Death AND Defiance
‘To do journalism (in Mexico) is to walk on an invisible line drawn by the bad guys ... in a field strewn with explosives.’
JAVIER Valdez Cárdenas was a swashbuckling investigative reporter and editor — a hard-bitten but poetic journalist with a fedora hat and Clark Kent glasses who might strike a pose or flip you the bird if you requested a portrait in his cluttered newsroom.
Valdez was an author as well as perhaps the best known investigative journalist in Mexico who still dared to regularly publish hard-hitting pieces on the narco-trade in these dark days when so many of his colleagues have ended up in exile, dead or disappeared.
He and his work were too big and bold for any conventional newspaper. His alternative weekly, founded in 2003, is based in the city of Culiacán — ground zero of Mexico’s most powerful Sinaloa cartel.
Valdez called his scrappy little paper Riodoce — the 12th river. There are 11 rivers in Sinaloa, a prosperous Pacific coast state that is home to Mexico’s tomato fields, some of its beautiful beaches as well as a ruthless multinational criminal mafia. The 12th river, he’d said, is the river of ideas.
On Monday, Valdez was murdered — the fifth Mexican journalist killed this year alone.
“The assassins pretended to be stealing his car, but fired 12 times with two different weapons. We have no doubt that whoever ordered this crime told the hit men to be sure of their objective,” the Riodoce staff reported.
And though Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has promised an investigation, no journalist is counting on him. On Tuesday, reporters all across Mexico marched for Valdez and against impunity. As they protested, they read aloud passages from Valdez’s books and columns.
In 2011, Valdez won the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists — an event for which he donned a bow tie and tux and was lauded in New York City as one of Mexico’s greatest drug war journalists.
By then, he’d already published books and landed a gig as a correspondent for the left-leaning Mexico City daily La Jornada. And he and his staff also had suffered a grenade attack on their offices. Not long after that incident, Riodoce’s website was offline for days as the result of what CPJ calls a “denial of service attack.” Threats were constant, yet Valdez told CPJ: “To die would be to stop writing.”
It was a duty he “felt deeply,” freelance journalist Sara Rafsky wrote: “Javier exemplified a generation of journalists who woke up in the last decade to find they had become war reporters in their own backyards …”
Indeed, in his CPJ award acceptance speech, Valdez painted a disturbing picture of what it’s like to practice journalism in Mexico: “To do journalism is to walk on an invisible line drawn by the bad guys — who are in drug
trafficking and in the government — in a field strewn with explosives.”
Many of my fellow investigative reporting friends have taken Valdez’s death personally. They have lost a chief in the idiosyncratic tribe whose members dare to take risks to cover the darkest side of corruption.
For years, the Sinaloan’s fierce, charismatic writing and his telling of taboo topics attracted dedicated fans and followers. Michel Marizco, an Arizona-based border reporter, was one of the many to seek Valdez’s counsel. Marizco recalled being inspired by a Valdez narrative about how a large restaurant temporarily shut its doors when El Chapo Guzman entered. No diners left after the notorious cartel boss offered to cover everyone’s tab if they all peacefully handed over their cell phones. It was a typically surreal Sinaloan scene everyone knew about, but no one normally would have dared to publicly describe.
Valdez was exposed to danger in his tiny newsroom, yet he maintained contact with a vast network of investigative reporters and far-flung foreign correspondents. He mentored, guided, inspired. Some of the Americas’ toughest journalists counted on his support, including Ginna Morelo, an investigative reporter whose Colombian coastal state is similarly plagued with violence. In her darkest moments, he’d told her: Smile, always smile.
As the murders of journalists mounted in Mexico in recent years, Valdez had protested against the deaths of colleagues and the government’s failure to bring the murderers to justice.
In March, Miroslava Breach, a journalist leader in the conflict-torn state of Chihuahua was shot eight times. Breach, like Valdez, was a correspondent for La Jornada. She’d served as a leader for other journalists in her own conflict-ridden state of Chihuahua. She, too, specialized in human rights and organized crime reporting. And she, too, was ambushed while driving her car.
Valdez’s response was outrage — and defiance. He tweeted: “If the penalty for covering hell is death then let them kill us all.”