SECRETO A VOCES

As far as scoops go, it wasn’t a bad story. A drug lord from the provincial narco-capital of Nogales had been attacked along with his 17-year-old stepdaughter. She died, he was shot four times, taking two to the arm. The Feds made note of who they were dealing with, Jose Peralta, the second in command of Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s operations in Nogales. Someone in Justice Department realized who he was and wrote it up into an intelligence report sent out to Arizona law enforcement. Someone else passed the report on to me and thank goodness they did; sources are the bedrock of how I get anything done around here.

My Mexican colleagues love getting their hands on these types of information pieces, slices of understanding into the world that surrounds them, and best of all, corroborated by gringo law enforcement, instant credibility, in the eyes of their editors if not their own. The Americans aren’t the best source of information, relying on Mexican media and confidential informants to get them the information they need for these intel reports. But they’re far better than their Mexico counterparts whose abject silence gives absolutely nothing.

So I in turn, passed the intel report over to my colleague in Hermosillo. Nothing to win a Pulitzer over, nothing major, just a bit of insight into who is running the Nogales plaza these days. Trading information is all part of the game and that reporter’s given me bits and pieces in the past.

I was surprised the next morning when the intel report appeared in two newspapers, his and a competitor’s, out front, bold headlines shouting it just under the masthead.

The first thing I thought was that someone in the Feds was passing these things around, the next thought was that my guy was going to be pissed – namely at me – thinking I'd handed it off.

“I know, I know,” my colleague said when I walked into his office and took a seat, didn't even open my mouth yet. “I’m the one who gave it to them," he says, flipping a pencil into the air and catching it before he leans back and grins.

“I have to protect myself.”

So this is how some reporters get their work done safely in this country: They scoop themselves, shielding themselves from any fallout in an umbrella of mass media and hope nobody notices. The new buzzword among U.S media organizations is “crowd-sourcing,” the idea that a flock of people monitoring the same event can produce a more deeply reported piece than one person alone. Mexican reporters have been doing it for years, not because analysts say they should but because their survival depends on it. If a story comes out in multiple publications without a byline, then everyone can point west up Kino Boulevard where the Mexican Attorney General's Office broods over the highway, and suggest it came from there. Take it up with them. It's one way the Mexican Feds' silence tends to be very helpful.

I've always known it, but I hadn’t truly realized before just how prevalent the atmosphere of insecurity has settled on those who can’t come and go like I can. I’m in Tucson, Ariz., most of the time, not in Mexico. I keep an AR-15 Bushmaster and a .357 Ruger nearby, I know my neighbors, they know me, and I can trust that my 9-1-1 system will work if I need to call the cops (I may get put on hold for a few minutes thanks to an overburdened system, but that’s another story). And for the most part, I can trust the cop who shows up. More often than my counterparts in Sonora can, anyway.

Little over a year ago, the State Department let it be known that some clown had threatened to off an American reporter. Some people in the Feds thought it was me, (nice to find that out a month later). Others assumed it was Freddy Corchado at Dallas Morning News, or Mariano Castillo at San Antonio Express-News, since the threat came from Laredo and they'd both been hitting the Gulf Cartel pretty heavily. It turned out to be some crackhead in the federal penitentiary, having fun with an informant. Good times. But I'm off track; my point being that American journalists don't live anywhere near the veiled threats of their Mexican counterparts, no matter how good they are.

They’re living under that shadow all the time; manipulating variants of truth to keep themselves alive. And when a name comes up, Peralta for instance, the truths are shrouded even deeper.

Peralta was brought to a hospital in Tucson – the Americans claim they didn’t know who he was until way late – and sent back to Nogales. The same day he returned, three bodies were found decapitated in a posh Nogales neighborhood with a message to Peralta’s rival.

There was no intel report to give any insight into those murders. The stories the next day reported what happened when, where, and, once the heads were found, who.

The fifth question, the meat of why journalism matters, will never be answered. Why.