War Crimes
( Getty Images
)
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. Since January, 2007, 6800 people have been killed. Since the year 2000, 24 journalists have been killed and 7 have vanished. These aren't Iraq stats. They're from a war much closer to home, the Mexican drug war, raging in cities just across the U.S. border. In places like Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana, the mounting violence is all about the competition between drug cartels for control of supply routes north.
And for journalists, it is one of the most dangerous stories in the world. Vicente Calderon is a veteran television reporter in Tijuana and editor of Tijuanapress.com. Amy Isackson is a longtime reporter for KPBS, the NPR affiliate in San Diego. They spoke to us from Tijuana, where they're attempting to bridge the 15-mile divide between their two cities by joining forces on an ongoing radio and Web series about the drug wars, called Border Battle.
This is from a recent report, a recording they made at 5 a.m. at the scene of newly discovered casualties in a residential neighborhood in Tijuana.
VICENTE CALDERON:
It looks like all of them are blindfolded and they have their tied - hands tied up with duct tape.
AMY ISACKSON:
One has his pants down. It’s Friday, and this is the fifth discovery of bodies early in the morning this week. There’s been bodies every day since Monday.
BOB GARFIELD:
Calderon says he’s been covering Tijuana for nearly 25 years, and though there has been drug-related violence for some time, he’s never seen violence of this scale or severity.
VICENTE CALDERON:
It’s just not the death toll but also the gruesomeness of many of these killings, and also the fact that many innocents have been casualties of this war between two rival gangs.
AMY ISACKSON:
It’s almost like the different groups are trying to one-up each other with decapitations or with cutting people’s tongues out. It just gets more and more hideous every day, it seems.
BOB GARFIELD:
I want our listeners to hear some of your reporting. This was a visit to the Lower California Crime Lab in Tijuana.
AMY ISACKSON:
Fernando Zuniga Chicate - he’s a forensic investigator with the State of Baja, California. We went to visit him one day in late October, and at that point there’d been about 150 murders, I believe, in Tijuana.
FERNANDO ZUNIGA CHICATE:
Too much. [LAUGHS] Too much, the bodies. Some days are nine, other day are six or four. I want to try to solve the situation to bring justice to someone. And my way of working here is to bring dead people to his relatives.
AMY ISACKSON:
Mr. Chicate was talking to us about how he was working some days 16 hours, that the lab had just actually run out of their year’s worth of supplies in October. He was showing us freezers full of specimens.
One of the ways that drug cartels have been killing, or at least disposing of people, is to dissolve them in big industrial trash cans full of acid. And so he had frozen jars of the liquid that had come out of these trash cans that they had to do testing on.
BOB GARFIELD:
Tijuana is not a small town. The population is on the order of two million. How much has the drug trade penetrated the city itself?
AMY ISACKSON:
We actually made this map, and we mapped out all of the killing for two months, from the end of September through the end of November. It is all over the city. There really aren't many areas that have gone untouched.
Also, the violence has become more public. There’s occasionally shoot outs in the street, and so the risk of being touched by the violence – still rare, but it has become greater.
And it’s all over the newspapers. It’s all over the media here. It’s something that I think is in the back of most people’s mind most of the time.
BOB GARFIELD:
But that coverage, I gather, has changed somewhat because of the violence against journalists themselves. What was drug war coverage like, for example, five years ago, and what is the status quo today?
VICENTE CALDERON:
The problem of covering the stories associated with drug trafficking or with Mafia has been dangerous here since the mid-'80s, when the drug cartel organization that we know as the Tijuana Drug Cartel established themselves here.
So the problem, the risk has been here for a long time, specifically with investigative pieces in depth on the cartel. But in the last months, as part of this wave of violence here in Tijuana, we haven't seen – and I hope we will not see that in the future – an increase of attacks on journalists.
It’s dangerous because you don't know who you will be dealing with. Or you can go to a crime scene, you talk to somebody and you don't know if you can trust them.
BOB GARFIELD:
Have either of you felt particularly at risk? Have you been threatened?
VICENTE CALDERON:
I was. I was several years ago. I was working with a local television station, and we were covering a series of murders, and we found out that they were linked to one of the drug organizations.
And we began receiving phone calls, and it got a little bit scary when they began giving us the description of the cars that we were driving and some more detailed information of our routines.
Fortunately, one of those guys that I think was associated with these threats was arrested, and I'm glad to say that I never heard again from something like that.
AMY ISACKSON:
I think that I've generally – I don't know if this is correct or not – but felt some insulation in that I'm a U.S. reporter and come to Tijuana and then can cross back to San Diego. I feel that, you know, if they came after me that it would cause an international incident.
That’s not to say, however, that U.S. reporters haven't been killed here in Mexico.
BOB GARFIELD:
Is there any sense that the media owners have asked their editorial staffs to back off the story for either for safety reasons or ones more sinister?
AMY ISACKSON:
I'll answer from the U.S. perspective first. There are two of us, two U.S. reporters from San Diego – Sandra Dibble, who works for The Union Tribune, and myself – who come to Tijuana regularly to report. San Diego TV stations generally don't allow people to come here to report.
VICENTE CALDERON:
I will say the only parallel that I see with Baghdad, it’s the fact that most of the reporters from the U.S. media outlets, it’s done by stringers or freelancers here. Amy and Sandra Dibble from The Union Tribune, the only ones who I see regularly working the beat here in Tijuana.
And the thing is, this was happening even before this wave of violence. It’s happening because more of budget reasons, I guess, and also there’s more concerns about the insurance.
That’s very sad, because I think the coverage in the U.S. media has a very direct effect on the lives of many people here in Tijuana. And I've seen very terrible journalism in U.S. media, and I will not tell them how to do their stories, but I will hope that they will be willing to spend more time working the beat.
AMY ISACKSON:
I think that there’s also a sense among many in the U.S., and San Diego in particular, that this is Mexico’s drug war. But it is tied to San Diego as well, and, at base, this is a fight for U.S. demand. And also, they say that 95 percent of the guns that cartels are using come from the U.S.
BOB GARFIELD:
There are a number of perfectly rational reasons for the San Diego media not to dig into the Tijuana drug war story. One, of course, is the danger to its staff. Another is the utter implosion of the media business that has put quite a crimp on resources even within the local community.
But I wonder, since you just said what you just said, how much of it has to do with an indifference to a bunch of Mexicans who have made the mistake of getting involved with the druggies to begin with?
AMY ISACKSON:
So many people have a tendency to just write it off as that’s just Mexico and that’s what happens. For example, last April we did a story. There was a shootout that’s actually the genesis of the violence that we're seeing now. There was a shootout and 13 people were left bleeding in the street.
And a lot of people I talked to, my colleagues included, started to question, why are we telling this story? We don't tell stories about gang violence in San Diego so why are we telling this story? And it’s an education process of saying, it’s part of an international story that’s playing out right on our doorstep.
VICENTE CALDERON:
Many of them think, well, it’s Tijuana. What can you expect? Violence is a way of life in Mexico. And that’s very sad, because this eventually will affect the progress made in very specific sectors in San Diego. The economy of this region, it’s closely linked – and I have to say, Bob, that this was unfortunately also happening on the Mexican side.
In many ways, when I talked to public officials in Mexico, even the governor once told me, well, it’s not nice people, the one who is getting killed. We need to say, you cannot be used to this level of violence.
And even the kids here are now familiar with the terms, way people gets killed as part of the drug trade. So the insensitivity is not just from San Diego to Tijuana but also from many of the sectors of the government and the society. And this is the result of years and years of impunity and negligence and corruption on the Mexican side.
BOB GARFIELD:
You met a woman named Melba Romero, a physician in Tijuana. What she had to tell you was – well, it gave me pause.
AMY ISACKSON:
Dr. Melba Romero, she’s a general practitioner in Tijuana, and we talked to her at a peace march a few weeks ago. And what she was saying, basically, was what a lot of people at this march were saying. The government here in Baja, California, the government of Mexico should just make a pact with the cartel.
DR. MELBA ROMERO:
We know that drug trafficking is going to be there. Nobody’s going to end that. It’s practically impossible. I think they do need to pact. You do your things, but leave our people alone.
AMY ISACKSON:
Do you care which cartel they pact with?
DR. MELBA ROMERO:
I really don't care, [LAUGHS] as long as don't mix with us.
AMY ISACKSON:
I think there’s this feeling that the only way that the killings are going to diminish is if the government says, okay, guys, you pass your drugs, get them across the border, but just stop killing and stop kidnapping so many people.
They don't see demand in the U.S. diminishing. They don't see governments, either the U.S. government, necessarily, or the Mexican government, being able to control something that generates – I think the estimate is something like 10 billion dollars a year.
VICENTE CALDERON:
They tried to establish the rule of law here, but they think that the cartels are so powerful that there’s nothing really that the authorities can do about it. There is some kind of [LAUGHS] nostalgia by the old drug traffickers, the ones who were just keeping the killing among themselves. It’s very – almost surreal.
But people are so desperate for the level of violence and how is this affecting every activity around their lives, they just want a solution.
BOB GARFIELD:
Amy, Vicente, thank you so much.
VINCENTE CALDERON:
Thank you, Bob.
AMY ISACKSON:
Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
Vicente Calderon and Amy Isackson are collaborating from their respective sides of the border on a series called Border Battle for Tijuanapress.com and KPBS, the San Diego NPR affiliate, KPBS.org.
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. Since January, 2007, 6800 people have been killed. Since the year 2000, 24 journalists have been killed and 7 have vanished. These aren't Iraq stats. They're from a war much closer to home, the Mexican drug war, raging in cities just across the U.S. border. In places like Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana, the mounting violence is all about the competition between drug cartels for control of supply routes north.
And for journalists, it is one of the most dangerous stories in the world. Vicente Calderon is a veteran television reporter in Tijuana and editor of Tijuanapress.com. Amy Isackson is a longtime reporter for KPBS, the NPR affiliate in San Diego. They spoke to us from Tijuana, where they're attempting to bridge the 15-mile divide between their two cities by joining forces on an ongoing radio and Web series about the drug wars, called Border Battle.
This is from a recent report, a recording they made at 5 a.m. at the scene of newly discovered casualties in a residential neighborhood in Tijuana.
VICENTE CALDERON:
It looks like all of them are blindfolded and they have their tied - hands tied up with duct tape.
AMY ISACKSON:
One has his pants down. It’s Friday, and this is the fifth discovery of bodies early in the morning this week. There’s been bodies every day since Monday.
BOB GARFIELD:
Calderon says he’s been covering Tijuana for nearly 25 years, and though there has been drug-related violence for some time, he’s never seen violence of this scale or severity.
VICENTE CALDERON:
It’s just not the death toll but also the gruesomeness of many of these killings, and also the fact that many innocents have been casualties of this war between two rival gangs.
AMY ISACKSON:
It’s almost like the different groups are trying to one-up each other with decapitations or with cutting people’s tongues out. It just gets more and more hideous every day, it seems.
BOB GARFIELD:
I want our listeners to hear some of your reporting. This was a visit to the Lower California Crime Lab in Tijuana.
AMY ISACKSON:
Fernando Zuniga Chicate - he’s a forensic investigator with the State of Baja, California. We went to visit him one day in late October, and at that point there’d been about 150 murders, I believe, in Tijuana.
FERNANDO ZUNIGA CHICATE:
Too much. [LAUGHS] Too much, the bodies. Some days are nine, other day are six or four. I want to try to solve the situation to bring justice to someone. And my way of working here is to bring dead people to his relatives.
AMY ISACKSON:
Mr. Chicate was talking to us about how he was working some days 16 hours, that the lab had just actually run out of their year’s worth of supplies in October. He was showing us freezers full of specimens.
One of the ways that drug cartels have been killing, or at least disposing of people, is to dissolve them in big industrial trash cans full of acid. And so he had frozen jars of the liquid that had come out of these trash cans that they had to do testing on.
BOB GARFIELD:
Tijuana is not a small town. The population is on the order of two million. How much has the drug trade penetrated the city itself?
AMY ISACKSON:
We actually made this map, and we mapped out all of the killing for two months, from the end of September through the end of November. It is all over the city. There really aren't many areas that have gone untouched.
Also, the violence has become more public. There’s occasionally shoot outs in the street, and so the risk of being touched by the violence – still rare, but it has become greater.
And it’s all over the newspapers. It’s all over the media here. It’s something that I think is in the back of most people’s mind most of the time.
BOB GARFIELD:
But that coverage, I gather, has changed somewhat because of the violence against journalists themselves. What was drug war coverage like, for example, five years ago, and what is the status quo today?
VICENTE CALDERON:
The problem of covering the stories associated with drug trafficking or with Mafia has been dangerous here since the mid-'80s, when the drug cartel organization that we know as the Tijuana Drug Cartel established themselves here.
So the problem, the risk has been here for a long time, specifically with investigative pieces in depth on the cartel. But in the last months, as part of this wave of violence here in Tijuana, we haven't seen – and I hope we will not see that in the future – an increase of attacks on journalists.
It’s dangerous because you don't know who you will be dealing with. Or you can go to a crime scene, you talk to somebody and you don't know if you can trust them.
BOB GARFIELD:
Have either of you felt particularly at risk? Have you been threatened?
VICENTE CALDERON:
I was. I was several years ago. I was working with a local television station, and we were covering a series of murders, and we found out that they were linked to one of the drug organizations.
And we began receiving phone calls, and it got a little bit scary when they began giving us the description of the cars that we were driving and some more detailed information of our routines.
Fortunately, one of those guys that I think was associated with these threats was arrested, and I'm glad to say that I never heard again from something like that.
AMY ISACKSON:
I think that I've generally – I don't know if this is correct or not – but felt some insulation in that I'm a U.S. reporter and come to Tijuana and then can cross back to San Diego. I feel that, you know, if they came after me that it would cause an international incident.
That’s not to say, however, that U.S. reporters haven't been killed here in Mexico.
BOB GARFIELD:
Is there any sense that the media owners have asked their editorial staffs to back off the story for either for safety reasons or ones more sinister?
AMY ISACKSON:
I'll answer from the U.S. perspective first. There are two of us, two U.S. reporters from San Diego – Sandra Dibble, who works for The Union Tribune, and myself – who come to Tijuana regularly to report. San Diego TV stations generally don't allow people to come here to report.
VICENTE CALDERON:
I will say the only parallel that I see with Baghdad, it’s the fact that most of the reporters from the U.S. media outlets, it’s done by stringers or freelancers here. Amy and Sandra Dibble from The Union Tribune, the only ones who I see regularly working the beat here in Tijuana.
And the thing is, this was happening even before this wave of violence. It’s happening because more of budget reasons, I guess, and also there’s more concerns about the insurance.
That’s very sad, because I think the coverage in the U.S. media has a very direct effect on the lives of many people here in Tijuana. And I've seen very terrible journalism in U.S. media, and I will not tell them how to do their stories, but I will hope that they will be willing to spend more time working the beat.
AMY ISACKSON:
I think that there’s also a sense among many in the U.S., and San Diego in particular, that this is Mexico’s drug war. But it is tied to San Diego as well, and, at base, this is a fight for U.S. demand. And also, they say that 95 percent of the guns that cartels are using come from the U.S.
BOB GARFIELD:
There are a number of perfectly rational reasons for the San Diego media not to dig into the Tijuana drug war story. One, of course, is the danger to its staff. Another is the utter implosion of the media business that has put quite a crimp on resources even within the local community.
But I wonder, since you just said what you just said, how much of it has to do with an indifference to a bunch of Mexicans who have made the mistake of getting involved with the druggies to begin with?
AMY ISACKSON:
So many people have a tendency to just write it off as that’s just Mexico and that’s what happens. For example, last April we did a story. There was a shootout that’s actually the genesis of the violence that we're seeing now. There was a shootout and 13 people were left bleeding in the street.
And a lot of people I talked to, my colleagues included, started to question, why are we telling this story? We don't tell stories about gang violence in San Diego so why are we telling this story? And it’s an education process of saying, it’s part of an international story that’s playing out right on our doorstep.
VICENTE CALDERON:
Many of them think, well, it’s Tijuana. What can you expect? Violence is a way of life in Mexico. And that’s very sad, because this eventually will affect the progress made in very specific sectors in San Diego. The economy of this region, it’s closely linked – and I have to say, Bob, that this was unfortunately also happening on the Mexican side.
In many ways, when I talked to public officials in Mexico, even the governor once told me, well, it’s not nice people, the one who is getting killed. We need to say, you cannot be used to this level of violence.
And even the kids here are now familiar with the terms, way people gets killed as part of the drug trade. So the insensitivity is not just from San Diego to Tijuana but also from many of the sectors of the government and the society. And this is the result of years and years of impunity and negligence and corruption on the Mexican side.
BOB GARFIELD:
You met a woman named Melba Romero, a physician in Tijuana. What she had to tell you was – well, it gave me pause.
AMY ISACKSON:
Dr. Melba Romero, she’s a general practitioner in Tijuana, and we talked to her at a peace march a few weeks ago. And what she was saying, basically, was what a lot of people at this march were saying. The government here in Baja, California, the government of Mexico should just make a pact with the cartel.
DR. MELBA ROMERO:
We know that drug trafficking is going to be there. Nobody’s going to end that. It’s practically impossible. I think they do need to pact. You do your things, but leave our people alone.
AMY ISACKSON:
Do you care which cartel they pact with?
DR. MELBA ROMERO:
I really don't care, [LAUGHS] as long as don't mix with us.
AMY ISACKSON:
I think there’s this feeling that the only way that the killings are going to diminish is if the government says, okay, guys, you pass your drugs, get them across the border, but just stop killing and stop kidnapping so many people.
They don't see demand in the U.S. diminishing. They don't see governments, either the U.S. government, necessarily, or the Mexican government, being able to control something that generates – I think the estimate is something like 10 billion dollars a year.
VICENTE CALDERON:
They tried to establish the rule of law here, but they think that the cartels are so powerful that there’s nothing really that the authorities can do about it. There is some kind of [LAUGHS] nostalgia by the old drug traffickers, the ones who were just keeping the killing among themselves. It’s very – almost surreal.
But people are so desperate for the level of violence and how is this affecting every activity around their lives, they just want a solution.
BOB GARFIELD:
Amy, Vicente, thank you so much.
VINCENTE CALDERON:
Thank you, Bob.
AMY ISACKSON:
Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
Vicente Calderon and Amy Isackson are collaborating from their respective sides of the border on a series called Border Battle for Tijuanapress.com and KPBS, the San Diego NPR affiliate, KPBS.org.
