"The press does not come to warm the place." Interview
Diego Enrique Osorno with
by Ariel Ruiz Mondragón
Sinaloa is the entity in the country that has had a reputation for being the birthplace of major drug lords and a stronghold of drug cultivation. Indeed, there can be traced, at least since the twenties of last century, a budding trade in psychotropic substances in the presence of Chinese immigrants, marketing that grew and that was multiplied with the prohibition of marijuana in the States in 1937.
now on illicit drug trafficking in the state grew, the policy has had different uses over time: from the strengthening of the opposition Agrarian policy of Lazaro Cardenas, to be used as an excuse to repress opposition movements and hide social problems.
A good account of this journey is in the book The Sinaloa cartel. A political history of drug use (Mexico, Grijalbo, 2009), in which, through the review and interview, Diego Enrique Osorno gives a good account of the changes experienced by the Sinaloa drug and use it to combat have given governments to suppress dissent.
"I'm the kind of date who still think that journalism must take social responsibility," says Osorno. He adds: "I see this business as a platform to become rich or famous, but as a tool to achieve a society to know each other, ask questions, debate and questioning. I try to do my job taking into account the spirit of humanism. "
With Osorno held a virtual conversation that addressed issues such as the contributions of his book, the risks of research, demonstrations and cultural changes of drug-trafficking and warrior bet Felipe Calderón. Also the benefits it has brought the drug, the practice of journalism and the press treatment given the subject. Osorno
studied journalism at the University Autónoma de Nuevo León, and has worked in various media, as Replicante , Links , Leopard and Letras Libres. Also a regular contributor to Millennium weekly.
Ariel Ruiz (AR): Why write and publish a book like yours? Diego Enrique Osorno
(DEO): In 2006, as a reporter, I had to give coverage to events that occurred at the two presidential campaigns, like the Pasta de Conchos tragedy, the miners' strike in Lazaro Cardenas (killing two workers during a police assault) and Nacozari and Cananea, as well as the operation of repression in San Salvador Atenco and Oaxaca rebellion. During a year of my job I lived directly important social events that occurred while the country was turned into a troubled electoral process.
next year, March 1, 2007, was aboard an Army armored truck with a bulletproof vest, walking paths Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, in search of drug traffickers. The country of that March 2007 was the same as 2006, but it was a radically different.
How had a clear scenario of social and political crisis in which an issue of security was predominant, I wondered while made that trip in the military convoy. The book The Sinaloa Cartel, published by Grijalbo in 2009, is the answer I could give to that question. Along with my work in the newspaper Milenio, which allows me to travel to different parts of the country during those two years I ask the same question to wealthy entrepreneurs such as Mauricio Fernandez Garza, farmers up in arms as the commander Ramiro ERPI (RIP), in consultation with specialists and Luis Astorga and Froylan Enciso and reviewing documents from the National Archives. I decided to publish the material he had gathered, after getting reports of Miguel Felix Gallardo, a key drug trafficker in the process Creation of drug cartels, who in his writings made in Almoloya, though not recounted in great detail the mechanisms of the drug world, it gave some important signs of a world where popular mythology abounds in short supply direct versions of itself as the Gallardo.
wrote the book because I felt I had something new to say on the subject, was published because it was interested in my editor Andres Ramirez, who knows that journalism is a matter of chance. And at this point is very obvious that the country we are quite hungry for information about what is happening to us. I think my book is a rare book on the subject of narco. No blood drained him and tried of it not being a big narcocorrido a police report nor implausible. I wanted to look at the world of narco with surprise, as I would to see the world of hunting in the country, if I were asked to do a story on this topic.
AR: You've devoted a good part of your journalistic effort against drug trafficking. Have you been threatened?, Have you felt in danger?
OED: The truth is I have not spent a lot of my work as a reporter to the issue of drug trafficking. In 2002 I wrote some articles about the issue that caused controversy in Nuevo Leon, but it was not until 2007 that I became involved with greater commitment.
I have received some threats but fortunately none seriously. Yes I have been in dangerous situations many times, especially in the process of gathering information in areas where the state has a weak presence and where organized crime queen, but so far, except for a couple of momentary retention, no is not nothing to regret too. Hopefully keep that hot streak, although the conditions are reducing the country's current good fortune of the citizens in general.
AR: At the beginning of the book points to a narco-poor, but there is also the rich, "of which little is said," but it also has its folklore. What is that culture and how it manifests?, what features it has in common with the poor?
OED: The book begins with a Sinaloa Cartel sent peacefully walking the aisles of one of the buildings where the richest men in Nuevo Leon, and perhaps the country, have their offices. Also tells how a businessman Fernando Canales level party lives in one of the kingpins of the Sinaloa group. In this kind of thing I refer when I make such a reference.
The narco of the rich is the one surrounding the whole apparatus that allows the drug business can wash their illicit profits in the legal financial system without much trouble. Not only She speaks little, but that efforts to combat narco seem obvious that reality and we see very little impetus to combat official money laundering, which is undoubtedly the structural problem of drug trafficking. Where
increasing number of entrepreneurs narco hit men arrested that believe that there is a real will to solve the problem that it is drug trafficking in Mexico.
AR: Already on the Sinaloa cartel, is there one, or are several? I point this out because if it is true that you rescue story that Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo came to dominate the drug trade even at the national level, and says that after being taken prisoner handed the territory between several characters, which they soon fall into disputes among themselves and divide, it seems that the unit has not been required to speak of a single cartel. Even as it is told in the book, it was recently the breaking and the war between the "Chapo" Guzman and "Mayo" Zambada, on the one hand, and the Beltran Leyva, on the other. Thus, in this case, has been, is, a single organization that can be called "cartel" (as far as I know, word originally foisted by the FBI and CIA to Colombian narcos groups) or is named as this group of bosses, even facing each other, whose origin is Sinaloa?
OED: In the book explain the origin of the word "cartel" citing experts from the likes of Luis Astorga and Froylan Enciso, who, among others, refuse to use it, because they believe does not correctly describe what it names. Also clarified that the DEA (not the FBI or the CIA) was the one who began using it but also, undeniably, the criminal groups themselves have returned now to the point that you see today in convoys Tamaulipas truck with the logo "Gulf Cartel" and also see characters talking near Sinaloa drug cartel of Sinaloa. As often happens, a technical vocabulary word officially became popularly rooted. This is the case of the word cartel, which today serves to name a coalition of criminal groups that have something in common, be it a name (the Arellano Felix Cartel, the Beltran Leyva cartel) or a main area of operation (Cartel de Sinaloa, Juárez).
Just think that after reading the book a reader can have elements to know that the Sinaloa cartel, rather than a hierarchical organization, blended and well defined, it is rather a circumstantial coalition of interests in the world Sinaloa drug .
AR: In the book you some statements that are just outlined. For example, when he died the "Lion of the Sierra, Pedro Aviles, one of the great lords of Sinaloa, said that the agricultural mafia began to transform their style and wealth," taking a huge cultural leap. " What was it, and the consequences?
DEO: After the death of the "Lion of the Sierra", who traded mainly marijuana, appears as a major figure Miguel Felix Gallardo, which not only begins to sell marijuana and opium crops in Sinaloa villages, but also a new product: cocaine, which requires sophisticated business alliances, as it is sent from Colombia. Death of the Lion of the Sierra symbolizes the death of drug dealer as a character of the countryside and peasants, and it will give new elements to the profile of drug, cutting more business than the peasantry. I do not think that the statement is only sketched. There are two chapters, one of them very long, which he dedicated to Felix Gallardo, and which, I think, shows the huge cultural leap.
AR: Later you say that Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Rafael Caro Quintero and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and their operators, "are a generation that gave a twist to the illegal drug business." In the same sense of the previous question, what was that money?
OED: In the book describes, through an analysis of Paul Gootenberg, how to change the map of the transnational drug trade when Chile and Cuba are no longer the major players in the United States traffic. Due to the heavy hand of the Cuban revolution and the dictatorship of Pinochet, that route is closed and appears to Colombia as a new supplier of cocaine instead of Chile, while Mexico replaces Cuba as a transit country. Amid these changes, Fonseca Carrillo Caro Quintero and Felix Gallardo become important men in Mexico in drug trafficking to the United States, especially cocaine, that in the eighties fashion has established itself as replacing marijuana.
AR: On the ethical issue, he discusses in the prologue Froylan Enciso, who intends to reinvent the moral "including the voices silenced, and even criminalized, to reintegrate humanism." Examples of such voices gets daily excerpts from Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, which is difficult to avoid surprise. " What I read in the Journal of the bonnet and the responses to the questionnaire that you sent me, rather, the idea of \u200b\u200ba character played by beating the average Mexican political discourse, in my opinion: the elusive, the complaint settled "can not be otherwise form-of impunity and social injustice, repeated a thousand times good wishes to combat violence and so forth. As a kicker, just read what it says about a criminal on the size of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, of which little need to make the apology. Do you think that voices like these can serve to "reinvent the moral" and "reintegrate humanism"?
OED: One of the problems usually found in the analysis of the phenomena of narco-and many other topics, is to take for granted a number of facts which are not necessarily our knowledge. What he says Felix Gallardo, in your opinion, is what you expect to read a drug, but after hearing the reports of him are published in the book you do not have a belief but a certainty. And your view that reproduces the average Mexican political discourse is no longer a vagary, but an analysis of a real testimony to which you could access and which can refer to when making an analysis. I think this refers mainly to a scholar as rigorous as Froylan Enciso in his preface, which claims the need to know what they think the narcos.
From my point of view, the testimony of Felix Gallardo is a valuable addition to the specific data that you throw and you may not seem relevant but I think, yes are, as their version of the creation of the drug cartels, which he says was made by a police chief and not by him, as had been saying in this ritual of giving as truths beliefs. In this book I tried not to be a narco mythologist over at the risk of huge events play some characters such as Felix Gallardo, which could eventually bore the reader.
I think even in public areas used by Felix Gallardo to explain their role lets us see many of the keys of the phenomenon of drug trafficking. The voices of the criminals help us understand better the functioning of our society, no doubt. Obviously, giving voice and attention a criminal just to show human traits analyzed, even when it is someone ruthless and with little appreciation for life. I was also aware of that risk.
AR: The final chapter is devoted to the political use of Felipe Calderón's war on drugs. Mention as a context, several political and social conflicts, such as moving doers, Atenco, Oaxaca, the dispute over the miners union and the EZLN's Other Campaign. But I think the President did well on fertile ground. In this regard, I also used as a very direct context of public safety Other information provided pages later: the drug had caused 500 deaths in Michoacán in 2006, and January to June 2008 is estimated between 15,000 and 17,000 the number of people executed in the style of the mafia. Do not you think that in this context and at a critical time was a good bet Calderón policy?
DEO: It was a measure designed to short-term and yes, indeed, gave the appearance of being a good political bet at first, but now it is clear that this was a serious error, because of the lack of a strategy to address the problematic. As you suggest, Calderon did not really want to finish with a problem like drug trafficking, he wanted the governors who were at risk at the beginning of his administration. And if you look at the Opinion polls in the early months of the Calderón administration, when there are 4 000 violent deaths, people openly supporting his alleged crusade against drugs, but a year and a half after the newspaper Reforma do another poll in which is that while the number of deaths low public approval. Today or say. Even to the red circle and many of those close to President Calderon challenge this dire public policy. Ruling blood, the story says, it always ends badly.
AR: We have identified a lack of government's communication strategy to address the political propaganda of the drug. It seems that the federal government itself has had a relevant strategy, but rather to obscure social and political problems. How would you describe it?
DEO: I do not understand the question but I guess it has to do with the above, regarding the placement of the drug issue on the public agenda priority over other issues like employment that both invoked in his campaign chairman Calderon, or the protests of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his followers, which today look nothing threatening as if it came to be in the first months of the Calderon. I do not know how to describe that campaign communications. Could perhaps say that now is in crisis and was designed by a desperate administration.
AR: Does the drug is no longer any benefit to Mexican society, especially the Sinaloa?
DEO: What an interesting question. In the book I mention some passages from Lazaro Cardenas to "The Gypsy", a gunman who killed a governor of Sinaloa Mazatlan during Carnival. Lazaro Cardenas, who legalized marijuana for a few months and then backtracked under pressure from the United States, was among those who believe that marijuana would help the balance of trade between Mexico and the United States and lead to greater economic independence the country.
Today, the illegal drug business is a source of immense wealth that just leaves a terrible trail of pain, death and impunity throughout the country, but it was also causing a huge economic benefit. As someone here wondering what would cause the 20 million of our compatriots go to the U.S. could get a job and send money to support their families in the country, it would be interesting exercise to ask about what would happen if Without the drug business in Mexico, what this huge mass live now depends on this huge illegal economy?
AR: At the end of the book, stating that: "I do not see how a reporter can be credible if it has no political principles and ideas about the current situation. Those who say lack of political ideas because they are impartial, they lie. At a time like the present one is perverse that there are those who invoke this alleged innocence. " In that sense, do not you think that another risk of journalist is to become member of "good causes"?
DEO: There is always the risk that a reporter who makes the process of total immersion necessary to tell a news story end devoured by it. Today it seems that there are two kinds of journalism: the fast, which seeks to place a small piece of information as soon as possible in the galaxy of information, and the other, now seems dated, in which the reporter involved, he lives, he asks, he knows many versions, feels, and is contradicted by the nature of their mission , is liable to come out with more confusion than certainty, and then make mistakes. That is one of the risks of this profession, perhaps a higher risk than the bullets of drug dealers, but I think we should accept it and deal with it. The commitment and militancy is the story you want to say. The rest is up to politicians.
AR: Also taking the above quote from your book, could make more explicit your principles and policy ideas which I believe support this book and your work in general?
DEO: It is very simple. I'm the kind of date who still think that journalism must take social responsibility. I do not see this business as a platform to become rich or famous, but as a tool to achieve a society to know each other, ask questions, debate and questioning. I try to do my job taking into account the spirit of humanism. I do not automatically or unconsciously. I'm not a machine.
Although it may sound shocking to me, journalism is not a professional matter, but something to something personal. I have 29 years and half of my life, since very little, I've been heavily involved into the fascinating world of the newsroom, the billiards and bars where journalists gather to chew over old, the daily attempts of powerful men trying to coopt consciences through acts openly or concealed, all that adrenaline to get information revealing that frustration of not getting it and the immense solidarity that exists among reporters for coverage difficult.
AR: In the book, including the use of press releases for decades, so you know how it was uncovered the problem at its roots. Broadly speaking, how has been the development of the Mexican press coverage has given the drug?
OED: The issue the drug was one of many who were little reflected in the pages of newspapers during the most important era of the PRI. Among the fifty-late nineties, when the PRI system was still very efficient in its authoritarian control, there is little news on the subject. During Operation Condor was launched by Mexico to U.S. pressure in the seventies in Sinaloa, there were some reports extensive and chronic, but obviously they did in the context of interest that existed at that point the government.
I think one of the things that also reflects this "drug war" is precisely this lack of journalistic expertise to address the phenomenon of drug, although it already has dozens of years in existence. Not a week in which I meet with colleagues to wonder what the hell to do or not do to cover this or that event. Like, for example, what happens today in the Tamaulipas border. We all know that there is a war going on but there is no sent to monitor. The last reporter who tried it, a friend of mine, was kidnapped by a gang of drug, with handcuffs and a black bag on his head, in a safe house. The narcos he was released and told to convey a message: "The press does not come to warm the place."
AR: You make a historical episodes and no follow a strict chronological order, but offer a good overview of what has been the drug trade in its main plaza in the country, and the responses that the government has three main stages of the seventies, the 1988 -1989 and the present. In this sense, do you think the country's democratization process has brought changes in the war on drugs?
DEO: Initially had settled the chapters of the book in chronological order, but decided in the final stage, although some friends advised me not to do so, it was better to intersperse episodes of present and past, to give a kind special rate to the history of the group is being told. One of the things that obviously is that I try to reflect how bipartidización the country (rather than democracy) altered drug codes.
AR: There is a hopeful sign mentioned in the book, I want more information. In a village in the municipality of Badiraguato there is a school, the Centro de Estudios Justo Sierra, who is an advanced community education project. How did?, Who studied there, how is it funded?, What lesson do you get there?
DEO: Sururato is a community nestled in the very area where it is concentrated Badiraguato planting marijuana and opium poppy and where many operators are often important drug in Mexico and the United States. The lesson of Sururato, where publicly funded and foundation are given to doctorate, is that there may be options in a region which we describe as a bastion of drug trafficking.
* Interview published in Replicante , June 2010. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.
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