"Dead bodies lie in the streets. A grenade explodes somewhere. A child dies as the military give chase to some halcones ["hawks", drug trafficking lookouts]. There are gunmen detained and weapons confiscated, the smell of burn flesh, of dead hair. The city is like a cemetery of wandering souls, a multiplied weeping-woman [image in a Mexican legend, she goes through the streets at night, crying] who doesn’t really cry because her tears are shed internally and no one can know, because to survive is to surrender and get used to the empire of automatic rife barrels. That blood, that salty water, those watery cavities, death, the cry of rotten pain, don’t appear in the newspapers; their pages publish silence, perhaps an accident, the rise in some product prices and some speech by the governor.”Javier Valdez Cardenas, the author of this paragraph did not surrender and, as he anticipated there, he did not survive.
The Mexican tragedy has devastated information, specially the local press. The desolation of that journalism is a symbol of national devastation. Journalists don’t have, of course, privilege in pain. If I stop at the threat to journalism it’s because their work is our eyes, our understanding. Journalists are, I say it without solemnity, the caretakers of the truth. Without the press we live in the dark and without words: dumb and blind. The writing of a newspaper is, in a way, the symbol of our uninhabitable jungle.
Harassed by criminals and politicians (the line separating them is false in Valdez's view), tempted and permanently beaten by corruption, infiltrated by spies who betray and intimidate from within, misunderstood, abandoned to its fate, the local newspaper is Mexico. It’s not only the journalist who is forced to shut up, to "put a bandage on his eyes and a pestilent rag in his mouth." In portraying the fear and the threat, the courage and betrayal, the helplessness and stubbornness of the war reporters, Valdez painted our terrible present.
Journalist John Gibler said in a recent interview published by El País: "In Mexico it’s infinitely more dangerous to investigate a murder than to commit it." Would anyone dare to deny it? Criminals have the protection of impunity. Javier Valdez was killed in plain daylight, left in the middle of the street. The hitmen left after shooting twelve rounds. One can’t say they fled because they didn’t seem to be in a hurry, because they didn’t need to hide, because they know they are safe. There are no images of the criminals. In downtown Culiacan, one of the country's bloodiest cities, surveillance cameras don’t work. More than 90% of them are useless. The government has not given them maintenance. Kill in peace, write in fear.
They are in charge, wrote Valdez. Silence wins. When he received the International Press Freedom Prize given by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, Javier Valdez spoke about the loneliness of the Mexican journalist. It wasn’t the natural solitude of the trade, the firm refuge of one who must stay away from those in power. He spoke of a "macabre" solitude. It was an abandonment or, rather, a helplessness.
What we write, risking our lives, has no echo in society. It remains on the page of a local newspaper, the article read by a handful of people, in the image lost in the tedious pornography of the daily bloodshed. Disinterest, tiredness, and social anxiety have become accomplices to violence. Change the subject and close your eyes. Our boldness, therefore, falls into the void, making us even more vulnerable. Valdez knew that indifference makes the hunting less expensive.
The word that comes through closed mouths, the report is published among so many others that remain unpublished, the image that shows the horrors is born from the admirable folly of the hero. Nobody has an obligation to be one. A society that needs heroes is a sick society. A healthy nation does not ask anyone to put their lives on the line, it does not call anyone to sacrifice. But a dying country does demand this: the monstrosity of heroism.
Is this a country?
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Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, Mexican academic and essayist, is the son of noted economist Jesús Silva-Herzog Flores, and grandson of historian Jesús Silva Herzog. Born in 1965, he studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and has an MA in political science from Columbia University. He is currently a professor in the School of Government of Monterrery Tech . He is a columnist for Reforma and host of "Between Three" on TV Azteca. @jshm00