A panel discussion on Mexico’s drug violence and its consequences for the journalists who cover it drew a packed house to Club Quarters in New York on April 27. The panel brought together two veteran reporters — Jorge Luis Sierra and Alfredo Corchado — and Pablo Piccato, an historian with special interest in the study of crime in Mexico.
Covering Drug Violence When You’re Part of the Story
A panel discussion on Mexico’s drug violence and its consequences for the journalists who cover it drew a packed house to Club Quarters in New York on April 27.
The panel, jointly sponsored by the press-freedom committee of the OPC and Reporters Without Borders, brought together two veteran reporters — Jorge Luis Sierra and Alfredo Corchado — and Pablo Piccato, an historian with special interest in the study of crime in Mexico. Piccato framed the story by describing the current violence as unprecedented in Mexico’s last 100 years.
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photos by Clementine Roussely Mexico Panel, from left: Peter Price, Pablo Piccato, Alfredo Corchado, Tala Dowlatshahi, Jorge Luis Sierra, Larry Martz Click the image below to see photos from the event. |
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“The business of crime is changing,” said Piccato, who heads Columbia University’s Institute for Latin American Studies. “There are multiple groups that compete, and a horizontal network of people fighting for retail sales in the cities.” The result is more than 10,000 dead in the past few years, among them 46 journalists killed since 2,000 and another eight reporters who have disappeared for unknown reasons. Mexico is now among the most dangerous places in the world to work in the news business.
According to Piccato, murdering a reporter is less a punishment for spotlighting crime than a kind of advertising for a gang’s strength. The police-blotter pages are the most popular features of Mexican papers, and the bylines of journalists who cover those stories are well-known. Killing a reporter generates attention that signals a gang’s ascendency.
Some traffickers have bought coverage in local papers, offering publishers a choice between violence or payoffs. In one case a gang employs an assignment editor who assembles packages of videos and photos depicting killings, phoning editors to dictate story placement and, in at least one instance, offered a heads-up on the forthcoming assassination of a mayor (a tip that proved accurate).
Especially in the small border towns of northern Mexico, where drug violence is at its most savage, “reporters are conspicuous and well known to the police, the traffickers and average citizens,” said Sierra, an investigative reporter currently based in McAllen, Texas. Their high profiles notwithstanding, he noted, “it’s difficult for reporters to get police protection. The traffickers include politicians and police.”
“Things are not as bad for US correspondents” working in Mexico, added Corchado, the Mexico bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News. “But we’re talking about transnational gangs. If they want to put a hit on you or scare you on this side of the border, they can.”
Corchado and Sierra both told of threats received in consequence of their work. But Corchado joked that in one sense he owes a debt of thanks to the narco traffickers, whose activities are largely responsible for keeping the DMN Mexico bureau in business, although in the past few years it has shrunk from 15 reporters to one.
Domestic demand for illegal drugs is growing in Mexico—a new trend of considerable alarm to Mexican health officials. But the biggest market for narcotics continues to be the United States, and nothing suggests that this will change. But perversely, the panelists agreed, the current drug violence may in time be viewed as part of a transition to a more democratic Mexico.
The election of Vicente Fox in 2000 ended the 71-year monopoly of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and according to Corchado that ended the corrupt but stable power relationships that included the narcotics business. The brutality of the drug “war” inside Mexico is in its way an effort to fill a political vacuum.
The panelists struggled for the requisite note of hope on which to close. Sierra, for example, pointed to a fresh generation of Mexican journalists—frequently with degrees from American journalism programs—who are bringing a new awareness of the profession’s ethics and standards. But for now, Sierra said, reporters go on covering the drug story for old-fashioned reasons.
“We believe in journalism,” he said.