Reporters Discuss Drugs, Violence, Media, and the Future of Mexico

March 4, 2010

The upsurge in violence from Mexico’s drug war is eclipsing broader discussion on the nation’s future, noted journalists and a prominent scholar told a packed audience at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. 

The panel focused on the violence that has grown as the Mexican military has stepped in to fight drug cartels. Panel moderator Tyche Hendricks, a lecturer at the journalism school, said that last year 6,600 people were killed in drug-related murders known as narcoejecuciones.

Militarization of the drug war has stirred up “a huge hornet’s nest,” said Steve Fainaru, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. Fainaru said his reporting casts doubts on the potential success of the military effort.  

“The military is a blunt instrument,” he said. “They’re not really trained in law enforcement. They’re trained to occupy territory.”

Better to help the overall Mexican economy, said Professor Harley Shaiken, chair of the U.C. Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies. Mexico’s gross domestic product dropped 6.8 percent last year, and the “the fierceness of the collapse governs the living stands, the future, the hope of millions of people,” Shaiken said.  However, he conceded that improving the economy alone would not stop the cartels, which have the business acumen to adapt and diversify their businesses.

Panelists also highlighted the tensions between the role of the United States in the drug war—including $1.4 billion of funding for the Mexican military response—and the demand for drugs by US customers. “There is huge resentment in Mexico because the drugs are being consumed here, and the brunt of this war is being felt in Mexico,” Fainaru said.   

The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Andrew Becker said in his reporting on both sides of the border, he often meets regular people—like a rental car agent in Phoenix—whose families have been drawn into the violence.

The panelists noted that the financial pressures facing the journalism field have increased challenges in reporting on Mexico. The Sacramento Bee’s Susan Ferris said the foreign press corps in Mexico has been “decimated.” Most news organizations have closed their bureaus in Mexico and parachute in reporters, if they cove the country at all.

“We often suffer the indignation that the first thing that is sacrificed for space in our stories is history and context,” said Ricardo Sandoval, a former long-time Latin American correspondent for Knight Ridder and the Dallas Morning News. “You do often lose the larger picture.”

Looking beyond the drug war, moderator Hendricks said other stories are not getting play in the press. On a recent reporting trip to Tijuana and Baja, Hendricks said she and her students saw a breath of life beyond the drug violence, from entrepreneurs’ making wind turbines to artists practicing their craft.

The inspiration behind the panel was the January murder of a Southern California school board member, Bobby Salcedo, who was executed in a restaurant while visiting his wife’s family in the Mexican state of Durango. Salcedo has no known drug connections and has became a symbol of the pervasive and savage violence ripping through Mexico as the government steps up enforcement. —Karen Weise

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