CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – (Sept. 25, 2008) Alfredo Corchado admits feeling occasional pangs of guilt when he strolls along the neatly manicured grass of Harvard Yard, when only two months ago he was flitting along the dusty U.S.-Mexico border exposing brutal drug cartels as a reporter for The Dallas Morning News.
“It’s great to walk around and not always look back,” he says, glancing over his shoulder one Thursday afternoon out a coffee shop window. “But I also want to get back to it.”
In fact, Corchado plans to return to Mexico as soon as his yearlong fellowship with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University ends – back to the place where drug runners rule entire towns with impunity and more than 3,000 civilians died in 2008 alone. "A new record," he said.
Corchado has spent the last 11 years working for the Morning News, mostly in Mexico City as the paper’s bureau chief for Mexico and now all Latin America. He also spent time with The Wall Street Journal and the now-defunct El Paso Herald-Post.
Finding sources on the drug trade in Mexico is a daunting task made even harder by threats to journalists themselves. In 2007, five journalists were killed or disappeared in Mexico, according to the annual report of Reporters Without Borders, a group that advocates for journalists’ safety.
Most journalists take precautions to protect themselves, Corchado said, because they know police won’t help them. In some towns, law enforcement is literally nonexistent – a May 31 New York Times article reported the entire police force of a town called Villa Ahumada fled a day after gunmen killed their police chief. Most police who stay in border towns are widely thought to be corrupt.
“The cartel leaders reach out to them,” Corchado said. “They say how much are you making? I can triple that.”
A WIDENING WAR
Other criminal gangs have deeper connections to the north than just distributors. An elite military unit of the Mexican Army known as the GAFES received training in the United States to fight border cartels, but may be fighting some of their own rogue members, according to a Nov. 15, 2005 report by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
Some 35 to 38 ex-GAFES became “guardian angels” for the drug cartels, Corchado said, bringing all their special ops expertise and military discipline to help the traffickers keep an iron grip on the most lucrative smuggling corridors. These rogue soldiers became known as the Zetas.
The Zetas came into closer contact than Corchado would have liked at a bar in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico in March 2005. Corchado said he was drinking with the publisher of a local daily in the border town when a man entered the room and made the sign of a pistol with his hand and pointed at them.
Corchado remembers thinking, “Maybe this is the way people greet people here – you know, ‘bang, bang.’ People are getting shot here all the time.”
Corchado’s friend quickly ended that illusion. The bartender, too, told the two men they would have to leave because they were not safe.
The two men decided to stay longer because no one had come to speak to them, until the man who threatened them left, Corchado said. Then another came in, sat down beside Corchado and his friend, and told them he was from the Zetas.
“He says, ‘Look, you’ll be fine here as long as you don’t ask where the Zetas train,” Corchado said.
On the other hand, the man said, if Corchado dug too deep into the Zeta’s location and top leadership, the gang would film themselves killing him and send the video to his family. To prove this, the man handed Corchado the address of his parents’ home in Texas. The next day, Corchado boarded the first flight to Dallas.
Since he was “on the radar screen,” Corchado’s newspaper sent him to Washington, D.C. for training in tactics to avoid getting killed in a war zone, where he sat with about a dozen other civilians, mostly contractors heading to Iraq, learning how to evade kidnappers and militants.
At one point, Corchado said the Morning News proposed he travel in an armored car, an idea he quickly rejected because it would be impossible to get any reporting done. Instead, he plans to take less drastic precautions like traveling in large groups.
‘NOT LOOKING FOR SYMPATHY’
The job of reporting in what some call a war zone is made all the harder by the Mexican public’s lack of interest in far-off killings that don’t immediately affect them. Until this year, Corchado said most journalists were though of as “collateral damage” in the war on drugs.
“That attitude is changing and it’s changing pretty fast,” Corchado said. “It’s hard to get any empathy from the Mexican public, but I think as the war widens, you’re starting to see it.”
The conflict became broader than ever Sept. 15 after a man lobbed a grenade into a crowd of revelers celebrating the country’s Independence Day in Morelia, Mexico. At least seven people were killed, and the federal government accused drug cartels of the attack after Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent thousands of troops to the area to suppress them, according to the Associated Press.
Roberta García, a French teacher who lives in Mexico City, admitted she feels less sympathy for journalists than for other civilians who do nothing to put themselves in drug dealers’ way.
“The risk that comes with it is just part of what they do,” García said. “No one should be have to be harmed, but it has to be considered because narcos are extremely dangerous criminals… the situation is really bad when violence gets to people who have nothing to do with it, who aren't drug dealers or policemen or journalists. That's when I think the situation is frustrating, unfair, and helpless.”
For now, Corchado is taking advantage of the extensive resources and more peaceful environment Harvard offers to complete a paper on drug violence, a topic he knows well. He said he will continue to report on the ground as best he can, but within reason, repeating a maxim spoken by reporters who cover dangerous areas.
“No story is worth your life” he said. “If you’re dead, you can’t report.”
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