On the Border Letter From Matamoros
Dead Line
In Mexico, how journalists cover the drug war that has terrorized the borderlands can mean the difference between life and death. Which is why a strict set of rules—and punishments—dictates what can and can’t be written.
STOP THE PRESS: The killing of Gulf cartel leader Cardenas made the papers in Brownsville. But not in Matamoros.
Photograph by Adam Voorhes
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The newest tourist attraction in Matamoros is a bullet-shattered storefront on Abasolo Street where infamous drug lord Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén, a.k.a. Tony Tormenta, was killed on a Friday afternoon last November in a terrifying gun battle involving 150 Mexican marines, 17 military vehicles, and 3 helicopters. In the weeks after the incident, matamorenses streamed past the destroyed pink-and-white building to take cell phone pictures or pocket a shard of glass as a memento of what was quickly dubbed “Black Friday.” During the shooting, which also claimed the lives of four other cartel members, two marines, a soldier, and a newspaper reporter, locals had cowered in their homes and offices while explosions erupted all across the city. Businesses closed and international bridges shut down. Across the river, at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, campus was evacuated in fear of stray bullets whizzing north.
The slaying of Cárdenas, one of the leaders of the powerful Gulf cartel and one of the DEA’s eleven Most Wanted fugitives in Mexico, was news all over the world. The Brownsville Herald topped a detailed story with the headline “Deadly Day, Gulf Cartel Leader Dead.” Reuters and the Associated Press covered the incident. In England, the BBC, the Daily Mail, and the Independent all ran stories. The news even reached Mumbai. Yet in Matamoros, coverage was evasive. The local paper El Mañana bannered “Unleashed Hell!” across its front page, but the story scrupulously avoided Cárdenas’s name, mentioning only “various casualties of unknown individuals.” In this city of half a million, no newspaper, radio station, television station, or website was willing to print the fact that the military had just trapped and killed one of the country’s most feared crime bosses. “Our profession has been practically kidnapped,” a longtime crime reporter in Matamoros explained to me.
A Mexican drug trafficking organization is like any other large, wealthy corporation—it seeks to maximize good press and minimize bad press. And in Matamoros, as in some other cities along the border, as the cartels have become more bellicose in recent years, they have also become more sophisticated, and relentless, about public relations. The Gulf cartel, in its home base of Matamoros, does everything it can to suppress news that might calentar la plaza, or “heat up” the smuggling corridor, even while fighting a hugely disruptive war against the Zetas, the former enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel, which split off to become a cartel of its own. Since early 2010, the fighting between the two groups has intensified in the state of Tamaulipas, as the Zetas have tried to push the Gulf out. Yet since leaders of the Gulf cartel do not like to see headlines about their frequent shoot-outs with the Zetas—or the authorities—and since the penalties for displeasing the cartel are extremely serious, local journalists have found themselves in a strange position, unable to produce even the most basic news about the war that is terrorizing their city.
There are four major daily papers in Matamoros: El Mañana, Expreso, El Bravo, and Contacto. All have been compelled to censor their coverage of the mafia war and refrain from digging too deeply. The Tony Tormenta shooting is the best illustration of this, but another widely cited example of how the cartel war has warped reality are the two accounts that were published of a different shooting that took place last November. After two police officers were machine-gunned while sitting in their patrol car in Colonia Tecnológico, a neighborhood on the city’s east side, state officials called a press conference and declared that the men were collateral victims of a jealous lover’s attack on his girlfriend’s husband. The explanation was dubious at best, but El Mañana ran with it, turning the story into a telenovela script, reporting that the lovestruck swain, “deranged by his torrid passion,” had insensibly killed the patrolmen while he was on his way to commit his crime of the heart. Two and a half weeks later, the same officials paraded two alleged Zeta assassins before the press and announced, straight-faced, that it was actually these men who had killed the policemen.
The clearest critique of what is going on comes from the journalists themselves. According to several that I spoke with, the dueling accounts of the cop murders were the result of state officials, who are believed to be in the pocket of the Gulf cartel, trying first to disguise a successful Zeta hit so as not to irritate the Gulf and then, after the rival triggermen were captured, broadcasting a Zeta defeat in order to please the Gulf. In both cases, the newspapers simply repeated the story line offered by the officials. To deviate from the script and violate the rules of cartel PR would have been to invite a punishment that every reporter understands and fears: la tabla. The word refers to a large wooden paddle commonly used in Mexican kitchens to stir pork carnitas in big pots. But cartel mobsters use it as an instrument of enforcement.
“They tell you, ‘Either come to us or we’ll come for you,’” explained Rafael, a journalist who works for one of the city’s broadcast outlets. “It’s better if you go to them, because if they have to come for you it will be worse.” (Rafael was one of four veteran Matamoros journalists who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. Their names have all been changed.) He said that a tabliza involves putting a gun to the victim’s head, wetting the board, and then beating him with it. “I know various co-workers who were victims,” he told me. “They couldn’t walk for days.”
And still, they might have been the lucky ones. In 2004 Francisco Arratia Saldierna, a 55-year-old Matamoros newspaper columnist for four regional newspapers who wrote about corruption and organized crime, was so brutally beaten with la tabla that he died of a heart attack. Then there’s the story, circulating in Reynosa, about a holiday party held several years ago by some Gulf cartel mobsters. Normally revelers would eat, drink, and break piñatas; on this night they ate, drank, and used la tabla to bludgeon adversaries of the cartel, who were hanging from the ceiling by their hands.
“We’re not inventing this stuff,” said another journalist I’ll call Bartolomé. “This is the reality we’re living.” Bartolomé was afraid to be seen speaking in the newsroom with a gringo journalist, fearing a cartel informant would take notice, so our interview was conducted inside his car in a hotel parking lot. Federal police reinforcements happened to be billeted nearby, and as we talked, four blue pickups filled with ski-masked agents gripping assault rifles roared out of the lot. “No one wants to be a hero,” Bartolomé said, chuckling darkly.
One of the ironies, and frustrations, of the situation for reporters like Rafael and Bartolomé is that regional Mexican newspapers—far more than their American counterparts—typically thrive on sensational crime news. Paco, a longtime police beat reporter in Matamoros, lamented that all the big stories are having to be hushed up, while traffic accidents and simple robberies make the front page. “Before,” he told me, “when there was a gunfight or a homicide, we’d say, ‘Hot damn!’ Journalistically, that’s good. Now when there’s a murder, we say, ‘What are we going to do?’”
The dilemma is clear to Jorge Luis Sierra (his real name), an investigative reporter who was formerly the managing editor of Rumbo del Valle, a newspaper in McAllen. “The Gulf cartel employs las tablizas as a way to intimidate journalists,” he told me. “And it seems the narcos have achieved their objective, because they’ve silenced practically all the newspapers down there.”
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