By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
SAN PEDRO GARZA GARCIA, Mexico Tinny salsa downbeats jangled out of the flashing cellphone. Mario Salas pressed hard on the clutch, jammed the gearshift into second and wedged the phone between his right ear and shoulder.
"Dime," he said -- "Tell me."
"Si," he said. "Si. A bad accident? A really bad one? I'm on my way."
It was 5:15 p.m. in this moneyed suburb of Monterrey-- time for Salas to transform. When the call came in, Salas was a taxi driver, prowling the streets for fares in a dented, bright green Ford sedan. But the phone call hurled him into his other identity -- hustling TV cameraman.
Salas is a Mexican archetype. In this country, where wages are painfully low, almost everyone, it seems, has a second gig, or a third, or a fourth. Moonlighting isn't a luxury; for many, it is a necessity.
Salas juggles three jobs. He is a taxi driver, a newspaper reporter and a TV cameraman. Sometimes, he's all three at once.
Minutes later, Salas hurtles down the hill, barreling toward the road to Saltillo, better known as the Highway of Death because so many cars and trucks end up smashed along the roadside, victims of a route where reckless driving is the norm.
Salas hazards a glance at the back seat. There, snuggled into a baby carrier, is Grecia Salas, his daughter, all of 2 months old, curling her toes and happily trying to force her tiny little hand into her tiny little mouth.
Salas has just picked her up from day care, but his cameraman job is a game of minutes, and there is no time to drop her off somewhere. Thankfully, he has also just picked up a neighbor's 15-year-old daughter after school. He presses her into service as an emergency back-seat babysitter.
Salas knows the Highway of Death better than most. He flings his little sedan down here every couple of days, and now his intimacy with the roadway pays off. Coming up on stalled traffic, Salas jams the brakes, expertly skids onto the narrow strip of pavement between the long row of idling cars and the shoulder, and deftly whips forward.
Up ahead, the streetlight turns red, but Salas is flying now. No time to stop. He rolls down the window and yells to a policeman haplessly trying to flag him down, "Code 20!" -- police jargon for journalist. The officer nods his head as Salas roars through the intersection.
Things are going well. Salas smells a big score. He lives to beat his competitors to the scene and he's feeling like he's got an edge on everyone.
Then he hears it. At 5:25, 10 minutes into his mad dash, the faintest wail rises from the opposite lanes of traffic. It gets louder and louder, more unmistakable. Then, the source of the sound comes into view: a boxy ambulance with flashing lights.
Salas pounds the steering wheel.
"That bothers me so much," he says to no one in particular.
In the calculus of Salas's job, missing one ambulance is a bummer, but it isn't a deal breaker. The first ambulance often carries a corpse or someone so badly hurt as to be motionless. The best footage, he explains, is of victims writhing in pain, their bodies shredded by flying glass and torn metal.
"The injured are worth more than the dead," he says.
But 30 seconds later, another ambulance comes into view, then another. As Salas presses harder on the gas, he sees his story slipping away. In the back seat, Grecia Salas, whose daddy wants her to be a star reporter someday, hasn't cried once. She's done this before.
Somehow, as Salas weaves in and out of traffic, he manages to grab his cellphone and dial a source.
"Where is it?" he says. "I've already passed the federal checkpoint."
Calm, but intently focused, he drops the phone onto the dashboard.
"Almost there," he says.
At 5:30, Salas spots a pickup truck, its front end an accordion of red metal. Farther ahead, a van lies upside down. Salas pulls his car over, jumps out, wrestles a television camera from his trunk and wriggles into a TV Azteca vest. Without hesitating, he runs across the road, camera resting on his shoulder, and stops in front of a sobbing young girl, shivering with a blanket on her shoulders.
"I'm so glad you survived," Salas says.
A trailer rests at a cockeyed angle a few steps away, its load of fruit sprayed across the asphalt. The scene is ugly, but the air is divine: It smells of crushed limes.
By 5:45, Salas has filled his cartridge with footage. He grabs the phone and dials.
"Three cars, five hurt. It's a miracle anyone survived," Salas tells his boss, expertly spinning his yarn.
Behind him, a sedan pulls up and stops. It's the Telediario cameraman. Salas's face lights up, a smile that says: "I won."
No time to gloat, though. At, 5:50, Salas gallops toward his car. He has video to file, a newspaper story to write and a baby to tuck into a crib.
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