Vold og frykt er en del av jobben

Marcela Turati dekker den meksikanske narkokrigen, men ikke med blodige beskrivelser av drap og skamferte lik. Hun skriver om de som overlever.

I boken “Fuego Cruzado” (“Kryssild”) har hun samlet historier om meksikanere som har mistet noen av sine kjære etter at myndighetene erklærte krig mot narkokartellene som har terrorisert de nordlige provinsene av landet. Hun skriver om enkeltskjebner, om ødelagte familier og om en frykt som kan lamme hele lokalsamfunn.

Turati var en av innlederne på seminaret Frie Medier, arrangert i Tønsberg av Institutt for journalistikk sist fredag, før Skup-konferansen startet. Her er hennes innledning, om arbeidet hun gjør som journalist i et av verdens farligste områder:

To put a human face on the cold numbers

By Marcela Turati

Good afternoon.
Thank you for the invitation and for your interest in what is happening in Mexico.

I must confess that I am a little intimidated sitting here in front of you. I consider myself a common reporter. I used to cover subjects like social inequality, indigenous communities, social movements or issues like human rights, the environment or corruption in social programs.

I am one of many reporters who had promised myself never to cover stories related to drug trafficking. I didn’t understand them, and I thought of them as isolated events.

But violence left us not options: it affects every journalist in Mexico. And it forced us to change.

After 2007 I began to find towns where blood was still fresh on the floor, from the bodies of murdered youngsters. Towns where people had nightmares and were crying of fear. Then I covered the first massacres of young people, where the killers seemed like ghosts that left no trail. I began to meet people who accused the army of taking a family member, whom they never saw again. I got advice from friends, asking me not to travel to towns where I used to report on peasants’ lives - because those places were no longer safe. Or they were owned by the drug cartels. My own family told me how in their city people, set their own curfews out of fear of being killed.

Like every Mexican, I was surprised by the violence. And like every journalist, I was unprepared for it.

Many times we feel we are standing in quicksand. We do learn from our mistakes. Like that time when I went to report life in ghost towns, where people had fled, and I was stopped by a man who warned me that I should get out and not ask anymore questions. Or when I checked out a murder accusation against the army, and I realized that I was asking inside the house of the town’s drug lord. Scared, I ran as soon as I got the chance.

But I can come here and talk to you. Many reporters covering similar stories have not survived or cannot talk about it.

In this undeclared war (undeclared because the government doesn’t want us calling it a war; and the United Nations will not declare it an internal armed conflict) I decided to focus on a subject often ignored, because violence is so loud: the invisible stories, the victims of violence.

Even though I was not interested in the subject of drug trafficking, or the narcos, I realized that the years I spent reporting testimonials in the most forgotten areas of Mexico had given me some tools – the tools to see the wave of violence from perspectives that are usually ignored in the news frenzy that runs from homicide to homicide, and from shootout to shootout.

I report on the fifty thousand children orphaned in this war, their pain, their incapacity to understand what happened, their traumas.

I report on the legions of young widows who become heads of their families but need psychological and legal assistance. Or just economic help to put food on the table.

I report on the stigma attached to the families of murdered people, whom the government and the society blame for their own deaths. Because “sure, if they were killed is because they did something wrong”. That’s the explanation.

I report on the survivors of shootouts who are wounded and need rehabilitation. On the families who spent years looking for a relative, or many relatives, who remain disappeared. On the dangers at drug rehab centers, places preferred for massacres. On the people wounded or killed by the government forces. And on people who become refugees of the violence, and human rights activists who are murdered, exiled or threatened.

My job is to touch the pain. To chronicle the horror. To put names on new phenomena, like “youth-icide”. But also to talk about new social forces and find citizens that have begun to organize.

As many colleagues, I have become a war correspondent in my own country, trying to put a human face on the cold numbers that tell us that more than thirty-five thousand people have been killed in four years. And the bloodshed isn’t stopping.

I try to rescue some of the stories from the common graves, and make sense out of them, most recently in a book published, a couple of months ago, using this material.

I have also reported on how journalists live in danger zones. There is one level of risk for foreign correspondents. Another for a journalist like me who live in Mexico City, travels to Ciudad Juarez, and return home. And another for local reporters living and working in the crossfire.

During my travels, most of them to the border areas, I have found many reporters who feel like dead men walking. Like war veterans, they feel indifferent towards life, and some have even written their last wills.

I have gotten notes from some of them giving me sensitive information that I can use as proof if something happens to them. I know photographers in cities like Juarez, who have the record of photographing up to 19 dead bodies in just one shift.

Many reporters are threatened. They risk their lives on every story. Many are silenced. Many have nightmares. I think almost we all do. We dream of hitmen - the sicarios - or of massacres. For some this is everyday, in an unstoppable psychological decay.

I have heard stunning testimonials. A reporter in northern Mexico heard that an armed group had taken a colleague out of his house in front of his family one night. He was sure he would be next so he said goodbye to his family and sat down in the living room to wait for the sicarios. He didn’t want to be taken from bed, in front of his family.

He’s still alive, but his friend was murdered. His body turned up the next day.

Then there was the editor of a website in southern Mexico who received phone calls with orders from drug lords to photograph severed human heads and publish the pictures. Because most of the bodies are tortured, dismembered, disfigurated and disintegrated in an orgy of horror. He’s still alive because he follows everyone’s orders: a drug cartel, a rival cartel, or from the army.

A freelance, who was kidnapped with another colleague by the narcos, was tortured and presented by the government at a press conference when he was rescued. He had to flee with his family and move to US, left alone by his tv employers.

Not every place is extreme. Not everyone is silenced. Mexico City, for example, is a bubble, far from the violence. But there is a tendency toward silence, a forced self-censorship, a tendency to believe that nothing’s happening. Some make heroic efforts to inform, to keep investigating.

Reporters and editors are doing what we can. In some places rival news organizations get together to write security protocols, forcing themselves to go out to report together, forgetting about scoops and exclusives. Some papers don’t use bylines for drug stories.

Some reporters, like me, are organized in a network we call “Journalists on Foot”, where we request training courses and seminars from experts in subjects we need. For example, how do you interview children affected by violence; how do you protect yourself; how do you handle fear; and how do you raise awareness so that the country doesn’t become a zone of silence and how to handle our fear.

There are some exceptions, but media owners are not interested in the safety of their reporters. They have not taken this issue seriously. Death is considered a laboral risk. At the newsroom we haven’t the practice to talk about what we feel, our fears and nightmares. Those who show they are frightened can lose merits. So everyone deal with it in their own way.

And work is harder and harder.

Proceso, the magazine where I work, has the widest coverage of violence and drug trafficking in the country, but it is subject to an advertisement blockade from the government. Some reporters have had to be displaced because of threats from drug lords or local authorities.

Every now and then, the magazine is attacked by the government. The army say the magazine is irresponsible and a propaganda tool for the cartels’. Proceso is accused of showing blood and denouncing the complicity between politicians and the cartels. However, in some places Proceso is the only source of information because the local press is silenced.

Over the years, the discussion of the role of the press has become polarized. Like in a war, either you are with the government or you are a narcos-publicist. The accusation is dangerous. Readers’ comments on the web are more virulent every day.

This is the overview in the Mexican press. It is not reassuring, but I can tell you that we are looking for ways to protect the information from censorship, either by politicians or drug lords, and to protect ourselves, so that we don’t lose our lives or let fear take away our capacity to enjoy life.

This is what I wanted to share with you. This story of how violence changed the life of a common reporter.

Thank you.