Break the Silence

BREAK THE SILENCE Lucy Sosa, Ángeles Mariscal, Ismael Bojórquez, Ignacio Carvajal, Luis Alberto Medina, Martha Izquierdo, Maricarmen Aguilar Franco, Kowanin Silva, Laura Sánchez Ley, Gerardo Romo Arias, Pedro Canché, Modesto Peralta Delgado, Patricia Mayorga, Carlos Manuel Juárez, Jesús Guerrero, Margena de la O, Darwin Franco Migues, Dalia Martínez, Martín Durán, Melva Frutos, Sergio Ocampo Arista y Norma Trujillo Báez. EDITORS: Emiliano Ruiz Parra Daniela Rea Alejandro Almazán © Lucy Sosa, Ángeles Mariscal, Ismael Bojórquez, Ignacio Carvajal, Luis Alberto Medina, Martha Izquierdo, Maricarmen Aguilar Franco, Kowanin Silva, Laura Sánchez Ley, Gerardo Romo Arias, Pedro Can- ché, Modesto Peralta Delgado, Patricia Mayorga, Carlos Manuel Juá- rez, Jesús Guerrero, Margena de la O, Darwin Franco Migues, Dalia Martínez, Martín Durán, Melva Frutos, Sergio Ocampo Arista, Norma Trujillo Báez, Emiliano Ruiz Parra, Daniela Rea y Alejandro Almazán. Octuber 2017 Download our publications at: www.brigadaparaleerenlibertad.com Translation: José Ramón Calvo with Jonathan Raab and John Gibler. Layaout: Daniela Campero Cover image: Fanny León @BRIGADACULTURAL We greatly appreciate the collaboration of Periodistas de a Pie, AC through out the development of this book. Foreword At first we wanted to call this book Geography of Silence, because it is about the spaces within politics and culture, where the press is silenced by narcopower through threats, harassment, and death. But as soon as we began to receive the texts from our colleagues, we realized our mistake. Even when there is silence, journalism – as an act – demands deep reflection. We recognize the power of that reflection in silence because we want and believe in a better society. This book, if anything, is therefore a cry of commitment to life and to the trade itself, but also a cry of pain and loneliness. Make no mistake, though: these stories exist in a landscape dotted with a different kind of silence, one of insecurity and censorship, where some plunder public funds, while others loot the people (through kidnapping and extortion), and still others destroy the future of an entire generation: they recruit them as lookouts, gunmen, and drug sellers, and thus make all but certain their untimely deaths. The following pages are our attempt to break those corrupting and unpunished silences. This book has a unique perspective, one constructed from the most surprising of sources: from the journalist’s lives themselves. Those who contributed have dedicated their lives to listening to the victims and the perpetrators, to walking the streets, to climbing the hills, and to exhausting themselves on highways and back roads, but they have never told their own stories as a way to break through the silence. They have never chosen, until now, to lay themselves bare – their fears and their hopes – in order to paint a picture of the totality of the Mexican narco experience. Why do these women and men continue to press on with their notebooks and their cameras? Because this is a war and they are freedom fighters. It is impossible to see them in any other light: Kowanin, Martha, Angels, Melva, Margena, Lucy, Paty, Maricarmen, Norma, Dalia, Laura, Ismael, Luis Al- berto, Darwin, Jesus, Martín, Carlos Manuel , Gerardo, Santiago, Modesto, Sergio and Pedro. Their lives are now as much a part of that war story as any others, even if we can see only the most gla- ring horrors of that war: the 200,000 dead, the tens of thousands displaced, the trail of 110 journalists murdered for their work since 2000. And the numbers continue to rise. Even as these lines are written, a command has killed Juan Carlos Hernández Ríos, photographer of La Bandera Noticias, in Yuridia, Guanajuato, out- side his home, on the night of September 6th, 2017. Many of those who have written in these pages came to journalism only a few years before or just after the defeat of the PRI in 2000. They learned their trade during a change in government that promised transparency and accountability. Instead, these writers confronted the worst betrayals that Organized Crime could mete out. And what is Organized Crime? Don’t be so foolish as to confuse it with some Hollywood fable. In Mexico, it’s the name we give to a black hole that swallows everything: the government, the owners of the news outlets, and, of course, the most powerful leaders in business. It is the mask for the new buddy-capitalism, where public works and human life are just fodder for greed and a need for power. The stories these journalists tell show us a sinister country: where a congressman can go into an office and beat up a journalist with total impunity; where an indigenous people choose to fight against entrepreneurs, forest cutters and drug traffickers in the hope of salvaging some relic of their way of life; and where a journalist can risk all to report on shootings and kidnappings, knowing that he carries the weight of his murdered sources on his own shoulders, while all the while standing terrified that something may happen to his family. Although there has been coverage about assaults on journalists recently, on the meager conditions in which they work, and on the threats, disappearances and murders that they must face, reading these stories is an even more painful undertaking than it might first seem to be. It confirms that our colleagues have known an unbearable kind of solitude because we have left them to themselves - never seeing them as victims – but simply as journalists: those who go out day after day to ask, to verify, to record, even if it’s their own integrity, their own tranquility, and their own lives that are at greater and greater risk. The aggression of the narco-government makes up the most scandalous stories in these personal tales. In Mexico, no puppet gets to keep his head. Nobody likes an independent journalist: the governor doesn’t like him, so he invents a crime to put him in jail. The mayor doesn’t like him, so he offers money from public funds to buy his loyalty. Not even his employer likes him: an independent journalist hinders the owner´s ability to sell out when it´s time to give up his editorial independence in exchange for an advertisement deal. But worst of all, even his fellow journalists don’t like the independent journalist. Yes, those other journalists, who are just as fucked up and in just as precarious a position as he is, but choose to work for the narcos anyway: those colleagues – traitors, according to Kowanin Silva – erase the photos from their cameras (those that do not suit the taste of the local crime lord) and offer to put the independent journalist on the payroll of the company. And if he still refuses, the traitor takes him to the hit men to be tortured or simply to disappear. The authors of this book cut off the heads of all the puppets. They also show how the great newspapers in the Capital actually go about their business, dismissing their correspondents and leaving them defenseless after they publish stories and names of corrupt officials and crime lords in their states. Or the large public universities that fire their reporters for demanding a salary increase. Or the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and Subcomandante Galeano, who veto journalists who dare to publish a version that undermines his own. Perhaps the hostilities of the narco are the most scandalous thing, but here the authorities censure and buy the silence and adulation of the media with the money of all Mexican people, while condemning to hunger those who do not align themselves with them and reward with luxuries the media owners and bootlicking columnists. In Mexico everyone wants to have control over journalists. Over journalists who, in some cases, earn two thousand pesos a fortnight and whose employers deny them any kind of social security while claiming to be the heroes of freedom of expression. Among these stories are the journalists who assume journalism in its simplest and most profound sense: the responsibility to tell the world what is happening. As Melva Frutos says: «Because silence should not defeat us». There is no room for useless metaphor in the stories that follow. Some are written in the form of confession. Here, journalists talk about fear, the anguish they feel when answering a call that tells them that someone knows where they are, how they are dressed, and ends up with the sentence «you are next» – doubly terrifying if that journalist just arrived at a crime scene and is standing in front of fresh blood. Or the soul-bearing of Ignacio Carvajal, who could no longer cover another execution without first soaking his brain in alcohol as if it were a cotton ball to clean up a wound. What else could he do, if that blood belonged to a fellow reporter? What else can they do if the coverage is no longer guided by GPS or a map but by the vultures that fly around clandestine graves? The stories of these journalists stir us but they also pose ethical questions. Only those who have witnessed the horror, or have been threatened with death or forced to move to save their own lives, can talk about the commitment necessary in order to remain a journalist. And each admits to his or her own sense of guilt: when they yield to the threat of death and thus stop publishing the names and numbers of the fallen; when they travel to other cities and to other countries simply so as to save their own lives. «When I finished writing this text, they killed Candido Rios,» Patricia Mayorga writes in pain.

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