Abstract
Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries to be a reporter today, but these dangers are not spread evenly between local and foreign reporters. Author
Writer and reporter Tim MacGabhann
CREDIT: Pablo Pérez Lombardini
“I feel guilty being able to talk about it because I’m not there now,” said MacGabhann, who lived in Mexico for three years. And he feels guilt because of the disparity between the fates of local journalists in Mexico and foreign ones there.
“As foreign correspondents we depend on the work of local reporters, as fixers, to read their stories, and yet they pick up the tab.”
MacGabhann’s novel, which is being optioned by publishers at present, was recently completed while on the prestigious MA in creative writing at the University of East An-glia. It revolves around a foreign journalist, Andrew (alive), who is haunted by Carlos, a Mexican journalist (dead). Carlos is based on the photo-journalist Ruben Espinosa, who was murdered in Mexico City in 2015, where he was living having fled his home state of Veracruz for fear of his life. While MacGabhann didn’t meet Espinosa, he was shot a mere two blocks away from MacGab-hann’s house.
MacGabhann lived in Mexico following university and reported for international media such as Al Jazeera from many states, including Veracruz. “I was a young Irish freelancer working in Veracruz. It highlights the difference in outcomes between local and foreign reporters. His case was a lightning bolt.”
MacGabhann has only experienced minor skirmishes, such as the time when his car was followed by a truck of men carrying rifles while reporting from Basihuare in the mountains of Chihuahua and another incident involving a gun being pointed “at my kidneys in a bar in Veracruz”. But, as MacGabhann said, these incidents were because he was in dangerous areas, not because he was a reporter. “It was not intimidation of the kind local journalists face.”
The threats, MacGabhann said, come from many angles. In the passage below, Carlos has been killed by two men who are masquerading as cops. Asked whether policemen would have been interpreted by Carlos as less threatening than cartel members, MacGabhann shakes his head. “People talk about their fear of the cops. The popular way of describing it is you can’t really tell them [cops and cartels] apart.”
“It’s depressing after a while because even if you go to a street stall to get a taco, you know the person running it is probably paying a cop just to be allowed to make a living.”
Does anyone protect journalists I ask?
“NGOs can get you a panic button, one that you wear around your wrist or at home, but lots of journalists don’t use them. They’re too afraid because the person threatening you is likely to be a cop and you’re not going to call the cops about the cops.” There’s also a government journalism protection scheme, but it’s accused of being underfunded.
The book’s provisional title is Call Him Mine, “because at this point the gravity and scale of disappearances and human rights violations means everyone has a tragedy in their lives”. MacGabhann explained how he was watching an episode of Narcos, the Net-flix show about Pablo Escobar in Colombia, when his then girlfriend asked him to stop the show as one of the murders was too similar to the murder of her uncle in Mexico.
Despite the violence, journalists continue to write and expose the country’s crime and corruption.
“They would rather be killed than stop reporting,” said MacGabhann. “They can’t stand by with their arms folded. If you grow up there and see the terrible things happening you feel a sense of civic duty.”
MacGabhann hopes the book will provide a window into these horrors for a wide audience, who might not necessarily know much about this side of Mexico.
“Mexican journalists are my heroes,” MacGabhann said. “Eating a pizza with Lydia Cacho, that was the highlight of my career,” he added, speaking of the award-winning journalist, whose 2003 exposure of a paedophile ring led to her arrest and imprisonment.
Call him mine
Carlos’ face was everywhere when I drove to meet my editor the next morning.
Carlos’ byline photo, the good one, the one that showed him in his brown leather jacket, with his wavy shoulder-length hair shining and glossy like in a L’Oreal advert, the photo his mother had held up for the cameras at the crematorium — that photo, it was on page one, everywhere.
Under the photos, you could read what the Zetas had done to him.
His face stared up from stacks of papers beside the door in the Oxxo convenience store at the corner of Monterrey and Viaducto.
The text told you how he’d been smoking a joint in his sitting room when two Zetas dressed as Veracruz State Police arrived at his door and smashed his big Ray-Bans with a fist to the face.
How the bad taste of red had welled up over his dislodged teeth.
How he had crawled, nearly made it to the kitchen, tried to send a message on his phone.
How one of them had dragged him back into the sitting room, dragged him upright, caught him in a chokehold until his hyoid bone crunched.
His face looked down from a copy of El Metro that lay on the dashboard of a bus driving beside my jeep along Baja California.
How they’d fired seven bullets into him: one in each wrist, one in each palm, two in the chest, one in the forehead. How the first bullet had hit between third and fourth rib on the right side, puncturing a lung. How the second bullet had hit between fifth and sixth rib on the left side, destroying his heart completely.
The pages, I paid them little mind; all of that data, none of it was anything I hadn’t been able to find out from Teresa at forensics, or from watching Donovan clean the bloodstains from Carlos’ floor two nights before.
His face even peeked out from a quesadilla stand on Nuevo Leon, where the vendor had crumpled page one of La Razon around her fist to dry off her hotplates.
A quemarropa, the pages said. At clothes-burning range.
That seemed about right: Carlos, he still had the burns on his shirt sitting beside me in the passenger seat.
“How’s it feel?” I asked him.
“What?” he said, lighting a cigarette with a thin blue flame that appeared on the end of his finger.
“The fame,” I said, nodding towards a newsstand whose metal lattice was clothes-pegged with copies of Reforma and El Universal and Proceso.
Carlos’ face looked back from every one, rippling in the light wind.
“Oh,” said Carlos in the passenger seat, smoke crinkling out from the bullet holes on his chest. “Rad!”
“Vapid,” I said. “This celebrity thing, it suits you.”
“Fuck you, Andrew.” He flicked ash. “To be honest, I’d rather have made page one with, you know, photos by me. Not photos of me.”
“Who wouldn’t,” I said and pulled into an open-air parking lot on Avenida Amsterdam, near the restaurant where I was due to meet Dave.
CREDIT: Alex Green
The viene-viene sitting by the entrance, he was reading El Universal. “Ooh, nice meta touch,” said Carlos. El Universal’s page one, it showed Carlos’ mother standing on the crematorium steps, staring into the silver ripple of flashing cameras, holding up the photo everyone else had led with. “Hey, Ma,” said Carlos. The handbrake jerked back, the sound like a hyoid bone snapping. A reverse chokehold, Teresa from forensics had told me. Even though I’d slept well, and even though we’d left early, the drive from my neighbourhood had been nothing but smog and traffic and burning, platinum sunlight.
CREDIT: Alex Green
“Dammit,” I said, fixing my hair in the rearview mirror. “I’m a mess.”
“The old traffic sweats,” said Carlos from the passenger seat. “Got to say, I don’t miss those.”
“Hoping my shirt’s loud enough to drown out my odour,” I said, and gave up on my hair, trying to fix the rumples in my shirt instead.
“It probably is.”
“I do have louder.”
“Yeah, but you’re meeting your editor — not fucken… Pablo Escobar.”
“Have you met Pablo Escobar out there, Carlos?” I said, patting my forehead dry with a tissue, and starting to look something like presentable again.
“Where do you think I am?”
“I’ve yet to speculate. How do I look?” My heartbeat was a quick electric tick, and the road-rage boiling lava-hot in my guts had started to cool.
“Fine,” said Carlos. “Ish.” My lips’ corners were dry, tacky, white.
“I look like I slept in a washing machine. Fuck. I don’t get it. We left early.”
“Early doesn’t exist in Mexico City, man,” said Carlos.
“Can I have another cigarette?” “Glove compartment.” “What a shame — only three left.” “Aw, fuck you, Carlos.” “Ni mierda, I need one. They’re in short supply out here,” he said, lighting the cigarette with his finger.
“What you need is a mentada de madre.” “Fuck you, Andrew.” “You know, I’m still goog-ling this kind of thing,” I said. “Post-traumatic stress.”
“Oh, you have?” said Carlos. “That’s borderline offensive.”
“No, but listen: I think I have it. The symptoms, just listen.” The tackiness at my mouth’s corners, it was kind of gone now. Lukewarm water from my dinged metal flask had helped a bit.
“I think your job explains the symptoms.”
“No, listen. ‘Constant low-level tension’,” I said, counting on a finger. “Definitely have.”
“That’s because you’re broke all the time,” said Carlos. “C’mon, man, we all are. We go to stupid places for too little money that always comes way too late.”
He wasn’t wrong. The end of every month, money was like a rat scrabbling under my ribs.
“‘Envisioning conspiracies’,” I said. “Definitely do.” “Brother,” said Carlos, blowing a smoke ring, “Mexico is a conspiracy.” ‘“Emotional unavailability’? Definitely have.”
“You’re not emotionally unavailable,” scoffed Carlos. “You’re pouring your heart out to a ghost.”
“‘Shutting off’? Definitely do.”
“That’s the job, man,” said Carlos. “A poker face is, like, a hundred per cent of the job.”
“Oh, meaning I’m probably fine?”
“Yeah, man.”
“Oh, meaning this conversation is fine?” A zero of smoke floated from Carlos’ lips.
“Obviously.”
“Yeah, well, you know, you would say that,” I said, turning back to the mirror. “Biased.” “Acid,” said Carlos gravely. “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.” He frowned, looked at me. “Or – you know, grows an extra ‘I’.”
“Why not both,” I said, and opened the door. From the drenched park and its big prehistoric-looking lushness of cactus and palm trees and banana leaves breathed this rich, deep green smell.
“There, toke on that breath of park,” said Carlos. “That’ll calm you down.”
“I’m twenty minutes late.”
“Brother, that’s on time in Mexico City time,” said Carlos, his bullet-holed hand cold on my shoulder. “Matter of fact, could even count as early.”
“Yeah, well. Hey, I’ll catch you later, yeah?” I said, swiping loose change and the two remaining cigarettes from the dash.
“Don’t worry, man,’ said Carlos. ‘This is a respectable neighbourhood. The valets don’t steal from the dashboard around here.”
“It’s not them I’m worried about,” I said, sliding the cigarettes into the packet again. “It’s you.”
“Aw, fuck you, Andrew.”
“What’ll you do while I’m gone?” I was out of the car now, giving my jacket lapels a last quick neatening tug. Carlos shrugged, rested an ankle on his knee, his hands behind his head.
He shut his eyes. “Aqui nomas. Casual. Probably sleep for a bit.”
“You still do that?” Carlos popped open an eye. Blood ringed the iris. Subconjunctival haemorrhaging, Teresa from forensics had told me. “Evidently,” he said.
Oh, OK,” I said, rapping my knuckles on the metal roof.
Carlos threw an empty coffee cup at me. “Buddy, just go see the man. You’re stalling.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “See you, man.”
“Fucking goodbye already, man, Jesus.”
Talking to Carlos, it almost made things better. Handing 50 pesos to the viene-viene by the entrance and, walking towards the restaurant where I was due to meet Dave, I almost felt good. My horn-rims were gleaming, my boots were polished to a high shine and even through the adrenal tang of sweat my Armani Code still smelled pretty strong.
Yeah, well, you know. You know I was none of those things.