Armando Rodriguez, at El Diario newspaper, was the top crime reporter in Ciudad Juarez, the deadliest city in Mexico.
He had seen it all. But this was different. This was personal. Last month someone had hung the decapitated body of a local drug thug from a bridge on the airport road.
Later the head appeared at the Plaza of Journalists, wrapped in a plastic bag placed at the foot of a statue of a newsboy hawking papers.
Arturo Chacon, a reporter at El Norte, a competing daily in this tough border city, said the message was unmistakable: Journalists beware.
“We knew it was bad but we didn’t know how bad,” he said. “A week later I heard the shots and then I heard they got Armando.”
Rodriguez, 40, was killed on November 13 in front of his home by a gunman. He was shot ten times while warming up his car, in front of his 8-year-old daughter, as he was about to drive her to school.
The slaying highlighted the growing danger to Mexican journalists reporting on the drug war, which has claimed more than 4,500 lives since President Felipe Calderon unleashed the army and police against the cartels and corrupt officials in early 2007.
Most journalists continue to do their jobs but concede they are limiting their coverage of the carnage.
The attacks against journalists, which run from threats hissed on their mobile phones to grenades lobbed into their newsrooms, form a new front in the larger war the drug cartels are waging against Mexico’s social and government institutions.
The resulting damage is undermining Mexican civil society as the rich and powerful cartels compete for control of smuggling routes into the United States, which is consuming all the cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana the cartels can deliver.
Mexican journalists say the threats may serve to muzzle their investigations and stop them from naming names. They also suggest that the cartels are attacking them to demonstrate their own power.
For years, Mexican journalists often served as stenographers to the government. Now an increasingly independent press is being weakened by the drug war.
Since 2000, 28 journalists have been slain and eight others have disappeared and are assumed dead, according to Ricardo Gonzalez of the group Article 19, which works to protect freedom of expression in Mexico, now the most dangerous country in Latin America in which to be a journalist. Gonzalez said: “Journalists are now included among the casualties of this war.”
Five reporters have been killed this year. “The border is now a terrifying place to be a journalist and Juarez is ground zero,” said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The extreme violence is fuelled by the crackdown on traffickers by the Calderon administration and by a power struggle between two competing cartels, one based in Juarez, the other in Culiacan, bitter enemies engaged in a mafia bloodbath.
The US has pledged $400 million to help Calderon fight the cartels.
Last month two grenades exploded outside the offices of El Debate newspaper in Culiacan. No one was injured.
“I don’t know if they were narcos or if this was an act of revenge or just some jokers. But we think it was a message, a message for all media and the government,” said Lucia Mimiaga, editorial director at El Debate.
Several newspapers have been attacked by men spraying bullets from machine guns in the past two years.
Editors at many newspapers and television stations now say they no longer deeply investigate the cartels or attempt to plot the intersecting lines of corruption and cash between the drug traffickers and their partners in government, business and law enforcement.
News directors insist that organised crime in Mexico employs all the tools of terrorism — violence, threats, sophisticated use of the media — to create an atmosphere of fear and impunity.
“I am the first to recognise that this situation is intolerable,” Chihuahua state Attorney-General Patricia Gonzalez said in a statement promising to find Rodriguez’s killer.
But none of the journalists interviewed expects the case to be solved. Rodriguez’s editor calls the killing “an assassination”.
Reporters along the border say they are routinely threatened in phone calls, e-mails and on internet comment boards.
Many times, the journalists say, they know who is calling but dare not report the warnings to authorities for fear their complaints will be passed to cartel enforcers, who include former and present military and police officers.
Many say their families beg them to find other work, or cover sports, business or society news.
Ciudad Juarez, a major border crossing crowded with Burger Kings and eateries, is a gritty industrial city of 1.5 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso.
There have been 1,300 homicides in Juarez this year, including the deaths of more than 60 police officers.
Many people were killed in gangland-style executions in daylight.
Several reporters have fled Juarez. Jorge Luis Aguirre, the owner of a popular news website called La Polaka, told reporters he was threatened over the phone while on his way to Rodriguez’s funeral.
He gathered his family and raced to the US. A correspondent for the Mexico City-based Reforma newspaper also left the city. A reporter for El Diario crossed the border after being threatened and is seeking political asylum in El Paso after repeated threats.
In Juarez, where a journalist might earn about $200 a week, the newspapers have removed bylines as a security measure.
Photographers wear Kevlar vests. Reporters have been ordered by their editors not to arrive on crime scenes before the police and when they do go, they are told to arrive in groups, along with their competitors.
Police routinely tell reporters to stay away entirely from certain crime scenes.
“Right now we have no permanent police reporters,” said Alfredo Quijano, editor of El Norte. Because of threats, his two crime reporters have been reassigned to other duties, he said.
“We’re in a tough spot. We’re trapped between the police and the mafia — and they are making a sandwich of the journalists,” he said.
Quijano said he is limiting stories to the facts of a killing — the who, what, where, when — and forgoing questions about the why. “We print the basic news. What the government says. So we are not publishing everything we know, which is not good. But we are trying to survive,” Quijano said.
Pedro Torres, editor at El Diario, was a close friend of Rodriguez, who was a godfather to his son.
As Torres was being interviewed, his mobile phone rang with the news that a dentist down the street had just been kidnapped from his clinic by a gang of armed men.
The information did not faze him. “No longer do they just threaten us,” Torres said. “Now they act.”
Torres said he does not know who killed his ace reporter. “Many people assume he was killed by the narcos but I am not so sure,” he said.
“He was killed by organised crime, I will say that. In Mexico, organised crime can mean the traffickers, the police, the government or the people in the office buildings.”
Some of the last stories Rodriguez wrote include reports about relatives of a top prosecutor in Chihuahua state, where Juarez is located. Rodriguez tied the relatives to the drug trade. The prosecutor is the same Patricia Gonzalez who vowed to find Rodriguez’s killer.
In the dark world of drugs and corruption in Juarez, speculation about Rodriguez’s death is rampant.
Some of his fellow journalists wonder why he would have been killed by the drug traffickers, since he had covered them for so long. Why now?
“Perhaps it was not even personal,” said Jesus Meza, president of the Association of Journalists in Ciudad Juarez.
“Maybe it wasn’t anything he wrote. He was a prominent journalist. He was known. So he was killed as a symbol. He was killed to create panic and paranoia. This is a technique of terrorism. They want everyone to be afraid because that will destabilise the society.”
The slain reporter’s wife, Blanca Martinez, is preparing to leave Juarez with her children, perhaps to seek asylum in the US. “When he wrote, he was an aggressive man. He wrote strong and hard,” she said in an interview a week after her husband’s death.
She sat quietly in their study, dark circles of grief bruising her eyes. The two met when they worked at a TV station.
The couple recently spent several months in El Paso after previous threats in January. She said: “Yes, maybe he was a symbol.”
“I just want to get out of this house,”she added.
