Vanishing Act

The last rousing strains of the march from The Bridge on the River Kwai die out.

All lights are trained on the ring. In the shadows of the big top there’s no hiding the sea of empty red seats on this February night at the Hermanos Vázquez circus in Mexico City.

“Well, you’ve cheered the happy clowns, the acrobats, the trapeze artists defying danger and heights — almost a complete circus!” the ringmaster bellows with a showman’s irrepressible glee. “I say ‘almost’ because we’re still missing the most important part: what we call the soul of the circus, what all the children always want to see in a great show. Here they come — the tanks of the jungle!”

A whistle blows, the band strikes up another brassy number, and two elephants the size of cement trucks rumble from the wings, wearing jaunty masks and trailing clouds of dust.

Guiding their movements is an angular young trainer sporting a pompadour. The elephants lumber twice around the ring before the larger one exits, leaving the other alone with his stick-wielding master.

The agile pachyderm finesses himself onto a stand at the center of the ring and strikes a statuesque pose — left front leg lifted forward, right hind kicked back, trunk curled just so. He breaks out of this stance and stands up on his hind legs, unfolding his towering gray mass as if reaching for the upper branches of a tree.

Back on the ground, the elephant executes a sprightly goose step, kicking up his right foot, then left, right, left. A spirit of giddiness washes over the audience as the three-ton beast romps around like a monkey. He almost seems to smile where his perfectly curled trunk meets his flabby lower lip.

The music stops and the trainer produces an outsize harmonica, holding it up dramatically like an enemy’s heart.

The elephant clasps it with his prehensile trunk.

“Listen to this,” the ringmaster coos, letting the anticipation swell.

“Da-daaaa!” the elephant blows, spraying saliva. “Da-daaaa!”

The audience bursts into applause.

“Do the kids like elephants?” the ringmaster calls. “¡Sííí!” scattered voices return, as the beaming trainer jabs the elephant under the chin with a bull hook to get him to nod his giant head.

Guillermo Vázquez has spent most of his 63 years in the circus, and it is through the prism of the big top that he has come to view the world. As owner of one of Mexico’s premier circuses, he speaks his mind, and no one in his colorful universe contradicts him.

He is sitting in his cramped trailer office on temporary circus grounds, holding forth with the high-strung energy of a former acrobat. Vázquez has a full head of black hair, a tidy mustache and a menacing stare that makes him seem larger than he is.

The walls of his office are covered with photos and awards from his years in the business. As he speaks, the sounds of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” filter in from the evening show.

“The circus is going through a tough situation,” he says, his hazel eyes growing moist. “Why? Because there’s television, there are videos. Also movies take away our public. Society cannot permit that the circus die, because it’s an escape from the nervous tension in the world — the wars, the muggings, the assaults. When people come to the circus they forget it all.”

It’s not just glitzy entertainment that threatens the circus, he sighs. In the old days, nobody questioned a circus’s right to procure tigers, elephants or other wild beasts. Who had ever even heard the word “endangered”? These days, international laws and animal rights people make it damn difficult for a circus to put exotic creatures in its spectacles.

“A circus needs an elephant,” Vázquez declares. “The thing that the people applaud the most is the elephant.”

For Vázquez, the need for an elephant is more than an idea — it’s an imperative.

If he were speaking in the abstract, his words might be fodder for a good debate. Unfortunately, he is trying to dig himself out of a hole and justify why he smuggled an endangered elephant from its home near Houston. He wants to explain an act so brazen and bizarre that it took corruption to a new low in Mexico, triggered an international media storm and put Vázquez in the crosshairs of investigations on both sides of the border.

“A circus without elephants is not a circus,” Vázquez insists.

That kind of thinking is what got him where he is today, desperately fighting to save his circus and its new star, a harmonica-playing pachyderm named Benny.

Early last month, a news item in a Houston daily had a tone so different from those of the other sober stories that it seemed as if a clown had suddenly popped up in an executive board room. “Life is a circus for elephant who sneaked across border,” the headline said above the giddy article on the surreal tale of Vázquez’s quest for a pachyderm. Other media coverage indicated that Benny could be seized at any moment by Mexican authorities.

However, a phone call to Vázquez quelled any notions of an Elián-like siege being under way. Asked about his elephant, the circus owner offered the assurances of a father caught in a custody war: “He’s with me.”

The next day, a visit to Benny’s new home showed the harsh realities of life in an urban jungle. The circus sits in the middle of a rough-looking neighborhood in the northwest part of Mexico City. The traffic-snarled street leading to the entrance is lined with used-tire shops, a throng of taco stands and assorted drab buildings — not the sort of place you expect to find frolicking clowns.

Hermanos Vázquez occupies a large dusty lot studded with all manner of trucks and trailers at rest around the blue-and-white big top, which rises from the desiccated grass like a cartoon castle. The big top is the center of this mobile universe, the fixed point around which the armada will rest until seat by seat, stake by stake, the scene gets broken down and the circus ships out for new ground.

On this evening, the early show has yet to start, and already Vázquez is dealing with multiple headaches. There’s a crew from Televisa clamoring for some close-ups of his elephant. More alarming is the rising discontent among families in line. One of the networks had announced that the circus would be giving away 100 free tickets, but no one at Hermanos Vázquez seems to know a thing about it. When isolated murmurs become general grousing, Vázquez arrives on the scene, well dressed and frowning. He hears out an agitated woman and grandiosely agrees to comp 200 tickets.

“The people must be given bread and circus,” Vázquez declares later that evening in his office. He waves aside questions about the elephant, making it obvious that such inquiries are yet another headache for him.

“What appears in the papers, the authorities in the United States will know,” Vázquez says, squirming behind his desk. “What we’re afraid of is that they’re going to fine us — a big fine.”

He prefers to talk about the declining relevance of the circus, a subject that brings out the sentimental side of the man.

A native of Guadalajara, Vázquez left school at 13 to follow his acrobat father into the circus. He dedicated himself to the parallel bars, tackling an aggressive regimen of double flips when such acts still had cachet. He performed for years on the road in Mexico and the United States.

“I worked in good circuses but not in Ringling. In those days, Ringling didn’t pay very well,” he says.

When he hit 30, Vázquez realized he could not spend the rest of his life tumbling for a pittance. He had a growing brood and wanted control over his future. He envisioned bigger things.

“I wanted to do something. As an acrobat, I wasn’t going to earn what I could as a businessman,” he says.

In 1970 he, his wife and his brother launched their own circus. The show started small, just Vázquez and about ten other artists setting up around Mexico City. To cut overhead, the family did virtually all the menial tasks.

“A circus family has to know how to do everything: put up lights, spike down the tents,” he explains. “The success of a circus depends on having an attractive show. Clean.”

As much as Vázquez polished and scrubbed, he couldn’t gloss over the fact that his circus lacked animals, specifically elephants. These giant creatures have been a near fetish for circus people dating back to 1815, when an American named Hackaliah Bailey struck it rich with an old African elephant in his act. Where Hinduism finds an incarnation of wisdom, showmen see the ultimate cash cow.

Vázquez learned that Barry Goldwater had a female pachyderm for sale. He liked what he saw and paid $5,000 for the cow, the first of some half-dozen he would own over the decades.

Beefing up his circus has been hard work. He’s recruited trapeze artists from Venezuela and clowns from Peru. He’s got a boxing kangaroo and dancers from Europe. All but one of his seven children have followed him into the business. Hermanos Vázquez is not exactly “the greatest show on Earth,” but it is one of his country’s most successful.

But 1999 was a disaster. Attendance was down, as it had been for several years running. Worse, one of Vázquez’s elephants died.

For a man who equates elephants with survival — pachyderms with pesos — the loss was devastating. Vázquez resolved to find himself a new elephant fast.

Elephants once ranged throughout Asia from Syria to Indonesia, northern China to the Indian subcontinent. The typical ills — loss of habitat, poaching, trafficking — have eviscerated the species, leaving scattered populations mostly in India and pockets of Southeast Asia. There are roughly 40,000 Asian elephants in the wild today, compared to some 600,000 of their billowy-eared cousins in Africa.

Several hundred Asian elephants reside in American zoos and circuses, many of which have set up breeding programs for both commercial and conservation purposes. These operations, frequently run under the auspices of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, have helped boost numbers. But they also have had unintended consequences.

Bull elephants, by nature, are aggressive, and few facilities are equipped to house them. Each new male in captivity represents a strain on an already overloaded system.

Benny was born on December 19, 1991, in a breeding program at Busch Gardens in Tampa. One of several surplus bulls, he was destined to change hands several times. At four months, he was shipped to the Columbus Zoo, where he and his mother spent several months on loan. Later Benny was bought by Bill Swain, the owner of Trunks and Humps, an exotic-animal business in the Conroe-area hamlet of Cut and Shoot.

Swain is an enigma in the elephant world. A former circus trainer, he claims he bought Benny because he wanted to breed an endangered species. Nevertheless, he has a way of exploiting his animals for commercial use, and Benny became something of a rainmaker.

Swain taught his tuskless elephant to hurl a fastball, a skill that earned Benny a gig throwing out the first pitch on opening day for the Oakland A’s. Man and elephant spent three days on a Burbank movie set for the 1995 remake of the Shirley Temple flick A Little Princess. Swain also placed Benny in a Tom Petty video. Inevitably, Houston’s Jim “Mattress Mac” McIngvale got a turn hawking wares atop the chubby pachyderm.

From 1996 through 1999, Benny was hired out to Circus Vargas in California, where he came under the dominion of a swaggering trainer named Chip Arthur, not known for sparing his charges the rod. But rather than become cowed, the elephant got increasingly feisty, prompting Arthur finally to send him back to Cut and Shoot.

Swain spent a lot of time on the road giving elephant rides at Renaissance fairs across the Southwest. But it was at home in Montgomery County where his animal kingdom began to draw fire. He kept six elephants on his property when a local agreement allowed for only two. Residents complained of foul smells. The situation blew up when one of his elephants got loose and charged through a neighbor’s fence. (See “Elephant Walk,” by Russell Contreras, February 17, 2000.)

Under pressure from local officials, he resolved to uncomplicate matters by unloading some elephants. “In the process of simplifying my life I’ve made it so much more complex,” he now says with a plaintive laugh.

Swain and Vázquez careened toward an intersecting fate. The Washington Post and other publications say that Vázquez first saw Benny performing in a circus in the Houston area at the end of 1999. However, Vázquez insists he never came to Houston, but rather an “associate” discovered Benny and reported back to him.

“I’m telling you the truth,” he says. “Somebody called me by phone and said, ‘There’s an elephant for sale here. It performs beautifully. It costs $40,000.’ I said, ‘It’s a good price.’ We needed it, you understand.”

Karen Gibson, the elephant supervisor at the Houston Zoo, is a friend of the Vázquez family. She says she urged them not to buy Benny. You can’t trust Swain, she warned, and besides, bull elephants in a circus are time bombs. The Vázquez clan had never worked with anything but mild cows.

“Nobody listened. I guess they don’t want to listen to an American girl,” she says. “They were suckers. They came along, and [Swain] took advantage of them.”

Vázquez plunked down the cash sometime around the beginning of February 2000. In the meantime, both buyer and seller had to take care of paperwork.

The Asian elephant is regulated under the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and the U.S. Endangered Species Act. As the exporter, Swain needed permits from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Vázquez had to get corresponding documents from Mexican authorities.

Most news reports have taken Vázquez at his word that he applied for the permits and waited patiently for them to arrive in Mexico City while Benny remained in Swain’s care. As time passed, Vázquez says, he got increasingly restless.

“The papers never came,” he says.

There is a logical explanation: U.S. and Mexican officials say they never got an application from either man.

Not to be deterred by inconvenient facts, Vázquez continues to insist that he grew desperate waiting for the permits he never applied for. For his part, Swain argues that he couldn’t get Fish & Wildlife approval until Vázquez had his import documents in hand. That’s true, says Tim Van Norman, chief of the agency’s international permits branch, but a person still can submit an application to get the process rolling. Swain didn’t bother applying.

As last April loomed on the horizon, Swain had to hit the road for business in Colorado.

“I said, ‘I have to go….I have other obligations. You’ll have to stay here and baby-sit this elephant,’ ” he recalls telling Vázquez. “He was supposed to sit there till he got the permit.”

Vázquez sent a worker to Texas. But baby-sitting wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. On April 1, the circus employee, on his boss’s orders, loaded Benny onto a trailer and made haste toward the border.

“There was nothing else to do,” Vázquez says.

There is no foolproof way to smuggle a three-ton creature across an international border. Yet when the boundary is the one dividing the United States and Mexico, certain dynamics favor anyone daring enough to try.

International bridges on the American side teem with agents from Customs and the INS, but they are far more preoccupied with what’s coming into the country than what’s leaving. The Mexican side is more complicated, especially for someone freighting an enormous load like an elephant. But there are ways of getting around that.

One “mule” from the circus sped toward Brownsville in a pickup, with Benny in tow in a large trailer. Another circus operative — armed with $4,500 from Vázquez — roamed Matamoros in search of a pollero to broker a bribe with Mexican Customs. The goal, Vázquez says, was to make the elephant “invisible.”

He found his smuggler in a public park in Matamoros. Now they were good to go. They reportedly opted to use the Brownsville/Matamoros International Bridge, a 24-hour crossing just west of downtown.

The Vázquez crew rolled onto the bridge sometime after 10 p.m. They paid the U.S. toll and made the short drive to Matamoros, where Customs agents stood waiting. Perhaps the spirit of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god revered as the remover of obstacles, was smiling upon them at that moment. More than likely, it was the bribe. The agents signaled the truck through without so much as a request for papers or a glimpse at what was in back.

Outside Matamoros, they met a driver from the circus on the roadside and hitched Benny’s trailer to a rig emblazoned with the Hermanos Vázquez logo. That done, they commenced the drive to the capital. Benny arrived on the circus grounds the next day.

“He was like a gift. It made me very happy because I knew we had a good act,” Vázquez says with a faint smile. “It gave me much pleasure to see him. But now I’m worried.”

Vázquez continues to rave about his elephant, calling Benny “stupendous” and the best he’s had. Swain, too, says he left the circus with a “rock solid” performer, gentle as a baby and adept at responding to 30 verbal commands.

“He’s never hurt anyone. I had him for eight years,” Swain insists. “I’ve taken him to ballparks, to fairs, little kids have had their pictures taken. He’s not dangerous.”

Try telling that to Vázquez’s son Guillermo.

Gibson, the Houston Zoo’s elephant supervisor, was visiting with the Vázquez family in April on her way to a job at a Mexican zoo. Guillermo had just picked her up at the airport, and the young man couldn’t wait to show off his moves with Benny. When they arrived at the circus, he valiantly entered the elephant’s electric-wire corral.

“The elephant attacked” is all Gibson says, reluctant to reveal too much about her friend’s ordeal. “I really don’t want to describe the incident.”

Could the young man have died?

“I don’t know,” she says. “People get in car wrecks and sometimes they die and sometimes they don’t. Same difference. An attack’s an attack. It’s a serious thing.”

“The elephant attacked?” Swain explodes, when told about the incident. He’s speaking from his cell phone somewhere in Arizona. “That doesn’t happen! The elephant doesn’t attack,” he says. Alluding to TV shows featuring amateur footage of berserk animals, he adds, “That’s a video!”

Since 1990 at least 53 people have been killed and more than 100 seriously injured by elephants in circuses and zoos, according to Jane Garrison of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA says many injuries and deaths go unreported.

Elephant trainers say the key to controlling the animals, particularly males, is to exercise “dominance” — to bend the will of intelligent, several-ton creatures to their own.

“You cannot make a beast continue to do unnatural behaviors — things that do not benefit his life,” says Carol Buckley, the executive director of The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. “You have to convince them that there is a reason why they are going to want to do that. That’s where the abuse comes in.”

Buckley spent 15 years as a circus elephant trainer before having a change of heart and opening the sanctuary. She ticks off the standard tools used to terrorize elephants. The most common is the bull hook, basically a stick with a very sharp metal point. Elephants have extraordinarily sensitive skin, despite its thick, leathery appearance, and are terrified of getting poked. Another device gives an electric shock.

But the domination often assumes a psychological component.

“You keep them in chains and restrict their movements so the only thing they get out of life is what you give them,” Buckley says. “It’s just like a battered child….It’s a psychological hold that the abuser has on the elephant.”

When all else fails, a circus will resort to a good old-fashioned thrashing. In this tradition, Vázquez flew in Chip Arthur, Benny’s former trainer at Circus Vargas, to “tune him up.”

“What that means in the circus industry is, typically, they chain an elephant down by all fours and they beat the animal until what is called ‘breaking the spirit’ of the elephant,” PETA’s Garrison says. “They get the elephant to the point where the elephant will do anything they say because the elephant is so fearful of being beaten again.”

Vázquez describes the treatment of his elephant differently.

“We treat the animals well because they are part of the family. Besides, they cost a lot of money,” he says. “In the country where they’re from, they kill them and take their tusks. Or they have to wander around looking for food. We have to give them their food and water at the right time. We have to treat them like part of the family because they’re part of the family.”

Whatever the method, brutality or hugs, the elephant went from being a typically volatile male to a harmonica-playing pussycat. In short order, the circus rechristened Benny — inevitably — Dumbo.

The animals at Hermanos Vázquez live under a long tent with a white top and royal-blue sides, matching the color scheme of the big top. The tent sits beside a chain-link fence along a busy street and its snarling waves of traffic.

Inside the dung-scented dwelling, eight llamas occupy a small pen beside a row of four horses and a camel. Each passes its time mutely masticating grains. A puma and jaguar live cooped up in a metal cage behind the llamas. When not sleeping, they live in a state of war. The puma has a nasty limp from a recent jaguar attack. A spider monkey is chained by the neck to the outside of the wild cats’ cage, condemned to life within breathing distance of two mortal enemies.

The elephants stand shackled in place behind the horses. Maggie is a 40-year-old cow who weighs perhaps a ton more than Benny. If not for their difference in size, they would look equally old with their immense folds of wrinkled skin and small brown eyes set in pockets of moist black flesh.

The elephants have steel cuffs around their left front and right hind legs. From the cuffs run lengths of chain spiked into the ground. The elephants spend their days shifting their enormous bulk from side to side the way some overweight people do. They heave themselves with enough vigor to lift the edges of their feet off the dirt.

The rolling assumes a rhythmic quality. This behavior has less to do with their weight than with the way they are designed. Elephants in the wild roam up to 25 miles a day, females in their matriarchal herds, mature males either alone or in small bands of other bulls. Roaming is just something elephants do.

As if to compensate for their immobility, Benny and Maggie give free play to their trunks, which perpetually swing and sway and probe the ground, occasionally blowing up dust or sweeping a cluster of hay into their mouths.

Elephants in the wild often live past the age of 70. The average U.S. circus elephant is dead at 28. Some attribute this to physical abuse or sheer devastating boredom.

In an entire day recently, circus workers freed Benny and Maggie from their shackles only to perform their act. But that was better than most of the other animals, which served no purpose other than to amuse passersby.

It is futile to hope you can make an elephant vanish. Elephants in the United States are regulated by the government and faithfully tracked by animal rights types. Word of any new or troubling development spreads like the flu in this insular world.

Benny has not helped matters for his new owners. He has never taken to the name Dumbo. If his handlers want to get him to do anything, they still have to call him Benny.

Somehow Fish & Wildlife got wind of Benny’s whereabouts. Vázquez got a call from an investigator in Laredo named Andres Guidera sometime last spring. Guidera says he cannot comment on the investigation, but Vázquez remembers the conversation well.

“I was scared,” he says with a nervous chuckle. “We did a bad thing, and they thought we were traffickers in animals.” He says he met with investigators to prove he was a circus person with a good 30-year track record. He says he has not heard from Fish & Wildlife since.

The investigation acquired another dimension last June when PETA’s Garrison learned from a whistle-blower that Benny was in Mexico illegally. She fired off a letter to Fish & Wildlife’s chief of law enforcement asking that Benny be immediately confiscated and returned to the United States. She says the official, Tom Riley, acknowledged her letter but said only that the agency is investigating the matter.

Early on, Fish & Wildlife sought help from its counterparts in the Mexican government, including the country’s environmental protection agency, known as Profepa.

Inspectors for Profepa reportedly began dropping in on the circus as early as May. On June 29 they asked to see papers for Benny. Vázquez tried to pass off another elephant’s documents as Benny’s. Inspectors suspected a ruse but allowed the circus to keep Benny while they sorted out the matter, says Humberto Ortíz, an official with Profepa.

Ortíz says in October the Fish & Wildlife Service sent him a diagram of an unusual hole, perhaps caused by a bull hook, in the soft tip of Benny’s trunk. This detail would prove crucial to cracking the case. Mexican officials no longer doubted that Dumbo was Benny. Finally Vázquez came clean.

“On the 24th of October he tells us … that [Benny’s] an animal he brought in [to Mexico] in good faith, illegally,” Ortíz recalls. Mexican authorities set in motion the process of formally seizing the elephant.

But the effort has sputtered and stalled. The dithering bureaucrats could go on indefinitely. In the meantime, journalists turned Benny’s case into a new kind of spectacle: a media circus.

Televisa, Mexico’s largest network, takes to the airwaves on a recent evening in Mexico City. Its channel resolves into an image of the elephant. A chipper female voice says, “Benny came into our country through the border at Matamoros with the very Mexican transaction of la mordida” — the bribe.

The report goes on to cover all the bases: Vázquez justifying himself, a Mexican government official blaming the former administration for the mess and setting an arbitrary deadline for Vázquez to present the proper documents. Then comes the inevitable cute stuff: “He eats, plays and even asks that they give him a pedicure! Finally, Benny is every inch an artist, and the kids adore him.”

Then Televisa’s unflappable anchor Joaquín López Dóriga observes dryly, “What the officials at the Customs station he came through must clarify is how he passed through without their seeing him….How do you not see an elephant?”

The media has milked the Benny story ever since the daily newspaper Reforma slapped a color photo of the elephant on the front page on January 28. The paper kept Benny’s trunk dangling on page one for several days and dubbed him “the wetback elephant.” Foreign media outlets, even The Washington Post and The Independent of London wrote tongue-in-cheek pieces. Soon, the likes of Tom Brokaw and National Public Radio’s Noah Adams were discussing the elephant over U.S. airwaves.

Underlying many of the pieces was an obvious bemusement at this newfangled low by corrupt officials. While the incident occurred before they came to power, officials in Vicente Fox’s government have been quick to express shock. During his campaign and early days in office, Fox has vowed to attack corruption at its roots. The Benny episode delivered a pungent reminder of how far he has to go.

The new head of Customs, José Guzmán Montalvo, interpreted the episode as an example of the shameless excesses of the former ruling PRI party. The new administration fired 45 of the country’s 47 Customs supervisors, including the one at Matamoros.

“We found personnel who were totally disconnected from the agency, administrators who felt they were independent,” Guzmán told the Associated Press. “They didn’t take orders from anyone….”

In the center of the media madness, Vázquez has demonstrated a keen ability to capitalize on the attention. Call it a flair for spectacle that comes naturally to circus folks. He cuts a sympathetic figure when he pleads for the survival of the circus. Virtually all coverage of his act has been gushingly positive.

“I’ve never seen an elephant play the harmonica. It’s really surprising,” one fan said to Reforma. “It’s incredible what he can do [despite] his weight. His act justifies their bringing him here.”

Vázquez gained such popularity that Reforma heavily promoted a simple Web chat with the man. He seemed to take to the high-tech forum. And he could afford to be expansive. Attendance at his circus has increased since the scandal broke.

Yes, Vázquez candidly admits in virtually every interview, he arranged the notorious bribe, as if such foul play were merely the price of doing business in Mexico. Which, of course, it is. But the brazen act could provoke a harsh response from a new government determined to burnish the country’s image.

Ortíz says authorities will seize Benny this month. True, Mexican government officials have been drawing a line in the sand for months and erasing it. But now there can be no more postponements, Ortíz insists. Vázquez’s lawyers have exhausted all the “tricks” they have at their disposal.

As for the circus owner, he faces a fine of up to 800,000 pesos (roughly $80,000) and could lose his license to run a circus or to have animals. Ortíz says there’s an outside chance Vázquez could get jail time, because his crimes go beyond permit violations and into the sordid realm of smuggling and bribery.

“I think he acted in good faith, but with bad procedures,” Ortíz says.

Back in the United States, it’s Swain who has come under the microscope of the authorities. He’s still reeling from a visit he received from a Fish & Wildlife investigator. “It was like I’d just met Adolf Hitler. The guy was very stern,” he says.

Swain now suggests that Vázquez stole Benny from him, even though he got $40,000.

“If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, the elephant is still mine. They have no permits, do they?” Swain says. “Now we can really muddy up the waters.”

“I have a receipt,” counters Vázquez. “It’s absurd.”

PETA has turned its wrath on Swain, demanding that the exotic-animal broker lose his wildlife permit. But the animal rights group has even bigger goals in sight: banning circuses from using elephants, and bringing Benny back to the United States.

“We are willing to find him an accredited sanctuary where he can live his life in peace,” Garrison says, “and not be shackled by leg chains as elephants in circuses are held the majority of their lives.”

That might be best for the elephant, but don’t expect it to happen. Mexican officials say they most likely will put Benny in one of their country’s zoos.

“What’s necessary is to put the elephant where he can reproduce with other elephants and live happily and not make a scandal so big as that of Elián González,” Ortíz says. “I think humanity has more important things to worry about.”

Buckley, the former elephant trainer, says there is no ideal place to put a male Asian elephant. Her 220-acre sanctuary doesn’t take males. Nor is introducing a domesticated Benny into the wild an option.

“There is no place set up right now to manage elephants in captivity in a good way,” she says. “That’s the sad reality. That’s why he is where he is.”

It’s after 7 p.m. when the shackles come off. Benny and Maggie lumber past their menagerie of tent mates and into the open air of the circus compound. It’s been more than 20 hours since they were free to walk unfettered.

There’s no berserk flight for freedom. They merely saunter in an orderly procession toward the big top, Maggie in front, Benny in back clutching her tail in his trunk.

The elephants, escorted by a caretaker, traverse the arc around the outside of the big tent. When they reach the back, a pair of handlers gussies them up for their act. One straps on the bat-shaped masks; another applies a fresh coat of white paint to their nails, making them look like bright eggs.

While they wait for a pair of clowns to wind down, the elephants commence their full-bodied rolling. Their tails flip and their trunks probe the ground like curious serpents.

Benny gets easily distracted. He wheels to the side and stretches his proboscis to grope at the circus folks milling about.

“No, Benny!” chides his handler, coaxing him by the base of his trunk to face front.

Then the familiar music begins from The Bridge on the River Kwai. The clowns retreat. The suave ringmaster bellows something about the “soul of the circus.”

And the elephants are led inside.

This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2001.