The more time I spent in Mexico, working or having fun, the better stories I discovered. When I wrote good stories, people noticed and were more willing to talk, which led to deeper stories. I was hitting the sweet spot for a reporter when I was fresh enough on the beat to be surprised and excited to witness new things, but not so new as to be naïve or to make a stupid error.
The big story at the time was an economic crisis in Mexico. There also were important and dramatic political changes happening, and in 1983 Juárez elected the first mayor from the conservative opposition, a stunning defeat for the ruling party that began an electoral revolution in Mexican politics. I got to know the young mayor, Francisco Barrio Terrazas, and many local party leaders, who would go on to hold important national positions.
I felt comfortable on the border but didn’t pretend I knew everything. There was a cliché about Americans in Mexico: the ones there six months were experts, while the ones there thirty years understood how little they knew. I learned something every day, and I got some of it into the paper.
After early afternoon when our stories were filed, the paper didn’t publish again until the following day. We didn’t regard TV or radio as competition, and the other paper didn’t appear until dawn, so we could relax for a few hours. This wasn’t like City News, where we updated the news around the clock. The newspaper’s rigid news cycle gave us time to digest the stories of the day and consider what we should publish, which made us less likely to make an error of fact, or worse, of judgment.
We were expected in the office before sunrise to get something fresh into the first edition. I always started my day reading the competing paper. Harry hated us reading the El Paso Times, however, and I knew not to be seen with a copy in the office. He couldn’t bear to speak its name, referring to it as “the other paper.” My City News training was to note the stories I had missed and recover them. Harry didn’t want us to do that; he wanted us to break stories for the other paper to follow.
The problem for me was named Matt Prichard, who covered Juárez for the other paper. His Spanish was elegant, he was a serious and thoughtful person, and he had sources at the highest levels of the city. I imagined him discussing Cervantes with Mexican intellectuals in smoky Juárez cafes. He wrote with such knowledge and sophistication that I read his stories holding my head in my hands so it wouldn’t fall off. He even was taller than I was.
Nobody liked to get beat, but to get beat every day was humiliating. The good news was that my editors didn’t care as long as I scooped the other paper just as often. That’s what they told me, anyway, but I could not hide my shame when Prichard had an exclusive story on page one, and I learned about something for the first time, like a tourist in my own town.
My secret weapon was Ken Flynn, our Juárez reporter, who wanted me to do well. Ken had served in the army at El Paso’s Fort Bliss, married a Mexican woman, Margarita, and raised a family on the border. He knew from his own life about the mixing of two cultures, and he had a passion for all things Mexican that was contagious.
Ken was enthusiastic and open and fit in easily with people on both sides of the border, but he seemed even more outgoing in Juárez, speaking Spanish, hugging and kissing everybody, and always enjoying himself. In addition to being a well-known reporter, he was a deacon in the Catholic Church, and baptized, blessed, and married people in both languages. Every day I hoped he would take me on an adventure across the border, which usually included a long lunch in Juárez, where he introduced me to his large network of contacts, informants, and friends.
I didn’t realize how good Ken was until Mexico’s president, José López Portillo, was to deliver his big annual address. On the day of the speech, September 1, 1982, nobody had any idea what was coming. We stood in the newsroom watching Mexican TV when the president announced something that would rattle financial markets around the world: in response to the growing financial crisis and weakening of the peso, the government was nationalizing the banks. I understood what he was saying in Spanish, most of the words anyway, but not the significance or what it meant for us in El Paso. Ken got it right away and managed to listen to the TV, answer questions from the editors, and write the story on deadline.
Minutes after he finished banging the keyboard, the building rumbled when the big drums on the presses started to spin. Then the first batch of papers came up, warm as baked bread and smelling richly of sour paper and flinty black ink. Ken’s story, below a giant headline, was flawless. Even better, the other paper couldn’t publish the news until the following morning.
The weakening Mexican economy was devastating to El Paso, and Harry was increasingly aware of how decisions in Mexico City affected life on the border, and even the future of the paper itself. If Mexicans could not afford to shop in El Paso, local businesses would decline, and the first thing they would cut was advertising. Without advertising, we couldn’t cover the news, and without news and advertising, nobody would buy the paper.
I knew vaguely that the paper had an advertising department, but I don’t remember any salespeople or what they did. The business operations were completely separate from the newsroom. I had heard about newspapers with bright yellow lines painted on the newsroom floor to prevent ad salesmen from influencing the reporters, but no paint was needed in El Paso. Everybody knew where Harry stood, and no ad salesperson would have dared to pitch a puff piece about a car dealer or big advertiser to curry favor. The opinion of the advertising people, if they had one, wasn’t something I heard discussed, ever.
Harry wasn’t oblivious to the business side, however, and part of his financial survival plan was that the Herald-Post would make its name as the best little paper covering Mexico and the border. To do that, he had a bold idea: Harry wanted to open the paper’s first bureau in Mexico City, and he wanted me to be the correspondent. I was thrilled, a little nervous, but brimming with a youthful confidence I could do the job.
Harry needed corporate approval for a new position, especially a rare and prestigious foreign posting, so the head of Scripps Howard’s newspaper division, Bill Burleigh, was coming to El Paso in the fall of 1983 to talk about the proposed bureau and to meet me. We had to convince the corporate guy that the paper needed a Mexico City bureau and that I was ready for the job, so I was told to write a story with an audience of one. Harry and Tim said they had just the thing. And then I got a lucky break.
I didn’t know anything about the corporate office, but Harry said Burleigh was a conservative Catholic who appreciated serious journalism. Tim, also Catholic, decided we should pitch a curve and write something about family planning in Mexico.
I had stayed in touch with Rebeca, whom I had falsely accused of baby selling. By staying in touch, I mean trying to date her, without much success. I had resigned myself to being “friends.” I talked with her about the family planning story, interviewed experts and mothers, and arranged for photos and graphics, which newspaper people called “art.” We wanted the story to be displayed well, so I had it finished days before deadline. The plan was for the Scripps Howard boss to see the first edition and then take me to lunch, where I would dazzle him with my knowledge of Mexico and my readiness for the new job.
Just before the boss’s arrival, the world provided an unexpected gift. Reporters had a saying that we hoped nothing bad happened, but if it did, “let it be on our time.” Meaning, if a good story was going to break, let it occur before our deadline and after the deadline of the competition. Then we could own the story for a few hours.
On the big day, I read the El Paso Times (discreetly to prevent Harry getting upset) and didn’t see anything about Juárez or the border. I was safe if the corporate guy tried to do a head-to-head comparison. There was a little item in a Spanish-language paper from Juárez, something about a Hollywood film crew getting in trouble.
Harry figured if I had the family planning story in the can, there was plenty of time to find another story. No editor ever was satisfied with what already was written;
they always wanted more, different, better. Photographer Ruben Ramirez grabbed a handheld radio and his camera bag, and we headed out to his red pickup. Let’s go to Juárez, ese, he said, using border slang for dude. My chest puffed up when he talked to me the way he would to a friend. Ruben was confident and fun; I was in good hands.
I had torn out a clipping from the Juárez paper about the Hollywood dustup. Now they were ranting about the story on Mexican radio. Every station seemed to be talking about it. Ruben drove us across the bridge to the hotel hosting the cast and crew filming Conan the Destroyer, starring body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger in the second big role of his movie career. There we met with a reporter from a Juárez newspaper at the center of the “incident” that was lighting up the media in Juárez.
She was shaken, upset about what had happened to her, but she agreed to tell me the story. I took notes and nodded my head sympathetically. She was well educated and had a good vocabulary, including some words I didn’t understand completely. She was bright and articulate, so I got the general idea. Ruben worked around us without speaking, unobtrusively taking pictures of her.
We said good-bye, and Ruben and I jumped back into the truck to return to El Paso. If we got stuck in traffic on the bridge, and risked missing our deadline, I would dictate the story over the radio to a rewrite in the newsroom. It wasn’t much of a story, though. To be honest, I couldn’t understand the big deal. The Juárez press association was furious and wanted Schwarzenegger expelled from the country. The other media in Juárez were calling for strong government action against the film crew. It all seemed blown out of proportion to me.
The reporter told me she was just doing her job and taking pictures of the film crew relaxing by the pool. One of them complained it was an invasion of privacy, roughly grabbed her camera, and removed the film. He returned the camera but kept the film. Schwarzenegger told us the woman should have stopped taking pictures when asked. He said the crew gave her $4 to cover the cost of the film.
Taking her film was totally wrong, and something reporters should protest, but it didn’t appear to me to be grounds to declare an entire film crew personae non gratae and expel them from Mexico. I went through my notes, putting together the story in my head.
We were almost to the bridge when Ruben shook his head and said, “Damn. I can’t believe that dude mooned that chick.”
“What?”
“That dude who dropped his trunks and mooned that reporter chick.”
My face must have given it away. Ruben looked over at me and said, “You missed that?”
Completely, entirely, 100 percent missed that. Suddenly all the other stuff, which I had shoved aside as extraneous to the main story, started to fit. All that talk of honor, sanctity, womanhood, the moral fiber of the nation. I got it now. I understood why the reporter was flustered talking about what had happened to her and why everybody was so angry. The Hollywood actor (not Schwarzenegger but another cast member) had exposed himself and insulted her in the most vulgar way. She had told me about it, but using modest euphemisms.
Ruben went over the entire interview, helping me flesh out my notes, which now made more sense. I filed the story, and it ran on page one. I should have insisted that Ruben share a byline, but that would have called attention to my poor Spanish on the day I was supposed to shine. Ruben never spoke of it.
After the main edition with my two page-one stories—birth control in Mexico and the much-more-talked-about indecent exposure—Harry and I walked to lunch with our visiting dignitary. Mr. Burleigh was deeply serious and thoughtful, showing little emotion during the meeting. He was a foot taller than I was and had a commanding presence, and a much better suit. He made a favorable comment about the birth control story—“I read every word”—and I thought things went well.
Harry told me later that the boss liked the idea of a Mexico City correspondent, but he thought the concern—at Scripps Howard one did not use the crass word “company” or even less the word “chain”—could use a man (it was not going to be a woman) covering the region for all the papers, not just El Paso. Our man would roam from the pampas of Argentina through the jungles of Central America and the beaches of the Caribbean, with cosmopolitan Mexico City as home base. His stories would run in all the Scripps Howard papers, plus papers around the world through Scripps Howard News Service, a news agency based at the company’s Washington, DC, bureau.
The newspapers had maintained a few overseas bureaus in Asia and Europe, especially during the war in Vietnam, but mostly reporters were sent from Washington on temporary foreign assignments. The company had just sold its major international news organization, United Press International (UPI), in 1982.
The new, expanded plan for the Mexico City bureau sounded good to me, but Harry seemed a little anxious.
I was sent to Denver to meet the editor of our paper there, along with the chief of the Washington bureau, a feared and powerful newsman known as the “lean gray wolf of Washington.”
At this point in my career, I was supposed to be a professional reporter, skilled at gathering information and making sense of complicated issues. Like many reporters, though, I was terrible at applying those skills to my own situation.
I got my first clue when I arrived at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Outside of the Chicago Tribune, I had never been in a newsroom where I looked up to so many reporters. I had a similar queasy feeling in a good bookstore: a mixture of awe and insecurity, a realization that I would never write that well or even read all that work.
The Washington bureau chief, Dan Thomasson, was a confident, firm-handshake kind of guy who looked good in a fedora—someone my dad would have called a “man’s man.” He had broken major stories during Watergate and was an influential voice inside the company. He could be charming or gruff, patting reporters on the back for a good story, or pounding his desk in rage when they missed one.
After the introductions, Dan excused himself to use the restroom. I said I would join him. I was so self-conscious trying to keep up that I had trouble walking. I focused on my stride—too casual? macho enough?—and I almost tripped. Older editors waved hello to Dan, and younger reporters jumped up to kiss his ring. The ambitious ones wanted to work in the Washington bureau some day, and Dan was the one who could take them in, or not.
Inside the men’s room, one of those ambitious types grabbed Dan’s hand, held on so he wouldn’t get away, and said, “I heard we’re opening a Mexico City bureau.”
I stopped dead, trying but failing to look as though I weren’t listening. Dan said, “You bet, kid. I’ve wanted to do it for a long time.”
The eager interloper said, “I’d like to be considered for the job.” Dan promised to keep him in mind.
What job? My job? Slowly the other signals I had not seen or just ignored started to make sense. Now I understood why Harry had been anxious about the company’s plan. They were going to open a Mexico City bureau, but it wasn’t going to be run by Harry from a little paper in El Paso. And if Harry wasn’t going to run the bureau, he wasn’t going to send his own reporter. And if Harry wasn’t sending the reporter, it wasn’t going to be me.
When I had overheard people talking about “green,” they weren’t referring to the grass. I had just turned twenty-six and had less than four years of reporting experience. Slowly I understood: the corporate bosses wanted the first Mexico City bureau to have a veteran reporter who answered to Washington.
We finished our meetings, and I went back to El Paso, mad and dejected. I was resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to Mexico. Maybe it was for the better, I thought. I had been considering a bigger Texas paper, perhaps the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which was known for good writing. Then I could try for Dallas and then the Chicago Tribune, the final destination. After two years in El Paso, I had learned a lot. I had friends at the paper and felt at home in the community, but I had bigger ambitions for my career.
The next day Harry was bubbly, goofy even. Come in,
come in, he said, pulling me into his office. He never closed the door, but he sat me in a chair in front of his desk.
You’re going to Mexico, he said.
Really?
Yes, he said, telling me I must have done a good job at the meeting in Denver.
More likely, Harry had thrown a fit, threatened to break something or quit.
There was a slight change in the job description, he said, but it would be fine.
I nodded.
You’ll report to me in El Paso, Harry said, and focus on border issues.
Good, I said, smiling; that was our plan all along.
And you’ll report to the paper in Denver, he added, because they want general coverage of Mexico and the deepening financial crisis.
That’s fine, I said. I can do that.
He paused.
And you’ll report to Dan in Washington because he wants coverage of Central America, especially El Salvador.
El Salvador? That was not in my plan.
El Salvador in 1983 was in a terrifying civil war, after centuries of poverty and oppression. The Salvadoran army, supported by the US government, was indiscriminately hunting anyone who called for change. Leftist guerillas ruthlessly controlled parts of the countryside. At night, cars with tinted windows and armed men prowled the dark city streets: death squads. Even an archbishop, who had criticized the misery and injustice in his country, had been shot to death—in a chapel. Then, at his funeral, dozens of mourners were slaughtered.
President Ronald Reagan feared the rebels would install an oppressive, communist government allied with the Soviet Union in “our backyard.” He vowed to stop them. The Soviet Union and Cuba gave the rebels weapons and training. Reagan and the Soviet leaders had opened a new front in the Cold War, and unfortunately for the people of El Salvador, their country became a bloody battleground.
Great, I told Harry. El Salvador. Good story. I decided not to think about it.
4
Finding the News Page 7