MEXICO CITY — The writer was one of the legion of underpaid beat reporters in Mexico, the kind who churn out four or five stories a day, for low pay and little recognition. They know all about the corrupt and violent dealings going on around them, even though they can't always pass on this knowledge to their readers.
He was going to brief me on the local situation, which involved some high-profile killings, various bands of criminals with colorful nicknames and the transport of large quantities of cocaine and marijuana into the United States.
But when I walked into his office, the reporter looked upset. He bit his lower lip and glanced down at the floor, seemingly trying to fight off tears. "I'm quitting," he said.
"What?" I said. "Why?"
In the 2 1/2 years I've been covering the so-called drug wars in Mexico and Central America, I've traveled to small-town police stations, government ministries and newsrooms where journalists require military protection.
Along the way, I've met many courageous people, and many people whose proximity to the drug traffickers' machinery of death has frightened them into silence. This reporter, the lone staffer in his bureau, was a little bit of both. I cannot mention his name, or the town he works in.
After announcing his resignation, he was silent for a time.
"Is there anything I can do to help you?" I asked. He shook his head. We sat like this for a few minutes, until he finally stood up and directed me to his desk.
He pointed to his computer screen and the window of an instant-messaging program, where a flashing missive declared: "You are bothering a lot of people."
It was a death threat: In the local idiom, to be told you are "bothering" someone is an unambiguous warning.
"They've been following me," he said. An hour and half a pack of cigarettes later, he had told me about a car with no license plates that appeared wherever he did, cruising slowly.
"But that's not the reason I'm quitting," he said. It was the low pay and the unfulfilled promises from his bosses (including a company car) that really had him angry. There was something wrong about having to take a bus to cover stories that could get you killed, he said. The threats were just the final straw.
In the end, the reporter stayed on his beat a bit longer and was transferred to a safer place, where he didn't have to cover so many funerals and drug busts -- and where he wouldn't "bother" people who didn't want to be bothered.
