## The Return of the Account to the Record
When Alvarenga arrived in Majuro and was formally identified and interviewed, the piece of his story that immediately drew the most attention from officials and reporters was the companion: what had happened to Ezequiel Cordoba?
Norman Barth, the U.S. Embassy official in Majuro who interviewed him, reported that Alvarenga spoke about Cordoba’s death calmly and coherently. The account Alvarenga gave — of a man who refused to eat, weakened, and died — was consistent in its outline with the account he would later give in more detail to Jonathan Franklin. Barth found him credible. The content of the account did not raise flags for Barth that the story was fabricated.
Mexican officials subsequently confirmed the departure of a two-person vessel from the Chiapas coast in November 2012. The official record identified both men by the names used in Mexican documents — names that differed somewhat from the names reported in international coverage, but which officials linked to the departure event. This confirmation established that Cordoba had indeed departed on the trip and had not returned — consistent with Alvarenga’s account that he had not survived.
What the official record could not establish, and what no investigation would ever be able to establish with certainty, was the specific circumstances of Cordoba’s death. The drift had occurred thousands of miles from any witness, with no camera, no documentation, no independent observation of any kind. The only account of what happened is Alvarenga’s account, and it must be treated as such — an attributed account of events that occurred in isolation, not a verified independent record.