by Chivis Martinez for Borderland Beat
Ismael Bojórquez heard
Chapo Guzman’s son was dead in a Lamborghini.
When he reached the scene there was no body, and no Lamborghini. Those at the scene denied an event had
occurred, yet the investigative reporter looked around and saw fresh blood,
shards of broken glass and a bumper which had broken off. He
photographed what he saw, and visited the municipal police who denied
anything happened…ditto the police commander, he said he could not speak about it. The
state Attorney’s office was called, they said “Officially, nothing occurred,”
Bojórquez recalls. “Officially, he wasn’t even dead.”
So it goes in Mexico, where what is permitted to be
reported is determined by one cartel or the other. The reality is cartels do not like much narco
news printed. Period. Even without writing an opinion, strictly
reporting basic facts, they will say when, how or if it is reported.
Rio Doce a Culiacan newspaper, in the hometown of
Mexico’s most powerful cartel, that insists on writing about the drug violence.
There are other places, online and in print, where Mexican readers can go to
find body counts or pictures of blood-spattered crime scenes, but Riodoce prides
itself on its investigative work, on trying to ferret out the stories that
neither the cartels nor the government want told.
They are targeted.
Even on the web, where their former California Web company pulled the
Welcome mat after being hacked into.
An example how selective reporting is in Mexico, is something
that happened in my city in Mexico. Our comandante
was killed. He was a regional comandante in charge of
several cities, much like the sheriff of Los Angeles County being in charge of multiple cities. We suffered a week of great violence. A war between cartels. I heard the comandante was dead. Killed by narcos and left a few blocks from
my office with a narco message pinned to his chest with ice picks. I sourced the news and nothing. Not for 4 days. And when it finally appeared, it was not on the front page, it was
minimal reporting at best. We were lucky; often
there is no reporting that violence has occurred.
This sets Rio Doce apart from all others. Rio Doce reports the facts of Mexico’s Narco
violence, uncut, unedited from outside influences.
Mexico is now deemed by the International Press Institute as being the most dangerous nation to be a reporter in.
This is an extremely long article, but so worth the time
reading. It is filled with intriguing
stories and information. You will see
Borderland Beat is mentioned in the Bloomberg article. I will comment in respect to the mention; I
do worry about placing my staff in danger, I am constantly rethinking my actions
and words and wonder if I inadvertently compromised their safety.
We reporters are here for the same reason
Buggs created BB to begin with. We are strong in
the belief that change is brought by the informed. We hope in our small way we can provide information
to the English speaking world of what exists, hopefully that will transcend into creating
a life with greater security in the Mexico we love…. Paz, Chivis
Ismael
Bojórquez, Director, Riodoce “Up to this point, despite the risks, I believe that there are conditions under which we can do this work, and with the small hope that things will get better,” he says. “It’s really a hope in that hope, because the truth is I don’t see a way out for the country in the short term. But you have to bet on something."
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Ismael Bojorquez Perea was born in Sinaloa, Mexico on
August 18, 1956.
He obtained a Social Communication degree
at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa.
He began his professional carreer as a TV
reporter in 1990, in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, and then, in 1992, he joined the Daily
Noroeste in Culiacán where he was part of the research team and beacame head of
information.
During that time, he worked as
correspondant for the national magazine Proceso.
In the fall of 2002, along
with a group of colleagues, he founded the weekly newspaper RIODOCE, which
firstly suffered the harassment of local governments, too sensitive to
criticism and now struggles to survive the neverending violence in Sinaloa, due
to the hostility of organised crime. He is currently Managing Editor of
RIODOCE, which has become national and international reference by receiving the
2011 Maria Cabot Prize awarded by the Columbia University. He believes that
journalism in Mexico is going through the worst time of its history, due to the
daily and deadly threats of the Narco. (WAN)
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by Drake Bennett for Bloomberg Business Week
Early on Aug. 29, 2010, Ismael Bojórquez, editor of the
newsweekly Riodoce, in the Mexican city of Culiacán, learned that a man
in his 20s had been found dead of bullet wounds in a white Lamborghini. Murders
of young men are common in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa and
the seat of power of the cartel of the same name, but this one was different.
The victim, Bojórquez heard, was the son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head
of the Sinaloa cartel and the most powerful drug kingpin in Mexico. Two and a
half years earlier, when another of El Chapo’s sons was gunned down by the
rival Beltrán Leyva cartel, it ignited a bloody war—387 people were killed in
Culiacán in three months. In a way, El Chapo (Spanish for “Shorty”; Guzmán is
5’6”) and his empire are the main subjects of Riodoce, one of the only
periodicals in Mexico that seriously investigates drug violence.
Bojórquez, a compact man with a thin moustache and a
broad, angular face, immediately drove to the crime scene. It was on a street
called Presa Azúcar, in a residential part of town. To his surprise, there was
no body, and no car—only some blood on the asphalt, scattered shards of broken
glass, and pieces of a car bumper. He took a few pictures and went to a police
post about 200 meters down the street, but the officers there said they didn’t
know anything and referred him to the district police commander. When Bojórquez
called on him, the commander said he couldn’t talk about it. The state’s
attorney’s office, too, said nothing. “Officially, nothing occurred,” Bojórquez
recalls. “Officially, he wasn’t even dead.”
Riodoce’s staff started calling around; they have sources in law
enforcement, in the state and local government, and others who are linked in
various ways to the cartels. Bojórquez’s original source, it turned out, had
been wrong. The car was not a Lamborghini, it was a Ferrari. And the victim
wasn’t El Chapo’s son but a different narco scion, Marcial Fernández. His
father, Manuel, was an ally of El Chapo’s, and a brutal man known alternately
as “El Animal” and “La Puerca” (“the sow”).
Riodoce’s reporters also learned about a strange altercation
that had taken place at the crime scene: As the police and a few onlookers were
standing around Fernández’s bullet-riddled sports car waiting for the coroner to
arrive, several heavily armed men drove up. They leveled their weapons at the
police, took Fernández’s body, and drove off. When two news photographers
showed up, the police told them nothing had happened, then left. Later that
night, the armed strangers returned and towed the Ferrari away, leaving only
the broken glass and blood that Bojórquez found after sunrise.
None of this made the news at first. Fernández had been
killed at 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, but a day and then a week went by with no
coverage of the shooting. Like many of the killings in Culiacán, Fernández’s
death had been declared off limits. “The police kept quiet, the government kept
quiet, but the press kept quiet as well,” says Bojórquez. One of the
photographers who had been on the scene left town, fearing for his life.
According to Reporters Without Borders, 80 Mexican
journalists have been killed and 14 others have disappeared since 2000. In
Juárez, on the country’s northern border, the city’s biggest newspaper, El
Diario, has had both a police reporter and a photographer murdered in the
past three and a half years. The editor of El Mañana, in Nuevo Laredo,
was stabbed to death in 2004, and two years later assailants sprayed gunfire
and tossed a grenade into the newspaper’s offices, badly wounding a veteran
reporter. Riodoce had its own grenade attack in 2009, although no one
was hurt. Mexico last year beat out Iraq as the most dangerous country in the
world for journalists in the rankings of the International Press Institute, and
the first death of 2012 took place on Jan. 6, when a reporter from La Ultima
Palabra, in a suburb of Monterrey, was chased down in his car and shot to
death.
“Crimes against journalists occur with impunity at the
local level,” says Jorge Zepeda Patterson, the former editor of El Universal
in Mexico City. “We are losing our capacity to say what’s happening to our
country.”
The attacks are meant to cow Mexico’s media, and they
have succeeded: Today the vast majority of the nation’s newspapers, magazines,
and radio and TV stations do not cover the bloodshed. Especially at the local
level, news outlets will, at most, reprint official press releases about
arrests and killings. In the worst areas, the narcos even have press
handlers—unidentified voices on the other end of the phone warning a reporter
not to cover a shooting, or giving the order to write about the “message
killing” of a rival.