Mexico's Journalists Feel Heavy Hand of Violence

At Milenio, a 40,000-circulation daily, editors began detecting the change about a year ago. One afternoon, a seasoned crime reporter approached Alejandro Salas, one of the newspaper's most experienced crime writers and editors, with a hot story.

"I've got great details," Salas remembers the reporter telling him.

The reporter had plied confidential sources to find out that a member of the local prosecutor's office was in a romantic relationship with a hit man from the notorious Sinaloa cartel. The prosecutor, the hit man and two others had just been murdered, the reporter said.

Salas, who has been a journalist in Monterrey, Tijuana and other Mexican cities for 23 years, smelled a front-page splash, and so did the reporter. But the reporter made one request before sitting down to write, Salas recalled: "Don't sign my name to the story."

Salas was floored. This was the kind of story reporters enter in contests, the hot scoop that makes a writer the toast of the after-deadline watering hole. But instead of grabbing the limelight, the reporter was begging for anonymity.

Around the same time, Salas said, he and other crime reporters were picking up snatches of disturbing chatter on police scanners. Cartels were hacking into police radio frequencies and saying, "I'm following a 20," the numerical code for a journalist. "I'm going to kill a 20."

Soon, other reporters were also asking for their bylines to be removed. With fear rising in the newsroom, Gomez gathered her top editors.

"It's going to get worse before it gets better," Gomez recalled telling them. She issued a decree: no more bylines on crime stories.

"They've intimidated us," Salas said later. "Their messages have had an effect."

Still, Salas did not feel the newspaper was doing enough to protect its staff, especially the 10 or so reporters who focus on crime. Even without bylines, he feared drug cartels could identify reporters who have distinctive writing styles, especially a star writer known for literary flourishes in crime stories. So, Salas instructed editors to rewrite all crime stories in an antiseptic, just-the-facts style.

"It's less fun now," Salas said. "There's less spice, fewer ingredients. There's no literary beauty."

The terror creeping across newsrooms has caused quick and dramatic changes in the ways stories are reported here. Monterrey may be Mexico's most competitive television market, because it is served by two national networks and a slew of local stations. But television reporters who once schemed to beat the competition are now collaborating, hoping for safety in numbers.