April 9, 1996: Lengthy Correspondance between ‘Unabomber,’ Mexican Farmhand Revealed

The New York Times reveals that Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the so-called “Unabomber” (see April 3, 1996), has engaged in a seven-year “pen pal” correspondance with an elderly Mexican farmhand he has never personally met. The farmhand, Juan Sanchez Arreola, a 68-year-old farm worker from Chihuahua, Mexico, is not suspected to have any connection with Kaczynski’s alleged bombing spree. Kaczynski began writing to Sanchez in 1988 after learning of his existence through his brother, David Kaczynski; Sanchez had done some work for David Kaczynski as a handyman on some West Texas property David Kaczynski owned. The letters shed little direct light on Kaczynski’s suspected career as the “Unabomber,” but they do give details of his life as a recluse in the Montana woods. Sanchez shows three of the letters he received from Kaczynski to a Times reporter, and says he threw some of the letters away. Kaczynski wrote of his fascination with the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, and described in detail his life in his mountain cabin with little money or food. In November 1995, Kaczynski wrote: “I am fine here. I am poorer than ever, but I am in very good health, and that is more important than anything. As to my poverty, I have $53.01 exactly, barely enough to stave off hunger this winter without hunting rabbits for their meat. But with the rabbit meat and a little flour and other things that I have put away, also a few dried vegetables from my little garden, I will get through the winter very well. And when the spring comes, perhaps I will have better luck with work and money, so that I can go to visit you. We will see.” Kaczynski also sent Sanchez at least one Christmas present, a brightly painted wooden cylinder bearing the motto “Montani Semper Liberi,” Latin for “Mountain Men are Always Free.” Sanchez says Kaczynski had twice asked his brother for money in 1995. “We only knew each other through letters,” says Sanchez, who says he was stunned to learn that his pen pal was suspected of a spree of lethal bombings. They did not discuss the bombings, Sanchez says, nor did they talk about politics, aside from their discussions of Villa and Mexican history. [New York Times, 4/9/1996; New York Times, 4/10/1996; New York Times, 4/11/1996]