To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War by John Gibler

home. From one bedroom they shoot into another. Some seek refuge in the bathroom and others in the kitchen. And that got extended throughout the entire country. And the government let it happen. The Beltrán Leyvas formed an alliance with Chapo’s enemies, and that extended the war to other regions of the country and made it crueler. I’m convinced that the Sinaloa Cartel has been less attacked, that it has been privileged. They do it because the Sinaloa Cartel doesn’t use extortion, makes less noise, and is less bloody.”
    A third question: what can be done?
    “I am an activist of pessimism,” Valdez said. “The fire is going to spread. And the worst of it is not only the dead, but also the lifestyle that narco imposes on us all. I am speaking of the fear. We have already ceded the public parks and the park benches to the narcos, to fear. And I think that is the worst loss. This society is ill. There is no place for optimism in this scenario. And I say this with a great deal of sadness. I have children. And I tell them that there are other ways of life, other countries.
    “How can you change all this? Well, by enforcing the law, the rule of law. I don’t think there is any drug war. All they do is respond to violence with violence. A real drug war would spend resources on education and health and combating poverty. That would be a war against drugs, because it would take away the narco’s most fertile terrain, youth.”
    At the end of the conversation I asked Javier Valdez, “Taking into consideration that it is impossible to cover the drug war well as a reporter, still what advice would you give to those coming here to give it a try?”
    “Don’t come here and count the dead,” he said. “Anyone can do that. Tell the stories of life. Profile the fear, which is another death that no one covers; it is an encroaching death, and it is the worst.”
    I went to Ríodoce ’s offices to speak with Ismael Bojórquez, the paper’s director and main editor, who continues to report and write as well. If Javier Valdez is the poet-storyteller of the drug beat, Ismael Bojórquez is the senior analyst. When I told Diego Osorno, the Mexico City-based reporter and author of the book El Cartel de Sinaloa , that I had interviewed Bojórquez at length, Diego nodded gravely and said, “He is one of the people who knows the most about narco in this country.”
    Ríodoce rents a small office space with four rooms on the second floor of a nondescript two-story, concrete building in central Culiacán, above a print shop. The inside is spare: two desktop computers, three simple wooden desks, a small conference table, and a bookshelf.
    Ismael Bojórquez’s desk holds a laptop and a stack of documents, newspapers, and magazines. I began with the same question I asked Valdez, phrased a bit differently: How can one cover the drug war well?
    “The thing is you can’t cover it well. We’ve understood that pretty much since we started this newspaper,” Bojórquez said. “We realized that we couldn’t cover it well, and it makes sense: the narcos will screw you, the narcos will kill you. You can write about politics, but narco is another thing altogether.
    “There are lines you can’t cross. For example, the narcos don’t like you to get involved with their families. You can’t say that narco so-and-so lives in that house; they’ll kill you the following day. You can’t say that they own ranches or that one just bought such-and-such a shopping center. We don’t just take a lot of precaution with this issue, but a shitload of precaution. There is absolutely no protection from the state for those who work as journalists. They can’t even protect themselves, much less us.
    “There are no clear rules in this shit. You develop a nose for it as you go along. There are lines, but they are very thin. What we have got clear is that you can’t do your job in such a way that it could be confused at some point with a police officer’s