Indiana Finlay and the Aztecs

10 November 2005

DBC Pierre will front a two-hour documentary about Montezuma, Aztec emperor and lover of chocolate.

The documentary will see Pierre returning to Mexico's 'heart of darkness' to explore what happened to Montezuma, his people and the treasures plundered by the Spanish conquistadors, conveniently timed to coincide with the release of Pierre's new novel Ludmila's Broken English, due March 2006.

From the Channel 4 press release:

The Spaniards, led by the ruthless and cunning Hernan Cortes, arrived in Mexico in 1519 and immediately faced fierce resistance from the Aztec Indians. The indecisive Aztec Emperor Montezuma was seized by the invaders and, believing his captors to be Gods, he became a puppet of the Spaniards. On May 13th 1521, during an uprising, he was killed by a volley of stones thrown by his own subjects. Overnight Montezuma’s body and, most spectacularly, his extensive, well documented treasure, disappeared. No trace of Montezuma has ever been found.

For the next 400 years no new evidence of what had happened to Montezuma was unearthed. Then in 1934 a British archaeologist stumbled upon a kind of Shangri-La nestled deep in a Mexican sierra occupied by a pre-Hispanic culture that still flourished under the influence of sorcerers.

At the age of 17, Finlay chanced upon the archaeologist’s obscure text in the thieves market in Mexico City. So began his lifelong fascination with Montezuma. He spent the next decade researching the history, meeting a rogues gallery of Mexican explorers, hustlers and Aztec descendents, and finally tracking down the valley in the Sierra where the sorcerers still protect a cave system that Finlay believes could be the key to the riddle of what happened to Montezuma’s legacy. During this time he became known to the Mexican press as “Indiana Finlay”.