Weekly vows to keep probing Mexico cartels
Despite the threats and the murder of colleague Javier Valdez, the weekly Riodoce plans to continue its role as a leader in investigating drug trafficking in Mexico. The office is austere, with fewer than a dozen computers spread around the small rented apartment. Safety measures seem conspicuously absent here. The entrance of the building, in the center of Culiacan, in western Sinaloa state, is always open. There are no surveillance cameras. And the door into the green-walled apartment that is home to Riodoce is not reinforced.
Yellowing newspapers pile up in the hallways. The office of Valdez, who was murdered on Monday at the age of 50, is tiny: a simple table, file boxes on the floor, a telephone, a printer, a framed photograph, some Post-its on the wall along with a few Riodoce front-pages. Valdez, who was also an AFP freelancer and a correspondent for La Jornada newspaper, had a love for “this combination of investigative journalism and prose,” said Ismael Bojorquez, a founder of Riodoce along with Valdez.
“Mala Yerba,” Valdez’s weekly column since 2003, reflected those dual loves. Riodoce was “overwhelmed” by drug cartel violence, and felt obliged to go “all out” to cover the trafficking scene. “We mark certain lines (not to cross) and certain precautions to take,” Bojorquez said. “We couldn’t not cover the issue in a state like Sinaloa. Either you do it or you make a fool of yourself.”
A line crossed, but where?
Riodoce faces many challenges, not least its financing. Forty percent of its income comes from sales. A copy sells for 10 pesos (about 50 cents), while the digital version is free. About 8,000 copies are sold each week. It has nonetheless managed to establish itself as a respected investigative reporting platform, with a wide network of contacts, in a country where the threat of violence means selfcensorship is the rule.
The courage of its journalists earned Riodoce the 2011 Maria Moors Cabot award from Columbia University in New York. The citation noted that the paper’s journalists “heroically struggle” in one of “the most dangerous places in the world to practice journalism.” In a display of both its courage and its connections, Riodoce on February 19 published a cover story by Valdez on his interview with Damaso Lopez, nicknamed “The Graduate,” the one-time right-hand man of Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Lopez was arrested May 2 at an apartment in an upscale Mexico City neighborhood. In Valdez’s interview, he denied having attacked the sons of “El Chapo,” despite their claims to the contrary, and said he was a friend of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, another close collaborator of “El Chapo.” But the interview provoked “considerable annoyance” between Guzman’s sons and Lopez’s faction, Bojorquez acknowledged. The day it was published, several men followed the newspaper’s distributors around to try to buy up all the copies. “I do not know which line we crossed,” but “the context in which Javier was killed was foreshadowed” by the publication of the interview.