by John Gibler
Pepis introduces me to the afternoon shift at Primera Hora: Marco Santos, the editor, and Juan Carlos Cruz, a staff writer and sometimes photographer. They all wear white button-down shirts with the Primera Hora logo stitched across the chest. Pepis then tells me that about an hour earlier there was a levantón, or “a pick-up,” that special type of kidnapping in Mexico that leads inevitably to execution. Several reporters and local police arrived on the scene soon after. As they did, however, the gunmen came back to grab someone else. They walked up to the reporters, aimed their assault rifles in their faces, and said, “Don’t take any pictures, and be very careful not to publish anything.” The police of course did nothing, and the gunmen apparently did not even feel the need to warn them against pursuing them. Pepis sympathizes with the local cop’s plight in such situations: “The police only had pistols, and the gunmen all carried AK-47s.”
As we talk, representatives of the United Nations and the Organization of American States are getting ready to meet with a group of invited journalists to inquire about press freedom in Culiacán. I ask if any Primera Hora reporters will attend the meeting and Marco tells me that no one from the crime beat press corps was invited and he wouldn’t want to go anyway. “Those meetings don’t do anything, never lead to anything concrete,” he says.
The censorship power of the cartels is inviolable, they tell me. At Primera Hora, they try to avoid attracting cartel wrath altogether. Their job is now to count bodies and photograph and describe death scenes. On particularly bloody days the front page will include an “executometer,” or ejecutómetro, showing the grim total.
“Investigative journalism is extinct here,” Pepis says.
For example, if a group of drug assassins leaves a written message at a murder scene, Primera Hora will reference that a message was left but not publish in the article or the photograph the text of the message itself. This editorial decision was made by someone within the Sinaloa Cartel.
They tell me that a gunman killed a chef who prepared regional shellfish dishes for the Sinaloa Cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, also known as MZ. The killers left a message that read: THIS WILL HAPPEN TO ALL WHO WORK FOR MZ. Primera Hora published the text of the message in the news article that they posted online and got a call within minutes. The voice on the phone said, “Take that shit down!” Marco called the news director at Noroeste to confer. The director concurred: “Take it down and just mention that a message was left.” And hence an editorial policy was born.
Pepis started at Noroeste as a member of the predawn crew that assembled the morning paper. After six months he began to work preparing the negatives and slides used in the printing process. At that time Primera Hora had a day-shift staff photographer who was famously lazy. Come lunchtime at 2:00 p.m. he would head out, turn off his mobile phone, and disappear until 6:00 p.m., leaving a four-hour chunk of the day uncovered. Several of the crime beat reporters joked with Pepis that he should learn photography so he could cover the languid photographer’s dead time. Pepis liked the idea. With his savings he bought a 1970s Yashica 35mm camera and studied darkroom developing techniques, how to work the camera, and finally the craft of taking pictures. He then apprenticed for a year, unpaid, covering the unofficial 2:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m. “lunch” shift before his night shift at the paper’s printing press. After a year, he started as a crime beat staff photographer for Primera Hora.
I ask the Primera Hora team to walk me through the background to the current state of war. In 2001, El Chapo busts out of federal, maximum-security prison to reclaim old territories, they tell me. At this time there was a grand alliance between Sinaloan drug cartels called The Federation. This alliance included the Arrellano Félix brothers (from Sinaloa, but in control of the plaza in Tijuana), the Carrillo Fuentes family (also from Sinaloa, but in control of the plaza in Ciudad Juárez), and El Chapo and El Mayo Zambada (both from Sinaloa and in control of the plaza in Sinaloa).
In 2004, assassins working for El Chapo gunned down Rodolfillo Carrillo Fuentes—brother of Amado, “The Lord of the Skies”—and his wife, Giovanna Quevedo Gastélum, in front of a movie theater in Culiacán. The Carrillo Fuentes gang sent a group of killers to murder El Chapo’s brother Pablo. With these murders The Federation dissolved, the alliances crumbled, and the war began. The violence ebbed in 2005 and surged again in 2006. During this time El Chapo made an alliance with the Sinaloan Beltrán Leyva brothers: Arturo, Héctor, Alfredo, Mario, and Carlos. The Beltrán Leyva brothers recruited Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez from the rival Gulf Cartel, and together they became the main armed wing of the Sinaloa Cartel tasked with invading new territories, taking over and opening up new plazas. One of the first places they went was Acapulco, Guerrero, where two state police officers were decapitated and their severed heads impaled on a fence one morning in late April 2006.
In 2008, the alliance between El Chapo and El Mayo and the Beltrán Leyva brothers fell apart. El Chapo apparently tipped off federal authorities to the whereabouts of Alfredo “El Mochomo” Beltrán’s safe house in Mexico City—where Alfredo was arrested on January 21, 2008—as a trade to secure the release of one of his sons from maximum-security prison in Mexico State. As a result, El Chapo’s son Archibaldo Guzmán was released a few months later, on April 11. The Beltrán Leyva clan demanded their brother’s release, and it seems that when El Chapo refused to help, they sent a hit squad to kill El Chapo’s other son, Édgar, in the parking lot of a supermarket on May 9. On May 7 and 8, hand-painted narco-banners were hung in Sinaloa with messages like POLICE-SOLDIERS, SO THAT IT BE CLEAR, EL MOCHOMO STILL CARRIES WEIGHT. SINCERELY, ARTURO BELTRÁN. The war was on again. The Beltrán Leyva gang made alliances with El Chapo’s bitter enemies the Carrillo Fuentes of the Juárez Cartel and the Zetas, then still working for the Gulf Cartel.
When I ask about Calderón and his war on drugs, the crime beat reporters urge the following distinction: there is the War on Drugs (la Guerra del Narco), and then there is the Drug War (la Narcoguerra). In the War on Drugs the federal government sends tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police parading through the streets, then announces the seizures of drugs and weapons and the arrests of alleged drug traffickers. In the Drug War, trafficking organizations—and the various local, state, and federal authorities allied with them—battle in the streets and seek to exterminate each other and establish absolute dominance in a given plaza. The two wars sometimes overlap, but they are not identical.
Pepis carries a radio similar to those used by the Red Cross and is able to intercept their communications. He has studied their codes. This is how he learns when and where the bodies fall. He used to tap into the police radio system, but the cops recently shifted to a prohibitively expensive Israeli radio company, and so now he taps into the ambulance radios.
As we are talking in the bunker, he picks up a call and holds the radio close to his ear. He hears, “five bravo fourteen,” grabs his mobile phone and makes several calls to confirm. Five stands for wounded, bravo for bullet wound, and fourteen for dead. So “five bravo fourteen,” translates to “the bullet wound victim died.” That is his cue. Pepis looks up and says that someone has been executed on the outskirts of town. “It appears as if it is the guy they grabbed in front of the reporters an hour or two ago,” he says.
We pile into the white Chevy pickup with the Primera Hora logo painted on the sides and head out. It takes us about fifteen minutes to get to the scene.
The pride of the blood photographer used to be arriving on the scene before the cops, paramedics, and most important, other reporters. The photographer could thus work in peace. He or she could walk right up to the body without navigating police lines and have a few minutes to try to get the right angle and capture the light without the image being filled with the clutter of detectives, ambulances, and other photographers. The photographer could fill the frame with death and nothing else, and hope for the front page and good sales. Not anymore. In too many occasions killers return to the scene
of an execution to either make sure the victim is in fact dead, or to kill someone else they missed the first time. In such situations the killers will execute anyone in the way of their task. So now reporters, paramedics, and even the police themselves will often wait awhile before getting too close to a dead body on the street.
“Trying to get the exclusive shot is a thing of the past here for us,” Pepis says. “We’ve had to put a stop to that, to self-censor. Now when there is an event, we’ll go, but we try not to get there before the authorities.”
The Culiacán government says that they have an average response time to homicide calls of four to eight minutes. Pepis says it is more like half an hour, and it can sometimes take them up to five hours. He gives an example, “I went to cover a homicide in Navolato once. . . . From the moment I heard the report, I coordinated with my colleagues and lost ten minutes. In the time it took me to drive to Navolato, another twenty-five minutes, so it’s now been thirty-five minutes. I arrive at the scene and see a person’s body discarded there, but there is nobody around. No one is there except the curious locals looking at the body. I asked one guy, ‘Hey, the cops?’ ‘They haven’t come yet,’ he says. I was waiting around for another thirty minutes when we see several trucks with mounted headlights like the drug gunmen use, coming at us from the distance. And the trucks are going full speed, jumping over all the street bumps. The people scream, ‘Here come the killers!’ They dive for cover in the bush and run where they can. And the body is alone again, like a dead animal in the woods. I stayed nearby. The trucks belonged to the state police, arriving as fast as they could, putting on their circus, but over an hour had passed since the report went out.”
We arrive at the scene and park the truck. The body has been discarded on the side of a dirt road a few feet from a barbed wire fence. Everything is green; it is the rainy season. We are at the northern edge of the city, about a hundred yards from the back wall of the last subdivision. Looking across a weed-covered field we can see clearly the second-story windows of at least ten houses. The people who live there must have heard the shots. No one would think of knocking on doors to ask them if they had: not the reporters, not the police. No one does this because the people in the houses would certainly tell you nothing, though there is always the chance that they would report your snooping around to people who drive around in SUVs with assault rifles.
We are the first reporters on the scene. There are two police trucks there already and the police are cordoning off the immediate vicinity around the body with yellow caution tape, tying it to a barbed wire fence, stretching it across the road and tying it to a tree on the other side. We duck under the fence and are able to get within feet of the body on that side. The photographers crouch and get to work.
I begin to write observations in my notebook when a young man walks up to me and asks, “Do you want the name?”
The young man did not ask if I wanted “his name,” but rather “the name.”
I say yes and he tells me: Juan Antonio González Zamorra. I say thank you.
The state forensic team arrives and starts to survey the scene.
Juan Antonio González’s dead body is face down. His T-shirt has been pulled up over his head, tying up both of his arms in the shirt. On his left side where his shirt has been pulled up you can see two small circular wounds. One of the photographers comments, “The orifices are very small, close range, must have been a cop-killer,” a 5.7x28mm-caliber pistol famed for its ability to pierce body armor. The T-shirt covering his head is filled with blood, still wet, seeping slowly through the fabric and into the ground.
I notice a man busily walking around the scene talking on a mobile phone. He is all business. He wears dress slacks and a button-down collared shirt both stitched with the word EMAUS. I glance back at the parked vehicles: one is a van with EMAUS painted in huge letters on the side.
The police take pictures of Juan Antonio González’s dead body. The forensics team locates the bullet casings, notes the body’s position, and measures the distances between the body and the casings. The news photographers walk the perimeter of the scene taking photographs of the police and forensics team working.
Everything about the scene is routine. Nothing here would lead you to believe that the form on the ground around which everyone’s movements, everyone’s tasks and actions and jobs are oriented, was once a person.
I walk up to the young man who offered to give me “the name” and strike up a conversation. His name is Jonathan and he works for the Moreh funeral parlor. “I’m the one who’ll be preparing this guy’s body in a bit,” he says.
I ask about Emaus. They are also a funeral service Jonathan tells me, the competition. I ask how he found out about the body. Moreh has a police radio and monitors the frequency, just as Pepis monitors the Red Cross frequency. It turns out that the first people to arrive at the scene of an execution—a crime scene, one supposes—those who apparently have no fear of returning gunmen, are representatives of Culiacán’s multimillion-dollar funeral parlors. They hear the calls go out on the police radios and rush to the scene. Once there, they will search the body for some form of identification and call the dead person’s name back in to headquarters. The funeral parlor will then dispatch a crew to seek out the dead person’s family. This crew arrives with “the bad news,” as Jonathan puts it, but they soften it up with lies, “so that the family doesn’t get too scared.” They’ll say, “We’re really sorry, but we have information that your beloved was in an accident. We can take you to where it happened.” On the drive the crew will explain that they work for the funeral parlor and will be ready and able to take care of the family’s wake and burial needs.
“Every day there’s work,” Jonathan says. Indeed, proud of his employer, Jonathan tells me that Moreh was in charge of the funerals for such major capos and their relatives as Nacho Coronel, Arturo Beltrán, and El Chapo’s son Édgar.
But, considering that the Beltrán Leyvas and El Chapo are sworn enemies whose feud generates all these dead bodies, isn’t it dangerous to work for both sides, or either side, for that matter?
“They are very polite,” he says of his customers, “and they tip well.”
After some fifteen or twenty minutes the forensics team and the police lift the body into the forensics van and drive off. And with that, the official investigation into Juan Antonio González’s murder is done.
We drive back to the bunker. Pepis drops us off at the back door and goes to park the truck. It is raining. We walk into the office and sit down. Marco and Juan Carlos start typing; I continue to write notes in my notebook. Less than five minutes later Pepis bursts in and shouts, “Let’s go!” Another body has been dumped.
Juan Carlos writes the article about Juan Antonio González’s murder in less than ten minutes. Pepis downloads his photographs and makes a selection to send off to the editors. First, however, he goes through each selected image and digitally distorts the faces of the police, forensics workers, and anyone else. He also distorts the license plates and squad car numbers of any official vehicles that may appear in the background. He saves the altered files and sends them on.
We head out again, this time to Navolato.
“Everything has become just counting the dead,” Cruz says as we walk out. “All investigative and feature stories have been extinguished. We used to go out to villages and talk with people. Not anymore. And it’s not just here, it’s all across Mexico.”
Cruz knows what he’s talking about. He won the Mexican National Journalism Award in 2002 for an in-depth investigative feature on a massacre in the Sinaloan mountains. He knows that good reporting demands going places and talking to people, and he knows that that has become next to impossible, which is to say, potentially fatal.
“Narco has always been around,” he says, “people learned to live with it. As long as you didn’t stick your nose where it didn’t belong. . . . But not anymore. It has become a psychotic environment.”
I
n the truck again I ask about Navolato. Since arriving in Culiacán I had seen daily reports of executions and shoot-outs in Navolato. I had heard that the entire municipal police force had quit en masse. It turned out, however, that there were still twelve acting officers, four on duty at any given time, for the entire municipality, an area of 882 square miles with a population of more than 135,000. Of course, the four on-duty police officers never leave the station. I asked several friends and contacts about going there, and every one of them had said the same thing: do not go there alone.
“Navolato was part of the Carrillos’ territory,” Juan Carlos says. “No one could go there without their permission. It is a strategic municipality, right next to Culiacán; it also includes coastline, good roads, and several landing strips. Navolato was untouchable. As soon as you entered the municipality there were cartel spies reporting on who was driving in. Now Navolato belongs to El Chapo.”
And so, I ask, all the dead bodies discarded on roadsides in Navolato, one assumes that they were people accused of working for, or perhaps just being sympathetic or related to, the Carrillos, and their killers are El Chapo’s gunmen? Do all these executions follow some logic of extermination?
Marco and Juan Carlos look at me, and then nod. “When a dead body is found no one says anything like that,” Pepis says while driving. “We just publish that so and so was executed and that’s it.”
No one is able to protect them, they said, if they were to publish anything that disgruntles a cartel. But, I ask, what about Calderón’s War on Drugs and all the army Humvees and federal police trucks patrolling around?
“The day that the federal government launched Operation Culiacán-Navolato, Culiacán looked like a military parade,” says Juan Carlos. “More than 1,500 soldiers and federal police officers rolled into town, and within an hour cartel assassins executed some guy in front of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. That was when we knew that the Operation would be useless. The narcos assessed the efficacy of that operation instantly.”
