Katherine Corcoran - In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press

For my Katherines, Mom and Lisa

CONTENTS

creer que un cielo en un infierno cabe,

dar la vida y el alma a un desengao:

esto es amor, quien lo prob lo sabe.

LOPE DE VEGA

(to believe that there is heaven within hell,

to give your life and soul to disillusion:

that is love, anyone who has tried it knows.)

On my first day as Associated Press bureau chief in Mexico City, I was awakened by a 6 A.M. phone call. The news agency had received a threat from a drug cartel. It came via cell phone text to one of our journalists, ordering us to publish a story about then-president Felipe Caldern protecting Joaqun El Chapo Guzmn, the worlds most notorious drug lord (now serving a life sentence in the United States), or we would receive a special visit. The message listed the address of the bureau. It was signed by the Zetas, El Chapos rivals.

One of my responsibilities as bureau chief was the safety of more than a dozen correspondents and twenty freelancers around the region. At that moment, I was faced with protecting the entire Mexico team of a U.S.-based international news agency. The Zetas knew where we worked. In a flurry of messages among AP offices in New York, Buenos Aires, and London, I told my editors that we needed to take extreme actions, to the point of removing from the country anyone in danger. I wrote this at 6:47 A.M.:

These guys dont fool around.

Welcome to your first assignment as bureau chief, the Latin America editor told me.

I cant say I was surprised. In fact, I knew immediately what to do. I had already worked in Mexico for two and half years, and I knew the press there was under siege. It was the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist, outside of a war zone. The forces that attacked the Mexican press usually left the international media alone. But this was an epidemic, and it was only a matter of time before it reached us.

since the Committee to Protect Journalists started keeping track in 1992. About half those killings had occurred since I arrived in Mexico in 2008. Ten were killed in 2010 alone, the year I got the early-morning phone call.

The same week, a Mexican news photographer was gunned down in Ciudad Jurez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. He was the second journalist killed at the local newspaper El Diario de Jurez in as many years. The first, assassinated in 2008, covered justice and organized crime and was far more in the crosshairs. But the photographer who was killed in 2010 was just twenty-one years old. An eighteen-year-old photo intern traveling with him was injured in the attack. What did anyone gain by attacking them? To the newspaper, its staff had become cannon fodder. addressed to the narcos: WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US?

The Diario de Jurez front-page editorial was the first major public acknowledgment of just how bad things had gotten, especially for journalists at news organizations along the Mexican-U.S. border, where drug cartels were in fierce confrontations over shipping routes. Up to that point, editors refused to talk if their newsrooms were hit, under the illusion that silence would buy them safety. Now a newspaper flat-out identified drug cartels as the de facto authorities.

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US? played around the world, as far as Japan and Russia, but particularly in the United States, where it garnered a New York Times editorial and networks calling my office looking for correspondents to interview. A week into my new job, I was thick into an issue that would dominate my time there.

Pedro Torres, editor of El Diario de Jurez , who wrote the headline, told me that his question, which everyone took literally as supplicating to the narcos, was in fact rhetorical. We werent speaking directly to [drug gangs]. It was an open message, Torres said in an interview. We wanted to provoke a reaction that would call attention to whats happening in Jurez, and in the end, I think we met our objective.

Except that despite the global publicity, nothing changed. for the photographers murder. One triggerman was sentenced to thirty years in the 2008 reporter killing, but whoever ordered the hit was never identified. Instead of pursuing the killers, Mexican officials had a way of blaming the victims, implying that if they were killed, they must have fallen into malos pasos , bad ways.

Then one journalist killing changed the narrative.

On April 28, 2012, Regina Martnez, correspondent for the national investigative magazine Proceso , was discovered beaten to death in her bathroom in Xalapa, the capital city of the Gulf state of Veracruz. Her death made news around the world. In a state known for corruption, Regina was the author of many exclusives. And no one could argue that she was dirty. Nor could they argue that it was a cartel hit. Regina covered government.

Even so, people who knew her, or who worked with her, or who were family members, refused to speak publicly about the case, clearly out of fear. In effect, they were unwittingly helping those who wanted to obscure the facts. Within a year, authorities arrested an alleged suspect and declared the case closed.