The Sunday Read: ‘Who Hired the Hitmen to Silence Zitácuaro?’

[0] My name is Nick Casey.

[1] I'm a writer for the New York Times magazine.

[2] Mexico is in the middle of a war against drug traffickers.

[3] But there's a second conflict there that you might not know about.

[4] It's a war to silence Mexico's free press.

[5] Last year, Mexico was one of the deadliest places in the world for journalists to work.

[6] Second only to Ukraine.

[7] Mexican journalists have faced phone hacks, death threats, beatings, torture, and in one case, a pair of grenades launched at their newsroom.

[8] Because no one has figured out how to protect journalists where they work, Mexico has resorted to the extreme step of hiding reporters in safe houses across the country.

[9] What's behind these threats is pretty simple.

[10] Many of the reporters under threat were investigating the government that was supposed to protect them.

[11] And many in the government, for years, have been on the payroll of Mexico's drug cartels.

[12] Now, imagine you're a reporter in Mexico.

[13] How do you do your job when you can't distinguish between the crime fighters and the criminals?

[14] Is this prosecutor I'm speaking to involved with the crime that I'm reporting?

[15] And what will he do to me for writing about it?

[16] It's a hall of mirrors.

[17] In Mexico, you're on your own.

[18] This week's Sunday read is my story about a local newsroom in Mexico called the Mituakan Monitor.

[19] The Monitor was a small news outlet, just one editor and a few of his friends, and they decided to investigate corruption in their city government.

[20] Soon they started getting threats.

[21] And as you'll hear in this story, some of these threats became real.

[22] But these did not deter Armando Linares, the editor -in -chief of the Monitor.

[23] And so even after the photographer of the Monitor was murdered outside the newsroom by two masked assailants, Linares took to Facebook live to address the killing.

[24] In the broadcast, a visibly shakenly, that is, sits alone in front of a microphone.

[25] His phone, a pen, and a reporter's notebook sit on the table.

[26] The Michoacan monitor team has been suffering a series of death threats.

[27] Today, these threats were carried out, and one of our members was murdered today.

[28] A few minutes ago, they made an attempt on his life.

[29] He lost his life a few minutes ago.

[30] That's the way it is at the Mituakan monitor.

[31] I can't talk much.

[32] I can't say much.

[33] All I can do is tell our colleagues' family that we are not going to leave things like this.

[34] We are going to take things to the bitter end.

[35] We're not armed.

[36] We don't have weapons.

[37] Our only defense is a pen, a pencil, and a notebook.

[38] Our only defense is a pen, a pencil, and a notebook.

[39] The Facebook Live continues, and Linares says that he knows who was behind the killing.

[40] He goes on to say that he's going to continue to report on corruption despite someone being killed in his newsroom.

[41] It's a spectacular decision.

[42] This wasn't the first small newsroom to be attacked this way in Mexico.

[43] Usually this means the end.

[44] Everyone goes into hiding.

[45] But with Linares, you have the case of someone who was just so grounded in what he did and what he believed.

[46] and the power of journalism to change things in a democracy that he decided he wasn't going to leave and he wasn't going to give up.

[47] And in the end, at the monitor, you're talking about ordinary reporters with little money or protection.

[48] People who thought they could make a contribution by exposing corruption in their town.

[49] But what they came up against was something much bigger and much more armed than they were.

[50] So here's my article.

[51] Who hired the hitman to silence Citacuoro?

[52] Read by Anthony Ray Perez.

[53] On October 19th, 2021, Armando Linares Lopez was writing up notes from an interview when his cell phone buzzed with an unknown number.

[54] Linares, 49 in stocky with black hair that was just starting to show gray streaks, ran an online news site in a small Mexican city called Sitakwaro.

[55] He knew his beats so in.

[56] intimately that calls from unfamiliar phone numbers were rare.

[57] But the man on the other end spoke in a way that was instantly familiar.

[58] Linares had come to know that pitched menacing tone from years of run -ins with every kind of Mexican gangster.

[59] This is Commander Eagle, the voice said.

[60] I'm from the Halisco New Generation Cartel.

[61] Sitakuro, in the hills of the state of Midrachan, had for years mostly been known for its fertile avocado orchards and the pine oak forest where tourists came to see the annual arrival of the monarch butterflies.

[62] But its central location had made it increasingly attractive to the drug trade.

[63] Farmers grew marijuana and opium poppy, the source of heroin, and nearby mountains.

[64] And in recent years, international drug cartels had been using Mitywakan as, a waystation for methamphetamine and fentanyl shipments.

[65] Linares' rise as a journalist coincided with the drug boom, and he watched its devastating effects on Sitakwarro.

[66] Severed heads dumped in front of a car dealership, business owners kidnapped for ransom, and a government that seemed unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

[67] If Mexico ever hoped to escape the violence that was devouring it, Linares often said, the press would need to pursue the politicians who enabled the crime.

[68] And so in 2019, he and a few friends founded a new site called Monitor Michwakan, publishing it downstairs from a law office.

[69] As the city's main, and perhaps only, muckraker, Linares quickly came to dominate the local conversation, typically publishing big reports on Monday or Tuesday, contract fraud, bribes and police shakedowns, and spending the rest of the week posting supporting documents on Twitter and Facebook.

[70] On Fridays, he would retreat to a little studio at the back of the newsroom to talk live with his sources for his weekly webcast.

[71] The big story in 2021 was Juan Antonio Ixtalawa Goriwela, sitakwaros -boyish and popular mayor, who 12 years earlier was arrested by federal agents after his name appeared on the payroll of a local drug cartel.

[72] The case against the mayor fell apart, and he stayed in politics, heading off to various federal jobs.

[73] He had recently made a successful bid to take back the mayor's office, this time with men toting high -power rifles, their faces covered in ski masks, standing watch at campaign events.

[74] Linanis' sources said the men were from the Halisco New Generation cartel.

[75] And now, a commander of that cartel was on the other end of his cell phone.

[76] wanting to speak.

[77] Linares put two fingers over the receiver and gestured to another reporter in the newsroom to come over quickly.

[78] He needed him to tape the call.

[79] Linatus grabbed a notebook and pen, putting the phone on speaker.

[80] Who's this?

[81] he said.

[82] The caller got straight to his point.

[83] Monitor Michoacan needed to stop taking shots at the local government and the prosecutor's office.

[84] Linares interrupted.

[85] He said the outlawful.

[86] didn't take sides.

[87] His job was to document events, nothing more.

[88] But the caller did not want to debate the role of journalism in a democracy.

[89] He said Linardis would hear from him again and then hung up.

[90] Two weeks later, Linatus was at home when his phone buzzed, this time with a much more direct message on WhatsApp.

[91] You were told to stop trashing the government.

[92] The text said, I'm trying to be your friend, but if I can't, you're going to have problems with us.

[93] Stop trashing, the prosecutor.

[94] Linares stared at the message on his phone, unsure of what to do next.

[95] The Monitor was investigating claims that the city government was overpaying cronial contractors from municipal lighting projects and had also done reporting that showed ties between the Halisco cartel and the prosecutor's office.

[96] He knew that the threat was serious and that the primary.

[97] promised problems almost certainly meant death, as another local reporter told me, killing a journalist is very easy and very cheap.

[98] Linares also knew the government was likely to do little to protect him and his colleagues.

[99] Attacks on reporters in Mexico were almost never solved by investigators, who were often themselves either terrified of or in league with the killers.

[100] The journalists were on their own.

[101] There was a phrase the editor had long repeated in the newsroom.

[102] We have only our pens to defend ourselves.

[103] He set his phone aside.

[104] The Monitor would keep publishing, just as it always had.

[105] Who's Who and Lies?

[106] The world has become an increasingly dangerous place for reporters.

[107] But outside the war in Ukraine, no place is more deadly for them than Mexico.

[108] Since the central government began its brutal and chaotic war on drugs in 2006, at least 128 reporters have been killed there, according to the committee to protect journalists, 13 of them last year alone, a chilling record.

[109] Mexican journalists have faced phone hacks, death threats, beatings, torture, and in one case, grenade attacks on their newsroom.

[110] They face these perils in part because the authorities whose job it is to protect them have in many instances long been infiltrated by the cartels.

[111] Hernaro Garcia -Luna, Mexico's former Secretary of Public Security, for example, was convicted in the United States this year for taking millions of dollars and bribes from the Sinaloa cartel in the early 2000s, when he was head of the Mexican equivalent of the FBI.

[112] And in 2014, police officers in the rural city, Iguala, kidnapped 43 students on buses headed for a march in Mexico.

[113] Mexico City and handed them over to a drug cartel that mistakenly assumed they were part of an attack from a rival.

[114] This year, a trove of text messages showed that nearly every branch of government in the region, including soldiers, the police, and a local mayor, were communicating with the cartel, which killed the students and incinerated some of them in a crematory.

[115] Unable to protect journalists where they work, Mexico resorted to hiding them in safe houses, the country.

[116] After years of increasing entanglement with criminal groups, the Mexican government is in some sense in a battle with itself, with case after case in which the government is, or at least appears to be, as involved in the crime as in the punishment.

[117] Sometimes the connection is clear.

[118] In 2017, Miloslava Brech -Veldussea, a journalist in Mexico's northern state, Chihuahua, was shot dead by a drug gang after years of reporting on corruption and criminal groups.

[119] A former mayor Brech had reported on, Hugo Ahmed Schultz Alcarus, later admitted to passing along recordings of the journalists to members of the gang that killed her and was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in her death.

[120] But concerns about government complicity often fall on death fears.

[121] In 2014, Ruben Espinoza, a 31 -year -old photographer, began receiving threats after the news magazine, Proceso, published a picture he took of Javier Duarte de Ochoa, then governor of the state of Veracruz, in an article declaring it a lawless state.

[122] In 2015, after fleeing Veracruz, Espinoza was shot to death with four others in an apartment in Mexico City.

[123] At least 17 reporters from Veracruz were killed while Duarte held office, a gruesome record.

[124] The former governor is now in prison on organized crime charges, but he has never been indicted in connection with any of the killings.

[125] Of 105 investigations of killings of journalists in Mexico since 2010, only six resulted in homicide sentences, according to Human Rights Watch.

[126] Far from defending journalists, some of the country's most prominent officials have turned on them.

[127] In 2021, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador added a new weekly segment to his morning press briefing called Who's Who in Lies.

[128] In December, he took aim at three reporters, including Ciro Gomez -Leva, a prominent television anchor saying that, if you listen to them too much, you could even get a brain tumor.

[129] The next day, Gomez -Leva was driving home from his broadcast when two men on a motorcycle opened fire on his car.

[130] The anchor survived only because the car was equipped with bullet -resistant glass windows.

[131] Armando Linares knew that investigating the local government could be risky on many levels.

[132] At his last news outfit, a daily broadsheet called El Despertaire, he had spent months looking into connections between the state prosecutor, office and the drug gangs it was supposedly pursuing.

[133] His colleagues had warned him that the newspaper was dependent on ads from the local government.

[134] Soon enough, the state attorney general called a meeting with the newspaper's owner seeking to shut down the reports.

[135] When he not as heard about the meeting, he confronted the owner and soon left the paper, several of his colleagues told me, though it was unclear if he had been fired or resigned out of protest.

[136] One former colleague described Linadis to me as the kind of street reporter who was so plugged in that he sometimes showed up at crime scenes before the police.

[137] But he also had had drinking problems and years before went to rehab for drug addiction.

[138] He was married, but hadn't lived in the same house as his wife in three children in years.

[139] Joel Vera Terrazas, his colleague at Monitor, Michoacan, told me that reporting is what saved Armando from Armando, from his demons.

[140] When Vera, a prominent attorney in Citacuaro, spotted Linares at a traditional Mexican sweat lodge on the outskirts of town, after he parted ways with El Despertar, he said he could see the toll the last months had taken on his friend.

[141] And so Vera made Linares a proposal.

[142] He would bankroll a new outlet in town with Linares at the helm.

[143] On a Monday morning in 2019, the staff of Monitor Michoacan gathered in its newsroom, a small office downstairs from Verra's law firm.

[144] Among those there was Roberto Toledo Barreira, a former bus driver who signed up to work as the outlet's cameraman and photographer.

[145] Wilber Sebastian Hoving, a lawyer in Verra's office, was hired as a part -time researcher.

[146] Vera would take care of the business end and write his own weekly.

[147] column, and Linares, as Vera had promised, was now the outlet's editor and lead writer.

[148] Vera eventually bought a suit and matching shoes for Linares and insisted that he wear them to interviews.

[149] But other than that, Berrador Linares, he wouldn't interfere with his work.

[150] Linares now had a type of freedom he hadn't felt before, something few journalists in Mexico have ever enjoyed.

[151] He was in charge of his own outlet and was editorially independent.

[152] No vendas your pluma, he told the newsroom.

[153] Don't sell your pen.

[154] I fear for my life.

[155] In the two years that Monitor Michoacan had been publishing, over the course of dozens of investigations, Linares had never received such a direct threat as the ones leveled by the mysterious call and WhatsApp message.

[156] Vera decided to seek help from the authorities, but no one in the newsroom trusted officials in Sitakwaro.

[157] Instead, Vera traveled with Linares to Mexico City, where they met officials from the Federal Prosecutor's Office devoted to crimes against free speech.

[158] The unit sits under Mexico's Attorney General's Office, which has broad powers to help protect journalists, including offering referrals for extraction into the government's safe houses.

[159] For an hour, Vera explained to an official the work the Monitor had been doing and the threats they had received.

[160] He provided a list of nine politicians, among them Sitakuro's mayor and local prosecutor, who the newsroom believed could have been behind the threat.

[161] But the official Vera told me seemed unmoved by the story, saying such threats happened often, and the matter would probably blow over.

[162] Vera and Linares left the office empty -handed, no referral for extraction or any other protective measure.

[163] Linares told no one else in Sitakuro about the threat, not even his wife.

[164] He continued his investigations, publishing stories about the inflated municipal lighting contracts and a detective who, Linares' sources claimed, was charging crime victims up to $10 ,000, roughly $480 at the time, to investigate.

[165] If there's no money, there are no investigations, he wrote.

[166] Soon the situation with the Eagle escalated, the cartel boss called again to demand a little support payment to the group, and then again, and again.

[167] The requested amounts varied with each call, but the Eagle eventually settled on the sum of 500 ,000 pesos, roughly $24 ,000.

[168] Linares and Veda realized that they were now trapped in the same kind of extortion scheme that they had spent years reporting on.

[169] They stalled for time, and Vetta called an acquaintance who was a martial arts instructor for some security advice.

[170] The instructor suggested installing video cameras, as well as a second door at the entrance of the newsroom, which could be opened by a buzzer only after arrivals passed through the first.

[171] The doors would be made of steel, reinforced to withstand bullets.

[172] Even if intruders made it past the first door, they would find a locked door between the between themselves and the newsroom.

[173] Perra knew the payment couldn't be avoided if he wanted the newsroom to remain safe.

[174] He and his wife withdrew money from their savings, and some of the staff set up a collection from friends.

[175] In mid -December, Linares settled on a day to make the handoff, but the location of the rendezvous was unusual.

[176] The Eagle wanted to meet at the Blasa in front of the mayor's office.

[177] The wads of money didn't fit into an envelope, and so Linares found a paper bag to stuff 500 ,000 pesos into.

[178] At 10 a .m., Toledo arrived with the bag of cash as Linares watched from a corner and Sebastian from a parked car.

[179] Two men from the cartel arrived, parking in slots reserved for government employees.

[180] Their faces were covered, and it was impossible to tell whether the eagle had come or sent two of his lieutenants.

[181] Whatever the payment achieved, it did not prevent the arrival of another, far more menacing, threat.

[182] A fake Facebook account posted Linatus's WhatsApp profile picture, which showed him standing with a woman.

[183] That was somewhat worrying.

[184] Even more worrying was that the post claimed that the woman in the photo was related to a leader of Carteles Unidos, a rival of the Eagles cartel, and that Linatus was in league with them.

[185] The danger was immediately clear to everyone in the newsroom.

[186] In the past, before deadly hits against journalists, mysterious messages often surfaced linking reporters to cartel groups.

[187] Sometimes Mexican officials even played up the supposed connections with little evidence.

[188] This allowed the killing to look like another hit among cartel members and offered an easy excuse to avoid an investigation.

[189] Vera sat with the other members of the newsroom for a moment, deliberating about what to do.

[190] Linares headed to the transmission room.

[191] Toledo followed him in, flipping on the switches of the camera as the two prepared a Facebook live broadcast.

[192] Linares was wearing a yellow puffer jacket and a face mask, which he pulled off before he began to speak.

[193] Good evening, friends of Monitor Mijwakan.

[194] He began.

[195] He explained the mysterious Facebook post and said the woman had nothing to do with any criminal group.

[196] The fake online profiles were meant to spread disinformation and distract from the actual news that they were publishing.

[197] Using the usual logic, we know these attacks come directly from our public officials.

[198] Linares continued.

[199] In the last days and weeks, there have been killings of journalists who have exposed corrupt governments, he said.

[200] The same thing could happen here in Sitakwaro, he added.

[201] Today I can tell you this.

[202] I fear for my life, and I will be seeking federal protection.

[203] Mexico has very strict gun laws, but many people do carry them illegally.

[204] That fall, Berra had gotten a pistol from a home.

[205] friend.

[206] First, he tried to give the gun to Linares, who turned him down.

[207] He approached Toledo next.

[208] Take it, Roberto.

[209] Vera said, you carry it.

[210] You're the one on the streets.

[211] But Toledo declined too.

[212] He shot photos, he reasoned, not bullets.

[213] No, boss.

[214] You keep it, he said, handing the gun back to Vera.

[215] If they come, then I will take the bullet for you.

[216] We're here from City Hall.

[217] Toledo started the morning of January 31st, 2022, with a stop at the prosecutor's office.

[218] The Monitor had a running tally of surprise visits it made to various municipal buildings to see if workers were present during their posted office hours.

[219] As usual, there wasn't much to see, so Toledo took a photo of the empty desks.

[220] His cell phone rang, and it was Vera on the line with a request.

[221] could Toledo bring a couple of bottles of coke back to the office?

[222] The photographer stopped at a corner store, then headed back in the direction of the newsroom.

[223] At the same time, several men on motorcycles approached Monitor Michoacan and parked on a side street with a view of the entrance.

[224] Two of the men walked up to the building as Toledo, coax in hand, rang the buzzer.

[225] Speaking through the intercom, Vera asked the strangers why they were there.

[226] We're here from City Hall, one of the men's head.

[227] But this looked nothing like an official visit.

[228] One of the men wore a gray hoodie with the hood pulled down low, and the other was in a baseball cap.

[229] Only their eyes could be seen above their face masks.

[230] Vera buzzed Oledo through the first door, and the two men came in behind him.

[231] Sebastian cracked open the second door, then shut it immediately when he saw guns.

[232] "'Aggale,