Reuters Investigates
Insight and investigations from our expert reporters
More bloodshed in Monterrey
After the latest news from Mexico where armed men torched a casino in Monterrey, killing at least 52 people, it’s a good time to re-read Robin Emmott’s special report “If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls.”
As the story says:
In just four years, Monterrey, a manufacturing city of 4 million people 140 miles from the Texan border, has gone from being a model for developing economies to a symbol of Mexico’s drug war chaos, sucked down into a dark spiral of gangland killings, violent crime and growing lawlessness.
Since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led war on the cartels in late 2006, grenade attacks, beheadings, firefights and drive-by killings have surged.
That has shattered this city’s international image as a boomtown where captains of industry built steel, cement and beer giants in the desert in less than a century — Mexico’s version of Dallas or Houston.
By engulfing Monterrey, home to some of Latin America’s biggest companies and where annual income per capita is double the Mexican average at $17,000, the violence shows just how serious the security crisis has become in Mexico, the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter and a major U.S. trade partner.
Monterrey’s drug war madness cripples model city
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Robin Emmott has been covering the drug wars in Mexico for the past four-and-a-half years, based in the north industrial city of Monterrey. Robin’s special report “If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls” examines the sharp rise in violence in recent years and how the country’s richest city is dealing with it. (Read the story in multimedia PDF format here.)
Here’s what Robin had to say about working on the story:
“Don’t worry about the violence,” the elderly priest said to the congregation in a middle class suburb of Monterrey last month. “Get out there and live your lives. When it’s your time to die, God will decide,” he said in his Sunday sermon as the distinctly bemused churchgoers looked up at him from the pews.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when a close friend who was at church that day told me the anecdote.
It is a sign of just how desperate things have become in Monterrey, the prosperous Mexican city near the Texan border that until four years ago was proud of itself as a Latin American success story.
Today, residents are often too fearful to go out and enjoy themselves at restaurants and bars at night, and there’s a self-imposed curfew to avoid being caught up, albeit randomly, in the firefights and grenade attacks raging across the city.
When I started my posting covering the U.S.-Mexico border in early 2007, Monterrey was still a great place to live. Although there were 55 drug war deaths in 2006, it still felt safe. The city was in the midst of hosting a huge cultural festival with performers, musicians and thinkers from around the world. It was like Barcelona meets San Antonio, in the very best sense.
It’s just ridiculous to go around saying that if Monterrey falls, Mexico falls. First of all, what does it mean to “fall?” To have a decline? Lot’s of places have declined in Mexico due to the violence, and yet most of the country remains quite pleasant. The decline in the news industry and the hazards of professional journalism in violent times have left Mexico sadly abandoned by any real or effective international coverage of a complex problem. We are left with this kind of story which is neither informative, nor interesting.
Covering the story of Mexico’s narco orphans
Our latest special report is not a feel-good story. Catherine Bremer visited an orphanage in Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of Mexico’s drug war, to tell the largely overlooked story of the tens of thousands of children whose lives are blighted by drug violence.
Northern Mexico is a tough place to work. This is what our Monterrey correspondent Robin Emmott has to say about covering the drug war:
“Mexican journalists, often poorly paid, face intimidation directly from drug gangs, from local officials in the pay of the cartels and even from their own colleagues who take bribes from drug gangs to ensure certain stories don’t get published. Many choose to publish without bylines, or in the most extreme cases, stop reporting on the drug cartels altogether, creating a news blackout that international press groups say threatens Mexico’s standing as a healthy democracy. Reporters fear they risk their lives if they run investigative reports about corrupt politicians working with drug gangs or if they publish the names of cartel leaders living at large.
For Reuters, our photographers are on the front line, covering crime scenes and dealing almost daily with the pressure that comes from covering the drug war where no one, least of all the police, can be trusted. Correspondents have the relative luxury of relying on local media for breaking news, but often need to get out in the field to report what is really going on and face the same kind of pressures and intimidation.
On a recent trip to Ciudad Juarez earlier this year, I was told by local police on climbing into a patrol car that if we came under attack from drug gangs that they could not be responsible for my safety.”
Prohibition does nothing but bankroll dangerous criminals, corrupt whole law enforcement agencies and generously arm international terrorists. Alcohol prohibition (1919-1933) was a casebook example of such dangerous folly. Today, alcohol is taxed and regulated and the shoot-outs over turf and the killing of innocent bystanders are no longer a daily part of the alcohol trade. So how come so many of us lack the simple ability to learn from such an important historical lesson, and are instead intent on perpetuating the madness and misery that prohibition has always invariably engendered?
It is clearly our always-doomed-to-fail policy of prohibition that is causing this intense misery. We need to fix ourselves (start thinking clearly) and in doing so, we will not only help rid ourselves of this terrible self-inflicted curse but also help to heal the whole planet.
Are we really such an adolescent nation that we can expect neither maturity nor cognitive thought from either our leaders or our populace? This is not a war on drugs; it’s an outright war on sanity!
Colombia, Peru, Mexico or Afghanistan, with their coca leaves, marijuana buds or their poppy sap, are not igniting temptation in the minds of poor weak American citizens. These countries are merely responding to the enormous demand that comes from within our own borders. Invading or destroying those countries, creating more hate, violence, instability, injustice and corruption, will not fix this problem. We need to admit that It is ourselves who are sick. Prohibition is neither a sane nor a safe approach. Left unabated, it’s devouring inferno will surely engulf every last one of us!