Covering Cartels Is Risky Business, Says Mexican Journalist

By Adrianna McGinley

The Committee to Protect Journalists will award Mexican journalist Javier Arturo Valdez Cardenas next week with the International Press Freedom Award for his work reporting on Mexico’s dangerous drug cartels.

Valdez Cardenas will be honored for his contributions to Riodoce, a weekly publication covering crime and corruption in Sinaloa, Mexico, one of the states that has been most affected by the escalating drug war.

Valdez Cardenas and fellow journalist Dolia Estevez participated in a discussion Friday in Washington, D.C., at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute entitled, “Reporting on Crime and Violence in Mexico.” The duo shared a daunting account of what it’s like to be a journalist amidst constant violence and eternal threat.

“The narco commands the news,” Valdez Cardenas said. “When I’m writing, I’m not thinking about my wife, my kids, the editor, the director, the reader. I’m writing and I’m thinking about the narco as if he was behind me watching as I write, and I think ‘Will he like it? Will he get pissed off and send me a bouquet of grenades?’…You don’t have to be under direct threat, you assume you’re under threat, reality is a threat…There’s a guy always pointing a firearm at you…following you…with his finger on the trigger waiting for you to cross the line to pull it.”

46 journalists have died since the administration under former Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels in 2006, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The question then is why pursue journalism? And why narco journalism?

Valdez Cardenas said there is no avoiding the narco in regions like Sinaloa.

“In these regions every path leads to the narco,” Valdez Cardenas said. “You could report on soccer, but the narco is there, or argricultural workers, but the owners of the lands are funded with narco money, the car dealerships are owned by narcos…the options are to write about the narco or stay quiet and play dumb.”

“I think we need to assume the responsibility put upon us,” Valdez Cardenas added. “It’s not that one decides to write about the narco, you either do it or you retire…It’s not something you plan to do, but the reality is there and it slaps you in the face and you have to learn to report it…You have to know how to publish the information, how to manage it, but not remain silent. I think silence is an act of complicity and death, and I don’t want to be an accomplice.”

However, not everything that Valdez Cardenas and his colleagues at Riodoce uncover gets published. He said everything that is written and reported undergoes strict scrutiny first in order to determine whether or not it should be made public.

“We only publish 20 percent of the information we have confirmed because a lot of it involves people who go around the streets accompanied by at least 20 gunmen and who have the capacity to move an army of 300 or 400 assassins within 15 minutes, and they’re protected by the police and the military…Instead of thinking about what you’re going to publish, you think about what you shouldn’t publish in order to stay alive, to keep writing.”

Eric Olson, Senior Associate of the Mexico Institute, moderated the discussion and asked how such auto-censorship has affected the quality of journalism in Mexico.

“There’s no liberty of expression,” Valdez Cardenas said. “What we’re doing is mediocre coverage, we’re counting the dead, all we need for that is a damn calculator and a cold heart. At Riodoce, though, we wager to tell the stories of the dead and the living, we investigate the narco.”

Dolia Estevez, an independent Mexican journalist and Senior Advisor of the Mexico Institute’s Initiative on Cross Border Journalism, said the government of Mexico is failing in its responsibility to protect journalists who risk their lives to inform the public.

“The state has the responsibility to protect this field because it is a social service, but they’re not doing it,” Estevez said. “It costs nothing to kill a journalist in Mexico, there is no consequence.”

Estevez also noted the failure of news organizations to stand up and seek justice when a journalist is murdered. 

“The news organizations say ‘we don’t know what he was involved in,” Estevez said. “And with that, they disqualify or minimize or ignore the fact that there is a real problem.”

Estevez said the Mexican legislature is now considering a bill that would make crimes against journalists a federal offense, but noted that the legislation has been on the table for years. It is expected, however, to pass this time around and finally become law.

“We need an institutional response and political will from all parties to admit there is a grave problem of violence and censorship and auto-censorship of journalism,” Estevez said. “Society is not receiving the information it needs.”