STAYING ALIVE—ARE MEXICO JOURNALISTS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES?

 

                              "We are not war correspondents. The war came to us."

Reporters holding photos of murdered colleagues (photo Rio Grande Guardian)

Since 2000, 119 journalists were murdered in Mexico because they dared to write about cartel violence and corruption. Thirty-five remain missing. A 2019 report by International Institute for Strategic Studies states 23,000 were killed due to the country’s “War on Drugs,” christened as such by President Felipe Calderon in 2006. Since 2000 due to cartel violence, nearly 200,000 are dead.

Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, according to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Last December alone, three Mexican journalists were shot within ten days.

“You want to kill a journalist, you can do it without much of a chance that you’ll be caught,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexico representative of CPJ.

The Cartel Project (photo Forbiddenstories.org)

THE CARTEL PROJECT

In response to the disturbing rise of Mexican journalist murders, The Cartel Project, a global network of investigative journalists coordinated by Forbidden Stories, emerged to continue work by reporters who had been threatened, censored, or killed. Working together across 18 different countries over a ten-month period, they investigated the global networks of Mexican drug cartels and their political connections around the world.

The cornerstone of this collaborative work is Regina Martinez, journalist for Proceso, a national investigative weekly out of Veracruz. Eight years after her death in April 2012, The Cartel Project’s reporting team picked up where her work left off. Throughout her tenure at Proceso, she wrote scathing commentaries on two successive governors in Veracruz who looted the treasury and allowed cartels to operate freely with help from local and state police.

MARTINEZ'S MOXY

Martinez was on the verge of publishing a blockbuster of a story. Her reporting would disclose that traffickers and their accomplices had executed thousands of people: teenage dealers, their families, farmers, politicians, even young women who attended cartel sex parties. She’d discovered an exponential rise in the number of bodies being buried in pauper’s graves. She believed that public cemeteries were being used to dispose of victims of forced disappearances. 

Martinez interviewing AMLO, 1992 (photo Alberto Morales Garcia)

The Cartel Project noted that Martinez told a friend it was the most dangerous investigation of her career. Shortly after that confession, she was murdered in her Xalapa home, beaten then asphyxiated with a dish towel. This killing of a high-profile correspondent for a national magazine set off a wave of targeted violence throughout the country. Martinez was one of the few reporters who dared to refuse bribes or to ignore cartel threats aimed at censoring the news. She paid for it with her life.

JOURNALISTS AS TARGETS

In their investigation, the Cartel Project found that before her death, Martinez was one of a group of journalists targeted by a sophisticated espionage unit run by the Veracruz Public Security Ministry. The unit used surveillance technology and a vast network of informants to gather information, monitoring those believed to be political opponents of the governor. Leaked reports showed analysts maintained files for decades on hundreds of targets, their family members and co-workers, including info on their hangouts and political affiliations.

Martinez’s looming bombshell of an investigation was her death sentence. “She was becoming very inconvenient for people in power,” said a fellow journalist.

She was killed before her story came out. The murder investigation of her death was botched and investigators ignored the fact that her death had been caused by her investigative work. The final report stated she had been killed in a robbery gone wrong. During the ten-month open investigation, murders of journalists escalated, with ten more reporters killed in that time.

Regina Martinez (Elfaro.net)

LA CHAPARITTA

"Fearless,” said Jorge Carrasco, director of Proceso where Martinez worked as a correspondent from 2000 until her death in 2012. “Everything the local press didn’t dare to publish was published via Regina Martinez."

Born into a family of 11 children, Martinez studied journalism and began reporting news for a local Veracruz TV station in 1980. Called Chaparrita, or “little woman,” in reference to her height of 4 feet, 11 inches and 100 pound frame, she made a name for herself in the field.

“Her work was her life," said fellow journalist and friend Norma Trujillo. “She was really interested in social issues, human rights violations. She was close to the people. That was her superpower.”

It also didn't hurt that she was a gifted reporter, going after the tough stories. Three years before the H1N1 crisis exploded in 2006, she covered the horrible sanitary conditions on pig farms in La Gloria, a Veracruz pueblo that eventually was named the probable epicenter of the virus. And one year later, she accused the Mexican Army of raping and killing a 72-year old indigenous woman.

                                                                                    

THE GOVERNORS

                                                                                                         

Call to action. (Dartcenter.org)

No matter how dangerous the road, she traveled it. Her doggedness led her to investigate the excesses of power and corruption in Veracruz. That, no doubt, was her undoing. Fidel Herrera and Javier Duarte, who served as back to back governors in Veracruz, became central figures under the pen she wielded like a sword in her investigative journalism.

Under these two governors, Veracruz became the world’s most dangerous place for journalists. Since 2000, 28 journalists have been killed there and another eight disappeared— half during the 12 years these men held office. 

The Cartel Project's reporting team discovered that law enforcement authorities in Mexico, the US, and Spain had opened inquiries into allegations that Herrera colluded with the Zeta cartel as governor and took money for his campaign. He also money laundered while serving in a diplomatic post in Spain, but to date has not been charged with a crime. Duarte is serving a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and money laundering.

Part two in the series will pay homage to other Mexico journalists who died while reporting on Mexico cartels. Stay tuned.

Check out www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, my memoir on expat life in Mexico.

HOW THE CASTE WAR OF YUCATÁN GAINED MOMENTUM FROM A SPEAKING CROSS IN THE JUNGLE

Caste War mural by Marcélo Jiminez

CASTE WAR

PART 2

The Caste War of Yucatán began in 1847 and dragged on for decades. Tired from years of struggle, the Maya regained confidence from an unlikely source: a talking cross found deep in the jungle near a cenote. Revolutionary Jose Maria Barrera, driven from his Yucatán pueblo, led his band of people to an uninhabited forest and to a small cenote called Lom Ha (Cleft Spring). It was there he discovered a cross that was carved into a tree. The cross bore a resemblance to the Maya tree of life, la Ceiba, and a new religion formed around it, the cult of the speaking cross. 

JOSE MARIA BARRERA

Barrera said the cross transmitted a message which was later given as a sermon by Juan de la Cruz (of the Cross), a man trained to lead religious services in absence of a Maya holy man. Barrera also used a ventriloquist, Manuel Nahuat, as the mouthpiece of the cross, and through this directed the Maya in their war effort, urging them to take up arms against the Mexican government, assuring the people of the cross they would attain victory. All withstanding, the talking cross served as a symbol of hope for the Maya.

Painting by Marcélo Jiminez from Caste War Museum

CRUZOB MAYA

From this speaking cross a community evolved—Chan Santa Cruz (Little Holy Cross)—and its inhabitants came to be called Cruzob, or followers of the cross. By chance, the cross bore three elements sacred to the Maya: the Ceiba tree, the cenote, and a cave. The cross was found growing on the roots of a Ceiba tree that sprung from a cave near a cenote. As explained by Nicoletta Maestra, the most sacred tree for ancient Maya is la Ceiba. According to their mythology, it is the symbol of the universe. Its roots are said to reach down into the underworld, the trunk represents the middle world where humans live, and its branches arch into the sky symbolizing the upper world and the thirteen levels of the Maya heavens. The Maya viewed caves as the entrance to the underworld and the domain of the rain gods. 

Reproduction of the World Tree in Madrid Codex, Museo de Madrid (photo Simon Burchell)

TALKING CROSS

It wasn’t a far stretch for the Maya to believe the cross spoke to them. In the ancient Maya text, Chilam Balam, priests were said to have heard voices from the gods. So even this aspect of mysticism fell into acceptable practice for the Maya. To the Chan Santa Cruz, the voice of God came from that cross in that tree. It told the war chiefs that the battle should continue and the people should be patient in their fight.

Chan Santa Cruz rebels (photo Ambergriscaye.com)

To the Cruzob, even though the cross was inspired by a shamanic ventriloquist, the man speaking to them through the cross was God’s chattel, a mouthpiece of the gods. The Cruzobs believed this tree and this cross were connected underground, one hundred kilometers from Lom Ha cenote to Xocen—the center of the world—where the first speaking cross came from. As more and more people heard about the cross, a new religion was born.

Four crosses are said to exist at counter points—tips of the cross—marking the boundaries of the Cruzob Maya. The religion is still practiced and ceremonies performed in these four sacred shrine villages: Tixcacal Guardia, Chancah Veracruz, Chumpon and Tulum, whose geographic positions roughly describe the territory of the Cruzob Maya. In 1935, the Chan Santa Cruz from these last holdout villages signed a treaty of sorts which allowed the rest of Mexico to rule them. The jungle-wise Maya had kept the Mexican government at bay for nearly one hundred years.

COUNTER POINT IN TULUM

I visited the church of the speaking cross in Tulum years ago. Hiding in plain sight and sitting very near el Centro, it was a humble white-washed structure surrounded by trees. A narrow path with overgrown shrubs on either side disguised the entrance that led up to it. Before entering the churchyard, I passed through an enclosed area where a custodial guard sat. He gave a nod and I continued on towards the church. A posted sign instructed that shoes and hats were forbidden, as were photos.

Inside votive candles were lit and the musky scent of copal wafted through the darkened church. The interior was a large open room with seating. Straight ahead, three crosses covered in small white huipil-like veiis sat on an otherwise barren altar. The room held little else except for a Maya woman kneeling on a blanket in a rear corner. Eventually I stepped back outside into blinding Yucatán sunshine. 

Huipil covered crosses (photo by Marina Hayman)

ORIGINAL CROSS

Of the four crosses held at the counter points, one is said to be the original. Tixcacal Guardia village elders fiercely guard what they swear is the original speaking cross and let no outsiders near it. It's kept in a city within a city, much like the Vatican, according to blogger Logan Hawkes, safely hidden away from all save the Cruzob spiritual leaders—a head shaman and a circle of elders. For generations, Maya have flocked to these outposts to worship a wooden cross that became a dynamic part of their history during the Caste War of Yucatán. In Tixcacal Guardia, the church which houses the cross is open to the public on feast days only, but even then it's said the artifact is not on display. It's located on an altar covered with veils in a blocked-off section called La Gloria. No one is allowed to enter the inner sanctum and the cross is guarded day and night by Maya from the region.

Image by Sac-be.com

FELIPE CARRILLO PUERTO

Even though Chan Santa Cruz, the rebels' capital city, now Felipe Carrillo Puerto in southern Quintana Roo, is not one of the counter points of the cross bearers, it was the main stronghold of the Cruzob Maya rebels during the war. To this day a rotating team of followers keep one week vigils at a local chapel where a flower-adorned shrine is set up in honor of the cross. Tihosuco, an hour to the northwest, is home to the Caste War Museum.

Caste War Museum in Tihosuco

With history this unique, it's not hard to realize that the newly founded Riviera Maya is but a shell for a more mysterious land of an ancient, respected people who have had an ongoing conversation with the gods and the universe for more than a millennium.

For more information on the Maya and my writing, check www.jeaninekitchel.com. Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya, is available on Amazon as are books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown. For you Mayaphiles, my journalistic overview of the Maya 2012 calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, is also on Amazon.

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