MEXICO CITY - Three Mexican fishermen said they sang ballads, danced and played air guitar as they drifted for months in an open boat across the Pacific, surviving on raw fish caught with engine cables and drinking rainwater.
They read the Bible aloud, prayed - and tossed overboard the bodies of two companions they said starved to death. The government said Tuesday it would investigate the deaths and other aspects of the survivors' account.
Mexican television interviewed the men, who seemed to be in remarkably good health, Tuesday on the Marshall Islands. The Taiwanese fishing crew that rescued them Aug. 9 dropped them off on the islands Monday, and doctors confirmed they were well enough to travel the 5,500 miles to their homes on Mexico's Pacific coast.
Mexican news media have cast doubt on the men's account of their nine-month odyssey, suggesting they might be drug smugglers who made up the story to avoid prosecution. There are no records of their departure, and some relatives initially said they had been gone for only three months.
"There are stories going around that you were shipping cocaine," Televisa anchor Carlos Loret de Mola told the men Tuesday via satellite.
"Well, no, that isn't true," survivor Lucio Rendon said.
The fishermen said they know their tale is far-fetched but insist it's true. They also said they never doubted they would live to tell it.
Their ordeal began, they said, on Oct. 28, 2005, in their hometown of San Blas, when they set out with the boat's owner and another man on a shark-fishing expedition they expected to last a few days.
A cold front swept in and a strong wind dragged the boat out to sea, they said. As the men struggled to turn toward islands they could see in the distance, they ran out of gas.
Currents apparently pushed their 27-foot boat all the way across the Pacific. The men protected themselves from the sun with blankets, and they crafted fishing lines from cables and hooks from springs in the boat's motor.
Rendon, Jesus Vidana, and Salvador Ordonez said they ate the fish raw - as they did the seabirds that occasionally flew by. But the boat's owner, whom the survivors knew only as Juan from Mazatlan, and the other man on board refused to eat the catch.
One died in January and the other in February, the survivors said. The fishermen said they waited three days before throwing Juan overboard.
"For Senor Juan we said seven Our Fathers and seven Hail Marys, then threw him into the ocean," Vidana told Televisa. "The same with the other one. We prayed and tossed him overboard."
President Vicente Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, told reporters Tuesday that "without a doubt there has to be an investigation."
"The presidency accepts as fact that they had this experience of practically nine months adrift, but a series of circumstances have to be explained, such as how the two other fishermen aboard the boat disappeared."
