Hunting season on Mexican reporters

I love Mexico. I’ve lived on both sides of our common border for 40 years, and I’ve puttered around 32 of Mexico’s 34 states — all but Colima and Quintana Roo.

I say this not to strut my bona fides, but to say that when I say that AMLO is an accomplice of terrorists, I do not say it because I’m racist, or illiterate, or monolingual, or a Republican.

I say it because President Lỏpez Obrador has effectively deputized drug cartels to murder journalists in Mexico. And AMLO continues to do so.

Lỏpez Obrador berates reporters nearly every day at his morning press conference, though a reporter has been murdered every 10 days under AMLO’s reign, during which 100 homicides have been committed every day in his country — one every 14 minutes, around the clock — 99% of which will never be prosecuted.

Hmmm. I wonder who coulda done it?

A good introduction to this abomination is New York Times reporter Nicholas Casey’s Oct. 3, 2023, piece in The New York Times Magazine: “Who Hired the Hitmen to Silence Zitácuaro?”

Nick Casey is a top-notch reporter. But let me sketch in some background.

I was a Mexico correspondent for the Arizona Republic in the late 1980s. I lived in Hermosillo, Sonora, with my Salvadoran wife and our three little kids. Every six weeks or so, the Federal Judicial Police pulled me over to try to steal my pickup truck.

Mexico in those days imposed a 100% tax on imported pickups, so a stolen pickup with a washed title could keep a Mexican cop on Easy Street … until he stole the next one.

Every time this happened, I apologized profusely for whatever I had not just done, and said meekly in Spanish: “I do not want to violate your country’s laws, because I am your guest here.” Pause, to give him my card. “I’m a reporter for The Arizona Republic.”

And every time, that squad’s OG — excuse me, I mean the police officer— waved off his crew: a bunch of black-clad gangsters with .45s in their pants.

In those days I sent my stories to Phoenix through a Radio Shack computer, a TRS-80, known to reporters as a Trash 80. I needed acoustic couplers — big old earphones — to clip onto both ends of the phone. To alert the news desk, I called before transmitting, to let them boot up the program.

And every time I told the news desk, or anyone anywhere, that the Mexican government was heavily involved in drug traffic, the phone went dead. All the reporters I knew said that. Mexican reporters had sense enough not to say it over the phone.

One day downtown in Hermosillo, as I carried an armload of Mexican newspapers and magazines toward my pickup, a friendly young guy in a suit — white shirt, no tie — hailed me and said in perfect English: “Hi, Robert. How did your interview with (a person) go yesterday?”

I said, “What?”

He smiled and said: “Give my regards to (another guy) when you see him at 11 tomorrow.”

I said: “Who are you?”

He said, still friendly: “I’m the guy who’s assigned to watch you.” Pause. Smile. “Just so you know.”

A friendly warning, 35 years ago.

Another day, the only quasi-reliable Sonoran daily had a story on a drug bust in the desert. The Mexican army had descended in helicopters onto two barren ranchos and arrested the ranchers.

So I drove there in my much-admired pickup. The multigenerational families the federales had hauled in lived on both sides of Carlos Quintero’s ranch.

The cops didn’t touch the Quintero ranch, of course. That goes without saying under torture.

They hauled in and did godnose what else to the Quinteros’ innocent neighbors.

No one would talk to me on the ranchos, except one old abuelo, who told me how it was, while his children and grandchildren gathered around and said, “No, Papá! No, Papá!”

And he said: “Shut up, niños. It’ll come out sooner or later.”

The week after my story appeared in the Republic, Sonoran newspapers reported that I was a CIA agent. Not just a snooper now: a target.

That was a generation ago. The cartels are exponentially more powerful today. They effectively rule hundreds of Mexican towns: millions of Mexican citizens.

I am not accusing AMLO of being on the take from drug cartels. But I know, and so does he, that his police are on the take from the cartels, as were and are many of his governors and other high-ranking officials, up to Cabinet level.

Mexico’s government and army know who run the cartels, and where the bosses live. And how the government could stop it. If it wanted. But it doesn’t.

Because you can’t fire your boss.

You don’t want to piss off the guys who could put a stop order on your paycheck.

Just like tax fraud in the United States. 

AMLO could round up all the cartel chiefs and their top lieutenants in three days, or kill them, if he wanted to. But why should he?

Look at it from his point of view: The cartels pay better wages than AMLO does, to tens of thousands of AMLO’S nominal employees and police forces. So he lets ‘em. Anything to keep a phony peace in the family. And AMLO will chip in with minimum wage: $1.73 an hour.

The United States government is not innocent in this. We do the same things, in our own way.

But 99.99% of the Mexican refugees arriving at our southern gates are not involved in it. They are fleeing it.

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