Javier Valdez Cardenas, Presente!

 
"The Sinaloa cartel has demonstrated in many instances that it can adapt. I think it's in a process of redefinition toward marijuana," says Javier Valdez, a respected journalist and author who writes books on the narcoculture in Sinaloa.
Valdez says he's heard through the grapevine that marijuana planting has dropped 30 percent in the mountains of Sinaloa. But he says the Sinaloa cartel is old school — it sticks to drugs, even as other cartels, such as the Zetas of Tamaulipas state, have branched out into kidnapping and extortion.

"I believe that now, because of the changes they're having to make because of marijuana legalization in the U.S., the cartel is pushing more cocaine, meth and heroin. They're diversifying," Valdez says. -- John Burnett, NPR, Dec. 1, 2014

 
Journalist Javier Valdez Cardenas, was gunned down midday Monday in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico. He reported on the drug wars for the national newspaper, La Jornada, based in Mexico City, and founded Riodoce, in Culiacan. I include the Riodoce editor's tribute to Valdez in Spanish and some articles below it to deepen the context of the "war on drugs." Mexican cartels, the US/Mexican border, the strange twist in the US pot trade, and the assassination of Mexican journalists. -- wmh
5-15-17
Riodoce
Hoy nos pegaron en el corazón: Ríodoce
Redacción
http://riodoce.mx/mexico-nacional/hoy-nos-pegaron-en-el-corazon-riodoce
Ha sido un golpe demoledor. Pero no solo para nosotros. Un grupo de gatilleros asesinó a Javier Arturo Valdez Cárdenas, nuestro compañero. Lo esperaron a que saliera de la oficina de Ríodoce, donde estuvo trabajando por la mañana. Lo mataron con saña. Los asesinos simularon el robo de su vehículo, pero le dispararon en 12 ocasiones con dos armas distintas. No tenemos ninguna duda: quien ordenó el crimen pidió a los sicarios que se aseguraran del objetivo.
Es un golpe demoledor para nosotros, para su familia, pero también para el periodismo, el sinaloense, el mexicano, sobre todo ese que investiga, escribe y publica en libertad.
Siempre, desde que decidimos brindar cobertura al tema del narcotráfico, supimos que esto podía ocurrir; lo sabía Javier, lo sabíamos todos en Ríodoce. Y hemos reporteado con miedo todos estos años, seguros, como lo dijo él muchas veces, de que cuando alguien toma la decisión de matar a alguien, mata.
Cohabitamos con la muerte, decía. Copulamos con ella, se ríe de nosotros, nos besa, se burla. Pero seguimos todos estos años —14 desde la fundación de Ríodoce— haciendo lo que un buen periodista y un buen periódico tiene que hacer en un estado como Sinaloa, en un país como México.
Nos han arrancado un brazo. O los dos. Javier fue parte fundamental de Ríodoce desde que el semanario era apenas una quimera concebida por un grupo de periodistas que creíamos y creemos en la libertad, en la independencia, en la honradez, en la crítica; que vemos en el periodismo un compromiso con la sociedad, cada vez más desvalida en medio de gobiernos cada día más corruptos y cínicos, criminales desde el Estado.
En estas convicciones estribaba nuestra terquedad de seguir adelante a pesar de las acechanzas cotidianas, en medio de tantos crímenes, de las guerras sangrientas del narco y de las que los periodistas somos, casi siempre, víctimas del fuego cruzado.
No podemos dejar de cubrir temas del narcotráfico, decíamos; menos ahora que el fenómeno es más amplio y profundo. Nacimos para la información, no para el silencio, sosteníamos, y nos debíamos congruencia. El problema es cómo hacerlo. Por eso tratamos de tener siempre cuidado de no cruzar esas líneas tan delgadas cuya transgresión puede significar la muerte.
No tenemos ninguna duda: el origen del crimen de Javier Valdés está en su trabajo periodístico relacionado con los temas del narcotráfico. No sabemos de qué parte, de qué familia, de que organización provino la orden. Pero fueron ellos.
Esperaríamos del gobierno estatal y del federal que se abocaran a investigar y castigar este crimen. Pero, sabiendo el destino de la mayoría de los casos, sin muchas esperanzas de que hagan justicia.
Qué pena por nuestra sociedad; qué dolor de país.
 
5-10-17
The Nation
Mexico’s ‘Drug War’ Is Really a War Against Journalists—Waged by the Government
Washington-backed military and economic initiatives have fueled a perfect machine of perpetual war.

Greg Grandin 

https://www.thenation.com/article/mexicos-drug-war-is-really-a-war-again...
 
 

Mexico’s “drug war” is the second-most-lethal conflict on earth, according to this year’s “Armed Conflict Survey,” conducted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, with 23,000 fatalities, more than Iraq and Afghanistan and behind only Syria’s 50,000 killed. If Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are included—and they should be, as part of a unified catastrophe of free-market economics and militarized public security—the death toll rises to 39,000.
The headlines reporting the survey have all blamed the “cartels,” but I put “drug war” in scare quotes because the conflict goes well beyond illegal narcotics. It’s a war against journalists. “Mexico is one of the worst countries in the world to be a journalist today,” according to a New York Times article titled “In Mexico, ‘It’s Easy to Kill a Journalist.’” “At least 104 journalists have been murdered in this country since 2000, while 25 others have disappeared, presumed dead.” And it’s not primarily the cartels doing the killing: “according to government data, public servants like mayors and police officers have threatened journalists more often than drug cartels, petty criminals or anyone else in recent years.… Cases include journalists tortured or killed at the behest of mayors, reporters beaten by armed men in their newsrooms on the order of local officials, and police officers threatening to kill journalists for covering the news."
It’s a war against environmentalists, too: In January, an indigenous anti-deforestation activist, Isidro Baldenegro López, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize—the same award given to Honduran activist Berta Cáceres before her murderwas executed in Chihuahua. “Mexico has emerged as one of the most perilous countries” for environmental activists, writes Newsweek. “Organized crime, state-sanctioned intimidation and near-total impunity have proved to be a hazardous and often deadly combination for the many activists trying to protect the country’s natural resources. In January, Mexico’s Center for Environmental Rights (CEMDA) released a report that documented 63 attacks against environmental activists in 2015 and 2016. However, this only included cases reported on by the media or other NGOs, so the number could be much higher.” It’s a war against students, including the 43 who were disappeared one night in September 2014. It’s a war against teachers. And against the refugees who pour out of Central America and Mexico. All told, since 2007, some 200,000 Mexicans have been killed in the “drug war.”
I’ve written, here for example, how the combined effects of Plan Colombia, NAFTA, CAFTA, the militarization of the US-Mexican border, and other Washington-backed regional military and economic integration initiatives have created a “perfect machine of perpetual war.” That machine chugs on. The death toll was significantly higher in 2016 than it was in 2015, according to the IISS report cited above. Policy and opinion makers tend to focus on one or another piece of the crisis, on drugs or trade policy, but resist seeing the totality of what Dawn Paley calls “drug war capitalism.” To get a sense of how the pieces fit together—how financial liberalization, intensified resource extraction, skewed trade policies, a punishing migration regime, the criminalization of protest, the militarization of social policy, and the promotion of biofuels, all underwritten by a ceaseless flow of US military aid—read Christy ThorntonAdam GoodmanAnabel Hernández, and Óscar Martínez (including this report published in The Nation), among others. Also read NACLA. The United States got Donald Trump as a consequence of decades of failed, bipartisan economic and military policies. Mexico and Central America got a mountain of corpses that is getting higher by the day.

 

 

 

5-18-17
New York Review of Books
Mexico: A Voice Against the Darkness
Alma Guillermoprieto
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/18/mexico-a-voice-against-the-darkn...
 
Yet another journalist has been murdered in Mexico. It was the usual pattern: Javier Valdez, fifty, wrote a drug story, revealed too much information, said something someone did not want said, and was killed at noon on a busy street near his place of work. Six other journalists, none of them quite as prominent as Javier, have been killed in drug-infested cities since the year began, but because he was a friend of mine the details matter more to me this time. On reflection, I was grateful that, unlike many of the more than one hundred reporters killed in Mexico over the last quarter century, he was not abducted, tortured for hours or days, maimed, dismembered, hung lifeless from an overpass for all to see.
No doubt Valdez owed his comparatively charitable execution—he was merely pulled from his car and shot twelve times—to his prominence: he had received a Maria Moors Cabot award from Columbia University and the Courage Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, published seven well-received books about the poisonous world he lived in, emerged as something of a hero for his younger colleagues, traveled, and talked endlessly about the fact that when a reporter was killed no one showed up at the protest marches except other journalists—no one seemed to think that it was important to have a free or unintimidated press. Since the vast majority of the reporters who have been murdered since the start of the drug wars work anonymously for tiny provincial papers, it has generally been assumed that someone like Javier Valdez would be safe. In fact, he survived for decades in the motherland of the drug trade, the northern state of Sinaloa. Why then was he finally not allowed to live?
Valdez grew up in one of the funkier barrios of Culiacán, the state capital of Sinaloa. Like most Mexican reporters, particularly in the provinces, he had clawed his way out of poverty and into a career. After graduating from a local university with a degree in sociology, he and Griselda, his new bride, found work as copy editors at a television station. This was thirty years ago, at the start of Sinaloa’s second drug boom, the one that transformed the state from a simple marijuana producer into a major intermediary in the world cocaine trade and, subsequently, the world’s second-largest heroin producer and exporter.
Javier was riveted by the story. Who wouldn’t be? Beyond Culiacán, entire campesino communities were going through ridiculous economic booms and then surviving an onslaught of violent, unfocused, useless government repression. Humble campesinos who barely knew how to sign their names were rising to legendary heights, and an entire folk culture—the narcocultura—was taking shape around them. It was a great story, and it was all about the barrios Javier had grown up in, the kids he had played with, the families and society whose destruction he was witnessing. Plus, the only way he knew to cure the hemorrhaging pain it caused him to see his homeland destroyed was to write about it. In 2003, having already made a name for himself as a reporter for news organizations in Sinaloa, he and a group of colleagues founded a newspaper in Culiacán, called it Riodoce, and gradually invented a kind of crime coverage radically different from provincial journals’ standard scandal-sheet news-of-the-moment.
Police guarding a gate to the attorney general’s office for organized crime soon after the arrival of Mexican drug lord Dámaso López Núñez, Mexico City, May 2, 2017
I met Javier five years later, on my first reporting trip to Culiacán. He swore like a lifer, had a rough face and a body like a Mexican bodyguard, paunchy and hard. When he smiled his face draped in folds. Understandably, he was paranoid for the first five minutes of any encounter with a stranger, but in my case he beamed and relaxed when I asked if he had thought of collecting his short weekly columns for Riodoce into a book. As it turned out, he already had, but his most representative writing was still a work in progress. He was just refining the style that would serve him well over the course of countless Riodoce columns and four more books; detectivesque, unafraid of clichés, and sentimental, his voice was new to Mexican journalism and ideally suited to a broad audience. And what that voice told was a revelation. Here is my lightly edited translation of the column that ran on the morning of the day he was killed:
His uncle couldn’t put up with him any more. He was the shame of the family. So he decided to check him into a rehab center. He called someone and the ‘flier’ came right away: a windowless van with seven youths who kicked and shoved him to the ground, tied his hands and arms, hauled him into the van and took him away.
When they arrived they hit him some more. Someone who seemed to be in charge strolled up. Well dressed, tall, deep-voiced. Everyone stopped when he approached, almost as if saluting him. Blackball, he said. And they all started the beating again. This time they split his head open and cut his back, cracked his collarbone. He lay there, flat on the ground. They gave him paracetamol and two days later they shouted get up, asshole. Speed it up, this isn’t a hotel.
They shook him, gave him some powder, and he came to. Come on, we have to pick up two other new ones in the flier. That’s what the Blackball was, and now it was his turn to inflict it on others. If not, they would apply it to him again.
He kicked and punched with the best of them and that’s how he managed to get invited to the parties. A superior level. Beer, grass and coke. Women were there for them too. They could dance and get high and then take them without asking for permission. There were other prizes waiting for him. He qualified for them with Blackballs. With yessirs to the boss, who was el licenciado [a Mexican honorific akin to the Italian dottore]. They taught him to become a criminal and smuggle drugs. His nickname was el demonio. When his uncle went to inquire about him they told him he was much better. But he didn’t get to see him. Where is he. Well, he went to buy food and ask for donations at stoplights. But he’s doing great, soon he’ll be completely recovered. His uncle left, glad for the news but not quite convinced: not getting to see him left a bitter taste in his mouth.
No one like him. The licenciado would say bring me el demonio and they would take him into the presence. He was good at hitting and following orders. El demonio would show up and slambang. The victim wouldn’t be able to move for days. A prize for him. He knew they’d give him any drug he wanted, and also the female interns in the next ward. He lost his way in the dark clouds of the underworld. He smiled and drooled. And that’s how they found him, sprawled on the floor, with his mouth full of gummy stuff. When they went to fetch him for another Blackball the licenciado said too bad. He was my favorite. And then he shouted, Blackball.     
Over the years his sketches filled in a world no one else outside the life had access to or could put into words. Thanks to this one, for example, his readers might be able to understand why a few years ago gunmen systematically raided the rehab centers in Tijuana and other towns along the border, killing some inmates and taking others away. They could speculate whether el licenciado was El Licenciado, otherwise known as Dámaso López Núñez, the former lawyer to Joaquin (“Chapo”) Guzmán, now engaged in an increasingly bloody war with Guzmán’s sons for control of the Guzmán drug empire. For clueless reporters from outside the life, like myself, Javier was endlessly generous with contacts, anecdotes, sources, tips, invitations to dinner, but it felt like we were in kindergarten, while Javier was poking around in the graduate chemistry lab, trying to find the secret formula before the evil professor realized that someone had been tampering with the chromatograph.
“He was the most imperfect of men,” Griselda, his wife, said at the funeral. “But he had a heart as big as the universe.” He caroused too much, he drank too much, or maybe he drank just the right amount to survive the tension of negotiating what he could and couldn’t say about the deadly currents and shifting whirlpools of the Sinaloa drug world. His courage was always incomprehensible to me. Beginning in February he started to write frequently about El Licenciado, in sketches like the one above, and also parallel, deeply and anonymously sourced news stories for Riodoce and a Mexico City paper, La Jornada. The threats he was used to getting became more frequent and scary. On the day he was killed Javier had just come from a meeting with the Riodoce staff about his security situation; he should leave Sinaloa, at least for a while, everyone agreed. He was intercepted by gunmen on his way home.