Pubdate: Sun, 02 Oct 2005 Source: Dallas Morning News (TX) Copyright: 2005 The Dallas Morning News Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117 Authors: Lennox Samuels and Alfredo Corchado, The Dallas Morning News Cited: Reporters Without Borders http://www.rsf.org/ Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Nuevo+Laredo Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Mexico THE MYSTERY OF LUPITA GARCIA NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - The voice on the other end of the phone was scared and anguished yet strangely calm. Instantly recognizable, the caller gasped the words. "Mama, I'm wounded. I've been shot. I love you." That day, April 5, was the last time Beatriz Escamilla heard the voice of her daughter, Lupita, shot nine times as she arrived at work. Eleven days later, Guadalupe Garcia Escamilla was dead, the latest journalist killed in Mexico's bloody drug war. The police reporter for radio XHNOE-FM joined an overall casualty list that stretches into the hundreds. Her killing remains unsolved, with the investigation hinging on a critical question: Was she gunned down because she was a tough investigative reporter exposing organized crime, or because she herself had become ensnared with one drug cartel and was executed by another? Some American and Mexican investigators and fellow reporters say Lupita was compromised, that she had been working for the Gulf cartel. Mexican authorities are checking whether a drug gang was paying her for information and to influence coverage. "Her activities and subsequent death could be tied to organized crime. Perhaps she worked for members of organized crime," says Rogelio Garcia Fernandez, assistant attorney general in the state of Chihuahua. Lupita's family rejects such claims, insisting she was untainted, that she did nothing wrong. Some local media executives say Lupita tried to manipulate their coverage to play down the seriousness of violent incidents and to portray her cartel contacts in a better light. In the perilous, unpredictable world of drug trafficking, where many things are unknowable, the case of the woman many considered the voice of Nuevo Laredo underscores the potential trap that Mexican journalists face as they cover the illicit drug trade. A Bygone Rule In this border city, rival drug cartels are fighting for supremacy with a savagery seen only in combat zones. In such skirmishes, reporters once could count on an asterisk: *Journalists working: Do not harm. Those days are a memory now. In Mexico, reporters have become key targets as ruthless narcotraffickers ratchet up the body count. "For reporters working anywhere in the Americas, the border has become the most dangerous place to gather information," says Leonarda Reyes, director of the Center for Journalism and Ethics in San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico. "The media and population live and work as hostages, careful about what they say or write. A wrong move may cost them their life. The population in general has no real sense of what the truth is anymore because reporting it carries deadly consequences." Mexico's drug kingpins have bought people of all stripes - local, state and federal government officials, police, military brass, judges, corporate chieftains. Reporters have not been immune. Some have succumbed to pressure, threats or payoffs to become associates of and apologists for traffickers rather than the dispassionate news chroniclers they're supposed to be. "Even if you start out idealistic, the cartels will knock that out of you," says a radio reporter from another station. "If you want to survive here, you have to walk a fine line." Lupita, some colleagues maintain, appeared to have crossed such a line in this nation's ever-widening narco-war. It is a war in which the prize is control of lucrative drug routes that translate to billions of illicit dollars. The Gulf cartel and its proxies go up against the Sinaloa organization and its enforcers - - and there are no rules of engagement. Local, state and federal authorities attempt to cauterize the malignancy, but their efforts are episodic and inadequate in the continuing struggle. The battle waxes with little wane. The death toll rises - numbers intermittently noted in media reports. Only those closest to the victims appreciate the pain behind the statistics. Only those trying to survive the tug-of-war understand the delicacy of navigating that treacherous space between the cartels. 'You're Next' Lupita Garcia, 39, was a committed and enthusiastic journalist. On that much, family and colleagues agree. In the white two-story building at Moctezuma and Morelos streets in Colonia Juarez, where she once spent much of her day, the men who worked with her sit in a studio, chatting over a bank of microphones. A sign on the door announces: Area de Silencio. "Area of silence." In an anteroom nearby, Lupita's tiny desk is as she left it, used cassettes stacked up, files neatly labeled and in a tray. The fallen reporter for Stereo 91 was a single mother with a teenage son. She was pale, with red hair, her right eye fixed in a permanent squint. Short and somewhat plump, she perpetually dieted but didn't much care for exercise. She didn't smoke. She was a nonconformist, passionate, strong-willed. She made many people uncomfortable with her honesty. She was stubborn, moved by injustice, determined to get the story out. "We knew she had been threatened." News director Roberto Galvez Martinez, a diminutive 30-year veteran of the radio business, says the words almost resignedly. "Many people did, especially anyone who followed police coverage, because anyone could hear the threats on the radio. Stuff like, 'Lupita Garcia, you're next. Viva Sinaloa!' That only made Lupita angrier. And if you knew Lupita, you'd know not to make her mad." On the morning of April 5, it seems, someone acted on those threats. It was just shy of 8 o'clock that Tuesday as Lupita stepped from her white 2004 Hyundai after parking the car in her usual spot near the back door of XHNOE. People in the street went about their business. No one paid any particular attention to a young man toting a backpack and lingering on the sidewalk. As Lupita walked toward the entrance, the man pulled a 9mm handgun from the backpack and fired 15 rounds at Lupita. Nine bullets hit the reporter - in the chest, abdomen, arms and thighs. The assailant fled in the morning heat as she collapsed near a bank of utility meters. Co-workers, startled by the gunshots, rushed from the station and summoned help. "Nothing is going to happen to me! Nothing is going to happen to me!" Lupita cried, as paramedics tended her wounds. She asked for something to ease the pain. "When we got to the hospital, Lupita was very much conscious," recalls her mother, Beatriz. "She tried very much to talk to me, to tell me something, but she had a long tube down her throat and so she would just make eye contact. For 11 days I was in and out of that hospital. "I miss her so much, miss everything about her. She had so much energy, so much spunk. I've lost a lot of people in my life, but this one took a large part of me." Lupita became the 16th Mexican journalist slain since the beginning of 2000, according to Reporters Without Borders. 'One Ear Open' The Lupita her mother remembers had been a teacher but always yearned to be a reporter. "My daughter loved journalism and being a voice for society. She really loved the police beat, the rush of adrenaline. She was the first woman in Nuevo Laredo to land such a beat, and she was very proud of that. It went with her personality. "When she'd go to sleep, she'd sleep with the police radio on. And if something happened at midnight, she'd jump out of bed and pursue the story. She wanted to get to the place before the police got there. She'd often joke, 'Mama, I sleep with one eye and one ear open.' " That instinct dated to Lupita's childhood. Growing up in this city, she showed mental toughness and inquisitiveness early on. She had no use for dolls or anything else that might be considered girlish. Come Christmas, she held out for cars and trucks. She would take them apart to see how they worked. "As a child she was very curious," says her mother. "She wanted to know why the world was round." As a reporter years later, she would demonstrate those same traits. She still shied away from things too feminine. No stiletto pumps for the grown-up Lupita. "She wore jeans and tennis shoes," says Mr. Galvez. "Nothing girlie. Once, she had to attend a reception and had to put on some high-heeled shoes. She complained the whole time, wondering how women could wear such uncomfortable stuff. She liked the sporty look - ready for anything, anywhere. And she cursed a lot." Newspaper reporter and friend Raymundo Ramos recalls her zest for knowledge. "She was aggressive. Wanted to be the first one to get the story. Lived for the adrenaline. When things were slow, she was jumpy, impatient, waiting for that radio scanner to go off with a big story. She hated dead time." Earlier, she taught school in Poza Rica, in the state of Veracruz. It took her hours just to get to her rural schoolroom, hardly the kind of pace that would sit well with a person who didn't much care for down time. Better for her a profession built on asking tough questions, on upending things to find the why. The kind of business in which professionals rush to places that others are fleeing. She soon landed her first journalism job, at El Manana, the leading newspaper in Nuevo Laredo. Ramon Cantu Deandar, the paper's publisher, remembers the determination that "possessed" her. "She was fiercely competitive, couldn't allow anyone to have the story first," he said. "She was tough and always wanted to be in the loop." For a brief while, Lupita did a stint in Nuevo Laredo City Hall's communications department. She took the job after leaving El Manana , where she had been a general assignment reporter. But she couldn't stay away from the hurly-burly of journalism. In 1999, she signed on with Stereo 91, the city's top-rated station. The station had used a "beautiful music" format to fill airtime but added news and eventually hired three police reporters. She was XHNOE's pioneer female cop reporter. Many Complaints She was not a resounding success right away. Station owner and manager Noe Cuellar Gonzalez, a short, burly man with shaggy, gray hair worn in the style of Charles Bronson, was dubious at first. "She didn't have a pleasant voice at all; it took some getting used to," he remembers. "And listeners didn't like it that she was a woman and that she had an ugly voice. She had a lot of calls." Negative, for the most part. But people came around and began to tune in to her show, "Punto Rojo." Mr. Cuellar can attest to that. "Over time, listeners liked her aggressiveness, her professionalism and her courage to go after the story no matter what. She was very well sourced. She proved she was more than a voice. In time she became the voice of the city. She was a voice of authority on crime issues." Plus she had smarts, a reservoir of street credibility. "She had this determination and anger and, for the most part, she used it well," says Mr. Galvez, who anchors a morning news show with a wide audience in Nuevo Laredo as well as across the Texas border in Laredo. "She made sure she covered every murder. Even if she was off, she was often the first one to show up at the crime scene. She sometimes knew more than the police." Then too, she was always looking for new challenges. Such as the time the Zapatistas, rebels who had risen up in the southern state of Chiapas to demand better conditions for indigenous people, went to Mexico City for talks with the government. The Zapatistas are led by Subcomandante Marcos, the masked radical-cum-folk hero who has since become a shadowy legend. Lupita fought to land the coveted assignment. "She earned it and did a great job for us there," Mr. Galvez says. "She understood the cause well. She liked the underdogs. She identified with that. She had a point of view, and she didn't hide it. That could have been her downfall, the thing that led to her death." 'Don't Get Too Close' Nuevo Laredo doesn't look like anybody's idea of a war zone. This isn't Fallujah. It is home to 310,000 people, a sprawling collection of unassuming dwellings. The city gives the impression of hunkering down, clinging to the ground. Almost all the buildings are one or two stories. The faded Hotel Regis and the federal building with its scalloped facade rise to three floors, and the 14-level Crowne Plaza looms over the city like a sentinel. But nobody's looking out for Nuevo Laredo. Not effectively, anyway. At police headquarters, three salmon-colored structures near the horse track east of downtown, officers swagger about with pistols strapped to their waists. A "wanted" flier announces that authorities are looking for "narcotraffickers, killers, kidnappers and car thieves." Mugshots of people such as Oscar "The Pooh" Guerrero Silva, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, Gustavo "El Erotico" Gonzalez Castro and a baby-faced Daniel Enrique "Chocotorro" Marquez Aguilar stare balefully from the wall. The cops may seem on top of things, yet these are the same people recently removed from duty - at least temporarily - by President Vicente Fox's Operation Safe Mexico, a federal campaign to increase security along the border and elsewhere. The Concern? Corruption. Too many local police, say the feds, were too close to the cartels and their retainers, the Zetas and the Men in Black. By the end of the operation in Nuevo Laredo, only about half the local officers got their jobs back. Into this environment stepped Lupita Garcia, a crusading investigative reporter who believed "criminals had to be unearthed," according to Mr. Ramos, who also is director of Nuevo Laredo's Human Rights Committee. Some say the Sinaloa cartel had Lupita killed because she went too far in her investigative reporting. Mr. Galvez remembers trying to pull her back. "We'd often tell her, 'Lupita, don't get too close; don't get too deep. You may make people uncomfortable. No story is worth your life.' But you always got the sense that words went in one ear and out the other." It was the news director who picked up the phone when Lupita received her first threat. The caller was a man who asked for the reporter, using an obscenity to describe her. She was unfazed. "Transfer the call," she said. She never told anyone the details of the conversation. The story that may have provoked the attack on Lupita was the one she did on Fernando Partida Castaneda, a lawyer who had represented alleged drug traffickers. Mr. Partida was shot April 4, just hours before Lupita, by two armed men who fired at his car a little more than 300 yards from a police station. He died instantly. The assailants escaped. No one knows for sure whether Lupita's coverage triggered the assault on her, but the report received a lot of attention. Was the reporter a victim of drug violence? Probably, says Mr. Galvez. "You have two camps throwing rocks at each other and you're stuck in the middle with few, if any, guarantees." Others have more sinister explanations. They say Lupita was actually working with traffickers, specifically the Zetas, enforcers for the Gulf cartel. That she served as a clearinghouse, telling fellow journalists what news items they could publish and what they needed to spike. "We're investigating unsubstantiated reports that she was receiving money from members of a specific organized-crime group in exchange for information and the control of information," says Mr. Garcia Fernandez, the assistant attorney general. A U.S. investigator, using information gleaned from Mexican informants, describes her role as "the buffer between the Zetas and the public, the person who helped determine what would be aired or printed in exchange for both money and information." In the Fernando Partida Castaneda case, the investigator and some reporters say, what may have sealed Lupita's fate was that she had too much information in her report. That may have angered the Sinaloa cartel, which reputedly was responsible for the lawyer's slaying. Some who believe Lupita was tainted say her involvement with the Gulf cartel could be inferred from the way her reports tended to zero in on the Sinaloa cartel and gloss over alleged offenses by the Gulf organization. For her final radio story on April 4, Lupita was authoritative, her report awash in details: The precision the assailants used in shooting Mr. Partida. Where they shot from. That they drove a dark green Ford Taurus. That they left it poorly parked in the middle of the street, facing the wrong way. That a 9mm pistol was on the floor of the front passenger seat. She described how they drove away. Their escape route. She never mentioned names. Not of any assailant. Not of any criminal organization. Druglords, the U.S. investigator says, seek to control the information flow in town, putting a muzzle on the media. Lupita, some former colleagues say, was a key go-between. There was the time Mexico agreed to extradite reputed Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas to the U.S. The big news was virtually ignored in Nuevo Laredo. Lupita had telephoned reporters, some media executives say, to instruct them that the matter was to be ignored, or at most buried in media reports. The idea was that the cartel was concerned that too much coverage might give credence that a key drug kingpin indeed would be extradited - something that rarely happens in Mexico. One media executive who received such a call from Lupita was sufficiently dismayed that he phoned her back after the story was published and broadcast - with little fanfare. "I told her to tell them that if this was how it was going to be, we might as well shut down because we had no credibility with the public," he recalls. He had gone along with her directions as a matter of course, but felt compelled to object after the public complained that the story had been buried. A former journalism colleague of Lupita who also felt pressure from drug traffickers says even criminals want to manage their image. "The cartels are like any other business organization. They like the good publicity. And they will pay for good publicity," the colleague said. "So it shouldn't come as a surprise that she would be a flack for the Zetas. She was their PR representative, and her death was a message sent by Chapo Guzman's people. It's like killing the spokesman for President Fox or the White House spokesman for President Bush. It sends a big, chilling message. In this case, the message affected all of us." That message: Journalists need to stay in line. Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is the reputed head of the Sinaloa cartel and perhaps the archnemesis of the Mexican government, which has been pursuing him for years. He has been in hiding since 2001, having stymied all efforts to force him out, including the recent arrests of his son, Ivan Archivaldo "El Chapito," and brother Miguel Angel. His archrival from the Gulf cartel, Osiel Cardenas, is being held in La Palma prison in central Mexico. No Apparent Gain Beatriz Escamilla, 65, is aware of the stories about her daughter. She contemplates what she calls the ironies of Lupita's life, as she sits in the home she now shares with 10 cats and four dogs. She'd like to give the animals away but believes that because they were her daughter's, she's obliged to keep them. "I don't believe we'll ever know who killed my daughter," she says heatedly. "There won't be justice. Instead of justice, authorities will smear a person's reputation after they are gone. That is what's happening with my daughter. "All of a sudden there is speculation about her as a person. If she was involved in anything with drug cartels, we didn't know anything about that. We don't know whether she had any ties to those people. She never talked about them, never said a word. And now that she's dead, they're saying all these mean things about her. I'd be surprised, shocked, if she was involved in any of this stuff." Lupita's son, Luis Aram Jafet Garcia Escamilla, 18, is bitter about the innuendos from people who are "nothing but two-faced." "When my mother was alive, so many worshipped her, so many thought she was a hero," he says. "Now they talk behind her back. That's what gets me so mad; people won't say that to my face. Won't have the guts and say that my mother was a drug trafficker to my face, or that she worked for them." If Lupita were in league with a criminal organization, there is no evidence that she benefited materially. The house in Colonia Madero where she lived 10 minutes from the station was bought for less than $8,500. It is government housing, Beatriz says, still not paid off. It is furnished with the basics: TV, stereo, computer, simple furniture. Her Hyundai came from her boyfriend, Marcos Hernandez, a Mexico Customs employee. She left 25,000 pesos (about $2,300) in two bank accounts. Her culinary tastes tended to Church's fried chicken rather than chicken cordon bleu. "If my sister was a drug trafficker or worked for them, would we be living in this dump?" asks Hector Manuel Contreras Escamilla, 26. "Wouldn't we live in a large mansion or ranch so that these animals could roam free? "Nowadays any death that makes politicians uncomfortable, they blame it on drug violence. That explains why the ice cream vendor was killed, or the shoeshine man, or the reporter. It's the easy way out." If there were no financial payoff, what would have motivated Lupita to make a deal with criminals? The same thing that drove her to be a journalist in the first place, colleagues say: the story, and getting it first. The cartels, reporters point out, know exactly what's going on, what's coming down. If they offered Lupita first crack at information, that could have been a powerful incentive, colleagues say. For a fellow reporter, though, the drug-involvement claims are apocryphal - and irrelevant. "Whether she was involved or not, her death has to be investigated thoroughly," he says. "We're talking about the loss of a human being." Lupita's brother dismisses the state investigation as shoddy, "a sick joke." He says that for weeks after his sister's death, investigators never asked for her cellphone, police radio, computer files or paperwork showing that Lupita and her boyfriend, Marcos, operated a dump-truck business on the side. Mexican officials are being assisted by the FBI, whose lab has been asked to analyze a video captured by the radio station's security cameras. The footage is said to include an image of the gunman. Mr. Garcia Fernandez, the assistant attorney general, says the case could take months to solve. "We're looking at ... personal motive, crime of passion or organized crime. ... We're taking our time, determined to get to the truth." 'No More Violence' They held a memorial service for Lupita Garcia at the church of San Judas Tadeo, an architectural curiosity off Paseo Loma Real that's painted an unecclesiastical pea green. On hand were dozens of people, including print and broadcast journalists, politicians, public officials, business people and friends. She was cremated, and her ashes were delivered to her family and ultimately interred at Jardin de los Angeles. The officiating priest, Leonardo Lopez Guajardo, called her "society's heroine." The mariachis played "Cielo Rojo," a sad song about losing a loved one. There was no mention of cartels or information brokering. "No more violence," Father Lopez pleaded. The people the reporter left behind continue to pick up the pieces. Her son, Luis, has been in seclusion. The radio station says it offered him protection, but the family denies that. "They talk from both sides of their mouths," says Beatriz. Hector Contreras Escamilla remains fiercely protective of his mother, and of his sister's reputation. "She was my hero, and I want to do something to honor her memory for what she was - a tough, no-nonsense reporter who fought for the little guy," he says. Marcos Hernandez, the former boyfriend, isn't talking. At Stereo 91, police offered station officials added security, but they declined. Mr. Galvez says staffers have made "small adjustments." "This incident gives the impression that some of us go around armed," he says. "I just carry this" - his Nextel cellphone. Programming remains the same, with Lupita's former sidekick, Vicente Rangel, 31, taking over her job on the police beat. The last time the two spoke was early on the morning she was shot. They had worked overnight on the Partida story. What he misses most about Lupita, with whom he had worked since 2001, is the way she used to scold him. He's never thought of quitting, of moving away. He is, however, glad about one thing: "My kids, thank God, are not in this city." A radio reporter sums up the atmosphere in Nuevo Laredo this way: No one is to be trusted. "We all came to this job believing in truth and justice," he says. "But you soon realize that's the stuff of movies. This is the border, infested with drug violence. Here the reality is much more grim." As for the allegations against Lupita, Ms. Reyes of the journalism center is not betting on a resolution anytime soon. "I don't know that we'll ever get to the bottom of this, because Lupita has been silenced forever. We'll never really know her side of the story. And that's tragic." [sidebar] THE CARTELS The Gulf and Sinaloa drug cartels have been battling each other for control of Nuevo Laredo and its lucrative smuggling routes into the United States. The reputed leader of the Gulf cartel is Osiel Cardenas, who is in prison. The reputed leader of the Sinaloa cartel is Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who remains at large since escaping from prison in 2001. Both organizations employ paramilitary groups to do their dirty work. The Zetas, founded by former Mexican army commandos, work for the Gulf cartel, and an organization called the Men in Black works for the Sinaloa cartel. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake