To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (8 page)

I did see the girl, about seven or eight years old, wide-eyed and smiling. She hurried up to get a close peek and then ran back to her family. Death as entertainment.

Back at the bunker everyone gets to work. I pull up a chair behind Pepis to watch him scan through his photos and select images to send to his editors. The photographs are much more intense visually than the experience of being there standing across the street and watching. The camera takes you closer than the police will let you go.

In countries like the United States and Japan—with globally dominant economies—there are industries capable of producing multimillion-dollar spectacles of fictional death for mass consumption. Such spectacles of death come in numerous varieties and subgenres. Westerns, action, suspense, gangster, and martial arts films all mostly involve death, if not gore. War and horror films of course are typically orgies of blood, death, and bodily destruction. For the price of approximately two hours’ work at minimum wage, people in the United States can sit back and gawk for 90 to 120 minutes—munching on popcorn and sipping soda all the while. In Mexico, for the price of an hour’s work at minimum wage, people can pick up the daily rag and gawk all they like. In the United States the price of admission also includes the luxury of knowing that the death you enjoy on the screen is fiction. The Mexican blood news includes no such luxury.

And it is only now, looking at Pepis’s photographs, that I see the level of destruction unleashed upon whoever that body in Navolato belonged to. He was not only killed, he was destroyed. Pepis flips through the images and says, “I like this shot; it has good light.” He is right; it does have good light. Pepis had turned off his flash and used the police headlights to illuminate the body while crouching down and shooting the picture from an angle. The image shows what the bullets did to that man’s head and face. No tricks, no darkroom or Photoshop manipulation; the image does not lie. I was there, but I did not see it like this. The image is so grotesque that even the
nota roja
editors will decline to use it.

Pepis looks at me and asks, “What do you think, John?” He is not asking about the quality of the photograph. We both stare at the image—one of the most revolting I’ve ever seen—in sharp resolution on his computer screen. His voice is slow and heavy as it carries this question, which is not meant to provoke or mock. It is a deeply sad question.

“
IT IS NOT NECESSARY
for someone to show up and threaten you,” said Javier Valdez Cárdenas, reporter and cofounder of the Culiacán-based weekly
Ríodoce
. “This situation is already a threat. It is as if someone were pointing a gun at you at every moment. The narcos control many parts of the country; they control governments and they control the newsroom. When you write an article about the narcos you don’t think about your editor. You don’t think about the news director. You don’t think about the reader. You think about the narcos and whether they’ll like it, whether they’ll have a problem with it, whether they’ll be waiting outside to take you away. The narcos control the newsroom.”

Ríodoce
, which means River Twelve (there are eleven rivers in the state of Sinaloa), is an independent weekly newspaper founded by four veteran Sinaloan journalists in 2003. They left their jobs at Culiacán’s main daily,
Noroeste
, started
Ríodoce
from scratch, reported for years without a salary, went into the streets to give away issues, went door-to-door, and personally convinced newspaper stands and convenience stores to stock their paper, and now
Ríodoce
is read by more than six thousand people across Sinaloa, and followed by many more online. Every week the paper sells about 97 percent of its print run. A few years ago the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City—with a large DEA outpost—ordered a subscription to
Ríodoce
and purchased a copy of their entire archive of back issues. Pepis described them this way, “The
Ríodoce
reporters are the only
faquires
covering narco.” In Spanish a
faquir
is a circus performer who swallows swords, fire, and poisonous animals without getting hurt.

Javier Valdez was born and raised in Culiacán and has worked as a journalist here for more than twenty years. He has written several books, including
Miss Narco
(2009) and
Malayerba
(2010), both of which chronicle the drug war in Sinaloa. Not only does he manage to cover the drug war and stay alive, he somehow maintains a zany, raunchy sense of humor. While we spoke at a café one day he received a call on his cell, politely said, “Excuse me, I have a call,” and answered. Someone on the other line told him that three police officers had just been killed in nearby Elota. He hung up and called an official at the Sinaloa state attorney general’s office and said, “
Culito, te extraño
”—which roughly translates as, addressing a man, “Little buns, I miss you”—and then without skipping a beat asked, “Yo homes, what do you know about three police getting killed in Elota?” He grabbed a napkin and took notes, thanked the official, and then hung up and said to me, “Confirmed.”

Ríodoce
is a necessary first stop for anyone arriving in Sinaloa with the task of trying to understand something about the drug business, drug politics, drug culture, and daily life in the state the majority of Mexico’s most wanted
capos
call home. So many, in fact, come knocking on their door that the paper’s staff members have a word for those foreign reporters—and by foreign they mean from anywhere beyond the borders of the state of Sinaloa—who call them up asking for information, contacts, leads, tips, and rides and then disappear without a trace. They call them
saqueadores
, or plunderers.

“There are people who come to squeeze information out of us,” said Valdez. “What we try to do is take care of them, orient them well. But they never ask about you as a person. They never ask about your family. They could care less. What they want is for us to give them facts, contacts, information, photographs, and even very sensitive information. We call these people plunderers. They are vampires. They come, suck us dry, and they go away. We don’t hear anything from them again until the next time they need something. These people didn’t even care how we were doing after somebody threw a grenade at our office last September [2009].

“The plunderers don’t just take information, but they don’t even cite us as the source. They use us and they expose us to danger too. For example, I take them in my car and I tell them, ‘Hey, if we’re going to such-and-such a place we need to be quick, like a boxer, get in and get out, like my dad use to say.’ And sometimes they don’t respect this. And they leave and I stay here. My car has license plates, it is not bulletproof, and the license plates are registered in my name. And then they are so stupid that they’ll call us up and ask questions over the phone, very heavy questions. And even if you don’t answer them, even if you hang up then and there, you’re screwed because you know people are listening in and perhaps thinking, ‘And why would they ask this guy that question?’ We don’t need to keep putting up with people like that. They need to go fuck themselves, speaking in scientific terms.”

I spoke with Javier Valdez without any ambitions of plunder. I did not want to steal their scoops, mine their contacts, or ask them to drive me out to see marijuana and poppy fields. Instead I had three questions in mind. First, how can one do a good job reporting on the drug beat?

“No one is doing a good job of reporting the drug world, I’m certain of that,” Valdez said. “There is no way to tell the story of everything that is happening here. So what we do is tell a part of it, what we hope is an important part. How do we do that? We have a lot of information. And I’m not talking about tall tales and secondhand gossip but solid, confirmed, firsthand information from high levels. And so what we have to do is administer that information and thus administer the risk. There are narcos that travel around with twenty gunmen everywhere they go. You can’t risk yourself with that kind of impunity. You don’t want them to point all those guns at you. The government should protect you, but it doesn’t. And so we have the macabre play between the real and the possible. And it is always frustrating, because we have a lot of information that is waiting, holding on for other times.”

Valdez writes breaking news, investigative articles, and a weekly column called
Malayerba
. In his news and feature pieces it is a constant balancing act, as he said, between “the real and the possible” but still manages to break national stories about the inner dynamics of the major cartels. In early 2009 he broke the story of a narco pact and its subsequent breaking two months later.

In
Malayerba
he profiles the daily stories of the drug world, stripping them bare of names, precise locations, and dates so as to leave everything just abstract enough not to incur, he hopes, the wrath of those implicated. The result is a literary treatment of the drug world composed entirely of facts based on reporting and firsthand, obviously anonymous, sources.

Another question I wanted to ask Valdez was this: how did this war begin?

“For a long time the fighting was just between them,” Valdez said. “In the seventies, in the eighties. Everyone said, ‘The narcos live in Tierra Blanca’ [a neighborhood in Culiacán]. They didn’t kill innocent people. Back then they still said not to kill women or children. I interviewed a paid killer one time who told me that he suspended the execution of a police chief once because the chief was with his mother. He killed him later.”

In the time of Amado Carrillo Fuentes in the 1990s, he said, it was a different type of organization. They understood each other. They saw each other face to face; they had regular meetings. When Amado Carrillo died in 1997 the Sinaloa-based organization split into two rival factions, one supporting the leadership of Amado’s brother Rodolfo, and another supporting El Chapo. Then, a few years later, and in the midst of this war, Chapo’s organization split with the Beltrán Leyva brothers.

“It is a domestic fight,” Javier said. “They were business partners, friends, godparents to each other’s children, family. The people from the different groups knew each other, worked together, and some were lovers. They knew each other personally, intimately. Hence the scale of the feud, and why I say it is a domestic fight, a fight in the home. From one bedroom they shoot into another. Some seek refuge in the bathroom and others in the kitchen. And that got extended throughout the entire country. And the government let it happen. The Beltrán Leyvas formed an alliance with Chapo’s enemies, and that extended the war to other regions of the country and made it crueler. I’m convinced that the Sinaloa Cartel has been less attacked, that it has been privileged. They do it because the Sinaloa Cartel doesn’t use extortion, makes less noise, and is less bloody.”

A third question: what can be done?

“I am an activist of pessimism,” Valdez said. “The fire is going to spread. And the worst of it is not only the dead, but also the lifestyle that narco imposes on us all. I am speaking of the fear. We have already ceded the public parks and the park benches to the narcos, to fear. And I think that is the worst loss. This society is ill. There is no place for optimism in this scenario. And I say this with a great deal of sadness. I have children. And I tell them that there are other ways of life, other countries.

“How can you change all this? Well, by enforcing the law, the rule of law. I don’t think there is any drug war. All they do is respond to violence with violence. A real drug war would spend resources on education and health and combating poverty. That would be a war against drugs, because it would take away the narco’s most fertile terrain, youth.”

At the end of the conversation I asked Javier Valdez, “Taking into consideration that it is impossible to cover the drug war well as a reporter, still what advice would you give to those coming here to give it a try?”

“Don’t come here and count the dead,” he said. “Anyone can do that. Tell the stories of life. Profile the fear, which is another death that no one covers; it is an encroaching death, and it is the worst.”

I went to
Ríodoce
’s offices to speak with Ismael Bojórquez, the paper’s director and main editor, who continues to report and write as well. If Javier Valdez is the poet-storyteller of the drug beat, Ismael Bojórquez is the senior analyst. When I told Diego Osorno, the Mexico City-based reporter and author of the book
El Cartel de Sinaloa
, that I had interviewed Bojórquez at length, Diego nodded gravely and said, “He is one of the people who knows the most about narco in this country.”

Ríodoce
rents a small office space with four rooms on the second floor of a nondescript two-story, concrete building in central Culiacán, above a print shop. The inside is spare: two desktop computers, three simple wooden desks, a small conference table, and a bookshelf.

Ismael Bojórquez’s desk holds a laptop and a stack of documents, newspapers, and magazines. I began with the same question I asked Valdez, phrased a bit differently: How can one cover the drug war well?

“The thing is you can’t cover it well. We’ve understood that pretty much since we started this newspaper,” Bojórquez said. “We realized that we couldn’t cover it well, and it makes sense: the narcos will screw you, the narcos will kill you. You can write about politics, but narco is another thing altogether.

“There are lines you can’t cross. For example, the narcos don’t like you to get involved with their families. You can’t say that narco so-and-so lives in that house; they’ll kill you the following day. You can’t say that they own ranches or that one just bought such-and-such a shopping center. We don’t just take a lot of precaution with this issue, but a
shitload
of precaution. There is absolutely no protection from the state for those who work as journalists. They can’t even protect themselves, much less us.