In the early hours of a November morning in 2011, a car pulled in front of the offices of El Siglo de Torrón, a newspaper based in the north-central Mexican city of Comarca Lagunera. The driver got out, lugging a vat of gasoline. He poured it over the car and lit a fuse. While the vehicle burned, he turned to the newspaper offices and shot an AK-47 at the building.
No one was harmed in the drive-by, perpetrated by a criminal gang in response to a series of stories the newspaper had published on cartel arrests. But to Editor in Chief Javier Garza Ramos, it was a clear warning to the paper of record in the northern Mexican states of Coahuila and Durango–another reminder of the dangers the newspaper faced for reporting.
The first threats from drug cartels came less than a year after Garza took the helm of El Siglo de Torrón in 2006. “Whenever a drug cartel tries to take over a city or a region, one of the first things they do is really pay attention to what the media is saying about them,” recalls Garza. This has led some publications to cease covering crime altogether. But instead of halting coverage–or putting his reporters in danger–Garza got strategic.
He took bylines off stories so a single reporter couldn’t be held responsible. He put an end to ambulance chasing: Reporters would wait until a crime scene had been locked down by police before arriving and would buddy up with another journalist or a photographer for the trip.
Then came a return to ‘fair and balanced.’ “The crime beat in Mexico has traditionally been a place where a reporter’s literary impulses can flow,” says Garza. “We really had to strip [stories] down to just the bare essentials–the bare facts. Any attempts to make it more literary or attractive would probably backfire.”
According to Garza, verifying facts became crucial after gangs started using social media to spread misinformation, such as publicizing a fake shootout on Twitter to mask a real one occurring in a different part of town. “Even if we lost immediacy,” he says, “It would be better to announce it later than to announce a shootout that wasn’t taking place.” The paper also stopped filling A1 with the most gruesome murders to avoid helping gangs broadcast warnings in the media through their homicides.
Garza’s efforts are aimed at helping protect Mexico’s local reporters, an endangered group that gets little attention. The influx of drug cartels in northern Mexico has created a culture of violence, and while more news attention goes to violence against foreign correspondents there, in reality it’s local journalists who are most at risk. Since 2007, more than 50 Mexican journalists have disappeared or been killed–often in targeted killings aimed at controlling coverage; of the Mexican journalists murdered in the last decade, 82 percent covered the crime beat. And these slayings face little consequence: In 2014, Mexico placed seventh on the Committee to Protect Journalist’s Impunity Index, which ranks countries “where journalists are slain and the killers go free.”
And while Garza’s vigilance didn’t allow El Siglo de Torrón to do investigative reporting, or much reporting on the structure of cartels, his staffers were able to report around them, publishing stories on the nexus between crime and the economy, the social impact of violence in schools, and personal profiles on victims of violence.
All this came to a head in February of 2013, when five of Garza’s employees were kidnapped in response to the coverage. All were released unharmed, and police set up a blockade around the newsroom. During the blockade, the newspaper was placed under siege by cartels, who staged three separate attacks over three days, injuring a customer and killing a bystander. In the months that followed, the police force dismantled the cartel responsible, diminishing violence in the region.
After almost seven years at the paper, Garza stepped down to focus on creating safeguards for journalists in other areas. Now a Knight International Journalism Fellow, he has consulted with newsrooms in Mexico and Central America on developing safety protocols, and, most recently, digital security against hackers.
He’s also helping to develop a crowdsourced map where journalists can plot the specific threats they’ve received based on region. “It allows you to tailor safety measures based on your local reality,” he says.
Alexis Sobel Fitts is a senior writer at CJR. Follow her on Twitter at @fittsofalexis.