
He's dead now.
He doesn't care how the story is told.
• • •
Edwin Antonio Valero Vivas was born in Bolero Alto, a tiny village in Merida, Venezuela, on December 3, 1981. Wedged between three national parks, Bolero Alto, is part of a parish named after Gabriel Picón González, a war hero who helped win the Battle of Los Horcones in 1813. It was a place where superstition still lived, where the elders might tell stories of babies being snatched by river witches. Less than 100 miles away is Lake Maracaibo, where on most nights of the year you can see terrifying lightning storms at the mouth of the Catatumbo River. The indigenous storytellers claimed this odd atmospheric phenomenon, which could produce up to 240 lightning strikes in an hour, was actually millions of fireflies trying to communicate with the earth. The image of these ruthless electrical storms suited Edwin, a restless boy embarking on his own stormy future, a boy born with lightning in his fists.
The third child born to Eloisa and Antonio Domingo Valero, Edwin came into the world as Venezuela was enjoying an unprecedented boxing heyday, with Ernesto España and Antonio Esparragoza earning accolades and championships. Edwin learned that he, too, could fight. Even at a young age he was brawling in the streets, settling arguments by throwing punches.
When Edwin was seven, his father left the family for another woman. For the rest of his life, Edwin would portray his father's departure as an apocalyptic event.
Eloisa moved the brood north to La Palmita. She took a job in El Vigia as a dishwasher. Edwin and his older brother Edward worked selling fruit and spices in El Vigia's Railway Plaza.
A vibrant city located on the Chama River, El Vigia's hallmarks included the magnificent Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, plus factories, shopping plazas, universities, parks, and a baseball stadium. Being the second-largest city in Merida, El Vigia must have seemed to Edwin like a futuristic metropolis.
The brothers also worked in a bicycle shop owned by a former fighter, Dimas Garcia. When Edwin said he would like to be a boxer someday, Garcia told him the business was too dangerous.
But Valero had known danger from a young age. Though El Vigia was a sophisticated city, it was a haven for pickpockets, kidnappers, and drug dealers. Like many poor boys from the country, Valero was drawn to the city's dark underbelly. When he wasn't selling fruit, Valero was running with kid gangs. He had become a little criminal. His mother couldn't control him. Edwin was a wild, dirty child, unwilling to bathe or wear shoes. Yet Eloisa never believed Edwin was as bad as his friends. She alleged that his new pals had even killed people. Edwin, she said, “was not a bad boy. Just a little bit off.”
Valero started drinking at age nine and using drugs at eleven. At thirteen he dropped out of school and enrolled in a tae kwon do academy. When his mother claimed the classes were too expensive, he quit and went back to selling garlic. Valero would later describe these years as “work, work, work.”
Sometimes he'd add his catchphrase: “I didn't have a normal childhood.”
• • •
Francisco “Morochito” Rodríguez was one of the country's most acclaimed amateur fighters. He remains the only Venezuelan boxer to ever win a gold medal at the Olympics, doing so at the 1968 Mexico games. Rodríguez used his fame to establish a small boxing gym in El Vigia. One day on his garlic route, Edwin noticed the place offered free boxing lessons. He convinced Edward that they should look into it.
Oscar Ortega took pity on the boys. Ortega was a respected boxing coach in El Vigia. When he found out Edwin and Edward couldn't afford bus fare home and were sometimes sleeping on the streets, he let them sleep on the gym benches at night. He also made sure they were fed. Years later, Valero would ask Ortega to be his godfather.
“Boxing just attracted me somehow,” Valero said, “and I decided to give it a try. One week later, I was living in the gym, where professor Oscar Ortega formed me as a fighter.”
Ortega liked this feisty little lefthander whose body seemed loaded with springs. Even at thirteen, Valero punched with unusual power. Ortega gave him keys to the place. Edwin would let himself in at night when he had nowhere else to go. Sleeping on hard benches wasn't ideal, but Edwin had a place to dream and think about the future.
Ortega fretted over Valero. The kid was a bit of a loose cannon. Valero would tell his coach, “Don't worry professor. I have my feet on the ground.”
Ortega tried to teach Valero that a boxer's life was difficult. One of the country's best, Vicente Paul Rondon, had recently died in a Caracas slum, destitute and forgotten.
Valero had no use for cautionary tales. In fact, Valero was jailed over a dozen times before he was fifteen. (One police file cited forty arrests throughout his life.) Ortega would always bail him out. Valero bragged that he was given preferential treatment because he was an athlete. Still, he couldn't curb his taste for larceny.
He robbed local university students, stealing small motorbikes and storing them in the gym. He later claimed his bike stealing got him six months in jail, which convinced him to get out of the criminal life. Other sources mention a seven-month stint for assaulting a woman at gunpoint. Valero is also believed to have shot and killed a rival over a stolen motorcycle. He hid out for weeks in Caracas like a fugitive.
Many look back at Valero's young life and say he was simply a rebel who did as he pleased. But Valero's dual personality—diligent athlete by day, street hooligan by night—reflected Venezuela's own double nature.
Venezuela
