From Charles Bowden’s piece in the current Mother Jones, telling the story of Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, a Mexican reporter who sought political asylum in the U.S.:
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.The reporter may die for committing a simple error. He wrote an accurate news story. He did not know that was dangerous because he thought the story was very small and unimportant. He was wrong and that was the beginning of all his trouble.
There are two Mexicos.
There is the one reported by the US press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war on drugs, aided by the Mexican Army and the Mérida Initiative, the $1.4 billion in aid the United States has committed to the cause. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, laws, and is seen by the United States government as a sister republic.
It does not exist.
There is a second Mexico where the war is for drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share of drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed.
The reporter lives in this second Mexico.
