To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  Earlier that day Pepis and I met for lunch to talk about journalism and violence in Culiacán. Pepis’ 14-year-old son came with him. Pepis is a family man. He took his job folding the morning paper at Noroesta because his wife was pregnant with their first child and he wanted to get a job with a health plan. Now they have four children and Pepis works the night shift for Primera Hora. Even so he makes a point of driving home to eat dinner with his family every night. One night on such a drive he had just passed through a traffic light when a gun battle broke out.

  “Sometimes I get sick of the life here,” he told me over a lunch of gorditas, northern-style thick corn tortillas that are opened up and stuffed with beef, pork, chicken mole, chilies or beans and cheese. “Sooner or later my kids or someone in my family is going to get mixed up in this, be it directly or indirectly. If we live in a violent city, one day something will happen. There are many innocent victims here. I’ve thought of moving, but it becomes a lifestyle. It becomes a way of life, coexisting with crime and violence becomes a way of life. If they kill someone right here,” and he points out to Culiacán’s central plaza, “it won’t cause a big stir, and this is a busy place. A bunch of people will crowd around the body and that’s it. It doesn’t shock that they’ve killed people right here in the city center, because they’ve committed so many high-impact atrocities worse than that.”

  After a few bites he looks over to his son and says, “A kid like him growing up in all this is thinking what he needs to do to get a new car, carry a good pistol, and go around town with a girl by his side. That’s what the youth of today think. They live day to day. They’re living only for the moment; they don’t think about having a family, starting up some business, or studying.

  “And the drug cartels here utilize this way of thinking to catch adolescents and use them as disposable triggermen. Why? A disposable triggerman won’t cause you any headaches. You’ll use him to kill ten or twenty people and when you know that he’s not useful anymore, you yourself kill him. And the people say he’s dead because he was up to no good. They use stolen new cars and give them a car and a pistol and a wad of cash. Ten years ago a hired gun would charge you an average of $1,500 to kill somebody, depending on the rank of the person to be killed. In some cases they’d charge almost $10,000, but the least they’d charge you would be $1,500. Do you want to know how much they charge now, or rather how much they pay them? They pay them about $300 a week. They give them weekly salaries. How much can these kids save up in the short lives they lead? How much can they save? Not even enough to pay for a funeral.”

  “These are disposable assassins.”

  We arrive during the very last moments of dusk in the small rural town of La Palma, Navolato municipality. Within moments it is completely dark.

  The body lies on the side of the road a few feet from a high white wall that stretches into the distance, enclosing a private property. Some twenty officers of the Culiacán state police force stand guard wearing bulletproof vests and holding machine guns at the ready. Some wear black masks covering their heads and faces. There are no Navolato municipal police present. Two police trucks are parked a few feet away, one on either side of the body, and their headlights illuminate the scene. A state forensics team gets to work, noting the position of the body and the bullet casings. The same man from Emaus that I saw an hour or so ago paces back and forth, talking on his mobile phone. Pepis gets to work.

  This is not just any street, but the main highway that cuts through town. There are about a hundred residents crowded across the street, watching the scene. Some push forward into the street as far as the police will let them, about twelve or fifteen feet away from the body. Men and women, young and old, all press together, watching. Some twenty adolescent boys and young men on the edge of the crowd stand over their bicycles. Girls and boys, small children and babies in their parents’ arms, also take in the spectacle. Families. Most watch in silence, some make hushed comments amongst companions; some of the teenagers and young men crack jokes and laugh.

  The man’s body—no one knows his name—lies on its back. His arms have been placed over his abdomen, crossed. On the wall behind him you can see bullet holes and splattered blood over the white paint.

  Pepis walks from one side to the other, around the periphery established by the state police. They do not use caution tape, but rather stand in the road with rifles poised, a presence that clearly marks a first perimeter for the crowd. A smaller group of police forms a second perimeter closer to the body, this one meant for the photographers. I walk through the first perimeter it as if I had a right to and the police eye me, but then say nothing when they see me speak to Marco. Pepis crouches down and clicks his shutter. Standing several yards away still, the body lies mostly in shadow. Something seems amiss about the shape of the body, but I don’t stare too long.

  The crowd observes and comments, the police scan the crowd, shift their weight from one foot to the other. The forensics team goes through the motions of registering the central facts of the crime scene: body placement, locations of bullet casings, and distances between the two. I scrawl observations in my notebook.

  And then gunfire rings out. Close. Loud. A machine-gun burst of some seven or eight shots. Quick and to the point. The entire crowd—spectators, police, reporters, everyone—lurches and then stills. Everyone looks around, scanning all sides. No one is coming. The shots came from the other side of the white wall not more than a hundred yards away. Once it seems that an armed convoy of professional killers is not careening toward us, the young men with their bicycles start to make jokes, “Here come the men with the masks!” And they laugh. But the families, the men, women, and children, start to move away. With unhurried but decisive steps, they head to their homes. Within mere moments the twenty or so boys and young men are the only spectators left. One of them says, “They left us all alone.”

  The police, detectives, and forensics inspectors also make a move. One detective says, “Let’s go, pick him up already.” And with that the forensics team, a few police, and the man from Emaus lift the body onto a stretcher, take it to the forensics van, and drive off. The police pile into two trucks and follow. The crime scene investigation is done.

  Total time between hearing the machine-gun fire and the exit of a hundred onlookers, twenty police, and another twenty or so inspectors, funeral parlor employees, and reporters: Five minutes.

  Notice that none of the twenty heavily armed and armored state police officers thought to investigate who had fired a machine gun nearby, itself a federal crime. On the contrary, the response was Hurry up and let’s go. And of course it was. For the state police response perfectly illustrates a central fact of the drug war; the trade’s death squads are more heavily armed and better trained than the on-duty state and local police, and most often the police are on their payroll anyway.

  The machine-gun burst was a message that the residents and police understood unequivocally: Enough theater. We still have work to do. Move on.

  As we get in the truck and leave, we see an army Humvee, with a soldier gripping a mounted .50-caliber machine gun on top, pull up on the corner and park, right across the street from the wall where the man was executed and beyond which someone had fired a machine gun a few minutes before. Clueless soldiers on patrol? Or fodder for those who say that the army supports El Chapo? Impossible to say, though it did seem a striking coincidence. How could the soldiers just happen to be right around the corner and yet not hear the shots or not care to investigate who might have committed the federal crimes of possessing and firing an illegal assault rifle?

  I glance back. The street is deserted, the blood still wet on the wall, the Humvee calmly parked on the side of the road.

  On the drive back I ask the Primera Hora team why they think the blood news, la nota roja is so popular in Mexico. Marco says, “The nota roja becomes a thing to do, like going to the movies. You’re not sitting in a movie theater; instead you’re at the scene of a crime. You sa
w how that little girl ran up barefoot, looking all around, smiled at me and then in a hurry looked at the dead guy. So, think of it like having the cinema on a personal level.”

  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 frustrati
ng, 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.