The photojournalist Alberto Morales has been documenting crime scenes like these, in the eastern Mexico state of Veracruz, where drug violence has exploded in the past year.
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
XALAPA, Mexico — Throwing his burly frame to the ground, the photojournalist Alberto Morales click, click, clicked away on Tuesday as police officers and soldiers in body armor barked into radios, hoisted their rifles and crouched into position on word of a suspicious vehicle moving in.
Up the block, three people sitting in a car had been shot to death, their bloody end luring Mr. Morales of Multigrafica magazine into the night with hopes of that perfect photo. He did not have much competition.
“Just a month ago there would have been 15 reporters here,” he said, rising from the pavement and grabbing a few more frames. “But now it was just us,” referring to a couple of other journalists.
Víctor Báez, a longstanding, go-to police reporter, surely would have been there, as a reporter for his closely followed, tabloid-style Web site Reporteros Policiacos and a crime correspondent for Milenio, a national newspaper.
But his killing last week, in this hilly capital of a state, Veracruz, where drug violence has exploded in the past year, scared off many of his brethren. It has sown confusion and fear over whether any precaution matters.
Mexico for several years has been one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with 45 killed or missing since 2007, according to one tally. But Veracruz State is considered the most dangerous patch of all in which to report the news. The violence here has gone off the charts, with at least nine journalists killed in the past year and a half.
Veracruz, with prime drug and migrant trafficking routes crisscrossing the state, plus a busy port on the Gulf of Mexico known for smuggling contraband, has erupted into a battleground, as two of the most powerful organized crime groups, the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel, fight for dominance.
Reporters increasingly report only the official version of crimes, if at all, and newspaper editors have told government officials they are pressured by criminals to report — or not report — certain episodes.
“Perhaps the most devastating effect of this unprecedented wave of violence is the fact that people in Veracruz are being deprived of vital information of one of the issues that is obviously having a very serious effect in the lives of the people, which is the level of violence, the number of killings,” said Carlos Lauría, who monitors Latin America for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The self-censorship, he added, “has a direct impact on the quality of democracy.”
As other journalists have laid down their notebooks and cameras and fled Veracruz, Mr. Báez, 46, took pride in staying behind and not allowing the criminals to impose their will. He taught his children to watch for suspicious people and cars, but also indulged passions like painting the mountainous Xalapa landscape and writing romantic poetry, which were quite removed from his nighttime job of documenting the carnage on the streets.
“We cannot give in to fear, we cannot live our lives afraid to go out, afraid to see friends, afraid to do what we do,” a colleague recalled his saying earlier this year, after an investigative reporter for a national magazine was killed in her apartment here.
Mr. Morales, the photographer, who is 54, has a similar philosophy, saying, “You have to accept the fear, but not let it paralyze you.” He made clear he photographs many things besides dead bodies, which he believes keeps him safe.
“And I don’t label the dead or say who was who in a confrontation,” he said after stumbling upon the still-hot crime scene on a recent night.
Others have stopped reporting altogether.
“I cannot go on here,” said one journalist, her voice trembling this week as she made plans to leave. She said she was told by a state official that she was on a list of journalists believed to be under threat, which was circulated among government officials, though none would acknowledge its existence.
Gina Domínguez, a spokeswoman for the state governor, Javier Duarte, said the police were working aggressively to investigate the journalists’ killings and quell the violence.
The governor, she said, is putting additional police officers on the streets and has proposed a new commission to assist threatened journalists.
But reporters here have their doubts about such efforts, tending to see the government, political leaders and organized crime as an interconnected “mafia,” in the words of several, using them as pawns in a struggle for power.
The authorities have linked Mr. Báez’s killing to organized crime because of the way it was done — he was kidnapped outside his office June 14 and his body dumped on a downtown street with a message attached to the corpse. “This is what happens to those who betray us and want to be clever, sincerely the Zetas,” said the note.
Journalists here, skeptical that Mr. Báez’s case will get a thorough investigation, are making their own connections, wondering, for example, if his death was some message to the governor, given Mr. Báez’s well-known, long-term friendship with Ms. Domínguez. He also had just won a car in a raffle the governor had sponsored as part of World Freedom of the Press Day on June 7.
More than a few of Mr. Báez’s colleagues read something into the fact he was found dead on a downtown street a block from the Statehouse, near a government communications office and three newspaper offices.
Ms. Domínguez rejected talk about ulterior motives as “speculation.” She said the authorities were scouring his Web site and his newspaper articles to see if something he wrote — or ignored — might be connected to his death.
The lack of answers has left reporters suspicious even of one another, with whispers about which among them might be on the take.
Mr. Báez’s death hit the journalism community particularly hard because he had mentored several younger reporters, pressing them to look for telling details in their images and their reports.
He did not investigate organized crime, friends said, and devoted a lot of space to accidents, assaults and routine arrests.
He was quick with a laugh, and serious about his Web site, which he founded with a group of other journalists. They have all left the state, friends of Mr. Báez said, and nobody answered telephone calls or e-mails or a knock on the door of the site’s offices, which are now guarded by the police. The Web site, however, remains active, with a few new news reports of accidents and other episodes.
“We cannot even describe how we should feel,” said a friend, who, like Mr. Báez’s anxious family members, spoke only on the condition of anonymity. “Who is going to protect us? The police? Human rights groups? The marines? Who, I want to know, who?”
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