Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels

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Sun Jan 10 11:39:30 PST 2016


https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/censor-or-die-the-death-of-mexican-news-in-the-age-of-drug-cartels/2015/12/09/23acf3ae-8a26-11e5-9a07-453018f9a0ec_story.html


Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels
By Dana Priest December 11, 2015

CONTROLLING THE STORY: This is the fifth installment in an ongoing
series examining the human cost of reporting the news around the
world.

One journalist's experience on Mexico's deadliest beat

REYNOSA, Mexico — As deadline descended on El Mañana’s newsroom and
reporters rushed to file their stories, someone in the employ of a
local drug cartel called with a demand from his crime boss.

The caller was a journalist for another newspaper, known here as an
enlace, or “link” to the cartel. The compromised journalist barked out
the order: Publish an article saying the mayor in Matamoros had not
paid the cartel $2 million a month in protection fees, as an El Mañana
front-page story had alleged the day before.

“They want us to say he’s not guilty,” the editor who took the call
told his colleagues during the episode in late October. Knowing
glances passed between them as a visiting Washington Post reporter
looked on.

They all knew that defiance carried a high price.

The enlaces are part of the deeply institutionalized system of cartel
censorship imposed on media outlets in northeastern Mexico abutting
the border of Texas. How it works is an open secret in newsrooms here
but not among readers. They are unaware of the life-and-death
decisions editors make every day not to anger different local cartel
commanders, each of whom has his own media philosophy.

Submitting to cartel demands is the only way to survive, said
Hildebrando “Brando” Deandar Ayala, 39, editor in chief of El Mañana,
one of the oldest and largest newspapers in the region with a print
circulation of 30,000. “You do it or you die, and nobody wants to
die,” he said. “Auto censura — self-censorship — that’s our shield.”

Readers get angry when they don’t get the news they need, he said.
Resentment against El Mañana grew so strong two years ago that
reporters took the logos off their cars and stopped carrying their
identification on assignments.

“The readers hate us sometimes,” Deandar said. “But they don’t know
the real risks we go through.”

Mexico has long been a deadly place for reporters. Some 88 journalists
have been slain in the last two decades, according to Article 19, a
worldwide advocacy group that promotes press freedom.

With its endless drug wars, Mexico is one of the most dangerous places
in a world that has seen a recent upswing in violence against
journalists, with scores of reporters killed or jailed in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, the Arab Spring countries, Central America and the former
Soviet bloc.

[Read previous stories from this series]

The risks have been especially high for El Mañana because its
circulation area is bounded to the west by the birthplace of the Zetas
criminal network in Nuevo Laredo and to the east by the Gulf crime
syndicate’s home base in Matamoros.

In February, the last time El Mañana defied a cartel’s censorship
rules, an editor in its Matamoros bureau was dragged outside, stuffed
in a van and beaten as his abductors drove around threatening him with
death.

“Next time, we’ll kill you!” one yelled before pushing him out of the vehicle.

Four El Mañana journalists have been killed in the past 10 years.
Others survived assassination attempts, kidnappings, and grenade and
machine-gun attacks on their offices. Deandar has been shot, kidnapped
and had his home set on fire, he said.

Hildebrando “Brando” Deandar Ayala, editor in chief of El Mañana,
center, checks in with different departments at the newspaper’s office
in Reynosa, Mexico, on Oct. 29. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The worst assaults began in 2004, when an editor in Nuevo Laredo was
stabbed to death. Two years later, gunmen broke into the bureau there,
detonated a grenade and sprayed machine gunfire, leaving one employee
paralyzed.

Afterward, bulletproof glass and electronic security keys were
installed at its three offices, where the blinds are always drawn.

In March 2010, when the Gulf cartel defeated the Zetas for control of
Reynosa, it took revenge on three El Mañana reporters whom the Zetas
had forced to watch one of its mass executions.

The cartel called the three Reynosa reporters and told them, “ ‘either
you come in or we’ll pick you up,’ ” an editor there at the time
recalled.

They surrendered to the cartel and were never heard from again. Their
presumed slayings were never reported by El Mañana, editors said,
because that’s what the Gulf commander demanded. The enlace passed
word that the killings were a one-time message to the Zetas, not a
tactic the cartel intended to repeat against the newspaper.

Twice in 2012, gunmen from the Zetas shot up the offices of the Nuevo
Laredo bureau. Not long after, El Mañana announced it would no longer
print cartel news in its Nuevo Laredo edition. Articles about Nuevo
Laredo crime sometimes appear in other editions, but without a byline
or names in the story.

Five of nine bodies are shown hanging from a bridge in the Mexican
border city of Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas state, in the early morning
of May 4, 2012. The bodies showed signs of beating and torture. (Raul
Llamas/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
North America’s ISIS

The cartels’ tactics resemble those most Americans would associate
with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The display of multiple beheaded
corpses and bodies hanging from bridges are a regular occurrence.
Hundreds of young people have disappeared. Mass graves are
commonplace.

The comparison with terrorist groups 7,300 miles away frustrates
journalists here. They watch the endless international coverage of
Middle East violence yet know that the terrorism just across the U.S.
border is largely ignored by the American media.

Mexico’s 2014 murder rate of 13 per 100,000 is twice as high as Afghanistan’s.

“We have a war here, and we’re doing war reporting,” said Ildefonso
“Poncho” Ortiz, a deeply sourced reporter for Breitbart News Network’s
Cartel Chronicles, one of the only American outlets to track cartel
maneuvers. “Sometimes AP [the Associated Press wire service] will pick
up a story, but other than that, it never leaves the valley.”

The three largest U.S. newspapers nearby — the Brownsville Herald, the
Monitor in McAllen, Tex., and the Laredo Morning Times — forbid their
reporters from crossing to report because it’s too dangerous,
according to the editors at the newspapers.

Pervasive corruption abets the violence. The local police forces have
been disbanded and replaced by the army and federal police in the
northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which includes Matamoros, Nuevo
Laredo and Reynosa.

A car bomb killed the Nuevo Laredo mayor one week after he was sworn
in. The new Matamoros mayor survived an ambush in March. Cartels
install surveillance cameras throughout their cities and employ
lookouts with cellphones to keep watch. U.S. Border Patrol officers
are regularly indicted for cooperating with organized crime.

“Tamaulipas is a black hole when it comes to information,” said Aaron
Nelsen, a reporter based in McAllen for the San Antonio Express-News.
“It’s so hard to get anyone to talk about it,” even elected U.S.
officials.
Hildebrando Deandar Ayala, editor in chief of El Mañana, sits in the
newspaper’s office in McAllen, Tex., in October. (Jabin Botsford/The
Washington Post)
Ildefonso “Poncho” Ortiz, a reporter with Breitbart News Network,
lives in the United States but regularly reports on cartel activities
along the Mexico border. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
A cartel media director

El Mañana’s circulation area includes major U.S. border cities; its
online editions are read as far north as San Antonio and Houston.

It is a third-generation family enterprise, founded in 1924 as an
anti-establishment voice. Over most of its 91 years, its formidable
enemies were corrupt politicians and their hand-picked prosecutors.

The newspaper now maintains a working relationship with the local
governments, as evidenced by the government advertising it receives.
Withholding state advertising dollars is a common and effective
economic hammer used against media outlets whose investigations upset
the status quo.

“When it’s not the politicians against us, it’s the drug dealers,”
said Heriberto Deandar, 78, who co-owns El Mañana with his brother,
Brando’s father. “He who is not afraid has no courage.”

Brando was raised in Reynosa but moved to McAllen in 2007 for safety
reasons. He commutes to work. Asked why he doesn’t find a safer job,
he said simply, “It’s in my blood. I cannot leave.”

During a recent visit to the town, the eerie atmosphere was inescapable.

Reynosa’s wide boulevards were nearly empty. Heavily armed soldiers
patrolled in black masks to protect their identities from cartels
resentful of the army’s two-year occupation.

Military helicopters whooped periodically overhead, racing to
shootouts or hunting suspects. At dusk, hundreds of cars streamed
slowly across the international bridge to McAllen, where an increasing
number of well-to-do Mexicans have moved their families to safety.

The Metros faction of the Gulf cartel controls much of civic life and
all contraband — drugs, sex slaves, immigrant smuggling, fuel, stolen
vehicles — in or moving through Reynosa, said journalists and media
experts here. Its commander, whose parents are from Reynosa, has a
more liberal view of the media than his counterparts in the other two
cities.

He seems to care about his image, too, they said, as evidenced by the
“narcobanners” that appeared on city bridges in November.

“This is to make it clear that I am a narcotrafficker, not a terrorist
like you’ve been saying in the media,” the cartel boss declared in one
handwritten sheet-sized banner. “Investigate and check your facts.
Crime has lessened since I took charge.”

In Matamoros, though, the commander of the cartel’s Ciclones faction
tolerates no coverage. In Nuevo Laredo, the Zetas have a commander of
finance, assassinations, logistics, stolen vehicles and fuel, weapons,
prostitution, immigrant smuggling — and media.

The Zetas media director, a clean-cut, 30-something man described by
one person who knows him as “a pretty friendly guy,” calls enlaces and
beat reporters at El Mañana and other media outlets every day to tell
them what stories the cartel wants published or censored. One day it’s
a story critical of new government limits on imported cars; the next
it’s a birthday party in the social pages featuring a cartel boss’s
daughter. Sometimes the media director provides photos and video for
an article.

“It’s a common conversation every day,” one reporter said.

Reporters have learned to consult him on nearly everything, one media
expert said. Even a car crash isn’t a simple car crash. “You have to
call somebody to make sure you can write about it,” one journalist
said, because it might actually not be an accident but a purposeful
vehicular homicide organized by the cartel.

Critical coverage of local politicians is also forbidden.

For his own security, the media director changes cellphones often, but
his online avatar always stays the same: a rabbit.

The three cartel commanders’ differing media philosophies force El
Mañana to produce three distinctly different editions. “If you want to
find out what’s happening in Nuevo Laredo or Matamoros, you read El
Mañana de Reynosa,” Deandar said.

For example, when Mexican troops captured the leader of the Matamoros
faction in October, known as “Ciclón 7,” El Mañana did not print a
word about it in its Matamoros edition. But in Reynosa and Nuevo
Laredo, it was banner news.

With Ciclón 7 gone, Deandar said, “we are waiting to see who is the
next chief, so we’ll know the rules.”

Hildebrando Deandar Ayala, editor in chief of El Mañana, right, and
Enrique Juarez, his Matamoros editor who was kidnapped by the cartel
in February because the paper defied its news blackout, discuss
coverage in Deandar’s office. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Mechanics of self-censorship

After hearing the enlace’s demand to exonerate the allegedly corrupt
mayor in Matamoros, the editor on duty rubbed his head trying to
contain himself.

“First they tell us what not to publish, now they are telling us what
to publish!” he yelled before heading upstairs to his office.

He dialed the editor in Matamoros who had passed the enlace’s message
to Reynosa, put the phone on speaker mode and upped the volume so the
whole room could hear.

Enlaces pass instructions via phone calls, text messages, apps and in
personal meetings. They often communicate cartel demands to crime
reporters who show up at the scene of shootouts, blockades, car bombs
and executions.

Sometimes a cartel member will run into crime reporters at the scene.

“They’ll say, ‘Get the hell out of here! We’ll kill you!’ And we have
to go,” one reporter said.

Three minutes into the conversation with the Matamoros editor, the
senior editor began raising his voice about the enlace.

“Give me his name and number!” he shouted. “And tell him you’re not
going to take any more messages! No more! Tell him if you take any
more messages, I’m going to fire you!”

He hung up, waved around the piece of paper with the enlace’s name and
phone number on it and then stood up. It was getting dark. Time to
leave for a safer city.

The front-page story that upset the cartel was a reprinted interview
with the new mayor of Matamoros, Leticia Salazar, an anti-corruption
crusader. The interview was conducted by the national Excelsior
newspaper. In it, she accused her predecessor of paying the Gulf
cartel more than $2 million a month in protection fees from public
works funds and towing fees.

El Mañana’s editors felt safe publishing the interview in all editions
because it seemed like a political corruption story, not one about the
cartel.

The cartel demand that followed was to run an interview with the
former mayor quoting him as saying he was innocent of the allegations.
But the former mayor had not requested an interview.

As he left the building, the duty editor said he planned to call the
former mayor on the way home.

Speeding through Reynosa’s back roads in the dark, he called the
former mayor, who said he had not requested an interview and did not
know the cartel had demanded one on his behalf.

It was time for a decision. “If you want an interview, we can do it in
our office or over the phone,” the editor said. If it’s in the office,
“we will need a photo of the interview; if it’s over the phone, we’ll
have to record it. Either way, we need to show it was real,” not
something made up by the cartel.

We won’t publish it right away, the editor added, so the cartel won’t
think it can tell the newspaper what to print.

The interview ran three days later, in all editions, including
Matamoros, where it mattered most to the cartel. But there was no
byline, not even in the Reynosa edition. Instead, it read simply, El
Mañana/Staff.

A photo shows a notice attributed to an organized crime gang that was
left next to the decapitated body of Maria Elizabeth Macias, the
39-year-old chief editor of the newspaper Primera Hora who was found
in Nuevo Laredo. The message was signed “ZZZZ,” normally associated
with the Zetas drug gang. (Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
Social media steps up

Several years ago, shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, mechanics, local
government workers and students began to fill the void in local news
with social-media coverage. It took the cartels a while to understand
what was happening on anonymous Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.

Once they did, retribution followed. On Sept. 26, 2011, the
decapitated body of a female blogger was left at the Christopher
Columbus monument in Nuevo Laredo. Next to her corpse were two
keyboards and a handwritten warning, signed “ZZZZ.”

But social-media crime reporting has only grown in the four years
since. It includes real-time maps of shootout locations, slayings and
kidnappings as well as endless cellphone videos of crimes in progress.

During the Post reporter’s visit in October, alerts and bulletins
about news that went unreported by El Mañana were rife on social
media:

Oct 17, 2:39 p.m. @MichaelNike8: Near the exit to San Fernando, tires
burning to distract the authorities

Oct 21, 1:50 p.m. @SSPTAM: Avoid the area between Reynosa and
Monterrey. Authorities are responding (to a situation)

Nov. 3: @Codigo Rojo [Code Red]: Yesterday, federal agents captured 3
men and a female commander of Toro [the local cartel commander in
Reynosa] and seized 3 new trucks and around 20 guns, including 5 or 6
guns covered in gold and diamonds; This photo shows what was taken out
of just one of the trucks.

Also trending on Twitter the same week was the one-year anniversary of
the killing of @Miut3.

@Miut3 was a prolific citizen crime reporter. She tweeted the location
of shootouts, explosions, carjackings and the identities of
disappeared people. On Oct. 15, 2014, her anonymous account was
hacked. Soon afterward, she became unreachable.

A tweet from the account of Maria Del Rosario Fuentes Rubio seen in a
screenshot, which has been modified by The Washington Post to protect
the identity of other Twitter users and with respect to Rubio's
family.

Her followers frantically refreshed their Twitter feeds trying to find
her. The next morning, at 5:04 a.m., a tweet from her account
appeared: “Friends and family, my real name is Maria Del Rosario
Fuentes Rubio, I’m a doctor and today, my life has come to an end.”

Minutes later, two photos appeared on her account. One showed Fuentes
Rubio in distress. “Close your accounts, don’t risk your families the
way I did,” her account read. “I ask you all for forgiveness.”

The second photo showed what appeared to be her bloodied face and
corpse on the ground. No one has been arrested.
An opening

In February, a few months after Fuentes Rubio was killed, the two
factions of the Gulf cartel in northeastern Mexico went to war again.
The chaos provided El Mañana with the kind of journalistic opening it
hadn’t had in 15 years.

With the cartel preoccupied, El Mañana became the newspaper it might
otherwise be had circumstances been different. The entire newsroom
deployed to cover the battles. Dramatic photos, detailed articles and
screaming headlines won Mexico’s attention.

Readers in Reynosa finally got the full story of what was happening around them:

Day One: “Border in Shock,” “Shoot-Outs and Roadblocks . . . ”

Day Two: “Border Under Siege: Marines Attacked, Three Armed Men
Killed, Soldiers Wounded”

“We were all excited in the newsroom,” said a longtime senior editor
who shepherded the coverage. “It was an adrenaline rush.”

“No other newspaper in the state” provided such detailed coverage.
“They were all afraid,” he said, nodding toward Deandar. “We have a
courageous boss.”

This was such big news, Deandar said he thought at the time, that he
wanted to share it even with readers in Matamoros despite the standing
cartel news blackout there. To be cautious, there would be no bylines
and no names of cartel members.

The cartels would not approve, cautioned Enrique Juarez, his Matamoros editor.

Just after midnight, the red printing press in Reynosa rolled out Day
Three’s edition. “Nine Dead in Fighting: Third Day Siege in Urban
Areas and Roads.” Delivery trucks dashed to their distribution hubs.

By 3 a.m., El Mañana employees discovered that the truck carrying the
newspapers for Matamoros had vanished. Deandar rallied a posse; they
found the vehicle at noon in an abandoned field, still full of
newspapers. He ordered the papers be delivered to Matamoros, where
they hit the streets an hour later.

Juarez, up in his second-floor office, got threatening phone calls right away.

At 4 p.m., as deadline loomed, someone called from the lobby asking
him to come down. He found a knife and braced himself. Armed men burst
in. One picked up a big jug of water and threw it at him, causing him
to drop the knife.

“We’re going to break you!” one yelled, as they dragged him away. They
stuffed him into a van, beat him about the head and back, and shoved
him onto the pavement an hour or so later.

Four frightened El Mañana employees in the Matamoros bureau resigned
the next day.

A story about Juarez’s abduction and a photo of him at his desk, with
the assaulting water jug, ran on Day Four next to the headline, “30
Dead Already, Mayor Suffers Grenade Attack, US Consul Suspends
Operations”

It did not appear in the Matamoros edition. Juarez and his family left
the city. He no longer works in Matamoros.

He is still not right, he said in an interview. “I don’t feel safe. I
look around when I go out.” He worries that the fighting cartel
factions will team up again and come after him.

“If I had the opportunity to leave . . . ” His voice trails off.

Enrique Juarez, an editor who was kidnapped over a story the cartel
did not like, is shown in the El Mañana office in Reynosa, Mexico, in
October. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Rosario Carmona, a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow at the University of
Maryland’s Phillip Merrill School of Journalism, where Priest holds
the Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism; Alexander Quiñones, a
graduate student there; and Post researcher Julie Tate contributed to
this report.



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