To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  Rafael quickly looks down.

  “What is up with these names?” he asks, seeing the names of the disappeared journalists Rafael had written down that morning. “What do you want to know? Why do you have these names here?”

  “Well, those are the names of some journalists that friends gave me to contact for information since I don’t know the situation here,” Rafael answers, not wanting to mention that he had heard reports of their disappearance.

  “No, these guys are up to no good. Fuck ’em up, handcuff ’em and ice ’em,” the comandante says. “Take these guys and ice ’em.”

  They put black hoods over their heads. They handcuff Eduardo, but can’t find a second pair for Rafael. The gunmen get in the backseat with them, close the doors and drive. Now Rafael knows he will die. This is when he loses hope. He is a dead man waiting only for the last moments. He thinks, “Holy fuck. We’re screwed.” He stares into the pitch darkness of the thick hood placed over him: “This is all that follows; nothing, permanent black and that’s it. I hope they don’t torture me and that they leave my body in a public place. The fucking anguish of families that live with having someone disappeared; that kills families. I hope they leave my body where it can be found.”

  A call to the gunmen’s radio pierces his thoughts; he hears a voice say, “Tell them to get them down!” And hands force his head down into his lap and he feels the barrel of a gun press into the back of his skull. But Rafael is a dead man now and thus is no longer ruined by fear. He starts to listen to the gunmen’s radio communications. He hears calls coming in from other CDG gunmen reporting on the locations of both army and Zetas convoys, and reporting on their own movements throughout the city.

  The drive does not take long, five or seven minutes. They stop. Rafael hears a large door opening, and then they drive though and the door closes. The gunmen take them out and sit them down in chairs. And the interrogation begins again. Where are you from? What are you doing here? Are you soldiers? Are you Zetas? Tell the truth! If you don’t tell the truth you will die.

  Eduardo begins to fidget. The handcuffs have cut off the circulation to his hands.

  “Stop moving, bitch!” And someone kicks Eduardo in the stomach.

  “What the fuck are you doing here? Who are you?”

  “We are reporters,” Rafael says.

  “Bullshit! You are soldiers.”

  “We are reporters,” Rafael repeats.

  “No, you are Zetas. You’re federal police. You’ve come to turn us in.”

  Rafael knows that the voices he hears through the hood can disappear him there in the house and no one would ever know what happened. Rafael feels like he is talking to God. The voices have all the power to kill, release, torture, or whatever else they may feel like doing with them. He only speaks when spoken to. He only answers those questions put to him directly and then he answers precisely, truthfully, without sarcasm or aggression, without unsolicited information.

  The comandante asks, “Who is Rafael?”

  “I am.”

  “You’re the smart one, right? You’re the one in charge?”

  “No, sir, I am a reporter.”

  “No, you’re the tough motherfucker they send all over the place, right? You go wherever there’s action, right?”

  “No, sir.” Rafael thinks of responding, “No sir, I’m the idiot who says yes and accepts the assignment,” but he holds back.

  The comandante asks, “Who is this general?”

  “I don’t know,” Rafael responds, “I can’t see.”

  “Don’t be a fucking idiot. Who is this general?”

  “Let me see.” They lift his hood and Rafael sees the comandante holding Rafael’s camera out to him with a photograph of an army general on the screen. Rafael does not look at the comandante’s face.

  “That is the general in charge of the November 20 military parade. I interviewed him before the parade.”

  Eduardo keeps moving involuntarily, adjusting his hands, his arms, his back, trying to release the pressure in his wrists, but also trembling all over. A gunman shouts, “Why are you shaking punk?” Eduardo says, “Because I am afraid.”

  One of the gunmen going through Rafael’s things speaks up from across the room. “This guy has a whole fuck of a lot of shit on his computer,” he says, “documents from the Attorney General’s office, army documents, he’s got photos of Beltrán Leyva.”

  “Why,” the comandante asks, “do you have photos of Beltrán Leyva?”

  “Because I went to cover the operation. I am assigned to cover security issues. They sent me and I went.”

  “So you are the badass they send all over the place?”

  “No.”

  The comandante and his soldiers continue to look through Rafael’s computer, camera, and notebook and talk amongst themselves. Then they pick up a radio and call, “Hey, we’ve got two reporters here who say they’re from Mexico City, from Milenio or whatever the fuck.” They wait for the response and it comes.

  The comandante turns back to them, “How much did you have in your wallet?”

  Rafael says about a thousand pesos ($75). The comandante checks to see if the money is still there; it is.

  “Look,” the comandante says to his two hooded captives, “Your things are all here. We are not street rats. We don’t want you coming here because all you do is say pure bullshit and heat up the plaza. We do not want to see you here, assfucks. We’re going to let you go, but we do not want to see you here because you heat up the plaza. And don’t even think about publishing that we kidnapped you because we are present in every state in the country and if we want to we can kill you anywhere in the country. Nothing happened here.”

  When he hears the words “We’re going to let you go,” Rafael realizes that he is still alive. He had been a dead man for a few hours, and those words give him life again, and with that life, hope.

  The gunmen lead them back into the SUV, still hooded. They drive for some fifteen minutes and then park. They remove Eduardo’s handcuffs; they remove the hoods from both men. They open the doors and lead them out. They are standing in front of a pharmacy. Their rental car is parked right next to them with the keys in the ignition. Rafael and Eduardo stand there, dumbstruck, unable to move. Rafael feels a strange, somewhat insidious urge to thank the man with the tattooed neck who had interrogated and beaten him for hours; he thinks of giving this man his watch.

  And the man shouts, “Go suck dick, bitches! Get the fuck out of here!”

  “Thank you,” Rafael says, “thank you very much.”

  They walk to the car, get in, start the ignition, and floor it. They head for their hotel to get the rest of their things. Rafael turns on his mobile phone and calls his editor in Mexico City. “We got picked up by the narcos,” he says, “I’m headed to Monterrey, now. Fuck this.” He hangs up. He becomes aware of the aching pain in his knees from where the gunman repeatedly beat him with the pistol. Two minutes later his phone rings. His editor says, “Don’t go to Monterrey, go straight to the airport, the director of Milenio just got off the phone with the federal police and they are sending a unit to stand guard until the flight leaves.”

  They drive to the airport and take the first flight out to Mexico City. Upon arriving they talk to the top editors at Milenio and tell them what happened. The editors are extremely worried. Rafael says, “I don’t want my name or anything linked to my name out there. If you want to write about this, denounce what happened, don’t mention me.”

  Ciro Gómez Leyva, the Milenio news director responsible for sending the crew to Reynosa, will write in his column, “Every day in more regions in Mexico it is impossible to do reporting. Journalism is dead in Reynosa.”

  A few days later, Alfredo Corchado of the Dallas Morning News travels to Reynosa to report on the story of disappeared journalists. While he is filming street scenes with a television crew from Belo Television, a stranger approaches him and says, “You have no permission to report here. I
t’s best you leave now.”

  Corchado files his story, “Cartels use intimidation campaigns to stifle news coverage in Mexico,” and leaves town. Months later, the two journalists kidnapped while Rafael was in town are still disappeared, along with three others.

  I spoke with Rafael in Monterrey several months after he and Eduardo were levantados and miraculously released. Just days before we met, Monterrey had been completely paralyzed by gun battles and narco-bloqueos, the drug gang practice of stopping motorists at gunpoint, taking their cars, and using them to shut off major avenues and thus impede enemy cartel, police, or army pursuit. The gunmen favor eighteen-wheelers and city buses but use any and all vehicles on the road. Often the gunmen lie in wait to ambush their pursuers. Gun battles rage throughout the city.

  Monterrey, with a greater metropolitan population of more than 4 million people, is Mexico’s second-largest city after Mexico City. The wealthiest municipality in the country is San Pedro Garza García, one of the municipalities making up the greater metropolitan area and the headquarters of Monterrey’s business elite. For many years, Mexico’s drug lords quietly bought property in San Pedro and kept their families there. Some of Mexico’s largest transnational corporations are based there, such as Cemex, the third-largest concrete company in the world, and FEMSA, Mexico’s largest beverage company and owner of the OXXO convenience store chain, again, the biggest such chain in the country. Far from being a dusty, forgotten border town, Monterrey is the poster image of Mexico’s “free trade” ideal of development: towering skyscrapers, sweeping plazas surrounded by art museums, glitzy shopping malls, bustling nightclub districts, elite private schools and universities. Monterrey represents the myth that the Mexican elite likes to tell itself about the country’s future. From the hills of San Pedro Garza García everything looks shiny. For many in Monterrey the drug war was as distant and abstract as the economic destitution in which half of Mexico’s people live.

  In 2010, with the split between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, things changed. Monterrey became yet another urban battlefield. In mid-March, drug gangs shut down the highways leading in and out of town, blocked some thirty major avenues and streets in the metropolitan area, and engaged in pitched gun battles with each other, the federal police, the army, and the navy. In one gunfight two young graduate students at Mexico’s top-ranked private university, the Tecnológico de Monterrey, were slain in the street. Army soldiers hid their student IDs, planted guns on them, and later told the press that they were Zetas. Almost immediately their true identities were discovered—Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso, 23, and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, 24, both on full scholarship for academic excellence—and the news of their killing and the Mexican army’s botched cover-up became a national scandal. Consuelo Morales, the director of Citizens in Support of Human Rights in Monterrey, told reporter Sanjuana Martínez at the time, “We are swallowing the idea that everyone the military kills is a criminal, and that is what they tried to make us believe with the Tec students, who they said at first were hit men and planted guns on them. But since the students were from a certain social class, the theater did not work for the army.”

  In April 2010, seventy-eight people were gunned down in Monterrey, the highest monthly execution tally in the city’s history up to that point. In one case, some fifty gunmen blocked several downtown streets and then stormed a Holiday Inn, demanding at gunpoint that the front desk clerk search the hotel records for a list of names. Once the gunmen had the room numbers of those they were looking for, they proceeded to go up to the fifth floor, pull five people from their rooms, march them out of the hotel, grab a clerk from another hotel across the street, and drive off. Those six people have not been seen since. In May 2010, there was another wave of narco-bloqueos, leading prominent business executives to take out advertisements in the daily newspapers demanding an end to such impunity.

  Between August 13 and 17, 2010, the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas again engaged in open warfare throughout Monterrey. Drug gangs blocked some forty streets and avenues, threw grenades at businesses and television stations, fought gun battles in the streets, and summarily executed more than ten people, including the mayor of Santiago, one of the eleven municipalities making up metropolitan Monterrey.

  By June 2010 the eruptions of urban warfare and drugland executions reached such a level that the arrival of Hurricane Alex with its 110-mile-per-hour winds and pounding rain was greeted as a respite from the gunplay.

  “Alex was a break for us; we could do journalism again,” said Luis Petersen, the director of Multimedia in Monterrey, a media company that publishes the regional daily newspaper Milenio Monterrey and broadcasts throughout the northwest on more than thirty radio stations and two major television stations. “It was a break for the state government as well. The governor, ten months after taking office, could in fact finally assume office. He went out to the affected villages and spoke to people on the ground. He could work on actually solving a problem. That lasted about two weeks.”

  Luis and I drove through Monterrey one day in late August as rumors circulated that a convoy of forty SUVs bringing Zetas reinforcements into town had just arrived. I asked him how one should cover the drug war.

  “We can’t do journalism here anymore,” he told me. “For me it is very difficult to do journalism when you have to take sides from the outset. It seems that we have to do that here, and the side to take is that of an institution in danger, the Mexican state. It is in the hands of people without broad popular support; the only thing they have is firepower. The twenty years of Mexican struggles for a democratic opening . . . that doesn’t exist anymore. Who exercises sovereignty? Where is power located? It is in the hands of those people. And the police? Infiltrated.

  “So we can’t do journalism. Why? Because we have to have a preconceived stance. Here’s an example. The army does not recognize its errors, which means deaths. And they are not going to recognize them and we can’t force them to. In the case of the Tec students, we can’t say it was the army’s fault. Why? Because we are choosing to favor them.”

  Luis received a call on his cell. “We are calling it a detention,” he said. He paused, and then: “They are asking us to not publish anything yet.” He glanced at me and gestured at his cell as if saying, “See what I mean?” After a bit he hung up and said, “That’s it. The army is asking me not to publish information about a shoot-out that happened today. The army is not asking me directly; the state government is doing the asking. There is no way. We can’t do journalism here.

  “The state governments have been defeated through the infiltration of their police forces. The municipal governments are defeated. Business leaders are defeated.”

  “How do you understand this war?” I asked him.

  “The government lost control. This war is a war to regain control of drug trafficking from the perspective of the state. And this, to me, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Drug trafficking isn’t going to go away. Perhaps the only deep, long-term solution would be to legalize, and from that position control many aspects, not just the violence, but health issues as well. Why not legalize drugs? It seems to me that there are many people for whom it is much better for drugs to remain illegal.”

  Three days earlier, on a Friday night, Rafael and I walked through central Monterrey and an area of town known as El Barrio Antiguo, famed as a hub for nightlife that once housed scores of bars, restaurants, and dance clubs. There was no one in sight. “Before,” Rafael said, “these streets were filled, jam-packed on a Friday night. Now look around.” Buildings were shuttered, FOR RENT signs hung on walls, entire blocks were dark and empty. A bit later, we passed a family sitting in their doorway talking. “That’s another thing,” Rafael said, “people used to set up chairs on the sidewalks in front of their houses to talk, drink, spend time together. It is very hot here, and at night it is often cooler outside, if you don’t have air-conditioning. So people would sit outside, whole families up and down the street. Bu
t not anymore, that too is lost.”

  Rafael and I met on multiple occasions and spoke for hours about his experiences. When telling his story he constantly circled back to the issue of impunity, the brazen way in which the drug gang he witnessed and was then abducted by moved and operated in plain sight. “This is tangible proof of impunity and that they are the ones who call the shots in Reynosa,” Rafael told me. “They can drive around in convoys, with men with assault rifles hovering in the windows, and no one says a thing. Even the way they drive is a form of impunity. They go balls-out and people clear out of the way. No one confronts them; no one gets in their way.”

  “In a goddamned public square they were beating us,” he said at another point. “They were interrogating us, they were reloading their guns in the middle of the street. And no one even walked outside. No one looked over. Not a single police car drove by. No police or soldiers went by on patrol. The city belongs to them. And the government’s discourse is ‘We’re going to send more troops to the border, send more soldiers.’ But there is a military base right there in Reynosa! It is impossible to prove anything, but things happen that make you think there is something here that doesn’t quite fit.”

  FOUR

  Terror is the given of the place.

  —Joan Didion

  EL DIARIO DE JUÁREZ IS A NEWSPAPER IN MOURNING. Two newsroom desks now serve as altars honoring two murdered reporters. No one sits in these desks now. Every morning El Diario’s readers find printed on the newspaper’s front page, just to the right of the masthead, a black ribbon tied in a bow. The text under the ribbon reads, “President Calderón: We Demand Justice for Armando and Luis Carlos.” Two large printed banners hang from the roof over the front of the building facing traffic on the busy Paseo Triunfo de la República. The first carries the image of Armando “El Choco” Rodríguez and says: WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR ARMANDO. THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY WITHOUT JOURNALISTS. The second bears the image of Luis Carlos Santiago holding a camera in the moment of taking a photograph. It reads: WHOM CAN WE ASK FOR JUSTICE? LUIS CARLOS SANTIAGO 1989–2010.