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