Now he was reduced to trudging through a car crash of a script at a time when he should have been sitting in his ranch in California and waiting for the special achievement award at the Oscars.
It began, he said, on Friday morning after a convoy of soldiers, federal police and state police, came under fire from a vehicle full of armed men close to the ranch located a few miles over the border in the state of Michoacán, near the town of Tanhuato.
"A pursuit began that lead to the ranch," Rubido said, "the rest of the criminals inside the ranch started to attack the federal forces with intensity".
"He said he had been offered maintenance work at the ranch," said a relative, adding that Romero didn't belong to a gang.
South of Bariloche are a string of pleasant towns, including El Bolsón – a former hippy hangout, and still popular with Argentinian campers – and Cholila, where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid bought a ranch (you can visit Cassidy's log cabin there).
The company did not pay higher prices to compliant ranch owners.
The ensuing gun battles, he said, extended throughout the large ranch of 112 hectares and lasted for about three hours.
When about 500 cows and bulls had crossed the river, I followed behind and shook hands with a few of the vaqueros, who I'd met the day before when I first arrived at the ranch.
There is one small ranch store, and every night a congregation forms outside it to share cowboy stories over rum.
Romero's relative said he believed what happened on the ranch "was a massacre" not a shootout with criminal gunmen, as the government has said.
Instead, a strict seventh-day adventist, he quit the game at the age of 29 and retreated to a remote ranch to meditate and await the end of the world.
